Two Boys Kissing(2)

It is 8:43 on the same Friday night, and Cooper Riggs is nowhere. He’s in his room, alone, and it feels like nowhere. He could be outside his room, surrounded by people, and it would still feel like nowhere. The world, in his eyes, is flat and dull. All sensation has been leaked from it, and instead its energy is running through the busy corridors of his mind, making angry, frustrated noise. He is sitting on his bed, and he is wrestling within himself, and ultimately the only thing he can think to do is go on the Internet, because life there is just as flat as real life, without the expectations of real life. He’s only seventeen, but online he can be twenty-two, fifteen, twenty-seven. Whatever the other person wants him to be. He has fake profiles, fake photos, fake stats, and fake histories. The conversations are largely fake, too, full of flirtation he’ll never deliver on, small sparks that will never turn to fire. He will not admit it, but he is actually looking for the surprise of something genuine. He opens seven sites at once, keeping his mind busy, tricking himself out of nowhere, even if it still feels like nowhere. He gets so lost in the search that nothing else seems to matter, and time becomes worthless, to be spent on worthless things.





We know that some of you are still scared. We know that some of you are still silent. Just because it’s better now doesn’t mean that it’s always good.

Dreaming and loving and screwing. None of these are identities. Maybe when other people look at us, but not to ourselves. We are so much more complicated than that.

We wish we could offer you a creation myth, an exact reason why you are the way you are, why when you read this sentence, you will know it’s about you. But we don’t know how it began. We barely understood the time that we knew. We gather the things we learned, and they don’t nearly add up to fill the space of a life.

You will miss the taste of Froot Loops.

You will miss the sound of traffic.

You will miss your back against his.

You will even miss him stealing the sheets.

Do not ignore these things.



We did not have the Internet, but we had a network. We did not have websites, but we had sites where we wove our web. You could see it most in the cities. Even someone as young as Cooper, as young as Tariq, could find it. Piers and coffee shops. Spots in the park, and bookstores where Wilde, Whitman, and Baldwin reigned as bastard kings. These were the safe harbors, even when we feared that being too open meant we were opening ourselves to attack. Our happiness had defiance, and our happiness had fear. Sometimes there was anonymity, and sometimes you were surrounded by friends and friends of friends. Either way, you were connected. By your desires. By your defiance. By the simple, complicated fact of who you were.

Outside of the cities, the connections were harder to see, the web thinner, the sites harder to find. But we were there. Even if we thought we were the only ones, we were there.



There are few things that can make us quite as happy as a gay prom.

Right now, 9:03 on that Friday night, we’re in a town with the improbable name of Kindling—surely the pioneers had a fiery death wish, or maybe it was just a tribute to the burning sticks that kept the settlers alive. Somewhere along the way, someone must have learned the third little pig’s lesson, since the community center is built entirely of bricks. It’s a dull, quiet building in a dull, quiet town—its architecture as beautiful as the word municipal. It is an unlikely place for a blue-haired boy and a pink-haired boy to meet.

Kindling does not have enough gay kids to support a prom on its own. So tonight the cars drive in from far and wide. Some of the couples drive in together, laughing or fighting or sitting in their separate silences. Some of the boys drive in alone—they’ve snuck out of the house, or they’re meeting friends at the community center, or they saw the listing online and decided at the last minute to go. There are boys in tuxedos, boys adorned with flowers, boys in torn hoodies, boys in ties as skinny as their jeans, boys in ironic taffeta gowns, boys in un-ironic taffeta gowns, boys in V-neck T-shirts, boys who feel awkward wearing dress shoes. And girls … girls wearing all these things, driving to the same place.

If we went to our proms, we went with girls. Some of us had a good time; some of us looked back years later and wondered how we had managed to be so oblivious about who we really were. A few of us managed to go with each other, with our best female friends covering as our dates. We were invited to this ritual, but only if we maintained the story line of our supervisors. It was more likely for Neil Armstrong to invite us to a prom on the moon than it was for us to go to a prom like the one being held in Kindling tonight.

When we were in high school, hair existed on the bland spectrum of black/brown/orange/blond/gray/white. But tonight in Kindling we have Ryan walking into the community center with his hair dyed a robin’s-egg blue. Ten minutes later, Avery walks in with his hair the color of a Mary Kay Cadillac. Ryan’s hair is spiked like the surface of a rocky ocean, while Avery’s swoops gently over his eyes. Ryan is from Kindling and Avery is from Marigold, a town forty miles away. We can tell immediately that they’ve never met, and that they are going to.

We are not unanimous about the hair. Some of us think it is ridiculous to have blue hair or pink hair. Others of us wish we could go back and make our hair mimic the Jell-O our mothers would serve us in the afternoon.

We are rarely unanimous about anything. Some of us loved. Some of us couldn’t. Some of us were loved. Some of us weren’t. Some of us never understood what the fuss was about. Some of us wanted it so badly that we died trying. Some of us swear we died of heartbreak, not AIDS.