Free Out of Position by Kyell Gold Page B

wear it proudly to your straight friends because it’s a validation of your lifestyle: I am gay and I have a committed partner. So there, myth of promiscuity! You wear it proudly to your gay friends in the way that women show off engagement rings: look, I got someone to commit to me! And the silly truth is that there’s a world of difference between the boyfriends I had before now, and the boyfriend I have now.
    We use the term whenever we get a sniff of commitment, but like love itself, whenever you think you’ve arrived at the pinnacle, you find that there’s something beyond that. In high school, when I had my first sexual experience, I thought we were boyfriends the next morning. Sophomore year, when Micha called me his boyfriend, I looked back on high school and laughed at how naive I’d been. Now, I look back at that and laugh, but more quietly, because I’m starting to wonder what I’ll be feeling when I look back at myself in a few more years, and whether I’ll be laughing then at my ignorance now. Because Micha was and is a sweet, sweet arctic fox. But I never would have driven three hours to see one of his debate matches.
    “I heard from Brian last night,” Salim says unexpectedly as the fifth song on the album is winding to a close in a screech of guitars. His car, he gets to pick the music.
    “Huh.” I make a noncommittal noise and look out the window at the skeletons of trees rushing by.
    “He was asking about you, asking if you were avoiding him.”
    “He knows I am.” I kept looking out the window.
    “He doesn’t know why.”
    “If he did,” I said, “I wouldn’t have to avoid him.”
    “You should just tell him, Lee,” he says. “He’ll understand.”
    “He’ll kill me.”
    “Maybe,” he concedes, “but afterwards, he’ll understand. I mean, it’s not like you’re dating one of the guys who actually did that terrible thing.”
    “It’s not just that.” I sigh. “I’m worried that he’ll do something…”
    “Rash?” Salim cocks his head. “You never mentioned this before.”
    “I didn’t want to talk about it much. I just feel guilty as hell about it, and I feel like this is pushing the blame back on him. At the same time… you didn’t really get to know Brian. He was impulsive at times.”
    “So what are you worried about?”
    It sounds silly and petty, saying it out loud. “We used to talk about gays in sports, and how it would just take one popular athlete coming out to start a waterfall. He’d be so thrilled to find out one of our star players is gay.”
    “He might call the paper.” I nod. “Okay,” Salim says. “I know my memory is not always perfect, but Lee, is that not what you had intended to do from the start?”
    “No. I just wanted to get one of them in bed, show them that they could be a little bit gay. Give them that thought next time they said ‘faggot’, that ‘hey, that’s me too’. Make ’em stop and think, hard as that is for them.”
    “Despite the fact that most studies show that the more a homophobe suspects he’s gay, the more homophobic he tends to be?”
    I glance at the weasel’s profile. His eyes are fixed on the road, but his ears are fixed on me. “Okay, so maybe some of it was wanting to have that to hold over them, too. In case something else happened.”
    “You could threaten to go to the paper.”
    “Yeah,” I say, reluctantly.
    “So partly you worry that Brian will do this because it is what you yourself might do.”
    “Well, yeah. Brian and I always used to think alike.”
    The ‘used to’ hangs in the air until Salim dispels it. “Why do you not want to go to the papers? Afraid he’d hate you?”
    “Partly,” I admit. “But I think more… he’s really good. I mean, I knew he could be good, but he’s just on a whole other level this year. He could go pro, Salim. There was a scout from the Dragons at the last game.”
    “For him?”
    “Could be him, could be our left guard. He’s no slouch