Two Boys Kissing

by David Levithan

  The world wakes up around Harry and Craig.

  Harry lifts his feet, wiggles his toes, and only feels soreness, bloat. His back feels like sandpaper has been put between each vertebra. His neck is a wire hanger that an elephant is pulling on. His eyes are dry, but his body is damp. He still smells the egg, feels the egg. But maybe that’s just what sweat smells and feels like after twenty hours. Despite the fact that he’s surrounded by electricity, he finds himself wanting it to rain.

  Craig wants to brush his teeth. He and Harry experimented with mouthwash when they were practicing, but it never worked—it was impossible to spit and kiss at the same time. Usually Craig’s fantasies of Harry are elaborate—dancing in tuxedos across the floor of Grand Central Terminal, or canoeing on a lake as the world around them turns instantaneously from summer to fall, all the trees burning into color at once. But now the deepest, clearest fantasy Craig has is of the two of them sitting down. That’s it. Him and Harry, in those two chairs right over there. Sitting down. Not even holding hands. Not kissing. Just sitting there, resting. No one else in the whole world. Just the two of them, sitting down.

  We think of ourselves as creatures marked by a particular intelligence. But one of our finest features is the inability of our expectation to truly simulate the experience we are expecting. Our anticipation of joy is never the same as joy. Our anticipation of pain is never the same as pain. Our anticipation of challenge is in no way the same experience as the challenge itself. If we could feel the things we fear ahead of time, we would be traumatized. So instead we venture out thinking we know how things will feel, but knowing nothing of how things will really feel. Already, Craig and Harry are far beyond any expectation, any preparation. They must make up each minute as it comes along, and in doing so, they are creative. Yes, creative. You do not need to be writing or painting or sculpting in order to be creative. You must simply create. And this is what Craig and Harry are doing. They are creating a kiss, and they are also creating their stories, and by creating their stories, they are creating their lives.

  This can be a very painful process.

  We, who can no longer create, can stand for hours and days and months without feeling anything. You wouldn’t think that we would miss physical pain, considering all the pain that we went through. But we do. We miss it. We miss the price we paid for life. Because it was part of life.

  Craig and Harry are exhausted, to a degree we can understand well. Some might think them foolish, to put themselves through this, especially if they fail. But we understand the need to push beyond expectation, beyond preparation. We understand the desire to create, to step on new ground. To feel every ounce of space you are taking up in the world. To endure.

  Around the world, screens light up. Around the world, words are flown through wires. Around the world, images are reduced to particles and, moments later, are perfectly reassembled. Around the world, people see these two boys kissing and find something there.

  Around town, boys and girls wake up. Around town, men and women mobilize. Around town, complaints are made and disbelief feeds within an echo chamber. Around town, breakfast is served and breakfast is taken. Around town, it feels like an ordinary day, but also not, if you know what’s happening on the lawn outside the high school.

  Camera crews from local TV stations begin to arrive.

  Shortly after waking, Peter is at his computer. This is what you do now to give your day topography—scan the boxes, read the news, see the chain of your friends reporting about themselves, take the 140-character expository bursts and sift through for the information you need. It’s a highly deceptive world, one that constantly asks you to comment but doesn’t really care what you have to say. The illusion of participation can sometimes lead to participation. But more often than not, it only leads to more illusion, dressed in the guise of reality.

  The headlines on Yahoo don’t require much of Peter’s head. The latest exploits of a rich girl with her own TV show, the latest poll showing that for the first time ever, Americans prefer dark chocolate to milk chocolate. Peter has to take in these words before disregarding them—so much information pushing its way into your consciousness, trying to take residence so you will watch the new show, buy the new chocolate. He quickly clicks on to the feed of the two boys kissing, and is relieved to find they are still there, still kissing. Twenty-two hours gone, less than ten hours to go. He scrolls through the comments and finds a lot of encouragement and more than a few haters. These words are now in his bedroom, now in his life. How can he not take them personally? If you let the world in, you open yourself up to the world. Even if the world doesn’t know that you’re there.

  The camera crews unload their equipment. The reporters check their makeup, gauge the light. Harry takes some satisfaction from it—attention was the point of this, and now it has come calling. Craig feels a slight uneasiness, and also a little relief that he doesn’t have to worry anymore about his parents seeing this without warning, turning on the channel and finding something unexpected.

  The news teams—there are three of them—are pushy. They want to ask questions, want to get close. The police officers keep them back on the other side of the non-caution tape. But still … they suck all the air from the area. They are the new center of gravity for the crowd. There are people now who haven’t been seen before, who haven’t spoken up before. There are Craig and Harry’s friends, yes, but there are also people who think this is criminal, that it should be stopped, that it is an affront to the high school, to the town, to society. The cameras search them out, and they gladly allow themselves to be found.

  You are always so willing to broadcast yourself. You have grown used to the ubiquity of lenses, the everpresence of cameras, whether they are in your friends’ pockets or watching you from atop streetlamps. For us, it was a choice to be on camera. There was a long and labored process to retrieve an image, to draw it from film and expose it onto paper. If we broadcast ourselves, it was usually just to the other people in the room. We were all actors, just as you are all actors now. But our audience wasn’t as large as yours. And our performances, like those on a stage, were fleeting, uncaptured.

  Harry and Craig felt nothing when it was only their own cameras that were on. Even as tens of thousands of people were watching, they didn’t really feel the eyes on them, no more so than usual. There was the perception that the people watching were friends, not strangers. But it is different when a camera crew takes aim. It is different when they can hear the reporters telling their story from a reportorial remove. They had been thinking of themselves as a cause, but now they feel reduced to a curiosity. And they can’t speak for themselves. They can’t say a word. They must continue kissing.

  Tariq is too shy to speak for them. In the back of his mind, he can imagine all the violent homophobes writing his name down, remembering him for later. It is Harry’s father who steps up and explains their aims. It is Smita who prepares the sound bites of support. It is Mr. Bellamy—Tom—who may be risking his job to say that he is a teacher at this school and that he supports the boys one hundred percent. He doesn’t identify himself as gay, but he doesn’t try to hide it, either.

  Craig tries to stay focused on the kissing. When distractions are manifold, it’s best to remember what you are supposed to be doing.

  Word travels fast, our parents would warn us. It’s amusing to think of that now. We thought words had so much speed back then, but we had no idea.

  Avery is driving to Kindling again. Ryan offered to drive to Marigold, then admitted he’d have to borrow someone’s car to do it, since he doesn’t have one of his own. Avery doesn’t mind—he likes driving, likes the feel of being on the road.

  At a certain spot, the music he’s been listening to loops around, and he doesn’t want to listen to it again. When he ejects the CD, the radio comes on—a station that’s Top 40 during the afternoon and evening, but talks too much in the morning. Avery would usually just put in more music, but his ear is drawn to th
e word gays and the way it’s being said. Dismissively. Contemptuously.

  “This is what the gays do—they stop at nothing to be in our faces with their disgusting habits and then act like they’re the ones being treated badly. I don’t want to look at that, and I don’t want my kids to have to look at that.”

  The host comes on. “So you don’t think they have the right to be there?”

  “I don’t think the founders of our country really had two homosexuals on their minds when they wrote the Constitution. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “And we have our next caller.”

  “I don’t understand why they’re not being arrested. Why aren’t the police arresting them? It’s a public place.”

  “You know the police are protecting the two boys—”

  “Well, they should be ashamed of themselves and start doing their job.”

  “I’m with you there. Next caller.”

  “I think what the boys are doing is brave.”

  “Brave? Tell them to join the army if they want to be brave.”

  “To be in public—”

  “They should just get a room! Next caller!”

  Avery doesn’t know what these people are talking about, and since he’s driving, he can’t go online to check. The sensation he has is a strange, difficult one. He knows these people aren’t talking about him. But at the same time they are talking about him, in their blanket dismissal. And they’re also talking about us. Because so many of them are our age or older, stuck in previous decades of thought. The gays of today, the gays of yesterday—we’re all the same bother, all the same wrong. Not people, really. Just something to yell about.

  “If we let this go on, what’s next? Men having sex with dogs in a church? Is that free speech?”

  The phrase rush to judgment is a silly one. When it comes to judgment, most of us don’t have to rush. We don’t have to even leave the couch. Our judgment is so easy to reach for.

  None of these people who are talking know Craig or Harry, or even care about who Craig or Harry are. The minute you stop talking about individuals and start talking about a group, your judgment has a flaw in it. We made this mistake often enough.

  “You can’t have a world record if you’re two guys. That’s not a world record.”

  Avery knows he should put on the music, blot out these voices. But none of us can stop listening. Because what is more transfixing than the sound of people hating you?

  In the darkest part of our hearts, we used to think that maybe they were right.

  We don’t think that anymore.

  Cooper is driving, too, but the radio is off. He was woken by a hard pounding on his windshield—someone telling him he needed to clear out of the parking lot.

  Cooper’s mind is slowly working up to something. The chemicals are gathering, some of them in the wrong places. He should be thinking about clothes, about a shower, about getting home. He should be realizing that his parents are probably going to church this morning, giving him an opportunity to sneak in and get more things. He should be figuring out a next step. He should care.

  But Cooper feels at too much of a distance to truly care. It’s like he’s sitting in an empty movie theater, looking at a blank screen. His parents aren’t going to change. The world isn’t going to change. He isn’t going to change. So why try? He’s too tired to fight it, too tired to sneak into his own house, too tired to call some hotline or ask some contact to pretend to be his friend for an hour or two.

  We know: An almost certain way to die is to believe you are already dead. Some of us never stopped fighting, never gave up. But others of us did. Others of us felt the pain had become too much, and that there was nothing left to life but the struggle for life, which was not enough reason to stay. So we signed out. We caved. But our reasons are not anything Cooper knows. If he could step out of his life for a moment, if he could see it as we see it, he would know that even though he feels it’s as good as over, there are still thousands of ways it could go.

  His parents call again, before they leave for church.

  He turns off the phone. But he can’t bring himself to throw it away.

  “I hope they’re giving each other AIDS,” the caller tells the radio host. “I hope that when they’re dying of AIDS, they show that on the Internet, too, so children will know what happens if you kiss like that.”

  The host chuckles, asks for the next caller.

  “Turn that off.”

  Neil has come into the kitchen, and he can’t believe what his parents are listening to, with his sister right there.

  “What?” his father asks, blinking up from the Sunday paper.

  Neil goes over and turns off the radio. “How can you listen to that? How?”

  “We weren’t really listening,” his mother says. “It was just on.”

  “The woman said she wants people to die of AIDS,” Miranda, age eleven, reports.

  Neil’s father gives her a shushing glance. Neil’s mother sighs.

  “We weren’t really listening,” she repeats.

  Neil knows he should let it go. This household operates through a series of unspoken truces, negotiated by instinct more than by actual conversation. Neil has always considered his gayness to be an open secret with his parents. They’ve met Peter, they know what the story is, but the story is never said out loud. Neil can lead his version of his life, and his parents can believe in their version of their good son.

  But open secret is a lie we like to tell ourselves. It’s a lie we often told ourselves, in both sickness and in health. It doesn’t work, because if you feel you still have a secret, there is no way to be truly open. In the interest of self-preservation, it is sometimes best to keep something back, to keep something hidden. But there usually comes a moment—and Neil is hitting his now—when you don’t want self-preservation to define who you are, or who your family is. Truces may stop the battles, but part of you will always feel like you’re at war.

  Neil should let it go, but he doesn’t. He thinks of Craig and Harry kissing, even though he can’t remember their names. He thinks of Peter, and of how Peter’s parents take Neil in, extend their family so that he’s like a member. He thinks of his sister listening to the trash talk on the radio and his parents letting it go unanswered.

  “How can you not hear that?” he asks his mother. “When something like that is being said, how can you just sit there?”

  Neil never talks to his mother like this. Not since he was little, not since it was forced out of him by punishment after punishment.

  His father steps in, conciliatory. He is always the good cop. Neil is tired of his parents being cops at all.

  “We really didn’t hear it. If we had, we would have turned it off. We were listening to the news at the top of the hour and left it on.”

  “When someone talks like that, you should hear it!” Neil says, his voice rising.

  His mother looks at him like he’s an incompetent employee. “Why should we hear it?”

  “Because you have a gay son.”

  Miranda’s jaw drops theatrically. This is, to her, the most interesting family conversation to ever, ever happen. Neil couldn’t have shocked them more if he’d used a dirty word.

  He’s broken the truce.

  “Neil …,” his dad begins, his tone half warning, half sympathy.

  “No. If some asshole on the radio was saying that all immigrants should go back to the countries they’re from, you’d pay attention. Even if you weren’t listening, you’d hear it. If they were saying they hope that all Koreans die of AIDS, your blood would boil higher with every single word. But when it’s gays they’re talking about, you let it slide. You don’t bother to hear it. It’s acceptable to you. Even if you don’t agree with it—and I am not saying you want me to get AIDS from kissing Peter—you accept it when someone else says it. You let it happen.”

  We tried to tell them what was happening. We tried to tell them the disease was spreading. We needed doctors.
We needed scientists. Most of all, we needed money, and to get money, we needed attention. We put our lives in other people’s hands, and for the most part, they looked at us blankly and said, What lives? What hands?

  “I am gay. I have always been gay. I will always be gay. You have to understand that, and you have to understand that we are not really a family until you understand that.”

  Neil’s father shakes his head. “Of course we’re a family! How can you say we’re not a family?”

  “What has gotten into you?” his mother asks. “Your sister is right here. This isn’t appropriate conversation for your sister.”

  Appropriate. The word is a well-dressed cage, used to capture the truth and hang it in a room that no one ventures into.

  “She needs to hear this,” Neil says. “Why shouldn’t she hear this? You know I’m gay, don’t you, Miranda?”

  “Totally,” Miranda answers.

  “So there are no big revelations here. You all know I’m gay. You all know I have a boyfriend.”

  But he’s never used that word before. It’s always been I’m going over to Peter’s house. Or I’m going to the movies with Peter. His mother once saw them holding hands as they watched a movie. That’s the only reason he’s sure they know.

  “Yes, Neil,” Mrs. Kim says, not bothering to hide the irritation in her voice. She picks the paper back up. “Now if we can get back to our Sunday morning …”