“I really wonder if we can move them on the church thing,” Matt says when it comes time to part once again on a Saturday night. “You deserve to see what it’s like to be in a place where who you love doesn’t make you a pariah.”
“I don’t know what that’s like,” I say. “It’s hard to even imagine.” All I see around me are the ways we aren’t accepted, the flaws. Matt sees it differently.
“There’s a lot of homophobia in the world,” he says. “But you act like it’s everything, everywhere. It’s not.”
I shake my head. It doesn’t feel real to me. Matt shows me even more movies, brochures, websites than I’ve found on my own. A veritable digital explosion of rainbows. It all reads like fiction.
“Some places I go online, it’s like a haven,” Matt says. “This weird utopia where any little homophobic thing gets called out as messed up. Kids who live in big cities, they act like the way we want the world to be is the way it really is. I don’t know what to make of that.”
“There are no billboards in big cities,” I say. “They don’t have to ride past smiling Reverend Dan on the bus to school every goddamn day.”
We recite his sign in unison: “Come out … to church and pray the gay away!” I bare my teeth in a reasonable facsimile of Reverend Dan’s psychotic grin.
“I wish harm on his dentist,” Matt says. “That shit just ain’t right.”
“His teeth are whiter than his … whiteness.” I’m already laughing.
“I had to post a picture of it in one of my chat groups,” Matt says. “No one could believe it was a real billboard. Some of them still think it was photoshopped.”
“Welcome to middle America,” I say. “Land of the forcibly closeted.”
Matt is a relief in this regard. People online sometimes talk about how great it is to come out and how everyone should come out as soon as possible so that the world becomes full of happy, out gay people and everyone will know a bunch of happy, out gay people and it will start seeming strange to find happy, out gay people so unusual. That makes logical sense, except then there’s the newspapers, and there’s always a story about a kid who’s getting beaten and another who can’t go to his prom and another who’s living on the street because his evangelical Christian parents kicked him out and now he’s a sex worker in Little Rock or Pittsburgh because he doesn’t even have the money to get a bus or a train to someplace better. And then there is what-happened-slash-is-happening to Matt in our very own high school. He might not admit it, but I know things haven’t been as smooth since he came out as he likes to pretend.
“You okay?” he says now.
“This moment? Yeah.”
This moment, this place, is safe. It’s separate from the world. We inhabit our own planet in Matt’s basement. He doesn’t say it, but he wants us to live on planet Earth. To walk down the halls at school holding hands and go to the movies and be something other than alone. My imagination paints the picture, but my logic brain erases it. Glorious graffiti, followed by a power washer. It’s hard for me to consider even walking upstairs with my hand still in his. Because my imagination does other things, too. It paints Dad slamming doors and Mom weeping, hunched over the Bible. It paints both of them gazing at me, shattered, haunted, the way they looked after Sheila’s funeral. I’d be dead to them. I imagine Pastor Carle standing over me, wielding a cross, shouting “the power of Christ compels you!” and dousing me with baptismal water like it’s an exorcism.
I try to see it differently, like how it happens on TV: a few empathetic tears, a little surprise, and lots of love. But that picture is harder to paint.
Matt kisses me at the bottom of the stairs. Kissing is both the same and different from what I always imagined.
“Laser tag Monday?” This is our habit now, planning the next time we’ll see each other before I leave, so that we know exactly how long we have to wait.
“Absolutely.”