Authors: David Levithan
SELF, either.) Mrs. Benchly caught me at her desk and looked quite alarmed. Since I was more than a little confused, I asked her for some clarification.
"Am I definitely gay?" I asked.
Mrs. Benchly looked me over and nodded.
"What's gay?" I asked.
"It's when a boy likes other boys," she explained.
I pointed over to the painting corner, where Greg Easton was wrestling on the ground with Ted Halpern.
"Is Greg gay?" I asked.
"No," Mrs. Benchly answered. "At least, not yet."
Interesting. I found it all very interesting.
Mrs. Benchly explained a little more to me--the whole boys-liking-girls thing. I can't say I understood. Mrs. Benchly asked me if I'd noticed that marriages were mostly made up of men and women. I had never really thought of marriages as things that involved liking. I had just assumed this man-woman arrangement was yet another adult quirk, like flossing. Now Mrs.
Benchly was telling me something much bigger. Some sort of silly global conspiracy.
"But that's not how I feel," I protested. My attention was a little distracted because Ted was now pulling up Greg Easton's shirt, and that was kind of cool. "How I feel is what's right . . .
right?"
"For you, yes," Mrs. Benchly told me. "What you feel is absolutely right for you. Always remember that."
And I have. Sort of.
That night, I held my big news until after my favorite Nickelodeon block was over. My father was in the kitchen, doing dishes. My mother was in the den with me, reading on the couch.
Quietly, I walked over to her.
"GUESS WHAT!" I said. She jumped, then tried to pretend she hadn't been surprised. Since she didn't close her book--she only marked the page with her finger--I knew I didn't have much time.
"What?" she asked.
"I'm gay!"
Parents never react the way you want them to. I thought, at the very least, my mother would take her finger out of the book. But no. Instead she turned in the direction of the kitchen and yelled to my father.
"Honey . . . Paul's learned a new word!"
It took my parents a couple of years. But eventually they got used to it.
Besides my parents, Joni was the first person I ever came out to.
This was in second grade.
We were under my bed at the time. We were under my bed because Joni had come over to play, and under my bed was easily the coolest place in the whole house. We had brought flashlights and were telling ghost stories as a lawn mower grrrrred outside. We pretended it was the Grim Reaper. We were playing our favorite game: Avoid Death.
"So a poisonous snake has just bitten your left arm--what do you do?" Joni asked.
"I try to suck the poison out."
"But that doesn't work. It's spreading up your arm. . .."
"So I take my axe and chop off my arm."
"But once you chop off your arm, you're bleeding to death."
"So I pull off my shirt and tie it around the stump to stop the blood."
"But a vulture smells the blood and comes swooping down at you."
"So I use my right arm to pick up the left arm that I cut off, and I use it to bat the vulture away."
"But. . ."
Joni trailed off. At first, I figured I had her stumped. Then she leaned over, her eyelids closing. She smelled like bubblegum and bicycle grease. Before I knew it, her lips were coming near mine. I was so freaked out, I stood up. Since we were still under my bed, I crashed into the bottom of my mattress.
Her eyes opened quickly after that.
"What'd you do that for?" we both yelled at the same time.
"Don't you like me?" Joni asked, clearly hurt.
"Yeah," I said. "But, you know, I'm gay."
"Oh. Cool. Sorry."
"No problem."
There was a pause, and then Joni continued.
"But the vulture pulls your left arm out of your hand and begins to hit you with it. . . ."
At that moment I knew Joni and I were going to be friends for a good long time.
It was with Joni's help that I became the first openly gay class president in the history of Ms.
Farquar's third-grade class.
Joni was my campaign manager. She was the person who came up with my campaign slogan: VOTE FOR ME . .. I'M GAY.
I thought it rather oversimplified my stance on the issues (pro-recess, anti-gym), but Joni said it was sure to generate media attention. At first, she wanted the slogan to be VOTE FOR
ME . . . I'M A GAY, but I pointed out that this could easily be misread as VOTE FOR ME . . .
I'M A GUY, which would certainly lose me votes. So the A was struck, and the race began in earnest.
My biggest opponent was (I'm sorry to say) Ted Halpern. His first slogan was VOTE FOR
ME . . . I'M NOT GAY, which only made him seem dull. Then he tried YOU CANT VOTE
FOR HIM . . . HE'S GAY, which was pretty stupid, because nobody likes to be told who they can (or can't) vote for. Finally, in the days leading up to the election, he resorted to DONT
VOTE FOR THE FAG. Hello? Joni threatened to beat him up, but I knew he'd played right into our hands. When the election was held, he was left with the rather tiny lint-head vote, while I carried the girl vote, the open-minded guy vote, the third-grade closet-case vote, and the Ted-hater vote. It was a total blowout, and when it was all over, Joni beat Ted up anyway.
The next day at lunch, Cody O'Brien traded me two Twinkies for a box of raisins--clearly an unequal trade. The next day, I gave him three Yodels for a Fig Newton.
This was my first flirtation.
Cody was my date for my fifth-grade semi-formal. Or at least he was supposed to be my date.
Two days before the big shindig, we had a fight over a Nintendo cartridge he'd borrowed from me and lost. I know it's a small thing to break up over, but really, the way he handled it (lying! deceit!) was symptomatic of bigger problems. Luckily, we parted on friendly terms.
Joni was supposed to be my back-up date, but she surprised me by saying she was going with Ted. She swore to me he'd changed.
This was also symptomatic of bigger problems. But there was no way of knowing it then.
In sixth grade, Cody, Joni, a lesbian fourth grader named Laura, and I formed our elementary school's first gay-straight alliance. Quite honestly, we took one look around and figured the straight kids needed our help. For one thing, they were all wearing the same clothes. Also (and this was critical), they couldn't dance to save their lives. Our semi-formal dance floor could have easily been mistaken for a coop of pre-Thanksgiving turkeys. This was not acceptable.
Luckily, our principal was cooperative, and allowed us to play a minute or two of "I Will Survive" and "Bizarre Love Triangle" after the Pledge of Allegiance was read each morning.
Membership in the gay-straight alliance soon surpassed that of the football team (which isn't to say there wasn't overlap). Ted refused to join, but he couldn't stop Joni from signing them up for swing dance classes twice a week at recess.
Since I was unattached at the time, and since I was starting to feel that I had met everyone there was to meet at our elementary school, I would often sneak out with Laura to the AV
room, where we'd watch Audrey Hepburn movies until the recess bell would ring, and reality would beckon once more.
In eighth grade, I was tackled by two high school wrestlers after a late-night showing of
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
at our local theater. At first, I thought it was a strange kind of foreplay, but then I realized that their grunts were actually insults--queer, faggot, the usual. I wasn't about to take such verbal abuse from strangers--only Joni was allowed to speak to me that way. Luckily, I had gone to the movies with a bunch of my friends from the fencing team, so they just pulled out their foils and disarmed the lugheads. (One of them, I've since heard, is now a drag queen in Columbus, Ohio. I like to think I had something to do with that.) I was learning that notoriety came with a certain backlash. I had to be careful. I had a gay food column in the local paper--"Dining OUT"--which was a modest success. I'd declined numerous pleas to run for student council president, because I knew it would interfere with my direction of the school musical (I won't bore you with the details, but let me, just say that Cody O'Brien was an Auntie Mame for the ages).
All in all, life through junior high was pretty fun. I didn't really have a life that was so much out of the ordinary. The usual series of crushes, confusions, and intensities.
Then I meet Noah and things become complicated. I sense it immediately, driving home from Zeke's gig. I suddenly feel more complicated.
Not bad complicated.
Just complicated.
The Homecoming Queen's Dilemma
I look for him in the hallways on Monday. I hope that he's looking for me, too.
Joni promises me she'll be my search party spy. I'm afraid she'll get too carried away with the job, dragging Noah over to me by the ear if she finds him.
But the connection isn't made. No matter how far I drift from the hallway conversations I'm having, I never drift into him. The halls are awash in Homecoming Pride posters and post-weekend gossip. Everybody is jingling and jangling; I look for Noah like I'd look for a pocket of calm.
Instead I run into Infinite Darlene. Or, more accurately, she runs on over to me. There are few sights grander at eight in the morning than a six-foot-four football player scuttling through the. halls in high heels, a red shock wig, and more-than-passable make-up. If I wasn't so used to it, I might be taken aback.
"Ah'm so glad I caught you," Infinite Darlene exclaims, sounding like Scarlett O'Hara as played by Clark Gable. "Things are such a mess!"
I don't know when Infinite Darlene and I first became friends. Perhaps it was back when she was still Daryl Heisenberg, but that's not very likely; few of us can remember what Daryl Heisenberg was like, since Infinite Darlene consumed him so completely. He was a decent football player, but nowhere near as good as when he started wearing false eyelashes.
Infinite Darlene doesn't have it easy. Being both star quarterback and homecoming queen has its conflicts. And sometimes it's hard for her to fit in. The other drag queens in our school rarely sit with her at lunch; they say she doesn't take good enough care of her nails, and that she looks a little too buff in a tank top. The football players are a little more accepting, although there was a spot of trouble a year ago when Chuck, the second-string quarterback, fell in love with her and got depressed when she said he wasn't her type.
I am not alarmed when Infinite Darlene tells me things are
such a mess.
For Infinite Darlene, things are always
such a mess;
if they weren't, she wouldn't have nearly enough to talk about.
This time, though, it's a real dilemma.
"Coach Ginsburg is going to have my hat," she declares. "It's the frickin' Homecoming Pride rally this afternoon. He wants me to march with the rest of the team. But as homecoming queen, I'm also supposed to be
introducing
the team. If I don't do the proper introductions, my tiara might be in doubt. Trilby Pope would take my place, which would be ghastly, ghastly, ghastly. Her boobs are faker than mine."
"You think Trilby Pope would stoop that low?" I ask.
"Is the Pope shrewish?
Of course
she would stoop that low. And she'd have gravity problems getting back up."
Usually Infinite Darlene acts like she's in a perpetual congeniality contest. But Trilby Pope is her weak spot. They used to be good friends, able to recount an hour's worth of activity with three hours' worth of conversation. Then Trilby fell into the field hockey crowd. She tried to convince Infinite Darlene to join her, but football was the same season. They drifted into different practices and different groups of friends. Trilby started to wear a lot of plaid, which Infinite Darlene despised. She started to hang with rugby boys. It all became very fraught.
Finally, they had a friendship break-up -- an exchange of heated classroom notes, folded in the shape of artillery. They averted their glances dramatically when they passed in the halls.
Trilby still has some of Infinite Darlene's accessories, from when they used to swap. Infinite Darlene tells everybody (except Trilby) that she wants them back.
My attention is beginning to wander from the conversation. I am still scanning the hallways for Noah, knowing full well that if I see him, I will most probably duck into the nearest doorway, blushing furiously.
"I do declare," Infinite Darlene does declare,
"what
has gotten you so distracted?"
It is here that I feel the limit of our friendship. Because while Infinite Darlene feels comfortable telling me everything, I am afraid that if I tell her something, it will no longer be mine. It will belong to the whole school.
"I'm just looking for someone," I hedge.
"Aren't we all?" Infinite Darlene vamps ruefully. I think I'm off the hook, but then she adds,
"Is it someone
special?"
"It's nothing," I say, crossing my fingers. I pray that it's not nothing. Yes, I pray to my Big Lesbian God Who Doesn't Really Exist. I say to her:
I don't ask for much. I swear. But I
would really love Noah to be everything I hope he'll be. Please let him be someone I can
groove with, and who wants to groove with me.
My denial has sent Infinite Darlene back to her own dilemma. I tell her she should march with the football team while wearing her homecoming queen regalia. It seems like a good compromise to me.
Infinite Darlene starts to nod. Then her eyes see something over my shoulder and flash anger.
"Don't look now," she whispers.
Of course, I turn and look. And there's Kyle Kimball walking by.
Turning away from me like he might catch plague from a single bubonic glance.
Kyle is the only straight boy I've ever kissed. (He didn't realize he was straight at the time.) We went out for a few weeks last year, in ninth grade. He is the only ex I'm not on speaking terms with. Sometimes I even feel like he hates me. It's a very strange feeling. I'm not used to being hated.