by John Goode
Matt stood there and smiled at me.
“I just wanted to say that. I’m gay and none of you had a problem with me before.” I looked at Mr. Aimes. “And they wouldn’t have had a problem with Kelly either.”
I didn’t wait for their reaction; instead, I just walked down the aisle toward Matt, no longer even caring where I was or who was watching. I reached out to him and pulled him into a kiss that made my entire world shake from his presence. I knew everyone in the room was watching us kiss, but all I cared about was this man in my arms and how he made me feel.
The kiss lasted for what felt like hours before I was able to remove my mouth from his. My forehead was pressed against his as I combated the twin urges to cry and laugh at the same time. “I’m sorry,” I said, not able to look him in the eye yet.
“And I’m Matt,” he whispered back. “I don’t think we’ve met yet.” That made me look up, and I saw the tears sliding down his cheeks. “But I would love the chance to know you.”
I just nodded as my brain flooded my mouth with far too many responses for anything to be considered English.
Someone called out “Kiss him again!” and I heard laughter rumble through the room. I looked back and say everyone was looking at us, most of them were crying, except this time they were tears of joy.
Before we walked out, I looked at the picture of Kelly again. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t see Riley’s ghost looking back at me.
Matt
WE SAT in my car as the people shuffled out of the funeral home.
“I’m not complaining, but how are you here?” he asked me.
I had been dreading that question ever since I decided to move back to Foster. There was no way I could convey to him that I did not move back here with some creepy plan to stalk him all over again.
“I live here now,” I finally admitted. “Not because of you, if that’s what you’re scared of.” He tried to interrupt me, but I kept talking. “I wasn’t happy there. I haven’t been happy anywhere, and I needed to be honest about that for once. I kept thinking that if I moved somewhere or did different things, I was going to end up happy somehow, but it wasn’t true. I am unhappy and I bring that with me wherever I go. So I moved back in with my parents and am going to try to figure out who the hell I am.”
He smiled at me, and I resisted the urge to ask him what he was thinking.
“I’ve felt that way since high school,” he admitted to me.
That made me laugh. “Yeah, I figured.
We both asked at once, “So now what?”
We chuckled at that for a few seconds before I said, “Okay, we tried love at first sight and we tried chasing each other halfway across the country. How about we try it from the beginning?” He arched an eyebrow questioningly as I stuck out my hand. “My name is Matt, and I used to watch you read as you leaned against your red door.”
He took my hand slowly. “I’m Tyler and I used to watch you watching me.” That made me redden a little and he added, “There’s a gay bar on the outskirts of town. It’s not fancy but it’s a place to go. Would you like to go have a drink with me?”
I stared at him for a moment, wondering if he was playing with me or not. After a long pause, I nodded. “That sounds like a date.”
Warmth made it all the way down to my toes as he answered, “It is a date.”
It wasn’t an explosion or a burst of fireworks; it was something slower and far more powerful. As we sat there waiting for the parking lot to empty, I could feel the continental plates that made up my life begin to shift under me. And it hit me….
This was the moment my life truly began. This was the day I stopped running from being happy and just let it happen.
And for the first time in my life, that wasn’t a bad thing.
Not the end….
Postscript
LOVE is hard.
I don’t say that like I have cured cancer or figured how many licks it takes to get into a Tootsie Roll pop or anything, but it is worth stating. Love is hard; real love is even harder. No matter how many times boy A meets girl B in a movie and falls in love while the catchy pop tune of the moment plays behind them, it doesn’t make it real. Hollywood has made love incredibly simple and impossibly difficult in the same action by trying to convince us that love is what they show us.
Simple because we think you meet someone, fall in love, and all is well. Impossible because you rarely meet someone, fall in love, and then all is well. We are sold these fairy tales by the pound and eat them up with a spoon day after day, TV show after TV show, movie after movie. There are whole industries making people believe that love is simple, love is obvious, and love comes for everyone.
Not everyone gets to fall in love.
I know, not a popular statement but as with my first proclamation, it needs to be said out loud. Love is so much more than just the right moment and the right song and the right place. Saying it is like that is like saying that cooking is just putting stuff in a pot and hoping it comes out as a meal. Sure it can happen, but how many bad meals can you make before you realize there might be more to cooking than that?
Now this may sound like I am anti-love, but that isn’t true. I am a big fan of love. I am all pro-love. Me and love are… well, I was going to say in love, but we are at best close, personal friends. There is a third proclamation coming up so be ready, because like the other two, it isn’t rocket science.
Gay love is even harder.
I know, duh, right?
Let’s go back to the cooking analogy, because I am too lazy to come up with a new one. So putting random ingredients in a pot and cooking it does not make a meal. Now consider you are not just trying to make a meal doing that, you are trying to make a meal that is low sodium, gluten free, and has under a hundred calories a serving. Suddenly the chances of all that crap you threw in the pot becoming something edible seems impossible, doesn’t it? All this is just talking to the numbers of falling in love. There are so many people out there, only so many gay people, only so many gay people who you will find attractive, only so many you would be compatible with, and then only so many of those who you would have the opportunity to meet.
This isn’t even taking into account the slut factor.
Now before I go on, this is not something all gay men go through. It is not a law, it is not even a statement, it is simply something I have observed and had other gay men agree with me on. So if you do not agree with me, that is fine; skip down a few paragraphs. There is a cute thing with Michael Jackson at the end.
Gay men are a lot like people who have been starved for most of their lives, forced to watch other people eat whenever they want.
Man, food again. I think I might be hungry.
Growing up, we see boy and girl, boy and girl, boy and girl over and over again until we are ready to scream. Most of us are not ready to announce our gayness to the world and even if we do, the odds of someone in high school being gay is so rare it isn’t even worth talking about sometimes. So we spend most of high school sitting outside the restaurant of love, watching other couples eat what we so desperately crave. Sometimes even in college we can’t sack up, so we go even longer starving ourselves. Sometimes we will pretend, just to be with anyone. Sometimes we will sneak around and take random thrills in the night, just to keep from going crazy. Either way, it is not a good thing.
Once we are out of school, away from home, away from the people who think we’re someone we aren’t, we tend to go a little nuts. How nuts? Try putting a group of people who have not eaten in years in an all-you-can-eat buffet and tell me how many of them are deciding to eat healthy. We binge, we try everything, we try to shove all those lost years into the smallest possible window of time.
In other words, we kind of turn into sluts.
Not everyone, and not everywhere, to be sure. But in general, most gay guys have been or at least know a slut or two. So there we are, in our sex buffet, going nuts and growing older. That elusive quali
ty all young men have begins to fade, and we come out of our calorie-induced coma and wonder What am I going to do now? We’ve had sex, a lot of sex, and in some cases more than a lot; we’ve done the club thing, we’ve done the casual fun thing. What about the love thing?
And then, most of the time, we get stupid.
Remember our pot we were just throwing shit into earlier? Yeah, well, you have to remember that most straight people have been at least pretending to cook most of their lives. They grew up knowing what their whole role was going to be. Some girls wanted to be a princess, some wanted to be an astronaut, some wanted to raise a family, some wanted to take over the world, and guys did the same thing. Some of us wanted to pretend we were in Swingers and everything was Vegas, baby! And some of us watched The Notebook and realized there was nothing wrong with being a romantic. But through popular media, the culture, the people around you, you began to shape what you would someday dream of.
For some of us, we just made it up as we went along.
Some tried to date guys like we saw other guys date girls. Some of us rejected the heterosexual model and took a more open lifestyle approach. And some guys just figured it out and settled down without a peep. It’s confusing to be a middle-aged gay man and not know what’s next. Am I supposed to want to marry someone? Am I supposed to adopt a kid? Do I have to watch Glee every week even if I hate musicals? We fumble around in the dark for so long, looking for a light, that we just forget the point.
That we are not happy and want to be happy.
This book is about the messiness of gay relationships. There is no promise that Matt and Tyler will work out, which is why there is not a “The End.” Just finding someone you like isn’t the end; it’s just the beginning of an even stranger and more challenging phase of a gay man’s life.
And this is why we need role models.
This very reason is why we, as a culture, must fight for gay people to be fairly represented in media. Why we should celebrate shows like Glee, The New Normal, Modern Family, and many, many others that show there is a way to be gay, happy, and in a relationship. We need to start showing gay teenagers out there right now that this isn’t a bad thing, this isn’t a weird thing… this is a life thing.
So if you are gay and not sure where you are in your life, it’s okay. Trust me, it’s okay. Take a deep breath and remember, it’s about being happy. And that starts with being happy with you. This is not as hard as it looks. Sure, it may look like those people are just throwing things into a pot and making food, but trust me.
They’ve had a cookbook much longer than we have. We’ll get there.
—John Goode
2012
About the Author
JOHN GOODE is a member of the Class of ’88 of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, specializing in incantations and spoken spells. At the age of fourteen, he proudly represented District 13 in the 65th Panem games, where he was disqualified for crying uncontrollably before the competition began. After that he moved to Forks, Washington, where against all odds he dated the hot, incredibly approachable werewolf instead of the stuck-up jerk of a vampire but was crushed when he found out the werewolf was actually gayer than he was. After that he turned down the mandatory operation everyone must receive at sixteen to become pretty, citing that everyone pretty was just too stupid to live, before moving away for greener pastures. After falling down an oddly large rabbit hole, he became huge when his love for cakes combined with his inability to resist the commands of sparsely worded notes, and was finally kicked out when he began playing solitaire with the Red Queen’s 4th armored division. By eighteen he had found the land in the back of his wardrobe, but decided that thinly veiled religious allegories were not the neighbors he desired. When last seen, he had become obsessed with growing a pair of wings after discovering Fang’s blog and hasn’t been seen since.
Or he is this guy who lives in this place and writes stuff he hopes you read.
Twitter: @fosterhigh
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TalesFromFosterHigh
TALES OF FOSTER HIGH: BOOK 1
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TALES OF FOSTER HIGH: BOOK 2
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TALES OF FOSTER HIGH: BOOK 3
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