Dear Kurl,
You’re right that watching Prince up close like that, with that degree of intimacy and intensity, is an experience only the tiniest percentage of his fans will ever get to share. Now that a few days have passed, I can appreciate that it was a memorable experience. I have to admit, though, that I found the whole night somewhat deflating.
I felt more and more self-conscious as the event wore on. When Prince slow-danced with one of his singers onstage—Shayna and Bron would know her name, the taller one—the lights came way down, and he told us, “Look away. Ain’t nothing to see up here.” And there we were in the dark for two or three minutes, with nothing to see and nothing to hold on to. You and the girls and Lyle had drifted away from me, so I just stood there feeling too small for the room.
Finally the lights came up a little, and Prince announced, “This here’s your prom, children. Couple up now, couple up.”
I don’t think you noticed, because you were speaking to Bron and the others, but someone had been chatting with me in the line outside. He came over and asked me to dance. Rogan, his name was.
God save us, I thought, it really is like the prom. Except that Rogan was older than high school, more like in his midtwenties. Too old for me, technically. But I said yes anyway.
While we slow-danced Rogan complimented the suit that the rest of you had thought so ridiculous for Paisley Park. He said my clothes reminded him of Under the Cherry Moon, so we talked about that movie, how we both thought Prince was expressing a great deal of sorrow on that whole album despite the bubbly, retro vibe. Rogan said, “I’m utterly enamored of this place.”
I told him I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard anyone use the word enamored out loud, in a sentence, before. He asked if that worked in his favor or against him, and I said, “In. Definitely in.”
So I was dancing with Rogan, and I was finally starting to feel a little happier—a little less bored and irritable, at least, flattered that someone in the room was interested enough in my existence to seek me out, to find a reason to touch me and talk to me—when I caught sight of you, Kurl.
You’d paired up with Shayna, and over her shoulder from eight, maybe ten, feet away you were staring directly at me and Rogan. I can hardly recollect your expression without shuddering, let alone try to describe it in writing. Your face was perfectly smooth and neutral as usual, but tensed, taut, as though it took everything in your power to keep it that way. There was something around your eyes, something locked down and pissed off and shadowy.
I half expected to see your fists clenched for attack, but your hands were resting open and relaxed on Shayna’s hips. When you noticed I was staring back at you, you dropped your gaze immediately, and the next time I looked over, Shayna was talking in your ear and you’d lowered your forehead to her shoulder to hear what she was saying.
Kurl, if you will recall, I informed you that I was gay in one of my earliest letters to you. You know that I have never tried to hide who I am. If you have a problem with my sexuality, I need you to be honest with me and admit it. Because if seeing me on a dance floor in a man’s arms is enough to generate that intensity of disgust and hatred in you, and you aren’t willing to deal with it openly and directly, then I’m afraid you and I are going to have a longer-term, larger-scale problem on our hands. There’s no point in you denying it, either. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve become somewhat of a self-taught expert at reading your face.
I am fighting an impulse here to tell you about my sexual history. I feel the need to make excuses, to exonerate myself, to impress upon you the fact of my relative innocence. In terms of physical experience, I’ve had very little: a couple of dare-based, fumbling grope sessions and one affaire du coeur at music camp that dragged itself out halfway through the summer. Painfully heavy on the overwrought text messages, painfully light on the actual physical contact. In fact, that middle-school melodrama is the reason I no longer carry a cell phone.
It makes me furious at myself to divulge any of this to you, Kurl. I know it’s my own sense of shame and humiliation prompting me to do it. Probably it’s my internalized homophobia as well. But how else am I supposed to feel? What else am I supposed to say? How else am I supposed to defend myself against being regarded as if I were something stuck to the bottom of your shoe?
Yours truly,
Jo