3:AM Magazine

By Robert Hyers

“Mom..Dad…I’m gay,” Colin announced at Thanksgiving dinner, with one hand on his bony hip and the other hanging from his bony wrist. How could they not have known? “And Dean is my fiancé.” He turned when he said this, his long, white index finger and recently manicured fingernail pointing directly at me. Some of his family was there: his mother, his father, his two older sisters and their husbands. The brothers-in-law, who had been talking about the day’s football game before Colin’s announcement, now looked uncomfortable. Off to the right of us was the kiddie table, where Colin’s two and three year old niece and nephews were making messes, and arguing about whose sippie cup was whose, completely oblivious to the silence sitting right next to them.

What the hell am I doing here? I told Colin I’d do it, that I’d show up for this, be his support for when he came out. But I found myself cringing as he spoke those awful two words. Not because I think coming out is bad—we all have to do it—but because I felt so out of place. I had done this long ago. So long ago, in fact, that I don’t even remember it. Not because I don’t want to, mind you, but because the event, which then becomes the memory, was eventually woven into my life. At first it stood out in my mind. I revisited it from time to time, like a recent lecture, analyzing what went right and what could’ve been done better. But more events happened, more memories became stitched into the tapestry, and, eventually, it became impossible to distinguish that thread from any other.

I met Colin about a year ago at this little gay dive about a half hour from my house. He had just turned eighteen and I had broken up with Tom, my “life partner” (as he liked to call it) of almost ten years. He told me we were “moving in different directions” after I caught him packing his things one night in our bedroom. It was a lie. He’d been moving in a new direction, and I’d been standing still. He grew more distant in the last year or two, and I guess to him I grew smaller, until finally he couldn’t distinguish me from the horizon line. By the time I met Colin, I’d been single for about three months. I had let myself go a bit while I was with Tom; my biceps had become smooth and pliable, and there was a growing supply of squishy fat making itself at home at my midsection, hiding my once smooth abdomen. I joined the most overpriced gym I could find in the heart of my local gay ghetto. I worked out like hell during the day, making the rounds at the clubs only a block or two away every night, waiting, hoping for someone to notice. I started to give up hope. All the bench presses and curls and jump rope and pilates couldn’t erase the gray hairs I was finding with more and more frequency, and the small lines that were starting to scar my forehead. And it couldn’t erase the fact that I was making my encore performance in this theater at 38, trying to compete on a stage that threw away most of its actors at the ripe old age of 25. But finally, after three long months, someone did notice.

Of course I noticed Colin first, dancing in the section of the club that segregated the 18-20 year olds from the rest of us who could drink. It was a smaller room off the main one. When I walked in and watched those boys dancing, I felt like an ancient Greek statesman walking into my favorite gymnasium. After I saw him, I sat down at the only couch in the room. Then he came up to me. He stopped dancing, broke away from his group of obscenely young friends, and came up to me. Soaked in sweat, with a bottle of purified water in his slippery hand, he introduced himself to me. The result was a high I can not explain, unlike the grey goose vodka I loved in my years before knowing Tom, the cocaine I had dabbled in, the ecstasy I used to buy at the bar with my AmEx card in the early eighties. Despite the high, I promised myself that if this turned into anything more than one night, I would take it slow. I would be cautious. I wouldn’t make the same mistakes I’d made with Tom. But now, at this holiday dinner, I questioned how well I’d kept those promises.

Colin’s mother was the first to break the silence, the thin lips she had passed onto her son asking him if he was happy.

“Yes.”

She looked at him, then looked at me. “Then that’s all that matters. Dean, welcome to our family.” I nodded and thanked her. Colin’s lanky body curved downward, and she reached up from her seat to hug him. He looked up from his mother’s shoulder. “Dad, is everything okay with you?”

His Dad nodded. I didn’t believe either of them.

Fiancé. I always thought it was much better than “life partner.” Gibbon apes have life partners, not people. And fiancé means so much more to me. It comes from the word “fier” meaning “to trust,” and now literally means “engaged to be married.” My mentor in graduate school reminded me that as a gay man I could never be a fiance, because two men can not legally get married. But it made me want to be the word even more, as an act of defiance, my own form (albeit a weak one) of civil disobedience. I hadn’t researched Thoreau enough to know if he would’ve approved, but I made a conscious decision to use this term. I would be someone’s fiancé, spitting in the face of the law that forbade it. Tom never liked the word fiancé.

Colin pulled himself away from his mother, and moved behind me. I felt his long, slender fingers and smooth, moisturized palms lay on my shoulders.  I could smell the hundred dollar cologne I had bought him on a whim. When he started to speak I felt his voice directly behind me. With each syllable I felt his breath behind me.

“I have one more announcement. Dean and I will be adopting a baby girl any day now.”

I always wanted to raise a child, for as long as I can remember. When I moved into my late thirties, I thought that this want might never be fulfilled. But one’s tragedy is another’s fortune and about nine months ago, my next door neighbor’s teenage daughter, Amanda, became pregnant. She came to me crying, saying that she felt trapped. Her boyfriend had said he loved her. She imagined them getting married, raising a family, and growing old with him. “I was so excited,” she told me between sobs. “I thought about us, and about the baby. It was what I always wanted, what I always imagined when I was little, when I played house.” But he changed when she became pregnant; he wanted her to get an abortion. She told me the story of their final conversation. It didn’t resemble the Hemingway I was then teaching my English 100 class. No Anis del Toros, no romantic Spanish scenery, no airy euphemisms. Just forties of the cheapest beer from the local deli that didn’t card, her parents’ dank, unfinished basement, and a boyfriend demanding that she get rid of that fucking thing inside her. But she didn’t want to have an abortion. And she wasn’t ready to be a mother. So I promised her I would take the child.

The silence returned.  Once again, his mother broke it. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?”

“Of course.”

“I mean, you’re still just a child yourself.”

“Lots of straight couples have children when they’re as young as me, Mom, and they’re all right.”

“Raising a child is such a large responsibility.”

“Mom, I can handle it.”

“I just don’t want your life to be…any harder than it is now.”

“Any harder than it is now?”

His mother stayed silent.

“Do you think my life’s harder now because I’m gay?”

Her lower lip started trembling. His father, sitting like a block of wood in his chair, took her hand. Colin moved from behind me to behind his mother and curved his lanky body downward again, this time to put his hands on her shoulders.

“Mom, you don’t have to worry. My life isn’t harder now.”

She nodded, with tears now streaming down her bony cheeks. I wondered if those tears had been building for years, perhaps since Colin was a toddler and she realized he was somehow different.  She must’ve feared this moment would come, when what she knew in her heart would finally be vocalized. She rose from her chair and the two embraced.

I remembered my Mom crying the same way when I came out to her, and remembered the moisture from her tears falling onto my shoulder. I think in a way those tears were freeing for her, a release from all those years of denying something that weighed on the center of her heart, a release from acting like she could be an active participant in a play that had already been written, doing everything she possibly could to avoid a prophecy that was unavoidable. In those tears, the tragedy ended. The last act was coming to a close. She could finally take her bow, and the curtain would close in front her.

After Colin’s mother calmed herself and sat back down, Colin returned to stand behind me, his hands back on my shoulders.

“You’re sure about this baby thing?” his mother asked, still wiping the tears, and a little foundation, from her cheeks.

“Yes, Mom. I am”

I don’t think his mother was convinced and if she was, I wasn’t. Just the night before, one of the biggest clubbing nights of the year, he whined because I didn’t want to go out.

“I’m tired, and besides, I’m meeting your parents tomorrow,” I told him.

“That’s your excuse for tonight. But what about last Thursday and Friday? Or the Saturday before that?”

“Don’t you get bored with going out? The same music, the same people?”

“No.”

“Well I do.” I was done performing on that stage.

“Well then I’m going by myself—”

“No!”

“Why not?”

Why not? Because there were men at those clubs as old as me who looked better, looked younger. Men who were more dedicated to working out than I was, men who weren’t afraid to inject steroids into their tight, tan-boothed asses like I was, men who wore their beginning traces of gray better than I did. There were a million reasons why not. But none I could tell him. Colin’s father started asking questions.

“Colin, do you know how much a child costs?”

“No Dad…I have no idea…” His hands awkwardly massaged my shoulders for a moment.

“Sir,” I said, looking directly at Colin’s father, “I will be providing financially for the child.” I made eye contact with his mother as well. “I know this sounds all rather..haphazard to the both of you, but I have been planning this for a very long time. I have always wanted to be a parent, and I’ve been given this opportunity at a time in my life when I’m finally able to afford a child.”

I was so nervous when I told Colin about the baby; my throat was dry; my hands shook. Tom was never that responsive when I tried to talk to him about kids. Looking back, I think it was one of the things that moved him in his new direction. But Colin couldn’t've been happier. He found a box in the basement with some of my old records. He analyzed them with those large brown eyes, those long fingers inspecting the faded and cracked cardboard, inspecting the dust and scratches on the black vinyl inside the sleeves. He resembled an Egyptologist on the Discovery Channel, finding a small piece of a new pharaoh. One of these records was an extended mix of Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach.”

He brought it upstairs to the living room, and opened my large, oak entertainment set. The record player was on the bottom shelf.  He told me he’d seen record players before, but never used one.  I lifted the dustcover, took the record from him, and placed the needle on the groove, telling him what I was doing as I was doing it. The violin intro sounded demonic at first, until I realized the speed had to be changed to 45 RPM. After that lesson, Colin showed his support for Amanda’s decision by playing it every time she was at the house. He even found her a maternity T-shirt that said “Italians Do It Better,” after seeing the old video in an eighties special on VH1.

After dinner and dessert, we all made polite good-byes and Colin and I retired to our hotel room not far from the house. Colin’s family members were practically sleeping on top of each other, and Colin’s parents asked if he and his “friend” could get a hotel room. Colin thought I might be insulted, but I was actually kind of relieved. I knew how uncomfortable all this would end up being.

“They hate me,” I told him.

“They don’t hate you. They hate me right now. Which is fine. They’ve hated me before. They’ll get over it. By next Thanksgiving no one will even remember this happened.”

“What about us?”  

“What about us?”

“Will we be together next Thanksgiving?”

“What do you mean—of course we will,” his thin lips said. I knew he was lying. His mind was preoccupied with thoughts he fought to keep private, thoughts that made those large brown eyes look away from me and made his beautiful fingernails scratch the scalp beneath his full black curls.

“And what about the baby?”

“What about the baby?”

“Maybe your mother’s right.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that maybe you’re not ready for this.”

This time he looked straight me. His movements were slow and deliberate.

“Of course I am.”

“Are you sure?”

“I know this is a big step, Dean. Give me some credit for chrissake.”

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Yes you did! Yes you did. Look, I know I can do this. I’ve always loved children. I baby-sit my nieces and nephews all the time—you know that. Hell, when I was a kid I always loved playing house. I always played the Mom.”  He smiled halfway.

I didn’t respond. When he was sure the conversation was over, he took off his Calvin Klein sweater and Polo shirt beneath it in front of me, then slipped off his khakis, displaying the smooth white skin and lean physique I fell in love with every time I saw. He informed me he needed to take a shower. He closed the door behind him and turned on the water.

I took off my suit jacket and loosened my tie. I sat at the foot of the queen size bed and took off my shoes. I stopped moving and listened to Colin slide open the shower door, step over the tub, and slide the door closed again. I couldn’t help but wonder how much time was left before we’d be watching the curtain close in front of us.
 
# # # # #

RH: Playing House was built around gossip I heard from a family member in the burbs.  Her neighbor, a very successful older gay man, planned to adopt the baby of a still pregnant teenage girl in town.   This man was also having problems with his current boyfriend, who was just shy of 19.  I created biographies for these two, both of whom I’ve never met.   The age difference interested me, because it taps into something very queer that’s always been, from Plato’s Symposium, to Mann’s Death in Venice, to today.   The conflicts arising from these things are what drove me to write the story. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Hyers lives, writes, and spins UK hardcore in and around Philadelphia.  He has work published at Shine…The Journal, and HUGE! Zine.  If you’d like to contact him, please go to his website. He’d love to hear from you. 

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Sunday, June 24th, 2007.