By Christopher Cappiello

The fashion photographer and filmmaker discusses collecting hundreds of gay people's stories describing When I Knew.

Photographer Robert Trachtenberg didn't know what he was getting into when he first decided to put together a lighthearted collection of stories from gays and lesbians describing when they first knew they were different. "I got the idea from people at photo shoots and at dinner parties coming out with these stories over a period of time. I remember these funny stories and I thought it would make a really funny book," he explains. Starting out with a handful of tales, mostly from friends, he embarked on what became a two-year journey collecting personal stories from more than 400 individuals and resulting in When I Knew, a colorful, entertaining, and surprisingly moving collection of more than 80 of those tales.

From the hilarious to the heartbreaking, told by celebrities and regular folks, the stories in When I Knew span a wide range. "I was really concerned that each story count and tried to not make them in any way repetitive," the thoughtful photographer carefully explains over a cup of coffee at Toast. "It was really a case of six degrees of separation. I'd be calling someone who I thought would have a story and they'd say, 'I don't really have one, but I heard this great story,' and one thing would lead to another. Which is why it took so long."

While Trachtenberg allowed his subjects to take their submissions in many different directions, he did have some specific criteria. First of all, the book was meant to be fairly light. "This was supposed to be a little tongue in cheek, with people looking back now and saying, 'What a goofball I was,' or being able to laugh at themselves." For that reason, he consciously avoided anything outright tragic or too salacious. "There was another rule I had," he explains, "One Judy Garland and one Barbra Streisand story." For the most part the pop culture references are delightfully more obscure than either of those iconic divas. Marc Shaiman, the Tony-winning composer of Hairspray, reveals a childhood crush on Get Smart's Hymie the Robot. "Hymie made me feel funny," his entry reads, "I thought about him when I went to bed." Tarzan gets two mentions, including one from Village Voice columnist Michael Musto.

Some of the stories read like a punch line: Harvard softball coach Jenny Allard remembers, "I knew in my twenties when I kept waking up with women." Ettore Zuccarelli simply states, "I was officially told when my wife and boyfriend sat me down and said, 'You're gay!'" Others are more ruminating, tender, and even melancholy. Trachtenberg reveals, "Interestingly enough, the most poignant stories come from people who are professional comics. So the 'lay' people turned out to be the funniest, and the professional comics gave me the most touching material." The latter category would definitely include standup comic Eddie Sarfaty's touching tale of coming out to his grandmother, a story so simple and powerful that it could melt the hardest of homophobic hearts.

Many of the stories are illustrated with childhood photographs from the contributors. For anyone who grew up in the pop culture of the '60s and '70s, these images bring back floods of memories: the bad hair and bad clothes, to be sure, but also the sense of isolation that a young gay child could feel in those days. In an age with no Internet or cable television, several stories refer to the ways in which imaginative young gays found consoling or arousing imagery at the library, on television or even on product packaging. Will & Grace producer John Kinnally recalls being attracted to the color illustration of a man's bare back on his mother's box of Doan's pain pills. "It's great!" Trachtenberg gushes about the obscure but clearly powerful reference. "That's what was so fun -- whether you were in a small town or a big town, the things that you zeroed in on and that did it for you at that age."

Stories that didn't have an accompanying photograph were illustrated by The New Yorker artist Tom Bachtell, whose deft use of simple ink lines is reminiscent of Al Hirschfeld's work in its economy and effectiveness. "I am so grateful that he agreed to do this because he really nailed it," Trachtenberg effuses, "The expressions that he got in those drawings for people where we had no photo ... he's incredible. He would fax me drawings and it would just be so much fun to get those. I think in only one or two cases did I say, 'This is how I picture it. Could you draw it?' Everything else he just took off from the story."

Toward the end of the process, Trachtenberg explains, Bachtell even offered his own story to add to the book. And he illustrated it himself. "It's great, he drew himself at the age of 8 and it's really good. He did a great job." Readers familiar with Bachtell's typically tiny black-and-white ink drawings from The New Yorker will enjoy the expanded canvas that When I Knew offers the artist, with many full-page drawings in primary color splendor.

While some of the stories are from celebrities -- including Broadway legend Arthur Laurents, style maven Simon Doonan, and actor B.D. Wong (who wrote his story in verse!) -- most are from people much less well known. The names are listed in small print, with no glossary in the back to provide biographical information. The effect is to let the stories stand out, not the contributors, allowing the universal aspects of each gay person's experience to rise to the top of the reader's consciousness. The fact that most of the stories are told from the perspective of a child makes them that much more powerful -- and hard to resist. It also makes it harder to come away believing that any of these young people chose to have a same-sex attraction.

"As it came together," Trachtenberg remembers, "I did think that if someone could buy it for their mom, where it's still not completely resolved between them in terms of the person's sexuality, or their grandmother, or their sister or brother, then that would be fantastic. Or vice versa: If a parent were to see it, and they know their kid is having trouble telling them, if it would facilitate a dialogue, that would be really incredible." In the meantime, the rest of us can enjoy a knowing laugh at the sometimes campy, sometimes corny, and always wonderfully human stories contained in When I Knew.

Robert Trachtenberg and several of the book's contributors will read from When I Knew at Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Blvd., W. Hlywd., (310) 659-3110, on June 9 at 7 p.m.