Nice Shirt

Matt Spadafora
Sep 5, 2018 · 7 min read

It’s as if I knew what he was going to say as soon as he tapped me on the shoulder.

I glanced back at him and did my best to survey him in the dim light. He was a few inches shorter than me, conventionally good-looking, with the ghost of a five o’clock shadow creeping across his jaw. He looked at me impatiently.

“Can I help you?” I said to him.

“That’s a nice shirt you’ve got on there.”

I looked down at the short sleeve button down stretched across my shoulders, damp from sweat and spilled beer. It was a floral print with bright blue and red and yellow flowers, and it looked as if it were just taken from the back of a sun-baked vacationer in Hawaii.

“Uh, thanks.”

“But don’t you think it’s a little… loud?”

I shrugged. “I like it.”

He chuckled. “Okay then, faggot.”

I shut my eyes and exhaled.

Faggot.

I knocked into someone as I staggered away from him, spilling their beer on the floor, droplets splashing onto my Vans. I cut through the tightly packed crowd on the dance floor, men and women bouncing with one another to Madonna’s “Like A Prayer” — The Garrison was throwing a dance party by the decade, and we’d reached the eighties — and I headed toward the washroom, ignoring my friends calling out to me. I locked myself in a stall and made myself throw up in the toilet. The stale smell of beer flooded my nose and trickled down my chin, where it met the collar of my shirt. I sat on the sticky floor, soaking my shorts and shoes in God knows what, and cried.

I was a stranger to Toronto, but in the coming months, I’d be moving downtown with two friends, renting the second and third floors of a newly renovated house on Ossington, north of Bloor. I grew up in Burlington, a suburb to the west of the city exactly one hour and one minute away via GO Train. When I was younger, I convinced myself the city was a scary place. The people, the commotion, the unpredictability — it was all too much for me. It wasn’t until I graduated from university that I realized, as I struggled to sleep on the lumpy twin mattress in the room I grew up in at my parents’ house, that the city is where I needed to be. The things that scared me as a child were the things that enticed me now.

I could be anyone.

I could be openly gay.

I’d earned it. I had spent a lot of time convincing myself I wasn’t.

I was ready.

Gay wasn’t something I wanted to be, not at first. Nor was it something anyone else wanted me to be. I was ten the first time I was called a faggot. I knew I was different, but I didn’t know why I felt that way. At recess, a group of kids in my class were excitedly talking about going to the mall on the weekend. I asked if I could go with them. A girl named Felicity laughed at me and said, “We don’t want to hang out with someone like you. We don’t want to hang out with a faggot.” I had no idea what the word meant, so I Googled it on the family computer when I got home.

fag·got
/ˈfagət/
1. (offensive) a male homosexual

“Offensive.”

I cleared the browser history.

I didn’t cry. Not that time.

By high school, I was still uncomfortable in my own skin, but I understood why. I was getting used to having my friends tell me, “yesterday, so-and-so in English asked me if you were… you know,” and I’d laugh it off. “Of course I’m not,” I’d say. I felt bad for expecting them to defend me when I was lying to them, too. I invented crushes on girls in my grade to give my friends something to talk about. I just wanted to be what I thought was normal. I wanted a girlfriend. I wanted to lose my virginity. I wanted a reason not to slump my shoulders as I walked down the hall at school.

It happened again when I was a junior. Brian and Allen, two football players on steroids in my grade, asked me to my face if I liked sucking dick. “We’ve heard it’s true,” they said to me, “so, is it?” They sat behind me in American History and snickered, whispering “faggot, faggot, faggot” at me as the teacher spoke. Allen and I used to play video games and go to the park together in the summer when we were younger. I wondered what Brian would think of him if he knew we shared that history.

I didn’t cry then, either.

I resented people for using that word. I resented them for problematizing being gay. And then I began to resent myself for the same reason. I’d think to myself, they were right. I’m a faggot, and I’m ashamed of that. I distracted myself. I kept it buried.

The summer before I moved to the city, I was exhausted. I knew I was gay. I was aware my friends knew, too. I had avoided it all together throughout university. It was only when I was alone, late at night, when I would admit it to myself. I began messaging strangers on Tumblr I’d never meet about my sexuality. I trusted them with a secret they could never share. I was inching closer to telling my friends, though telling my family was off the table.

When a friend in the city invited a group of us to join her at The Garrison for the decade dance party, I was excited. I had bought the floral shirt weeks before, ignoring the disapproving look my mother gave me when I plucked it from the rack, and felt it was the right time to wear it. The anonymity that Toronto afforded was enough to empower me. What if? I’d ask myself. What if I just happened to tell one of my friends I was gay? What if I kissed another man? What if something happened?

Yes, something happened.

Crying came naturally this time.

I couldn’t tell my friends about what the guy had said to me. Instead, I wiped the vomit from my chin, scrutinized myself in the mirror with bloodshot eyes, bought myself two beers — one for each hand — and let the night slip away from me, dancing through the decades, waving hello to Britney Spears in the nineties. When everyone else had passed out at my friend’s apartment, I lay awake on the floor, drunk and dizzy, a voice still echoing in my head.

Faggot, faggot, faggot.

The floral shirt sat by my shoes, crumpled in a ball.

I wouldn’t wear it again for a year.


Days later I picked my best friend Devan up from her parents’ house in my mom’s Hybrid for a joyride. We were the same. Both of us moved back in with our parents in Burlington after graduation to save money. Both of us decided to move to the city. She would end up there a week before I would, moving in with our friend Kim to a two-bedroom apartment on Yonge. We loved to spend our nights driving around Burlington like we were still in high school. We’d meet up at ten and spend hours in the car, making sharp right turns through neighbourhoods where the houses cost more than both of our parents’ houses combined, blasting music as we drive.

Moving to Toronto came up as we talked, as it always did. We talked about what we wanted to do in the city. “Concerts,” she’d said more than once. “Let’s go to festivals. Let’s get drinks on patios.” We talked about quitting our jobs and finding new ones. We idealized the experiences we had yet to collect.

I told her about my night at The Garrison as I made the last turn onto her street. When I told her about what the man had said to me, I was close to tears.

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” she said. “People can be awful.”

“Yeah.”

I turned the car off in her driveway.

Silence.

I swallowed. “Well, you know, I guess I’m so upset because… I… I don’t know, people have always said things like this, but this time… I guess it’s because I think I’m…”

Silence.

“…bisexual?”

It was as if I was asking her for permission.

Why did I lie? Did I think that being bisexual was an easier truth to accept than being gay was? Was I not as ready as I thought I was?

She said, “okay.” We hugged, and she climbed out of my mom’s car, waving as she disappeared through the front door of her parents’ house.

Months later, when we had both settled in to our new apartments in the city, we were out with Kim for drinks at The Madison. In the short time since telling Devan the half-truth, I was being far more liberal about myself online than I ever had been. I was openly talking about being a gay man on social medias where I knew none of my friends followed me. It empowered me to accept myself. And it made me ready to say so.

I drank myself silly at the bar, slurring my words, burping beer into my mouth, wondering how I hadn’t already thrown up on myself. Once Kim left our booth to buy us drinks from the bar, I hiccupped at Devan, “I’m gay.” Before that, I’d written it out more times than I could recall. I needed to say it.

“I know,” she said.

When Kim returned with fresh beers and slid back into our booth beside me, I said again, “I’m gay.” It was as if the years of fear hadn’t mattered at all.

“I know,” she said. She smiled. “We had a feeling.”

I let the air out of my lungs and cried as I hugged them.

Matt Spadafora

Written by

27. Publishing assistant at HarperCollins Canada. Christine Baranski enthusiast.

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