Two Boys Kissing

by David Levithan

Yes, we could talk to you for days on end about all the bad first dates. Those are stories. Funny stories. Awkward stories. Stories we love to share, because by sharing them, we get something out of the hour or two we wasted on the wrong person. But that’s all bad first dates are: short stories. Good first dates are more than short stories. They are first chapters. On a good first date, everything is springtime. And when a good first date becomes a good relationship, the springtime lingers. Even after it’s over, there can be springtime.

People like to say being gay isn’t like skin color, isn’t anything physical. They tell us we always have the option of hiding. But if that’s true, why do they always find us?

Your humor is your compass and your shield. You can hone it into a weapon or you can pull its strands out to make your very own cotton-candy blanket.

Doubt is an acceptable risk for happiness.

They weren’t using the kiss to keep their love alive, but were using their friendship to keep the kiss alive.

The first sentence of the truth is always the hardest. Each of us had a first sentence, and most of us found the strength to say it out loud to someone who deserved to hear it. What we hoped, and what we found, was that the second sentence of the truth is always easier than the first, and the third sentence is even easier than that. Suddenly you are speaking the truth in paragraphs, in pages. The fear, the nervousness, is still there, but it is joined by a new confidence. All along, you’ve used the first sentence as a lock. But now you find that it’s the key.

Two boys kissing. You know what this means. For us, it was such a secret gesture. Secret because we were afraid. Secret because we were ashamed. Secret because it was a story that nobody was telling.

Every time two boys kiss, it opens up the world a little bit more. Your world. The world we left. The world we left you. This is the power of a kiss: It does not have the power to kill you. But it has the power to bring you to life.

It is hard to stop seeing your son as a son and to start seeing him as a human being. It is hard to stop seeing your parents as parents and to start seeing them as human beings. It’s a two-sided transition, and very few people manage it gracefully.

This is what we don’t admit about first kisses: One of the most gratifying things about them is that they are proof, actual proof, that the other person wants to kiss us. We are desirable. We desire. Every kiss that matters contains a recognition at its core.

While you have to listen to the first message, it’s the most recent message that matters the most. Tempers can calm. Rage can wear itself out. Sense can return.

He thinks it’s because he was born in the wrong body, but we want to whisper in his ears that many of us were born in the right bodies and still felt foreign inside them, felt betrayed. We completely misunderstood our bodies. We punished them, berated them, held them to an Olympian ideal that was deeply unfair to them. We loathed the hair in some places and the lack of hair in others. We wanted everything to be tighter, stronger, harder, faster. We rarely recognized our own beauty unless someone else was recognizing it for us.

and sift through for the information you need. It’s a highly deceptive world, one that constantly asks you to comment but doesn’t really care what you have to say. The illusion of participation can sometimes lead to participation. But more often than not, it only leads to more illusion, dressed in the guise of reality.

The gays of today, the gays of yesterday—we’re all the same bother, all the same wrong. Not people, really. Just something to yell about. “If we let this go on, what’s next? Men having sex with dogs in a church? Is that free speech?”

The minute you stop talking about individuals and start talking about a group, your judgment has a flaw in it.

But none of us can stop listening. Because what is more transfixing than the sound of people hating you? In the darkest part of our hearts, we used to think that maybe they were right. We don’t think that anymore.

We know: An almost certain way to die is to believe you are already dead. Some of us never stopped fighting, never gave up. But others of us did. Others of us felt the pain had become too much, and that there was nothing left to life but the struggle for life, which was not enough reason to stay.

But open secret is a lie we like to tell ourselves. It’s a lie we often told ourselves, in both sickness and in health. It doesn’t work, because if you feel you still have a secret, there is no way to be truly open.

But we feel this connection all the time, don’t we? Our bodies don’t have to be touching to be connected to one another. Our heart races without contact. Our breath holds until the threat is gone.

In 1992, when over two hundred thousand of us were infected and over ten thousand had died, Calvin Klein launched a new ad campaign with a white rapper named Marky Mark. If you are young and you are male, most conceptions you have of your bodily ideal can be traced to those advertisements. Every Hollister model that calls out to you, every voice in your head that tells you that abs need “definition,”

It’s one of the secrets of strength: We’re so much more likely to find it in the service of others than we are to find it in service to ourselves.

It killed us, to be picked on, to be ridiculed for being something we weren’t even allowed to be. So many of us first heard the word gay as an insult, an abomination. So many of us were called a faggot before we even knew what that meant.

That is, sometimes the power of anger is so intense that you will shoot it everywhere. Even when, in truth, you should only ever shoot your anger at the people you are truly angry at, the people who truly deserve your rage.

For the past year, Neil has assumed that love was like a liquid pouring into a vessel, and that the longer you loved, the more full the vessel became, until it was entirely full. The truth is that over time, the vessel expands as well. You grow. Your life widens. And you can’t expect your partner’s love alone to fill you. There will always be space for other things. And that space isn’t empty as much as it’s filled by another element. Even though the liquid is easier to see, you have to learn to appreciate the air.

There will come a time when you will look at someone younger than you and feel that he or she will know more than you ever did. There will come a time when you will worry about being forgotten. There will come a time when the gospel will be rewritten. If you play your cards right, the next generation will have so much more than you did.

There is the sudden. There is the eventual. And in between, there is the living. We do not start as dust. We do not end as dust. We make more than dust. That’s all we ask of you. Make more than dust.