“I didn’t know Kelly personally, but I knew the kind of kid he was. He tried to run faster than the other boys, talk louder, and spit farther because he was scared. Scared that if he didn’t, he’d be less of a man somehow. Those of us who are different and grow up in Foster seem to be cut from the same mold when it’s time for us to learn to be men. We think that everyone else has it figured out and that if we don’t know something, we should just fake it and pretend we do. We are taught that showing weakness is wrong and that if you do, you are somehow wrong. But that just isn’t how life is. The dangers of small towns like this are the very things that make them wonderful to raise kids in. They give a sense of normalcy. Foster is an island of calm adrift in the middle of the insanity that the world seems to be today, and, for the most part, we thank our lucky stars for that.”
I could see people nodding and wiping their eyes, and I forced myself to keep talking.
“Our town has been spared things like gangs and real crime. We don’t have shootings or a drug problem. We are safe here and secure that our kids are safe. We love this town because of that, but it comes at a price, a price that unfortunately Kelly had to pay.”
People gasped but I pressed on.
“What happened was a tragedy, but it was one that could have been avoided if we just realized what we were doing to these kids.” I looked at Mr. Aimes. “Kelly may have pulled the trigger, but it was the rest of us who put the gun in his hands.”
Aimes jumped out of his seat, screaming, as people began to talk hurriedly to each other.
“There is nothing wrong with being gay,” I said, talking over the chaos. “I’m gay, and I should have said that before. I am as much to blame as anyone else is. We are all to blame. We need to have a real conversation in this town about what being a man is and how it’s okay to be different.”
“My son was not gay!” Mr. Aimes stood up and yelled.
“And if he was,” I said to him from behind the podium, “there would have been nothing wrong with that.” I looked to the crowd, who was captivated by the real life drama in front of them. “I am Tyler Parker; and I am gay. I have always been gay and just too terrified to admit it. The entire time you have known me, I liked guys. I am the exact same person who was born and raised in this town and who you all cheered for when I went off to college.” I pointed to myself. “I am the same guy you rooted for in the bleachers, and I am the same guy you buy your kid’s uniforms from. I am a gay man, and not one of you had a problem with me the entire time I lived here.” I took a deep breath and asked them, “So why would you now?”
I looked at Mr. Aimes. “Why should they have a problem with Kelly? With Brad or Kyle or with
any
kid in this town? It doesn’t matter what they are or who they are attracted to. They are our kids, and shouldn’t that be enough for us to let them be who they want to be?”
“How dare you embarrass my son like this?” Mr. Aimes raged at me.
“He’s dead,” I said to him, shaking my head. “He isn’t embarrassed. That is you. Are you incapable of seeing anything past your own ego? This isn’t them!” I finally shouted. “They get it from us.
We
are the ones with the problem and we pass it along to them. If there is going to be a solution, it needs to come from us. How many more kids need to kill themselves before we realize that something needs to change around here?” No one answered, but that’s okay. I didn’t expect them to. I opened my mouth to say more, but I looked up and saw him in the doorway and my brain just froze.
Matt stood there and smiled at me.
“I just wanted to say that. I’m gay and none of you had a problem with me before.” I looked at Mr. Aimes. “And they wouldn’t have had a problem with Kelly either.”
I didn’t wait for their reaction; instead, I just walked down the aisle toward Matt, no longer even caring where I was or who was watching. I reached out to him and pulled him into a kiss that made my entire world shake from his presence. I knew everyone in the room was watching us kiss, but all I cared about was this man in my arms and how he made me feel.
The kiss lasted for what felt like hours before I was able to remove my mouth from his. My forehead was pressed against his as I combated the twin urges to cry and laugh at the same time. “I’m sorry,” I said, not able to look him in the eye yet.
“And I’m Matt,” he whispered back. “I don’t think we’ve met yet.” That made me look up, and I saw the tears sliding down his cheeks. “But I would love the chance to know you.”
I just nodded as my brain flooded my mouth with far too many responses for anything to be considered English.
Someone called out “Kiss him again!” and I heard laughter rumble through the room. I looked back and say everyone was looking at us, most of them were crying, except this time they were tears of joy.
Before we walked out, I looked at the picture of Kelly again. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t see Riley’s ghost looking back at me.
W
E
SAT
in my car as the people shuffled out of the funeral home.
“I’m not complaining, but how are you here?” he asked me.
I had been dreading that question ever since I decided to move back to Foster. There was no way I could convey to him that I did not move back here with some creepy plan to stalk him all over again.
“I live here now,” I finally admitted. “Not because of you, if that’s what you’re scared of.” He tried to interrupt me, but I kept talking. “I wasn’t happy there. I haven’t been happy anywhere, and I needed to be honest about that for once. I kept thinking that if I moved somewhere or did different things, I was going to end up happy somehow, but it wasn’t true. I am unhappy and I bring that with me wherever I go. So I moved back in with my parents and am going to try to figure out who the hell I am.”
He smiled at me, and I resisted the urge to ask him what he was thinking.
“I’ve felt that way since high school,” he admitted to me.
That made me laugh. “Yeah, I figured.
We both asked at once, “So now what?”
We chuckled at that for a few seconds before I said, “Okay, we tried love at first sight and we tried chasing each other halfway across the country. How about we try it from the beginning?” He arched an eyebrow questioningly as I stuck out my hand. “My name is Matt, and I used to watch you read as you leaned against your red door.”
He took my hand slowly. “I’m Tyler and I used to watch you watching me.” That made me redden a little and he added, “There’s a gay bar on the outskirts of town. It’s not fancy but it’s a place to go. Would you like to go have a drink with me?”
I stared at him for a moment, wondering if he was playing with me or not. After a long pause, I nodded. “That sounds like a date.”
Warmth made it all the way down to my toes as he answered, “It
is
a date.”
It wasn’t an explosion or a burst of fireworks; it was something slower and far more powerful. As we sat there waiting for the parking lot to empty, I could feel the continental plates that made up my life begin to shift under me. And it hit me….
This was the moment my life truly began. This was the day I stopped running from being happy and just let it happen.
And for the first time in my life, that wasn’t a bad thing.
Not the end….
L
OVE
is hard.
I don’t say that like I have cured cancer or figured how many licks it takes to get into a Tootsie Roll pop or anything, but it is worth stating. Love is hard; real love is even harder. No matter how many times boy A meets girl B in a movie and falls in love while the catchy pop tune of the moment plays behind them, it doesn’t make it real. Hollywood has made love incredibly simple and impossibly difficult in the same action by trying to convince us that love is what they show us.
Simple because we think you meet someone, fall in love, and all is well. Impossible because you rarely meet someone, fall in love, and then all is well. We are sold these fairy tales by the pound and eat them up with a spoon day after day, TV show after TV show, movie after movie. There are whole industries making people believe that love is simple, love is obvious, and love comes for everyone.
Not everyone gets to fall in love.
I know, not a popular statement but as with my first proclamation, it needs to be said out loud. Love is so much more than just the right moment and the right song and the right place. Saying it is like that is like saying that cooking is just putting stuff in a pot and hoping it comes out as a meal. Sure it
can
happen, but how many bad meals can you make before you realize there might be more to cooking than that?
Now this may sound like I am anti-love, but that isn’t true. I am a big fan of love. I am all pro-love. Me and love are… well, I was going to say in love, but we are at best close, personal friends. There is a third proclamation coming up so be ready, because like the other two, it isn’t rocket science.
Gay love is even harder.
I know, duh, right?
Let’s go back to the cooking analogy, because I am too lazy to come up with a new one. So putting random ingredients in a pot and cooking it does not make a meal. Now consider you are not just trying to make a meal doing that, you are trying to make a meal that is low sodium, gluten free, and has under a hundred calories a serving. Suddenly the chances of all that crap you threw in the pot becoming something edible seems impossible, doesn’t it? All this is just talking to the numbers of falling in love. There are so many people out there, only so many gay people, only so many gay people who you will find attractive, only so many you would be compatible with, and then only so many of those who you would have the opportunity to meet.
This isn’t even taking into account the slut factor.
Now before I go on, this is
not
something all gay men go through. It is not a law, it is not even a statement, it is simply something I have observed and had other gay men agree with me on. So if you do not agree with me, that is fine; skip down a few paragraphs. There is a cute thing with Michael Jackson at the end.
Gay men are a lot like people who have been starved for most of their lives, forced to watch other people eat whenever they want.
Man, food again. I think I might be hungry.
Growing up, we see boy and girl, boy and girl, boy and girl over and over again until we are ready to scream. Most of us are not ready to announce our gayness to the world and even if we do, the odds of someone in high school being gay is so rare it isn’t even worth talking about sometimes. So we spend most of high school sitting outside the restaurant of love, watching other couples eat what we so desperately crave. Sometimes even in college we can’t sack up, so we go even longer starving ourselves. Sometimes we will pretend, just to be with anyone. Sometimes we will sneak around and take random thrills in the night, just to keep from going crazy. Either way, it is not a good thing.
Once we are out of school, away from home, away from the people who think we’re someone we aren’t, we tend to go a little nuts. How nuts? Try putting a group of people who have not eaten in years in an all-you-can-eat buffet and tell me how many of them are deciding to eat healthy. We binge, we try everything, we try to shove all those lost years into the smallest possible window of time.
In other words, we kind of turn into sluts.
Not everyone, and not everywhere, to be sure. But in general, most gay guys have been or at least know a slut or two. So there we are, in our sex buffet, going nuts and growing older. That elusive quality all young men have begins to fade, and we come out of our calorie-induced coma and wonder
What am I going to do now?
We’ve had sex, a lot of sex, and in some cases more than a lot; we’ve done the club thing, we’ve done the casual fun thing. What about the love thing?
And then, most of the time, we get stupid.
Remember our pot we were just throwing shit into earlier? Yeah, well, you have to remember that most straight people have been at least pretending to cook most of their lives. They grew up knowing what their whole role was going to be. Some girls wanted to be a princess, some wanted to be an astronaut, some wanted to raise a family, some wanted to take over the world, and guys did the same thing. Some of us wanted to pretend we were in
Swingers
and everything was Vegas, baby! And some of us watched
The Notebook
and realized there was nothing wrong with being a romantic. But through popular media, the culture, the people around you, you began to shape what you would someday dream of.
For some of us, we just made it up as we went along.
Some tried to date guys like we saw other guys date girls. Some of us rejected the heterosexual model and took a more open lifestyle approach. And some guys just figured it out and settled down without a peep. It’s confusing to be a middle-aged gay man and not know what’s next. Am I supposed to want to marry someone? Am I supposed to adopt a kid? Do I have to watch
Glee
every week even if I hate musicals? We fumble around in the dark for so long, looking for a light, that we just forget the point.
That we are not happy and want to be happy.
This book is about the messiness of gay relationships. There is no promise that Matt and Tyler will work out, which is why there is not a “The End.” Just finding someone you like isn’t the end; it’s just the beginning of an even stranger and more challenging phase of a gay man’s life.
And this is why we need role models.
This very reason is why we, as a culture, must fight for gay people to be fairly represented in media. Why we should celebrate shows like
Glee
,
The New Normal
,
Modern Family,
and many, many others that show there is a way to be gay, happy, and in a relationship. We need to start showing gay teenagers out there right now that this isn’t a bad thing, this isn’t a weird thing… this is a life thing.