Boyfriends With Girlfriends

  “Expecting a call, honey?” his mom asked, as he stared at his phone on the kitchen table.

  Lance shrugged, not wanting to go into it with her—even though his mom and dad were completely cool with him being gay.

  The first time the issue had come up, he’d been barely eight years old. A TV news story about commitment ceremonies showed a pair of guys in tuxes hugging and laughing as they cut a wedding cake topped with two little groom figurines.

  “When I grow up,” Lance had announced to his parents, “I want to marry a man.”

  His mom peered at him a moment, then turned to his dad.

  “Well”—his dad stared back at her—“I guess you were right.”

  “Right about what?” Lance asked.

  After an awkward silence, his dad told his mom, “This one is all yours. Go for it!”

  “Gee, thanks.” His mom smirked and turned to Lance. “Well, honey . . . Right about . . . that you might want to make a family with a man someday . . . And if that’s what you want, well . . . that’s okay. The important thing is Daddy and I love you very much. That’s all that matters.”

  Lance returned to watching the tuxedoed men on TV, not really understanding what had just happened, but feeling happy.

  With Allie, too, his coming out had been pretty much unnecessary. In grade school, they’d played Barbies at her house while they giggled about which boys in class were cutest.

  In middle school, when other boys traded drawings of girls’ boobs, Lance didn’t get the point. He loved to be with Allie, but he felt no desire to see her—or any other girl—naked.

  When classmates began to use words like homo and queer about people, Lance started to put all the pieces together. But he didn’t think it was a big deal until one day in seventh grade when a girl asked him point-blank, “Are you gay?”

  “Yeah, I guess.” It was his first time to admit it out loud.

  By day’s end, the entire school was buzzing with the news. Nobody really hassled him; people were mostly just curious. But since he’d never actually had sex with anybody, he didn’t have much to tell. Within a week, kids lost interest; he never really had to deal with any homophobes.

  High school brought a couple of small-time boyfriends, culminating with the Big One: Darrell Wright, a JV point guard that all the girls crushed on. So did Lance. But he never seriously imagined he stood a chance with him . . . until one afternoon.

  He was heading home from Drama Club, Darrell was leaving basketball practice, and they found themselves alone in the boys’ restroom.

  “So, like, is it true what people say about you?” Darrell asked.

  Lance braced himself, a little nervous. “Um, yeah.”

  Darrell glanced warily toward the door and whispered, “You want to come over?”

  When they got to his house, Darrell unloaded an avalanche of questions: How had Lance known he was gay? Did he think he could change? Did his parents suspect? Had he ever done anything with a guy?

  Lance answered everything honestly, although uncertain where all this was headed. Then Darrell turned silent, giving him an odd look of anticipation. A heartbeat later, they were feverishly running their hands all over each other—across shirts and down jeans. It was the closest Lance had ever come to sex. And just as suddenly, Darrell pulled away.

  “My parents are home!”

  Lance became aware of a car engine turning off outside, doors opening and closing.

  “Try not to act gay!” Darrell told him.

  “But I am gay,” Lance said in a low voice.

  “Just try!” Darrell insisted. “Please?”

  Lance tried his best not to “act gay,” whatever that meant, as he met Darrell’s dad, a glum, unsmiling man, and his mom, an equally stern-looking woman.

  “Don’t tell anyone about this, okay?” Darrell whispered as he walked Lance outside.

  “Okay,” Lance agreed, feeling a little dazed. This wasn’t how he’d imagined his first sexual experience. Shouldn’t he feel like singing as in some musical—or at least humming?

  He had to tell somebody about it. As always, that someone was Allie.

  “Darrell Wright is gay?” She giggled and gasped. “No way!”

  “Way,” Lance replied. “And he kind of said I act gay. Do you think I do? Come on. Tell me. Be honest.”

  “Well . . .” Allie hesitated, not sure how he’d take it. “ . . . Maybe, sometimes, a little.”

  He perched his hands on his hips and rolled his eyes. “I didn’t mean that honest!”

  “See?” she said. “Like when you stand like that and roll your eyes.”

  “Why, what’s wrong with how I’m standing?”

  “Nothing is wrong with it; it’s just not something most straight guys do.”

  “Okay.” He crossed his arms. “I’ll stop doing it.”

  “Babe, you shouldn’t change who you are just to please Darrell. Maybe you should just wait for a different guy.”

  But it was too late: Lance had already begun to fall for Darrell. Hard. Head-over-sneakers hard. Harder than he’d ever crushed on any boy.

  At school, Darrell avoided any acknowledgment of him beyond, “’Sup?”

  Nevertheless, Lance invited him to sit at his group’s table.

  “Thanks,” Darrell said. “But I don’t want people to get ideas.”

  “Um, what ideas?”

  “About us . . . Look, you can be whatever you want, but . . . I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can. Just come out!”

  “I can’t,” Darrell insisted, and the next time they were together, he explained, “My parents would disown me. Besides, I still want to get married and have kids someday.”

  “You can do that with a guy,” Lance argued.

  “Not with my family.” Darrell gave a hopeless sigh. “And even if I could, it wouldn’t be the same.”

  “But if you’re gay, you’re gay,” Lance persisted.

  “I’m not sure I’m gay,” Darrell said, despite having had his hands inside Lance’s pants. “I’m not going to come out.”

  And yet every few days he once again waited for Lance after school.

  When they were apart, Lance phoned, e-mailed, and texted him constantly: Where r u? Miss u. And an hour later: Sup? What r u doing now? When asleep, he even dreamed about him. He couldn’t get Darrell out of his mind. He loved his foresty smell, his dark-dark skin, his gleaming white smile. He ached to do everything with him, spend every moment together.

  “I can’t help feeling kind of sorry for him,” Lance explained to Allie. “I’m the only person he’s really open to. Maybe with time, he’ll change and accept he’s gay.”

  “Are you sure about this?” Allie asked.

  “No,” Lance admitted, “but I’m sure I love him.”

  Nonetheless, as the days passed Darrell and he got into more and more arguments, mostly about the closety sneaking around and Darrell’s not wanting to be seen with him in public. And yet Lance couldn’t give him up. Instead he decided to try harder. Maybe if he told Darrell how he really felt, then Darrell would change and come out.

  “I love you,” Lance finally told him one afternoon. His pulse beat wildly while he waited for Darrell to say it back. . . . But Darrell didn’t.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” Darrell said and turned away.

  Lance’s heart sank like a stone.

  “What did I do wrong?” he asked Allie over the phone afterward. “I only want to love him.”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong,” Allie consoled him. “It’s not about you. But maybe you should ease up on him. give him some space.”

  Lance cut back on texts and IMs. But even so, Darrell no longer waited for him after school. And he stopped answering Lance’s calls—until after about the hundredth time, when Darrell finally told him, “Don’t call me again, okay?”

  It cut like a knife to see Darrell every day at school and be ignored. For weeks, Lance stumbled around with a hollow emptiness inside
his chest, feeling as though his life was over; he might as well just lie down and die.

  “Brace yourself,” Allie told him one day in the hall. “I just heard Darrell is going with Fiona.”

  “He’s going out with a girl?” Lance asked. He leaned back onto his locker in disbelief, unsure whether to feel hurt or angry or even more sorry for him. On one hand, he wanted to expose Darrell as a fake who liked to stick his tongue in another boy’s ear; on the other hand, he felt kind of sorry for Darrell, wanted to cradle him in his arms and tell him, “Dude, you don’t have to pretend. Just be yourself.”

  “What should I do?” he asked Allie.

  “I think you should just let the whole thing go,” she suggested.

  Gradually, Lance tried to date other guys. But it seemed as though they were either too young and immature, too old and bossy, didn’t have time for him, lived too far across the city, already had a relationship, weren’t into him, or only wanted sex. . . . Not that he had anything against sex. He liked sex—at least the little bit of it he’d had.

  “Is it me?” he asked Allie. “Why is it so hard to find a guy to love? I’m seventeen already! I should have a boyfriend by now. I’m not a bad person, am I? What’s wrong with me?”

  “Nothing is wrong with you,” Allie reassured him. “Take it easy. You’ll find someone.”

  He hoped she was right. At least she’d always love him, even if nobody else ever did.

  The evening after meeting Sergio, Lance went online and surfed through his friends’ friend lists—the same way he’d initially found Sergio. But no one caught his attention and he returned to Sergio’s page.

  When he’d first read the page, he’d liked how out and open Sergio sounded, not caring what anybody thought of him—the total opposite of Darrell.

  Sergio’s page included a Helen keller quote: “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” That’s me, Sergio wrote, daring and dramatic, provocative and controversial. Hola!

  Okay, Lance now thought, so then why don’t you just admit you’re gay?

  On impulse, he picked up the phone to call him, but then stopped himself. He wasn’t ready to risk it.

  A little before noon on that Sunday after meeting Lance, Sergio woke up and checked his cell. It surprised him that Lance hadn’t called or texted. The dude had seemed so puppy-dog eager. He set the phone down and lay beneath the warm and toasty sheets, thinking about Lance’s yummy white skin speckled with freckles. . . . And within seconds he was into a full-blown fantasy, with Lance snuggled beside him.

  I hope I locked the door, Sergio thought.

  One time his mom had walked in on him solo-sexing. Whoops! Mortifying. That night she took his sister out shopping so his dad could give him the Talk.

  His old man had paced the living room carpet, jingling a pocket full of coins and clearing his throat—“ahem . . .”—while lecturing Sergio about the perils of girls and “canoodling.”

  What the hell kind of word is that? Sergio wondered.

  Above all, his dad emphasized the importance of good hygiene—as if being extra clean was the most significant part of sex. And he never even broached the possibility that Sergio might be attracted to guys as well as girls.

  Since at least kindergarten, Sergio had liked both—playing “doctor” with the boy next door; kissing girls during Spin the Bottle; and smooching in the restroom with a kid named Peter.

  Guys and girls brought out different feelings in him. With boys, he liked the rough-and-tumble play, their earthy smells and no-nonsense talk, the fact that in so many ways they were the same as he was. With girls he liked everything the opposite: their soft tender touch, their flowery scents, the way they flirted and teased, their difference and mystery. By the time he’d finished grade school, he’d scored kisses from three boys and three girls. The teams were tied, even-steven.

  When he reached middle school, his antsy hormones began to demand more excitement, and he discovered that to get any action from a girl required a lot more preliminaries. First, a friend had to tell the girl that Sergio liked her. If she liked him back, he’d need to talk on the phone and IM her for hours, telling her how much he liked her . . . until finally, he might get a kiss. And if he got super-lucky she’d let him sneak a little feel.

  Fooling around with boys was way less complicated. They could wrestle and horse around, and if a hand strayed below the waist, they just giggled about it and punched each other.

  With middle school also came porn. One afternoon in seventh grade, his buddy, Big Brian, showed him how to get around his computer’s Net Nanny, and they pornsurfed, stumbling onto an all-male site.

  “They’re gay,” Sergio said, stating the obvious.

  “Yeah, gross,” Brian said. But he didn’t change the page.

  “Um . . .” Sergio squirmed, staring at the pictures.

  “ . . . You ever wondered what that would feel like?”

  “Nah.” Brian’s voice quivered in response. “Have you?”

  Sergio shrugged evasively. “You want to try it?”

  “Um . . .” Beads of sweat broke out on Brian’s forehead. “You want?”

  Their belts got unbuckled fast; pants fumbled open.

  “You go first,” Brian whispered.

  “But how do you . . . ?” The boys studied the photos, trying to figure things out.

  “Oh, I get it. Like this!”

  “Man, that feels great.”

  “Yeah!” Hearts pounded among echoes of “Yeah! Yeah!”

  Afterward, they cleaned up with a crusty old sock, grabbed chips and soda from the kitchen, played a computer game, and the next day went to school like any other seventh-grade boys. They never talked about their experiences; it was easier not to.

  In high school Sergio began to date, alternating between guys and girls, until he met Zelda, his first serious relationship.

  He was sitting one day between the school library shelves reading A Wizard of Earthsea, when a girl’s voice whispered, “Hey, that’s the book I was looking for.”

  He gazed up a pair of long slender Lycra-panted legs at an impish-looking girl with a butterfly sticker on her cheek.

  “How is it?” Zelda asked, pushing her raven black hair behind her ears. “My friend tells me it’s great.”

  “Yeah,” he replied. “It’s my second time reading it.”

  She plopped down onto the carpet beside him, where they talked about their favorite fantasy books, and then about time travel, and then about trance music. . . . When the end-of-period bell rang, he knew he wanted to spend more time with her.

  “I’ll let you take the book,” he teased, “if you give me your number.”

  She smiled, but only a little—as if she didn’t want him to think he was getting too big a bargain—and wrote her number on his hand.

  Within a week, they were talking on the phone every day—about school, their families, favorite foods, anything and everything. . . . He opened up to her more than he’d ever opened up to anyone except Kimiko.

  “Just so you know, I’m bi,” he told Zelda, wanting to be honest. But in reality he’d stopped thinking about guys. She’d become the only person he thought about—almost each and every moment.

  “I’m bi too sometimes,” she said with a half smile.

  “Sweet!” he replied, feeling he could be totally himself with her.

  He loved the time they spent together . . . talking, kissing, holding. . . . He loved everything about her: when her hair fell across her forehead and how silky soft it felt when he combed his fingers through it; how her breasts fit into his cupped hands like two golden apples—the first bare boobs he’d ever touched; how their bodies seemed to fit together perfectly; he loved her body naked, damp and moist after they’d made full-on love. It all seemed so cosmic. . . .

  Until the afternoon Kimiko came over, acting weird and evasive—fidgeting, not looking him in the eye.

  “What’s up with you today?” he asked.

  “I saw Z
elda at the mall . . . ,” she muttered softly, “. . . with some guy. I’ve never seen him at school.”

  “So?” Sergio felt his chest tighten. “The guy was probably her cousin or something.”

  “Dude, the guy didn’t exactly look like a relative. He was black. Zelda is white. And . . . they were holding hands.”

  Sergio felt his head grow warm. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Why would I lie to you?” Kimiko asked.

  He knew she wouldn’t, but he didn’t want to believe her.

  “Maybe you’d better ask her about him,” Kimiko suggested.

  After she left, he played Tetris on his phone for a while, trying to ignore what she’d said, until he finally shut the game down. He dialed Zelda’s number, counting the number of rings: one . . . two . . . three . . . fo—

  “Hi,” she answered, just like normal. Obviously, Kimiko had been wrong.

  They talked for a few minutes about nothing important, while Sergio debated whether to mention what Kimiko had told him.

  “I heard you were at the mall this afternoon,” he said at last.

  Zelda suddenly went quiet—only for a moment, but long enough for Sergio to notice.

  “Yeah,” she replied. “I went with a friend.”

  “Who?” Sergio asked, scooting back on his bed against the headboard.

  “A friend,” Zelda repeated. Her voice seemed tense. “ . . . Why?”

  Sergio grabbed a pillow and clutched it to his chest. “Because you two were holding hands.”

  Zelda let out a loud sigh. “Look, this isn’t working for me.”

  “What isn’t working for you?”

  “This. Us. I’m always wondering: Are you thinking about me or about a guy?”

  Her comment took Sergio by surprise. “Why would you wonder that?”

  “Because you’re bi! Whenever we’re kissing or anything, I never know if you’re really thinking about me or about some guy.”

  “If I wanted to be with a guy,” Sergio replied, “I’d be with a guy. I’m with you because I want to be with you.”

  She turned quiet again as though contemplating what he’d said. “I just don’t think this can work. I don’t want to be a couple anymore.”