Like a Love Story

by Abdi Nazemian

But for now, love is the four-letter word they forgot we care about ever since they discovered that other four-letter word, AIDS, the disease formerly known as GRID. Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. That’s what they called it at first. They changed the name eventually, once it became clear we were not the only ones who would die. But the stink never wore off. It never does when they want to control you.

And AIDS will always be GRID. It is our disease, born of our deficiencies. But I’ll tell you what we will never be deficient of. LOVE.

Leave the risks to those of us who are going to die soon,” he says. I hate when Stephen does this. He makes these throwaway jokes about his imminent death, which I choose to believe isn’t coming anytime soon. I choose to believe that a medical breakthrough is on the horizon and will arrive just in time to save his life. But I don’t say this. I’ve tried before, and it upsets him. He says he wants to have hope, but not too much hope. “Too much hope will just kill me faster,” he said to me once. I don’t know exactly what he meant by that. But another time he said to me, “It’s the anger that’s kept me alive, you know. Without the anger, I’d have joined José by now. I just have too much to scream about to leave just yet.”

Something else hits me hard—that when I strip away the punk hairdos and the alternative style, I look so much like my dad. I think about how easy it would be if this were who I was, a person who liked his red ties, and his boring haircuts, and his trades and deals and golf games. A person who didn’t like boys, who didn’t hate convention, who wasn’t so angry. For a moment, I even wish for this, for an easy life. But this wish just makes me angrier, fuels me more. It reminds me that what I want, what I truly want, is to be loved and accepted for being me.

Now we’re not bantering anymore. Now we’re talking about something deadly serious . . . Madonna! “Stephen thinks that’s why she’s so popular with gays. Why divas in general are so popular with gays. Because we can see what’s hiding beneath the artifice. We know what it’s like to be one thing on the outside and another on the inside. All of us.”

For the first time in my life, I know what being gay is all about. It’s not about the wet dreams, or the jerking off, or the ability to impersonate your diva of choice. It’s about the feeling you get when you look into another person’s eyes and have an out-of-body experience. It’s about whatever the hell I was feeling when I really saw Reza for the first time. It’s about love. How can I not keep fighting for that?

I just have a problem with this particular book club because they only read self-help books. Not a joke. Their current choice is The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change. Pretty much every book they’ve ever read involves a colon or a semicolon in the title.

every one of those women is married. Every single one somehow attracted a man while wearing pastel and filling her bookshelves with books about how to be the best you. Which makes me wonder if I’m not the best me. I wonder if Reza would prefer a pastel Judy with highly effective habits.

“Judy,” she said, “life is so much easier when you fit in. All you have to do is choose to be interested in things others are interested in.”

She glances at me with interest. “I know you better than the back of my hand, you know. Of course, I won’t look at the back of my hand ’cause it looks so old. Hands are the first to go.”

My mom lingers after my dad leaves. There is something unfinished about our conversation. There’s always something unfinished about us, like we’re a sentence that ends in a comma.

Maybe someday high school will change. Maybe someday there can be two homecoming queens, maybe someday girls can ask other girls to the prom, gay boys can enter locker rooms without fear. But if it doesn’t, then just remember that high school ends. And that there is another life waiting for you, over the rainbow.

I go limp, letting the police lead me. But the irony is, I have never felt more in control. This is not the Iranian Revolution. I’m not a kid who is afraid of his father, desperate to please his mother, living in the shadow of his sister. That is not me anymore. I’m seventeen, and yes, I still have fear in me, but I have strength too. I am the chaos now.

“Whatever confidence I had was my attempt to mask everything underneath it. God, Judy, how do you think it feels to have your dad tell you that gay men deserve to die, that AIDS killing us off is a good thing? Your parents love you, they encourage you, you get annoyed with them because they’re too nice to you sometimes. My parents want me dead.”

I always wanted this moment. For Art to find a guy. But why did it have to be the one guy I wanted?

I don’t know who I am, and I can’t pretend to. I like men, but that doesn’t mean I’m like all other men who like men, does it?

“How could I not see it?” she asks quietly, like she’s talking to herself. “How could I not know my own son is like this?” Like this. I’m like this. It suddenly hits me that there is no word for gay in our language. No word for coming out. In the language my mother speaks, I literally don’t exist.

May and June 1990 “A lot of people are afraid to say what they want. That’s why they don’t get what they want.”

we have still not had sex. Yes, my hands have touched his body. His lips have touched my lips. But that’s all. I haven’t let anything else happen. The moment I come close to doing more—I feel the fear and instantly think about disease, death, blindness, and lesions. It paralyzes me.

“The jury is out on whether oral sex is safe or not,” Stephen says. “But my advice is to use a condom for that too.

Stephen nods and repeats the last word, “Live.” Live. A marching order given to me by two men with little life left in them, their future a ticking clock with the alarm set to go off at any moment. Live.

My mom hasn’t mentioned my coming out since it happened. She hasn’t used the word gay or asked about Art. She just pretends it never happened, and the rest of the family seems to back up this fiction.

Sometimes, I worry that I prefer life through a lens to life, you know. In a lens, I can . . . structure things. Frame them the way I want them to be framed. It’s safe.”

“Art,” he says tentatively, “I’m serious. What if AIDS is our warning that something even worse is around the bend?” “What if AIDS is our warning that life is short?” I ask. “What if it’s telling us that we should love when we have the chance?”

But the show takes a turn when Madonna sings “Like a Prayer.”

After “Like a Prayer,” she sings “Live to Tell,” and at that point, the audience is in a hush.

Will it grow cold, the secret that I hide? I feel it all in the two hours that Madonna graces us with her presence. Joy and pride and love and fear and anger and passion. And one emotion I never thought I would feel: faith. Yes, faith. Because if the world could bring together this woman with these songs and these dancers in this place with me in it, then creation must be more powerful than destruction.

I need supplies. I walk to a pharmacy as soon as it opens, when it’s still empty and free of other staring customers. I purchase condoms and lube. Everything I need to lose my virginity.

We lie naked next to each other, and we kiss for what feels like either a split second or an eternity. It’s a kiss that stops time. There is no past or future, just this moment, just this kiss.

Thanks to Madonna, I saw queerness not as a death sentence, but as a community and an identity to be celebrated. My gratitude to her is boundless.