Everything Is Awful

by Matt Bellassai

  I should clarify, of course, for the Texans reading this, that an underwear ad did not actually turn me gay. Nothing can turn you gay, no matter what those TV preachers say, not even the seductive stare of an amorphous penis on a package of boxer briefs. I was just plain old born gay, probably because my mother watched too many daytime soap operas while she was pregnant with me, and then, bit by bit, the gayness grew inside me until it finally started seeping from my glands sometime in the late 2000s.

  I never had the “AHA” moment you hear about in more dramatic gay people’s books, where I’m awkwardly unclasping some poor girl’s bra and then, like a bolt of lightning hitting the gay part of the brain, I suddenly realize I’d rather be in a bathhouse with Ryan Gosling. I mean, sure, I’ve had moments like that. Everybody has moments like that. You can’t watch The Notebook and not have involuntary sexual visions of Ryan Gosling dropping soap in a gym shower. It’s part of life. But a thought like that was never the epiphany for me, because there never was some Big Moment of Gay Clarity. It was more like a thousand tiny “MM-HMM” moments that piled up to confirm a nagging suspicion, a buried inkling that I was craving a different cut of beef.

  When I was ten, I had my first real hunch when I discovered my brother’s poorly hidden adult magazines for heterosexuals. (Apologies to my brother, if he’s reading this, but I found your straight porn. You should’ve gotten a lockbox or something that tripped a silent alarm.) This was before we had a computer, of course, which means he had no choice but to buy disgusting nudie magazines instead of digital porn, and I had no choice but to spend my free time rifling under his mattress instead of, I don’t know, doing whatever kids do on the Internet these days (Buy meth?). I remember turning those crinkly pages like a scientist looking through lab samples, taking in those appallingly hairy pictures and running them against a mental database of things that triggered an exciting emotional response. Nothing. When I got to the last page, I remember thinking, out loud, with a clarity I’d never experienced before, “Where the fuck are all the dicks?” It felt like a gross oversight on the part of such an esteemed publication to just forget to feature a whole half of the population. Even then my brain knew one basic fact: everything is better with more penis.

  Of course, that was only a hunch. I assumed everybody came to this conclusion at the end of their straight porn perusal. A few years later, I got full confirmation while searching online for posters to hang on my bedroom wall. This was a big moment in its own right, since I was finally replacing one of the many bedroom themes I’d had through adolescence (first “Pokémon,” then “Nautica,” then “Rainforest Cafe”). I was ready for the more sophisticated, undefined aesthetic of a trendy college dorm, like the kids on Boy Meets World. This was the 2000s after all, I’d survived Y2K, and it was time to enhance my bedroom game with a few posters that said, “Hey, if you think this is a kid’s room, you can go fuck yourself. Because an Adult Man lives here now, one who likes Lizzie McGuire and NSYNC and American Idol, like all grown heterosexuals do.” I clicked on a section called “College,” obviously, because that’s the category all mature men shop for their bedroom posters in. I scrolled through endless images of Pink Floyd covers and Bob Marley heads and that one dumb picture of John Belushi from Animal House where he’s just standing there with a stupid look on his face, until finally I noticed a subcategory called “Hot Girls” looming in the corner of the screen and, just beneath it, like the shiny clasp of a treasure chest poking through the surface of a dirty beach, waiting for some lucky explorer to catch its seductive glance, “Hot Guys.”

  I hovered over that link for a good five minutes. I knew full well that the one above it was what other boys, like my older brother, who already had a poster of a woman in some gaudy animal-print bikini hanging on his own wall, would eagerly click without hesitation. But that wasn’t what gave me pause. What gave me pause was the gurgling well of Catholic guilt that had been filling my stomach since baptism.

  My family was never particularly religious, but by some circumstance we were Catholic, and so, by default, I was sent to Sunday school, where I was taught that anything even vaguely sexual is a sin, and if you even think about sex once in your life, you’ll spend eternity personally shining Satan’s shoes in hell. Or something like that. I don’t really remember specifics, but there are a lot of rules in Catholicism, and most of them go something like this: “No smiling, no getting naked, no touching your penis for more than five seconds while urinating, no erections, no looking at another person’s bare skin, no kissing anybody but your mother and also Jesus, no meat on Fridays during Lent, and no looking at posters on the Internet with sinful descriptions like ‘Hot.’ ” And I was a gullible child, fearful of any semblance of retribution. My cousin once convinced me that Catholic priests could identify when you’d sinned and would smash a raw egg on your head when you approached them during Mass, in front of the entire congregation and everything. And I fucking believed that shit for almost an entire week before I realized Catholic priests weren’t allowed to touch eggs because they come from bird vaginas. But still. I was scared shitless.

  The truth is, though, I don’t remember any chastising of homosexuality specifically. In Catholic school, all sex is wrong, no matter who it’s with. (Unless you’re a priest, but you know what, I’m not gonna get into that right now.) When I lingered over that “Hot Guys” link, I wasn’t even thinking all that much about the fact that it was guys, but about the fact that this was an Adult Thing to do, and something Jesus would probably not like very much.

  Of course, you know where this is going. I clicked the fucking link. I was thirteen and horny. Catholic guilt might be able to convince you you’re going to hell, but it can’t convince you that looking at dick on the Internet isn’t worth the journey.

  When I finally opened that page, after asking Jesus if he would politely look away, it was like Scrooge McDuck sauntering into his vault of money, untying his velvet robe, and skipping the ladder to dive headfirst into his pond of gold. I should note, for the curious, that these were not high-quality posters of hot guys (I remain convinced that no such thing exists, though I’d gladly be proven wrong). These were images of burly, misshapen New York firefighters and the midsections of middle-aged bodybuilders and maybe one half-decent picture of David Beckham. Stuff that most grown women, let alone thirteen-year-old boys, would find utterly uninteresting and perhaps even repugnant. And yet, my tiny, horny, sinful brain flooded with adrenaline and dopamine and all those good feelings that say, “If you’re looking at a picture of a Latino Chippendale and feeling these things, congratulations, you’re a homosexual.”

  Once the door was open, it was like every little thing reaffirmed the inevitable truth. The shirtless gardener on Desperate Housewives, the hot male cheerleader from Bring It On, shopping bags from Abercrombie & Fitch, that picture of Mark Wahlberg in his Calvin Kleins, Ashton Kutcher. The first time I heard a song from Dreamgirls and the first time I voted for Clay Aiken on American Idol. Brendan Fraser in George of the Jungle and the Batman movie where Robin wears the pointy-nippled suit. Oh, and the time Playgirl published those nude photos of Brad Pitt, which actually happened and wasn’t just a concoction of my overstimulated gay brain.

  Now, most people mistakenly believe children can’t possibly know they’re gay, that it’s absurd for a child to know that a pubescent fancy for Matthew McConaughey in How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days will manifest itself in a lifelong pursuit of a strapping Adonis with well-kept facial hair and a loft-style apartment. And I’d be inclined to agree if the signs on my part hadn’t always been so glaringly obvious. I mean, sure, if you don’t know you’re looking for them, maybe the signals are easy to miss, but it’s a goddamn mystery I made it as long as I did without a single member of my family raising questions.

  The evidence: I took a baking class instead of playing baseball because I preferred the safe, delicate art of muffin making to the heterosexual demands of running in sand. I stayed inside on wee
kends to watch TLC’s Trading Spaces and went to the local library after school to borrow multiple volumes of interior design books to scheme my dream Parisian château. The most emotion I felt on the day of my First Communion was the moment I got a Beanie Baby wrapped in a Backstreet Boys gift bag. I once demanded to be taken to the music store for the sole purpose of purchasing Britney Spears’s seminal classic “Oops! . . . I Did It Again” on compact disc. My favorite toys were a collection of animal dolls called “Littlest Pet Shop,” which I accessorized to death and kept in a full-sized dollhouse. And my favorite Power Ranger was the pink one, which, I know, isn’t gay in and of itself, but considered in context was pretty damn gay.

  And yet, my family still claims they had no idea.

  The problem, I imagine, is that most of my eccentricities could be ascribed to the fact that I was a shy, chubby nerd who didn’t like to talk about his feelings. Sure, I never liked sports or girls or NASCAR (I don’t know what straight boys are into), but nobody expects the president of the science club to have a girlfriend. (Actually, to be fair, I did have a girlfriend named Samantha in third grade. And yes, we kissed behind the old car at the end of the block—closed-lipped, on the cheek, I showered in scalding water afterward—and despite the fact that I only truly liked her for the purple, fur-rimmed coat she wore on the playground, to the outside eye, I get that I was sending hetero cues on this one. But, c’mon, the Trading Spaces thing is kinda hard to overlook.) My family, I assume, concluded that I was a hapless, sensitive straight soul who would marry some poor girl when I finally got the courage to talk to her sometime after my fortieth birthday.

  And perhaps because I was a shy, chubby nerd who didn’t like to talk about his feelings, I stayed in the closet through high school and well into college. I suppose a part of me was scared of what the reaction would be, but my family was never particularly conservative. We watched Will & Grace and Glee and all those shows on HGTV where most of the designers look like they just got off a boat from Fire Island. Our boy dog sometimes humped other boy dogs and my family didn’t have him immediately put down.

  In retrospect, the real reason I stayed in the closet for so long is that coming out is weird and personal and awkward and, yes, sex-adjacent, and having that conversation with anybody, least of all my parents, was the last thing I wanted to do when I was already weird and awkward and easily embarrassed talking to people about anything vaguely intimate. The thought of having to one day admit, out loud, that I thought I’d maybe perhaps be interested in putting my penis inside another boy’s penis (note: this is not how gay sex works or what you’re required to say when coming out) was downright terrifying.

  Besides, as a teenage boy already self-conscious about my weight and my dorkiness and my all-around social outcast–ness, I was afraid that coming out would usher in an era of unwelcome attention at a time when I wanted nothing more than to blend in. The only other out gay kid at our high school was a lesbian who called herself Madonna, and she was everything that terrified my teenage self: loud and obnoxious and different and annoyingly confident. If I came out, I feared, I would become Madonna, and gayness would define me.

  So I just didn’t. And it was easy. I could look at gay posters on the Internet and harbor real-life gay crushes and not have to worry about engaging in embarrassing conversations or attracting any unwanted notice. We lived in the suburbs, after all, which wasn’t exactly crawling with other like-minded teenage boys to consummate my gayness with. In fact, the only other boy I was even vaguely interested in was the only other boy I regularly interacted with, one of the neighbor boys, likely an early indication of my predilection for soft-skinned midwestern twinks with muscular calves who are good at baseball and swimming. But, he was straight, and besides, I was a horny red-blooded American boy, and I probably would’ve fallen in love with a pool noodle if it had slight pecs and asked me to hang out with it after school. (God, this is gonna make going home for Christmas awkward, isn’t it? Someone from that family is gonna read this book and make eye contact with me out of their kitchen window, and I’m gonna have to be like, “I’m sorry I admitted to being horny for you/your son/your brother. I was merely a child and also he mooned me once as a joke between bros, so it’s kinda his fault for turning on that particular light switch, if you know what I mean.”) So I went through high school perfectly content with keeping my gayness not necessarily secret, just not publicized.

  It wasn’t until college, when I met my straight best friend, the first boy I ever truly loved, and utterly destroyed our friendship with my inability to admit that I was perhaps in love with him in a way he couldn’t reciprocate, that I finally felt the pressure to come out and put in the work.

  But let’s start that story from the beginning.

  I met Kellan on the third day of our freshman year of college, at a dining hall table of misfits. (Note: Kellan is not his real name, but it is the name of a gay porn star I’ve seen, so we’ll call him that to spare him scrutiny and also to further indulge my fantasies.) By the third day of orientation, my given roommate Troy—a wannabe frat boy with an outsized ego and zero game—having already decided I was a social liability, had ditched me for what he deemed a more lucrative social circle and left me to find dinner alone. I went to the dining hall by myself and walked with my tray to find an empty seat, presumably to plot how I’d spend the next four years in solitude. But I saw an open seat at a table full of guys I recognized from our dorm, and asked if I could join. They said yes.

  There was Alex, a moppy-haired engineer who, by day three, had already fully embraced the shower-free, anti-deodorant, sweatpants-and-flip-flops lifestyle of the college professional. Then Jared, a Chinese immigrant studying economics, who always wore jeans that ended four inches above his ankles, and who, I assume, is still wearing the same outfit as he manages some billion-dollar hedge fund on Wall Street. And finally, there was Kellan, Alex’s roommate, tall and slender and boyish, with smooth skin and bowl-cut hair, and just the right amount of social anxiety to be approachable. He was beautiful in the same way that nerdy girls in nineties movies are beautiful, which is to say, he was one makeover montage away from being sweep-you-off-your-feet hot, if he actually gave a shit about that kind of thing, but obviously he didn’t, because he was too awkward to make that happen.

  That night, we all became friends, and ate dinner together for most nights after that. We studied together at night and played video games on the weekends and occasionally smuggled cheap vodka from the junior who lived down the hall, to bring to football games, which was just an excuse to eat cheese fries and be underage drunk outdoors.

  A few months in, Alex joined a fraternity (where his disheveled nature would find its true home), so we saw less of him, and Jared was often off on his own (he ate, no lie, approximately seven meals a day, and the rest of us couldn’t possibly keep up). So Kellan and I grew particularly close.

  One night I mentioned I’d be leaving to go home for Thanksgiving and Kellan let out a dramatic “Nooooo!” and when I asked what was wrong, he said, “You can’t leave! Then I’ll have nobody to hang out with.” And I felt warm and fuzzy and good about the fact that I’d found a friend who considered me his person, another boy who would genuinely miss me when I was gone and rejoice when I returned.

  Kellan was an only child, the son of wealthy parents, who spent much of his childhood moving from private school to private school around the world. He’d spent the last several years in Texas, where he’d developed the slightest of southern twangs, but he was, in other words, someone who’d been similarly unaccustomed to deep friendships with other guys. We’d become friends largely out of chance, but we liked each other’s company, and worked well together.

  You can tell where this is going. It had only been, like, two months and I was already wildly overreading the cues. I knew he was straight, don’t get me wrong, but he was sensitive and endearing and he actually liked hanging out with me! I’d never had a close guy friend before—not in adultho
od, at least—let alone one who I kinda thought had a nice face and teeth and arms and butt, though I would never admit that, even to myself. And he was a similarly intimacy-averse freak, so romantic rivals were largely out of the equation. In fact, we rarely talked about girls at all. I never mentioned that I was gay (though I’m sure it was obvious), and he never talked all that much about girlfriends, though I knew he’d had one in high school. And so, it was easy to fall into a kind of imaginary romance without having to admit that’s what was happening.

  And so, we did everything together. Every morning, I would get ready and go to his room to collect him for breakfast (sometimes I’d get there early, because he’d be coming back from the shower and I could see him in his towel). On Christmas break, we’d chat online every day, and being the wildly insecure person I was, I’d often wait for him to chat me first, so I knew he really wanted to talk, and then I’d obviously interpret that as a sign that he was somehow falling in love with me, too. The summer after our freshman year, I flew to Houston to stay with him for a week, and we went to the mall and a baseball game and ate tacos, and we hugged at the airport before I flew home. And one night, when we were both too drunk on Four Lokos (before they were banned by the government), we passed out next to one another on his bed and drunkenly cuddled before falling asleep.

  It didn’t take long into our sophomore year before I started expecting too much. Actually, that’s the nice way of putting it. The truth is, I went crazy. I became obsessive and possessed. I was in love but didn’t want to admit that I was in love, not because I didn’t want to admit that I was gay, but because I knew he wasn’t, and I wanted our relationship to be the most it could be without us having to say it. We were just best friends! The closest of best friends! The closest you can possibly be to being gay for one another without actually being gay because obviously neither of us is gay, we’re just best friends! The tiny gay demon on my shoulder whispered in my ear and made me insane.