This indecisiveness would have amused my brother. Don’t be such a chickenshit, he might have said. He switched from fag to chickenshit after I told him I was gay. This was typical of Henry; when I least expected it, he was a good big brother. In fact, when I told him I was worried about coming out to our parents, he came out to them instead—“to test the waters”—a couple of years before I came out to them. After a week, Henry told them he’d been kidding. “Mom was pissed, but dad thought it was funny,” he later explained.
