by Tim Anderson
“Oh, by the way, I’m ga—”
“I know!”
Thing is, I was still afraid of the word. Saying the phrase while standing in front of the mirror—“I’m gay”—it just never sounded as nonchalant as I wanted it to sound. It’s such a simple, basic sentence, but, for some reason, very hard to say about yourself.
“That’s gay”—so easy.
“I’m gay”—terrifying.
Still, I forced the words out of my mouth a few more times during the break, telling my friends Mandy and Neal one night and my sister another night. I was still having trouble just blurting it out—the lighting had to be just right (almost total darkness), and we had to be far, far away from any prying human ears. But I did it. I communicated my gayness. Sure, Neal actually guessed before I even said anything, and my sister almost had to literally pull it out of me by inviting her lesbian friends from college out with us and using them as truth magnets. Still, my mouth formed the words “I’m gay,” and it felt less horrifying each time.
When I returned to Guilford for the spring semester, I had a little less weight on my shoulders, which made dancing at raves even easier. And there was an exciting addition to the LGBT group: A young man named Trevor started showing up. He was just back from a semester abroad in England, and he was a truly crush-worthy specimen: rail thin, messed-up teeth, greasy hair, oversized clothes, and terrible posture. He also had the most brilliant ice-blue eyes I’d ever seen. One could swim for miles in the puddles of his irises, if one were trying to be poetic. And his deep, resonant voice felt as sturdy as a sycamore tree, under which you could lay cooling yourself after your twenty laps in his irises. He was who I would have been talking to my girlfriends about all day and all night as we sat up and did one another’s hair, if I had had any girlfriends at Guilford with whom I was comfortable chatting about boys. Instead, I just dreamily chatted to myself about Trevor, while shaving my head by myself in my dorm room as Jeff talked on the phone with his mom.
Trevor lived right down the hall from me in the Milner dorm, so we would sometimes run into each other coming to and from the showers. I would, say, walk out of my room with my towel around my waist, see him walk toward me, and then loosen my towel so that it fell farther south, just enough to be awkward. He, meanwhile, would have three towels on, one around his waist, one over his shoulders, and one on his head like he was Rizzo from Grease or something. I never ever saw him with fewer towels on. Nanook of the North was less fully clothed. He was obviously shy and awkward around other semi-naked men, so I made it as obvious as possible in other locations that I had a thing for him: staring at him in the cafeteria and trying to catch his eye between stanzas of Chaucer; trying my damnedest to get to the mail room in time to catch him looking through his mail and corner him into having a conversation about, I don’t know, Echo and the Bunnymen?; walking slowly when I knew he was behind me in the hall so that he’d have to overtake me (he never overtook me). When would Trevor just give up these unnecessary games, let go, and surrender to love? Maybe if I made him a mixtape.
I spent a few hours one Saturday afternoon in the WQFS listening room and put together the sickest collection of post-punk, New Wave, shoegaze, and dream pop nuggets of wonder I could possibly have been expected to assemble. I then made a copy of the collection so I’d have one for myself, then, after confirming with Becky that I would be hitching a ride with her and her friends later to some rave or other downtown, I left and went to dinner in the cafeteria, where I sat by myself reading Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour. I knew Trevor liked Anne Rice—had heard him speaking admiringly of her vampire books. And there he was, sitting with a few other LGBT folks I knew. I’d just go say hi.
“Hey, Trevor,” I said, tucking the book under my arm to call attention to it. “What are you up to?”
“Oh,” he said, “just, you know, eating.”
“Big plans tonight?”
“No, I don’t think so. Just probably going to chill out. There’s a thing I was going to go to; not sure if I will.”
“OK, well, I’ll see you later.” And I went back to Milner, planning on knocking on his door later, mixtape in hand.
I knocked on his door about an hour later, and after about ten silent seconds, he opened the door.
“Hey! Um, hope it’s not a bad time!”
“No, no,” he said, trying to smile and look like I wasn’t bothering him.
“I made you a mixtape!” I yelped, holding it up.
“Oh,” he said. “Thanks, that’s…great.” He took it from me and started looking at the track list.
“Yeah, I was at the radio station and was making some mixes for myself so I went ahead and made an extra one ’cause I know we like a lot of the same music and, you know, and, I figured, and, eh, why not? And, yeah. And. You know. I put some Kate Bush on there!”
“Thanks a lot,” he said. “You want to come in? I’ll put it on.”
“Sure!”
I went in and sat down in a chair he gestured me toward. He stuck the cassette in, and the first strains of synthesizer from “In the Space Capsule (The Love Theme)” from Flash Gordon by Queen, suckled our eardrums. It soon segued into tracks by the Bunnymen, This Mortal Coil, The Damned, Wire, Lush, and Slowdive. When “Crushed” by the Cocteau Twins started spangling all over the place, he would be mine.
We chatted a little bit about bands and classes and various things, and I kept waiting for the air between us to electrify. Our mutual chemistry should be making itself known any minute now.
“Oh, crap,” he said, looking at his watch. “I’m supposed to go to this moon thing. I told my friend I would go.”
“Moon thing?”
“Yeah, it’s this full moon ceremony that’s going on out in that field by the tennis courts.”
“Full moon ceremony? Like witches and such?”
“I think they prefer the term wiccans,” he said. “But no, I don’t think they’re all practitioners.”
“Oh, OK, well…”
“You could come, probably,” he offered.
“Oh, well, I, uh…don’t know if I’m dressed properly.”
“Eh, it’s casual. Plus, you know, dark.”
So I took him up on his halfhearted offer and walked with him outside. As we passed from the Milner dorm hallway out into the darkness, I couldn’t tell for sure if I should be thinking about this as a romantic excursion with erotic possibilities or simply something that was happening because he’d found himself in the unfortunate position of having an unexpected guest come to his room just before he was supposed to go somewhere and he couldn’t think of a good solid reason not to invite that random guest along.
We got down to the field and Trevor greeted his girlfriends, introducing me to a few of them briefly. There wasn’t much time for chitchat, though, as the hour of the ceremony was soon upon us. We were instructed by the nice lady presiding over the assembly to gather together and form a circle. There were about twenty-five of us, so we made a large-ish ring in the dark as the light from the full moon shone on our pale, pale faces. I was sure to stay close to Trevor so I wouldn’t be flanked by two perfect strangers on each side. Our moon mistress, a friendly-faced, frizzy-haired woman dressed in jeans and a cardigan, asked that we all hold hands, then addressed us and our overlordess.
“Lady Moon, bright and serene,
Shining with the bounty of the Mother,
Look down on us, your Children of the Earth.
Come, light of the Goddess,
Fill us with your power.
Impart to us your light and blessing.
Your love and grace surround us.”
I was pretty sure at this point that this ceremony would probably be number one on the list of Things I Could Be Up to at This Moment That Would Horrify My Poor Mother. Worse than Jerking It in My Dorm Room to Pictures of Dudes, worse than Losing the Bible She Gave Me Before I Left for College, but maybe just this side of Dancing in Rainbow Speedos on a Float in a Gay Pride
Parade.
Thankfully for my mother, I wasn’t listening too closely, thrilled as I was to be holding a gay boy’s hand for the first time. Trevor’s and my hands were lopsidedly locked in a dispassionate embrace, my hand clinging to his as if its life and the life of its fingers depended on it, his returning the sentiment with what can best be described as raging apathy. His indifference to me was palpable. It was as plain as the nose on the man in the moon’s face, which shone so brightly down upon us. But I ignored this instinctive knowledge I had already absorbed into my brain and focused on the facts: I am holding a man’s hand. A man is holding my hand. And this man, I’d been told, liked other men. We’re practically engaged! Sure, we were instructed to hold hands, but that didn’t change the fact that we were, in front of everyone here, engaged in a brazen display of unbridled interdigitation. Filthy.
Apparently the moon’s energy had been summoned with this opening incantation.
“Her energy is among us,” our mistress intoned. “Now we must direct it, use it, release it. We must give thanks.”
Thank you, Goddess, for finally finding a man to hold my hand. Next time, maybe find a man who doesn’t act like you paid him to do it?
“Power blessed to me by the Goddess,
rise in me for healing,
to replenish and renew my being.
Power blessed to me by the Goddess,
Surround me with strength.
By the power of the Goddess,
So mote it be.”
So mote it indeed.
“Now, let us all enhance the energy around us by giving thanks back. Laurel, would you like to start? Just gently squeeze the hand of the next person when you are finished, as we go around.”
Oh, Lord. We were now going to be forced to give thanks to the Goddess in front of everyone. I didn’t even like saying the prayer at the dinner table in front of my family.
“Thank you, Goddess, for bringing us here tonight, for bestowing upon us the energy we can use to make our lives and other lives better.”
The next person in the circle also gave thanks to the Goddess for some vague thing or other. I don’t know, I couldn’t listen because I was too focused on what on earth I was going to give thanks for. My persistent, relentless virginity? My great WQFS time slot? The advances being made in sugar-free candy technology? (Advances were not being made.)
Down the circle we went until we got to Trevor. “Just want to give thanks for friends and for beautiful nights like tonight.”
Simple, elegant. Well played, Trevor. Next up: me.
I can’t recall with precision what I emerged with, but I think it went something like: “I’d just like to thay sanks for the company of everyone and for all the people and the things. So, thanks.” (Silent staring at/squeezing the hand of the next person to encourage her to hurry up and start giving thanks and get the moon’s judgmental eyes off me.)
This was not my best moment in public speaking, though it was perhaps an improvement over the time in high school that I got in front of my speech class and taught the students how to fold a dollar bill into the shape of a bowtie:
“And then you fold it this way. Then this way. Then fold that over this way. Then fold the four corners like this. Then do this. Then this, aaaaaaand voilà! Bowtie!”
The thanks continued around the circle until we once again reached the mistress of ceremonies.
“Now, let us close this rite with an address to she whom we are here to celebrate.
“Goddess and Spirits,
You have heard our voices,
and our Craft has been completed.
Depart with our thanks and our love.
By the power of the Goddess and Spirits,
This Circle is undone but not broken,
So mote it be.”
And so mote it was. All of our hands dropped to our sides, none so rapidly, it seemed to me, as Trevor’s. His feelings toward me were making him anxious. (Those feelings: disinterest, discomfort, and whatever the opposite of lovelorn is.)
“Well, that was fun,” I said to him.
“Yeah,” he said. “There were quite a few people here; I was surprised.”
I struggled to think of something to say to keep the conversation going, but my brain was unable to recall words and basic grammatical sentence structure because of the massive amounts of Moon Goddess energy swirling in the air around us.
“Well,” he said, “I’ll see you later; I’m supposed to go get some coffee with my friends, so…” As he talked he was actually backing away from me.
“Oh, sure, I’m going to head back. Enjoy the mixtape!”
“Oh yeah, thanks a lot for that. I’ll see you later.”
He walked away to rejoin his girlfriends, and I stood there looking up at the moon. Oh, Moonman, I thought, not even bothering to address the Goddess, seeing as how she’d let me down utterly, I didn’t even like him that much. I didn’t, really. But the fact that he didn’t like me, that he obviously was not interested at all, in the slightest, probably not even for cash—that was unacceptable.
I put my hands in my pockets and started walking back to my dorm. My fingers found an old Tootsie Roll in one of the pockets, a leftover bullet in my perpetual battle against Low Blood Sugar Madness. Even though my blood sugar wasn’t in the least bit low—it was probably on the high side, in fact, thanks to the excitement of being on a fake date with an uninterested unsuitor—I unwrapped it and put it in my dry mouth.
A tiny indiscretion, certainly, compared to what I wanted to put there.
Oh, how our little boy has grown up. Once he was just a little child twirling about blissfully in his room pretending to be God knows what—a sassy waitress, a pilot, a Stormtrooper. Now look at him: He’s sitting in there in that DJ booth at his college radio station like a real adult, just stone cold pumpin’ out the bangin’ jams, or whatever the culturally disabled youth of the nineties say.
Let’s survey his kingdom: He’s got one song playing on a CD player in front of him with a second CD player cued up to the next song on his list, plus two LPs on the turntables beside him, with their respective needles positioned by him at the beginning of each desired track so that when he presses the power button on each one the song will start and his seamless music event will continue uninterrupted. He has placed each album sleeve behind its respective turntable so he can keep straight which one corresponds to which album and song. He’s got this operation down.
Of course, there are any number of things that can go wrong for our DJ—he presses the wrong button and his microphone is shut off during an address, he presses the wrong button and his microphone is on so that people can hear him beating his pencil to the beat while a song is playing, he accidentally brushes his arm against something and things come crashing down—a stack of CDs, an album sleeve, an open soda bottle, his aura of basic competence. Will any of these things be happening today? Would we be here otherwise?
He of course is forced by station rules to play some songs from albums that have just been released, so he’s constantly having to interrupt his stream of celestial post-punk classics with stuff from obscure, kind of grungy American bands with names like Nirvana and Pearl Jam. God, what an awful, unattractive racket they make, our DJ thinks. We agree wholeheartedly with him. These bands are going nowhere fast.
He’s sitting in for a fellow DJ who is sick. It’s an afternoon show, and, because he’s not used to doing a show during normal waking hours, he’s quite nervous about performing his DJ duties when people are actually listening and, more importantly, while the station manager sits in an office down the hall, listening to his show. So far he’s been acquitting himself nicely. Look at him now, for instance, sitting before us and leaning into the microphone to address his audience as the song comes to an end, tell them what they’ve just heard, and coax them into staying with him for the next hour because he’s got some smashing music coming up from Brian Eno, the Darling Buds, and Altered Images. What a silky smooth radio
voice he has.
It’s true, though: He’s talking awfully slowly. Granted, there’s a fine line between the laid-back, mellow delivery he’s obviously going for and an address…that…involves…way…too…many………pauses. As if to illustrate my point, he takes a deep breath between the words “Altered” and “Images” before turning to one of the public service announcements all DJs are required to read once every half hour. Usually it’s hard for him to read these with a straight face, it being way too challenging to utter the words “sexually transmitted disease” without being a little bit of a scold (and, in his case, a little bit jealous). It is always his delivery of these PSAs that lets his audience know if he’s bringing his A game or not.
“OK, folks, it’s PMS time,” he says into the microphone. Unclear if it was a joke or an accident.
“What do sex…tattoos…body piercings…toothbrushes…and contact sports have in common, hmmm?” he asks, squinting and struggling to decipher the jumble of words on the index card. “The answer is…all of these things can put college students at risk for…” At this moment there is an interminable pause for…dramatic effect? Brechtian distance? The fuck of it?
“…hepatitis B, a serious disease that can lead to…” He drops his notecard onto the control board, and for the next few seconds his late-afternoon audience is treated to the sounds of his teeth chattering while he tries to pick it up with his soggy fingertips, which are now dripping wet from wiping at his sweaty forehead. Ah, he’s got it now. And just in time, because Tracy the station manager is standing outside the DJ room looking concerned that one of her DJs is doing a show while stupid drunk.
