Idlewild

by James Frankie Thomas

what books she surreptitiously read under her desk (Sherlock Holmes, Dorian Gray, Rimbaud poetry);

she’s so me

Iago is gay like a black leather whip, like Paris in the 1920s, like calling non-food things delicious. Iago is gay like cold eyes and bony hips, like a pearl-handled pistol tucked in one’s suit pocket, like delicate fingers that could play a Chopin prelude or crush a throat with equal grace. Iago is gay in the way that we the F&N unit aspire to be gay, but it’s harder for girls.

One evening he rented Velvet Goldmine (1998, dir. Todd Haynes). I happened to enter the living room just in time to catch the eighteen-second kiss between Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Ewan McGregor, and I was instantly mesmerized with something almost closer to religious awe than sexual arousal.

this also happened to me in high school

I appreciated Gareth coming to my defense, but he was mistaken: the idea of joining in had never once occurred to me in the hundreds of hours I’d spent in contemplation (via film, fanfiction, or fantasy) of two dudes doing it. “No,” I said. “I don’t want to join in.” “Interesting,” my father said. “So in your wildest dreams, you’re merely a voyeur?” That wasn’t quite right, either. “No,” I said. “In my wildest dreams, I’m not there at all.”

I couldn’t manifest homosexuality in myself, I would instead locate it everywhere else. If Nell and I couldn’t be gay together, we could—we would, we did—create for ourselves a separate world in which gayness was ambient and immanent and unrelated to us.

me when i was still closeted (different kind of closeted than fay)

Okay, no, I’m tapping out. There is absolutely no fucking way I’m revisiting the Faunfic.

To this day I’m chronically sleep-deprived for no reason except that staying up too late, past the point of exhaustion, remains a pleasurable form of self-harm.

She didn’t understand. I had never wanted anything as desperately as I wanted to be Iago. How could I explain? “It’s just,” I said, clutching the printout against my chest, “I feel like I really get Iago. Like, I am Iago.”

How vividly I could visualize what I wanted my Iago to look like! How clearly I saw his wickedness externalized as telltale sissy traits that set him apart from everyone else: the effete flicks of the wrist, the lightly sibilant pronunciation, the fine dark clothing that clung suggestively to narrow hips. Eyeliner, perhaps. The image set my heart racing with joyful narcissism, a full-body epiphany that this was it—with “it” existing simultaneously as “the physical manifestation of what I like best about myself” and “that which I most wish to fuck.”

this followed by fay realizing that the sissy traits she’s affecting just make her look like a normal girl instead of a gay man. crushing.

Up till then I had never been forced to confront my own inability—an inability so total it bordered on the neurological—to picture myself as an adult. I couldn’t fathom being anything other than what I currently was. I couldn’t be what I currently was anywhere other than at Idlewild.

“Look,” said Theo. “Sometimes you just need a tiramisu.” There was something faintly effeminate about his pronunciation of tiramisu, or perhaps it was the inherent effeminacy of a fifteen-year-old boy buying himself a single serving of tiramisu in the middle of the school day.

“Partners in Latin,” said Bottom, “as in crime.” He flipped through his Aeneid book.

“Wow,” he said. “You’re obsessed with her.” “No, she said she’d meet me here.” “Don’t be defensive,” he said. “Christopher’s obsessed with me the same way. It’s fun.” As he walked away, he called out over his shoulder, “I haven’t seen her.”

“Lots of girls came to see me on Friday night because I’m so hot and sexual.”

I knew full well how strange it was. It did feel like a crush, but what excited me was the thought of Theo being, by definition, sexually unavailable to me. I couldn’t explain it; I could only joke about it.

“Theo is right,” says Daylily Jones. “Idlewild teachers aren’t just your teachers. They’re your friends. And the best teacher-friend I’ve ever had … was Wanda Higgins.”

this is stressing me out so bad

And I suddenly understood that spiraling out of control was the point. This was all a game to him. Meeting for Worship was—of course, of course, he’d said so himself—a dollhouse, and he was a boy who played with dolls. Oh, my Marble Faun! How magnificent he was in that moment. How beautiful. Theo flashed a tiny smirk, just for me, from one Iago to another.

“Christopher tries to keep up,” said Theo. “But he doesn’t really get the whole Leopold and Loeb thing.” “That’s ironic,” I said. “Since he’s the Leopold to your Loeb.” “Well, we haven’t murdered a guy yet.” Theo smiled. “If you know what I mean.”

what did he mean by this.

This was flirting, I suppose, in the sense that it was an escalating and erotically charged exchange of verbal teasing that served as an indirect acknowledgment of an attraction that felt otherwise unspeakable. But it was a delicate balance we had to strike. A single false move—by which I mean a heterosexual move, on either of our parts—would have broken the spell. The flirtation was asymptotic, the attraction displaced: my object of desire was not Theo himself, but the abstract idea of Theo being gay. That was what I wanted.

He regarded me unblinkingly. “You’re not a girl,” he said. “You’re like this weird sad pervy gay guy in a girl’s body, cruising me.” 4. Identification in the wild: He saw me. He understood me. He knew me.

“He’ll be good,” said Fay. “You’ll be good, won’t you, Theo?” “I’ll be so good,” said Theo, who had already made his way into the corner of the rehearsal room. He flung himself onto the scuzzy prop armchair in the corner. “You won’t even know I’m here.” “Fat chance, Mr. Cellophane.”

It struck me with sickening clarity that I’d brought this on myself. This was a taste of my own medicine: Jimmy was objectifying me and Nell just as I objectified Theo and Christopher. Just as I objectified all gay men. How could I sit in judgment of Jimmy Frye? I was no better: a sleazy fetishist, sweaty and predatory and pathetic. Small wonder no one could stand me once they got to know me.

“I just don’t get the logic,” I said, “of attacking a guy who has nuclear bombs. Shouldn’t we be sucking up to him?” That was actually what I believed. Appeasement, in general, has always been my policy. This might be my least favorite thing about myself. “Sucking up to him?” Fay whispered back. “He’s a brutal dictator.” “Yeah, but so is Bush,” I edgy-teenagered.

We’re gonna write to Senators Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton and let them know that their constituents are against the war.

haHAAAAA

“Oh, you know how Jen’s parties are.” “No, I don’t.” I was surprised he did. I’d never thought of him as a party guy. “No, I suppose not,” he said. “Well, this one got typically wild later in the evening once it moved to the roof. But we did write a lot of letters before that.” “I hope it stops the war,” I said.

lmfao

had a friend who did this once and never got caught. icon. legend.

For in truth I was electric with ecstasy over Theo Severyn, so depraved and deranged, my ice-cold little Marble Faun. My imagination ran wild with the Faunfic potential of what he’d just done, and what else he might be capable of doing.

I saw, beneath my screen name, my most private and primal wish, and I knew that Nell was seeing it too, that it couldn’t be undone and we would never again exist in a world without the image of me gagging on a cock, the fictional Theo Severyn standing in for me, choking as I was choking on my desire to inhabit his body and use it to gag on a cock, even as the scene was also very much about the real Theo and the very real desires that he’d awakened in me. I was certain that Nell, who never failed to understand me, understood all of this.

she didn’t give a shit about anything except being gay. And she wasn’t even gay. She just wished she were.

Christopher: [quietly] “Don’t do this.” Theo tugs on the navy-blue neckerchief tied around Christopher’s neck, drawing Christopher close. He speaks in a murmur so soft that F and N can only just hear it. Theo: “If you do it, I’ll make out with you.”

What I expected from it, I think, was total transubstantiation. Through Theo, I would touch and be touched by Christopher; through Christopher, I would touch and be touched by Theo. I would inhabit both boys at once and experience their pleasure multiplied. I would exist only as light, as vapor, as pure elemental boy-kiss.

I thought of Iago’s line in the final act: “He hath a daily beauty in his life / That makes me ugly” (V.i.20–21). Theo and Christopher were beautiful, and the togetherness of their boyness was what beauty was, and my own existence was the negative space where beauty was absent.

It wasn’t precisely that I was a bad student. In a certain sense I was too good a student, overcommitted to my studies. The problem was that my field of study was not school, and schoolwork was one of many worldly matters I had renounced in my ascetic pursuit of knowledge. It was discipline, not laziness, that had me reading Maurice and The Picture of Dorian Gray under my desk during class, or playing hooky to catch Red River at Film Forum, or ignoring weeks’ worth of homework assignments to read fanfic and write Faunfic. In essence, I’d spent all four years of high school studying to be a gay man. There was no college in the world that offered that preprofessional track.)

“Theo is, like, obsessed with the idea of being the Marble Faun,” he said. “He’s like, ‘They get me. They saw me.’ But I think he just wishes he were like that. I think he started acting more like the Marble Faun in real life just so you’d write more about him.”

He pointed to me, and then to himself. “The sad pervy old man,” he said, “and his arm-candy boyfriend.” For a moment I was too overcome to speak. “I’d take you everywhere,” I said. “I would shower you with presents, to make you stay. But it wouldn’t work.” “Nah, I’d still leave you,” he agreed. “But I’d miss you after.” He swiped a fingertip through the powdered sugar on his cake plate. “Not at first,” he said. “But the years would go by, and I’d keep randomly thinking about the first man who ever loved me.”

To be hit in the face is a shockingly intimate experience. It wakes you up, even as it dazes you into docility. It makes your cheek go hot and red as if you’re sunburned or drunk or in love.

“Yeah, only.” My voice came out as a snarl. “I bet you fucking hated that. I bet it sucked to curl up with him and write your own porn together.” He backed away a few steps more. “I don’t want to be mean,” he said uncertainly, “but how is this different from what you and Fay did?”

I was suddenly overwhelmed by how big other people’s lives were, and how little I knew about them at any given moment.

He was stronger than I—the thought registered dully in the back of my mind—because he was growing into a man, and I was not, and in the end there was no way around that.

I can see now, from fifteen years’ distance, what I was really doing. In my own secret way, in the only way I knew how, I transformed myself into Theo Severyn.

“Why weren’t we friends in high school?” we kept exclaiming. “Why did it take us so long to do this?” “Honestly?” I said. “It’s because I’ve always kind of blamed you for 9/11.” “That’s fair,” he said. “Sorry I did 9/11. I was young and stupid.”

He told me this so matter-of-factly. I don’t think he was trying to make me feel bad. I’m not sure he even knows I was one of the kids who made fun of him. It keeps me up at night sometimes, the fear that he’ll find out.

Jimmy Frye is no longer the IT guy. He was fired in 2008—not for any of the reasons I’d have expected, but because he got caught torrenting Dead Poets Society on a school computer.

I cackled, and then I felt bad—but Eddie declared that “as people of fat-kid experience,” we’re allowed to be smug when skinny girls join our ranks.

I regret who I was back then. At the same time, I don’t know if I’ll ever be happy in the same way again. And I don’t know what to do with that.