“There is a conspiracy of indifference against me, and I can’t take it,” Jon-Jon Goulian writes of his classmates’ failure to react when, in 1985, he attended prom in women’s clothing. During the following two decades Goulian won notoriety among New York party hoppers as a fabulous recluse, a man of intelligence and Ivy League credentials who nonetheless insisted on earning a salary by babysitting for $12 an hour. This grandson of political philosopher Sidney Hook, and one-time assistant to The New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers, declined, at every major stage in his life, to build upward. Instead, he sublet a portion of a room in the Lower East Side, and chose to live a neurotically abstemious life while finding succor in four-inch heels and belly shirts.