He grinned back. “Let me have a look,” he said.
I held the computer back so the camera could capture my shirt. I was wearing one that read I kiss boys. “You are a naughty boy.” He laughed. “How long did you get to wear it right side out?”
I settled the computer back on my lap. “I managed to get through the front doors, barely.” I grinned. “Do you remember Denton Townsley?”
“Denton? What kind of name is Denton?”
I laughed. “You know, he wrote that column for the newspaper last year, junior class president ... Anyway, he had his shirt on inside out today. It was really cool.”
“Is he—”
“Nah, I don’t think so. He just likes protests.”
“How many today?”
“I counted seven.”
“Sounds like you’ve started a movement.”
Hmph. Maybe I had. It was his next statement though that set my imagination on fire: “Why don’t you make it official?”
Chapter 20
I’m Queer. Get Over It.
Give me a T!
By Nate Schaper on Sept. 14
Yep. That’s me. And this is my blog.
Anyway, I have an idea. I’m calling it T-shirt Tuesdays. Here’s the deal (and it doesn’t matter where you fall on the orientation spectrum or where you go to school): Show everyone you don’t fear queer by wearing your T-shirts inside out every Tuesday. And take pictures, send them to me, and I’ll post them (if I can figure out how to do that—Danial?)!
Somebody riddle me this. Why do people find pro-gay slogans on T-shirts so threatening? Like one of my T-shirts says, What does my being gay have to do with you (them)?
To Adam: Thank you. You know why.
As an afterthought, I posted the link to our school’s unofficial Facebook page. Before I hit the door the next morning, I checked for comments, not really expecting any. I was surprised to find five.
Comments:
GodChild223
Sep. 14, at 11:20 P.M.
God hates queers, asshole.
HappyBoy
Sep. 14, at 11:58 P.M.
T-shirt Tuesday. Brilliant. It’s on! Keep writing, Nate. I’ll be following. Do u Twitter? And GodChild223 ... ur a jerk! God hates hate, ignoramus!!!
Xyz123
Sep. 15, at 12:01 A.M.
I think ur rly brave, Nate. Im a soph at wphs. Not sure I can do T-shirt thing yet. I’ll b watching u tho.
RedHairedBeauty
Sep. 15, at 12:16 A.M.
You did it! I gotta get sum sleep but wanted to say you rock. C U in the AM. XOXOXO
Adam
Sep. 15, at 1:16 A.M.
Congrats! Look forward to discussing your comments in person. LOL. Post a pic!!!
Check your e-mail. I’ll send one.
I glanced at the time in the corner of the screen. I needed to get going or I was going to be late for school and miss my opportunity to get picked off for my Shhh ... Nobody knows I’m gay shirt, but I couldn’t resist a quick check of my e-mail. I felt a stab right through my heart when I opened the file Adam sent. It was a picture of us at a summer concert on Market Street. I vaguely remembered Juliet snapping it. Adam was standing behind me, his arms wrapped around me. I remembered thinking it was too hot out for that much contact, but not wanting him to let go either. I touched his face on the screen and struggled to swallow past the tightness in my throat, then shut down my computer and hit the door.
Chapter 21
Danial stopped by a few days later to show me how to upload photos to my blog. He took one look at the photo of Adam with his arms around me and said, “Cute.”
“Jealous?”
“Uh-huh,” he said in an exaggerated way.
“Just show me how to upload photos.”
He grinned and settled the cursor on a small square on the menu bar above the editing screen. “Insert picture. Browse photos. Click. Done.”
“That was it?”
He laughed and shook his head, then scrolled down to the comments below. “Who’s GodChild223?”
“I don’t know. Some creeper.” Danial moved his mouse to delete the comment, but I stopped him.
“Just leave it. Let him spew his hate. How did he find his way to my blog anyway?”
“Well, either he’s a student—you did post the link to Facebook, so a student and a self-righteous nerd—or maybe he’s set up a Google Alert for queer or gay teen. I figure he’s either a serious closet case or some right-wing nut job out to save the world from the gays, i.e., a serious closet case.”
He propped his chin on his fist for a moment and studied the screen, then rotated his head to look at me. “Are you sure you want to do this? You know, you’re not the only one running a campaign out there.”
I knew. I’d seen the T-shirts too—the innocuous Adam and Eve, Not Adam and Steve and Gay marriage is a sin. But there was also the scarier Gay Rights? Under God’s law the only “rights” gays have is the right to die (LEV. 20:13). The kids wearing those shirts had been intercepted as well, but instead of turning their shirts inside out, they hid them beneath hoodies, which were too hot to wear this early in the school year, but which allowed them to unzip and flaunt their crap in my face when no adults were around.
“Today I actually saw a bumper sticker in the parking lot,” he added. “ ‘AIDS: God’s cure for homosexuality.’ ”
“They’re just a bunch of ignorant assholes. They don’t scare me.”
“Maybe they should.”
Adam agreed.
“What’s the body count today?” he asked me after the second T-shirt Tuesday.
“Thirty-five for. Against, hard to say.”
We were talking by phone. Adam’s show was in its fourth week, but he’d had the day off, sleeping most of it.
“We had some new visitors on campus today.” I told him about the protestors outside. A small group of adults—parents, or maybe just some local religious kooks—had marched in a ridiculously tight little circle just across the street from the school entrance. They’d carried sad little homophobic signs with stuff like Keep Our Schools Moral and Gay with a red circle around it and a slash through it—the international symbol for prohibition, or oppression, depending on how you looked at it. The signs looked like they’d been made with old tempera paint on the side of a cardboard box.
“I don’t like this, Nate.”
Neither did I.
Chapter 22
Last December 10
Coming out
It hadn’t taken long for Adam and me to draw fire after coming out. By design, we hadn’t been overly affectionate that first day—Adam’s hand on my hip, a whisper, a slight decrease in personal space. Juliet had suggested we ease into it, nothing overt, give everyone a chance to get used to the idea of us.
Adam waited for me at my locker after the final bell. I unzipped my backpack, shoved my pre-calc book in, then zipped it back up and shouldered it. “Not so bad,” he said as I slammed the locker door and snapped the lock back into place. I grinned back at him. “Not so bad.”
He hooked a finger in my belt loop as we headed to the door. When I saw Andrew Cargill approaching, I pushed Adam’s hand away, a reflex I instantly regretted. He looked at me, surprised until he saw Cargill plant himself in our path. I clenched my fist at my side.
“Don’t,” Adam said, grabbing my elbow.
Cargill looked down at Adam’s hand on my arm and sneered. “I always knew you were a fucking faggot, Schaper.” His eyes were dark and full of trouble.
I took a step toward him, my face burning. “What’s your problem.” It wasn’t a question.
Andrew shoved me hard and I stumbled back into Adam. “My problem is you cocksuckers. You make me sick. Why don’t you faggots go suck each other off in some other school?”
Adam tugged at my arm, but I stood firm, angry and ready for a fight if that’s what he wanted. A crowd gathered around us, eager for some blood.
Andrew spat on t
he hallway floor. “If I catch you faggots alone, I’m gonna fuck you up. That’s a promise.”
“Anytime, anywhere, asshole,” I said, my voice hard and angry. “But you better bring your A game because I’m not little Jake Winfield.”
A slow smiled spread across his face. “You’d look real pretty with an extension cord wrapped around your neck.” He shouldered past me. I turned, prepared to tear that asshole limb from fucking limb. Adam positioned himself in front of me, his hands firmly on my arms.
Only after Cargill disappeared around the corner did I allow Adam to pull me away.
It went downhill from there. The snickering behind my back, the insults, the taunts, the threats. Adam tried to keep me grounded. “We knew this would happen, Nate. Don’t let them get to you.”
But by the Thursday before Christmas break, I was just one faggot away from an out-of-school suspension. So when Butch Evans blocked my way outside English class and demanded to know if I charged for my services, I snapped. I tried to muscle my way past him, but he shoved me. I stumbled back a few steps. When I regained my balance, I came back at him with all the pent-up fury of a lifetime of putting up with everybody else’s shit. He stumbled into several girls who were trying to pass, setting off a flurry of curses. He recovered and tackled me, letting fly a string of homophobic slurs. We struggled for advantage, but before either of us could get in even a glancing blow, Mr. Wolf and one of the male teachers pulled us apart.
I sat across from him as he completed the forms. A uniformed police officer stood in the doorway. Mr. Wolf rubbed his temple. “All right, Nate,” he said. “Normally fighting carries a three-day out-of-school suspension.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
He kept his head down when he spoke. “You shoved Butch Evans.”
“He shoved me first.”
“You provoked him.”
“I provoked him? How? By being gay? How is that provoking someone?”
Mr. Wolf looked at me, exasperated. He popped the cap on a bottle of Tylenol and tossed two back, then snapped the cap back on and slid the bottle into his top desk drawer.
“There were no fists involved, no weapons. I’m going to reduce it to a one-day suspension.” He leaned back in his chair and scratched his eyebrow. “Consider it an early Christmas gift. Go home. Maybe when school resumes after the break this will all have settled down. You’re gonna have to give people time to get used to the idea.”
“And while they’re getting used to the idea”—I said this with as much dripping sarcasm as I could muster—“are we supposed to just sit on our hands and let them trample all over our rights?”
“What did you expect?”
What did I expect? “Can I ask you something?” I said.
He indicated that I should continue.
“Where do you stand on this?”
He turned back to his paperwork. “It doesn’t matter where I stand.”
That’s what I thought.
He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment. “Does your mom know?”
“Know what?”
Instead of answering he dipped his chin in a you-know-what-I-mean way.
“No.”
“I’m going to have to call her. She has to come in and sign these papers and take you home. And I’m going to have to tell her about the threats. I can hold off on that for a day so you can have the talk. Unless you want me to be the one to tell her.”
Oh, hell no. I’d tell her myself. I was so done with trying to make people comfortable.
Chapter 23
It was the third T-shirt Tuesday, and the God Hates Fags mob was back. I was determined that I would not let them rattle me. Another school suspension would defeat the purpose of being both out and there.
I found Danial propped against my locker, his T-shirt inside out. I preferred to wait until I was asked. I had a repeat on today: Let’s get one thing straight. I’m not.
“I see you’ve got your fan club out there again today,” he said.
“What can I say? I’m a Three Stooges magnet. Don’t you have a locker of your own somewhere?”
He laughed and moved out of my way. I’d been seeing a lot of Danial in the hallways in the past couple of weeks, and I found it absolutely amazing how his schedule just kept intersecting with mine. I opened my locker and looked at him while I grabbed for my books. “Are you developing some kind of man crush on me?”
He snorted. “Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“Taken. Remember?”
He laughed again. “Just keeping you safe for the rest of the queers.”
“Oh, what? Now you’re my bodyguard?”
I was kidding, but he shrugged, and I realized that was exactly what he was doing. “You can’t be serious,” I said. But I could see that he was. I wasn’t sure if I was irritated or relieved. Maybe both.
Homosexuality was one of those polarizing issues, like abortion or Obama. You were either for it, or you were against it. There didn’t seem to be much middle ground. From what I’d heard here and there, my little T-shirt campaign—okay, to be blunt, the fact that my dick wanted to reach and touch someone else’s—was apparently threatening The American Way of Life. I guess all that stuff about life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and personal freedom was just a feel-good piece of rhetoric—nice for political speeches but suspiciously MIA when the rubber met the road.
“I don’t need a babysitter,” I said, not fully believing that to be true.
“Oh, come on,” he said, punching my arm playfully. “I don’t want anything happening to my favorite substitute guitar teacher.”
“I gave you one lesson.”
He ignored the comment and continued. “Then I might get stuck with Juliet, and”—he cleared his throat—“I can’t guarantee her safety.”
Well, well, well. Danial did have a thing for Juliet. Before I could pursue that thought any further, he smirked and held out something for me—another T-shirt?
“Really, you shouldn’t have,” I said, taking it.
“Not me. It was here when I got here.” He laughed.
I held it up and grinned when I saw the slogan—Sexy Bitch.
“You are not going to wear that shirt. I might be able to fight off the bad guys, but I’m not so sure about a flock of flamers.”
I shoved my backpack in his hands and yanked off my repeat shirt, quickly replacing it with the new one.
“You got some balls for a girly man,” he said, shaking his head.
“Thought you said I wasn’t girly.”
Instead of answering, his eyes flicked over my shoulder and he jutted his chin in that direction. “Looks like your boyfriend might have a little competition.”
I shot a glance over my shoulder, just catching some kid’s eye before he looked away and hurried down the hall. He wore a UT shirt and had shaggy blond hair jutting out wildly from beneath a baseball cap. I didn’t recognize him. He was tall but looked younger. I guessed he was either a sophomore or a junior.
Danial raised his eyebrows. “Come on, sexy bitch,” he said, shoving my backpack into my chest. “Let’s get a move on. This babysitting’s really gonna kill my perfect tardy record.”
Morning Announcement:
“Students, I’m sure you noticed that we have some protestors outside our building again this morning. Those protestors are not on school property and are exercising their constitutional right to free speech. However, we will continue our school day just as we always do. You are here to learn. I expect you to focus on your work. Protests inside the school will not be tolerated.”
As Juliet had once said to me, that train had left the station.
Chapter 24
I’m Queer. Get Over It.
Don’t hate me because I’m gay!
By Nate Schaper on Sept. 30
God hates fags? Really?
Does it make sense that God would love haters but hate lovers? To the village idiots outside my school today: Get the fucking
log out of your own eyes before you try to remove the splinter from mine.
And for those of you who claim to be okay with gay as long as you don’t have to watch. Don’t watch. Please.
To my fellow queers ... where are you? The statistics tell me you’re out there. Everywhere I go now, I watch for you. But I don’t see you. Or do I?
Comments:
GodChild223
Sept. 30, at 11:22 P.M.
Your an abomanation. A freek of nature.
HappyBoy
Sept. 30, at 11:54 P.M.
I’m sending you a pic of our first TT! So awesome. UR a celeb here. And GodChild223—learn to spell! What an idiot.
Xyz123
Oct. 1, at 12:01 A.M.
I’m here. I’m just not as brave as you, Nate. Maybe someday. Maybe soon. Is that your boyfriend you hang out with at school? Who’s the guy in the picture?
RedHairedBeauty
Oct. 1, at 12:16 A.M.
Can I watch? Please??
Adam
Oct. 1, at 12:30 A.M.
OIC. Get your own guy, RedHairedBeauty, you trollop. LOL. Please add a caption to our pic, Nate. You’re giving these peeps the wrong idea! And who are you hanging out with at school? PakistaniPal
Oct. 1, at 8:30 A.M.
We need to talk about comment mod.
Chapter 25
“It’s just Danial,” I told Adam when he Skyped that afternoon. “He’s my self-appointed bouncer now, I guess.”
I hadn’t talked to Adam for two days. I hadn’t seen his face for almost a week. Just a series of missed opportunities as our schedules got crazier. Or maybe the distance was taking its toll. I couldn’t help but feel like we were losing our grip on each other, like we were in some cosmic ocean, the waves and the undertow pulling us apart and no physical hold on each other to keep us together. It was always one thing or another. Either one of us had forgotten to charge his cell phone, or a series of blackouts in New York had knocked out communication, or we’d just gone to bed too tired to connect. We texted, we left messages, but it wasn’t enough.
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