“When I was your age,” he said, his nostrils flaring, his rage contorting his face into something beautiful and strange, “I fell in love with my friend.”
The way he said the word “friend” hurt me, and I knew already the kind of story it would be.
“And he loved me. And we kissed each other, touched each other, all of it was a secret. It was so secret it was almost a secret from ourselves. We didn’t know what we were doing because we couldn’t afford to know. It was so dangerous just to be ourselves that it seemed dangerous to see, to feel, to be. It was like a dream where one thing morphs into another, and what maybe started out as a fear that we were not like other boys, that we were attracted to men, became a fear that our deepest selves in every particular were blasphemous, and that if we ever truly communicated with anyone the world would end. It was another time, there’s no way you can understand what it was like.”
“I understand,” I said, and I thought I did.
“My mom, she didn’t grow up watching Will & Grace. It was—I’m sure you have some stereotype in your mind about what the world was like before Prop 8 was struck down, but you will never understand what it meant for it to be that way, the kind of—the kind of deformity of consciousness that takes place. The way you can pretend you aren’t thinking certain things, refuse to notice that you notice what you notice. Anyway, I will never know exactly what happened or why, but word got out at school. I don’t know how someone found out. But the bullying was…was so tremendous that I had to leave the school.”
“My friend,” I said, my voice nervous on the word because it meant so much and it meant so little. Bunny was my only friend, but she was not my friend in the way that Anthony had used the word. She was not my lover, and yet, in some way I knew I loved her more than I had ever loved anyone before, more even than I loved Anthony. “Not a boyfriend, just a friend, beat up another girl because that girl saw us making out. In your car. And she was telling. And now the girl is in the hospital in a coma and she might not wake up. And my friend might go to jail, or else maybe nothing will happen. Her dad is really rich, so.”
“You weren’t out,” he said, a guess instead of a question.
“I mean—I wasn’t not out. I wore makeup and I had my little piercing and my sass. I’m sure people knew. But no, I was not out out.”
“Sometimes I wish I could have grown up in your generation. Just the freedom. Gay, bi, poly, queer—you could—I know it feels like the world is ending now, but coming out won’t end your world. You’ll see—it will be—”
And then I was so angry that the words ripped out of me just like the string on a FedEx envelope shreds the cardboard, unzipping myself, exploding with thoughts I didn’t even know I had inside me until I spit them into the close air of his car. “You tell me, ‘Oh, you don’t know what it was like, you could never understand the past, it was so hard’—well, you can’t fucking understand the present. You don’t know what it is to grow up in a country that has only ever been at war. To do active shooter drills in fucking kindergarten. To grow up knowing you’ll never make a living wage. You’ll never own a house. That the whole game is rigged, and you’ll work your whole life and have nothing to show for it.
“Sometimes I look at all these houses. These mansions. Sometimes I walk through this town and wonder: Who needs a house like this? Who needs a three-car garage? Who needs a master bedroom big enough for a couch by a fireplace? Who needs fucking LaCantina doors that slide so the whole front of your house is open? And the answer is: Everyone. Everyone wants their own personal fucking mansion, and everyone is willing to do whatever it takes to get one. We’re like rats at the feeding machine, pushing the lever, confused when all we get are shocks. And sometimes I walk around this neighborhood and I wish that everyone in it would die and