I knelt in front of Junior only a handful of times, but after each tryst, he made sure to point out that he wasn’t gay because he didn’t do it back. As kids, we understood gay to be bad, a label denoting weakness. Junior was fine with accepting the blow jobs as long as he wasn’t the one being labeled, as long as we were pretending to be other people, as long as I kept quiet about our interactions. Even then I didn’t consider either of us gay; we both saw me as a girl in this context of our sexual playing, and there was nothing gay about girls sleeping with boys, I reasoned.
