Boys Who Hurt
Dad knew what my cousin had done. He had been building up his nerve for most of the seven-hour drive from Maryland to Connecticut — but I didn’t know that yet. We sat silently in my white Impala as we sped northward on I-95 back to Yale’s campus. Fall break had just ended. Our tires squelched over old snow. I had an essay on James Joyce’s Dubliners due soon, and I was trying to focus enough to read. I couldn’t get past the first story: “The Sisters,” the one about the priest and the boy. The word “paralysis” kept tripping me up like an uneven step I had forgotten how to avoid.
We stopped for gas in Fairfield, about half an hour from New Haven, and ate our Dollar Menu dinners slowly as if we were afraid of our empty mouths.
Dad revved the engine as we merged back onto the highway. The sun set as he drove. I was putting my headphones back on to drown out the talk radio my dad was playing when he asked if I wanted to talk about it. I instinctively knew — as all queer people know — exactly what “it” was. I had anticipated this conversation for several weeks. I feigned ignorance anyway.
You know, it. Your sexuality, Dad said. I tried to act surprised.
Oh. Do you want to talk about it? I asked.
Are you sure this is the life you want? he asked, rubbing his chin like he does when he is confused or fuming. My memory of my answer has blurred. My dad’s question made me anxious about what he would say, ask, demand. It also made me angry. Angry at him for daring to break a 19-year-old silence. Angry at my cousin for forcing him to do the breaking.
Dad said something about the impossibility of a child of two lovingly married parents turning out gay. He said something about being young and unsure. Something about grandkids. I trained my eyes through the windshield on the green traffic signs as I counted down the exits to New Haven. I tried to do what I had been doing ever since I realized that my desires were an embarrassment. I kept quiet. I deliberately zoned out.
In the middle of all this blur, my cousin’s name sliced through. Why would Dad mention his name?
“Mom said you thought it was all your cousin’s fault,” Dad said. That was true; I did say that. He was the one who outed me, after all. “But how did he know?” Dad demanded.
There was that uneven step again. I stumbled on it. I told Dad I didn’t know how my cousin knew I was gay. Maybe he was just guessing. Maybe he found my Twitter. I don’t know.
“You and him were always strange together…,” Dad trailed off. We took the exit for downtown New Haven. I could see Harkness Tower in the distance, its silhouette staining a dark sky even darker.
Finally we reached my dorm on Prospect Street. I unloaded my suitcase and told Dad I loved him as I slammed the trunk closed so he wouldn’t hear it.
A few weeks earlier, I had been sitting in Watson Hall, struggling with a set theory assignment that was due the next morning. Apparently, two sets with the exact same elements are treated as identical, even if some elements are duplicated. Even if they are in a different order. None of it made much sense to me.
My phone buzzed with a text from Mom. A distraction, I thought warmly. I scanned the paragraph-length message. The words “gay” and “sexuality” flashed onto my retina, remaining like seared afterimages. My body froze over. I read the text.
Mom told me that my cousin had gotten into a fight with another relative of mine on his construction jobsite. Somehow, in the tussle, he told that relative I was gay. This part of the story still baffles me. Not because he knew my queerness could be used as a weapon in our family — of course he knew that — but because he chose to wield it anyway.
That relative told my paternal grandmother, whom I call Nana. She got upset and came to my father with the news, who then told my mother, who insisted she knew all along. Cousin, relative, grandmother, father, mother: this was the opposite of how I would have wanted to come out. The order mattered. It still does.
Mom assured me that she was fine with my choice. I reminded her impatiently that being gay wasn’t a choice. I said things, hurtful things about my cousin that I no longer believe. A seismic power shift had occurred between me and him after years of silence; I needed that power back. I told Mom I needed space and went to bed, feeling like my axis hadn’t just shifted, but dissolved.
I drove myself home for Thanksgiving break that year. Another seven-hour road trip with Dad was out of the question. The weeks following my cousin’s outing of me were a painstaking exercise in avoidance. I avoided Mom’s invitation to watch And the Band Played On with her, one of her many well-meaning attempts to prove her wokeness to me. I avoided a trip to Orlando with Dad. I avoided Nana’s gaze.
I didn’t have an occasion to avoid him until Thanksgiving. He showed up late for dinner at the house of my maternal grandmother, the one we both call Grandma. He brought his girlfriend, a thin woman with hair the same color as mine and a voice almost as soft as the one in which I once spoke to him. I cursed myself at these thoughts. Why should I compare myself to her? Why should I carry that weight, too?
A cigarette dangled from Grandma’s smile. She grinned at all of us, her whole family, as we fixed our plates in the kitchen. I didn’t know if she had found out that I was gay. I still don’t know. Sometimes grandmothers know things, and sometimes they refuse to know them.
I stood in the back of the line for Grandma’s baked macaroni and cheese. I always wait for everyone else to grab a plate so I don’t look too eager; call it the food tax for fat people. He was once fat too — or at least not fit. I didn’t know why he held back with me, away from our relatives, who were flocking to the food. Grandma turned her back to us as she put her cigarette out.
He offers me a side hug. Haven’t seen you in a while, he says. I agree. I am spooning pasta onto my plate when he reaches down and grabs my right ass cheek. Another freezing-over. There is no means of extraction for me. Only he can push us forward, out of this moment.
He decides he doesn’t want any macaroni after all. He’s watching his figure, he says. I feel him watching mine as he returns to our family in the living room.
I steady myself on the kitchen counter and shame the flush in my cheeks until it disappears.
Saturday after the holiday. My high school friend Kris was home from college for Thanksgiving too. Some people once told me they didn’t believe Kris when he said he was straight. I am mostly responsible for that. We are very close friends, and I’ve always been physically affectionate with those I care for.
I drove 10 minutes to his house and found him in his basement playing FIFA on his Xbox. I lay down next to him on the ratty ’90s-era couch. I rested my head against his abdomen as he stared blankly at the screen. He cursed softly when he lost his match, then asked if I wanted to watch a movie. I said yes and grabbed a blanket to share.
In the gentle darkness that rolls over you while watching the credits of a movie very late at night, Kris started talking. I began to see glimpses of the boy I had my first honest-to-God crush on several years ago. He told me about his girlfriend and how they wanted to get married one day, but not too soon. He told me that he didn’t know if he wanted to go to medical school or work in pharmaceuticals. I could feel his diaphragm pushing out each sentence, I was so close to him. The quiet between us was warm, almost mammalian.
He seemed to have nothing more to say. My turn. “Can I tell you something?” I asked him. Of course, he said. I made him promise he wouldn’t breathe this to anyone.
“A long time ago, I was in a…sort of relationship. And looking back now, I’m not sure everything that was done to me was entirely consensual.”
That was all I could say. I couldn’t make myself name my cousin. Kris nodded and sighed and let me hold him in the dark a little longer.
After that night with Kris, the sensations came back to me. A sunless bathroom. A cold mirror. A doorknob that locks. Him with me, him on me, him in me. A pair of toy sunglasses that lights up blue so he can see what he’s doing. It doesn’t occur to me to say no. I feel so natural. No more writing lies about girls in journals that I knew my parents would read. No more pretending to like-like my girl best friends. I know what I want now.
Soon my backside is wet with something I’ve never seen before. I don’t remember the ages. Three years between him and me. He was old enough to know what this wet thing of his was, and I wasn’t.
The door holding in that memory unlocks after I talk with Kris. I can hear the other doors unlocking too, a whole hallway unlatching, a cascade of cold drafts slipping through the doors cracked open. One door opens into Grandma’s pool. Another into his bedroom. A third into mine.
I don’t remember the year it began, or the year it ended. What use are years to somebody frozen?
But it happens again. Again. Again. Again.
Christmas, the year after he grabbed my ass. He arrived at Grandma’s house with a different girlfriend this time. She had two children, a girl and a boy, who seemed as in love with him as she did. We found ourselves together in the kitchen again. We were both wearing clothes we had received as presents that morning. He spotted a long sticker on the thigh of my new jeans. “54 in. x 32 in.,” it read, over and over. He peels it off slowly as though it were a scab. How can it heal like this? How can I?
In a tidier universe, our story would be fiction. He would be the priest in “The Sisters” and I would be the boy. Our family would whisper, but if my father was any indication, they had been doing that for years. They would be sure it was his fault. In that story, he is also dead. In that story, he exists only in memory.
The years, like I said, are blurry. I believe he had just entered high school when he ended it. In any case, he’d started dating his first girlfriend. He told me all the ways they loved each other: the things they did together, the boundaries of hers that he respected. I knew nothing of boundaries. He had just started to lose weight for ROTC. He got contact lenses and a Justin Bieber haircut. He began to worry about looking handsome. I was still fat with unkempt hair and librarian glasses. I was, by his appraisal, not handsome.
We still spent time together, but we rarely did things in the dark. Sometimes we would roughhouse, and he would hold me down until I tapped out, submitted to his dominance. Sometimes we would get into arguments, and he would tell me to stop acting like a faggot. What a strange word, I thought then. I knew it wasn’t desirable, but I liked the way the sentence sounded when I whispered it to my pet tabby cat one night, under my covers: “I am a faggot.” I had never been labelled so accurately, albeit so crudely, before.
Looking back, his reasoning seems quite simple. I wasn’t desirable; therefore, he was. I was a faggot; therefore, he wasn’t.
My first involvement with a boy did not simply end. It was terminated. One day he realized what he was doing was somehow wrong. I don’t know what prompted this realization, though I suspect it had more to do with my gender than my age or my relation to him. In the end, he was the one who ended things. His “no” was the one that mattered, because I was not aware of the possibility — the promise — of “no.”
I have since tried to blame him, but the blame isn’t simple. He is not innocent. The damage done to me was real and lasting. I still struggle to build relationships with men in which I feel secure in saying “no.” And yet, he was not the priest. I was not the boy. I was a boy, and so was he, boys with a family who should have known better. One boy can hurt another, especially when he himself is hurting. These things happen, and that is not an absolution.
