Collective Fallout Magazine

FULL STORY TO APPEAR IN THE GOTHIC (November 2010) ISSUE!

“Promise me you won’t fuck anyone at the party tonight.”

“I can’t promise you.  I’m just getting into this queer lifestyle.  I’ve been turning around on the sidewalk checking out girls all my life, and now here I am making a sincere effort to be gay, walking through Bed, Bath and Beyond, where there’s always plenty of faggots in striped shirts, dropping my eyes to that big weight between their front pants pockets, wondering what their cock and balls look like.  By the way, can you tell what a guy’s cock looks like, just from his face?”

Trey, mincing fresh-brined olives at the kitchen counter, raised his neatly-plucked eyebrows.  “If you can, it’s too subtle for this boy.  Believe me, it’s not as if I haven’t done the research.”

Geoffrey, twice Trey’s age, sat at the kitchen table, long and muscular, legs sprawled, close-cropped black hair, rugged face, aiming his too-blue eyes at Trey.  “It’s really disappointing when they pull down their pants, eager as a puppy, and here’s this unimpressive little limb sticking up.”

“Why are you even doing this?  Who makes an effort to turn gay?”

Geoffrey spread his large hands apart.  “What am I supposed to do?  It was getting to the point where I was fucking fat girls, just to have a different body type.  Fat girls!  Can you believe that?  So I thought, here’s this whole other body structure, boys with big biceps.  Cocks.  Why not try that?  Plus guys are really casual about taking off their clothes with a gay.  There’s no fear of failure.  Even if you don’t get hard, who gives a shit?  It’s another guy!  There’s no shame.  But anyway, I can’t promise you I won’t fuck any of your party guests tonight.  What if I meet a boy at your party with a beautiful ass, eyes like a doe?  I’m not supposed to fuck him?  Isn’t that the whole point to being gay?  You fuck everyone you can?”

“Nobody talks like that.  ‘Eyes like a doe.’  Certainly not queers.”   Trey turned around, black and white Betty Boop apron tied across his white chinos, her round face cheerful with flirtatiously raised black eyebrows, his triangular face twisted into an exasperated look.  “This is serious.  I want this party to be a huge success.  These are my friends.  I want them to get to know you.”   He dipped his hip.  “I want them to feel jealous, okay?  I’m fucking a straight guy, who’s old enough to be my dad.”  He rolled his pretty brown eyes.  “If my dad had a rock hard body, with a cock that weighs twenty pounds.  It’s a gay fantasy.  Help me out.”

“I love it when you act stern.  It’s like watching an ant aggressively raise its little pincers, just before I step on it.”

Trey, hands in pink oven mitts, turned back to the stove, lifting a white china plate of steaming artichoke bottoms out of the bamboo tower on one of the burners.  Slim back to Geoffrey, he spoke in a voice quiet enough to suggest both a personal thought, and one that could be eavesdropped.  “I don’t want ‘us’ to just exist in our bedroom.  I want the whole world to know.”

The older man sighed.  “What’s the point?  You don’t love me.”

Trey dumped the colander of rinsed baby greens in the stainless steel sink.  “How can you say that?  After what I did for you, when you woke me up in the middle of the night last Thursday?”

“If you truly loved me, you’d make me a lasagna sandwich.”