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if people like us wanted to make something of ourselves in a world ruled by men as pale as their own dinner plates, we had to lie.
With the next snap of the candle’s flame, my mind blinked back to my ancestors, in the place now called Texas. I thought of land we’d sown for hundreds of years and then lost, the border of the United States crossing us long before we ever crossed it.
but it was a white man who said it, so I didn’t assume he was right.
“Boys like us always know one another about a thousand years before anyone else knows us, don’t we?”
everything that’s ever moved you or that you’ve ever loved, there’s something real and irrefutable. There’s a lattice of numbers proving that it’s true, that it’s really there, that you didn’t just imagine all of it.”
“You see, I live with this sort of faith that life can be as we dream it.
This boy whose shoulders I held in my hands, I wanted him to have the shimmer of the whole world.
Don’t even best friends have to fall a little in love?
The kind of love between a man and a woman has never been any particular dream of mine, and that was a gift, not a fault.
“He’s good about not getting his hopes up about things in business. He’s objective, neutral. But about the rest of his life, that hope is so active, it’s as though his heart is carbonated.”
“I’m not used to people saying a word like lesbian without whispering it.” “Would you rather I whisper it?” Martha asked. “No,” I said. “I like being around people who speak who they are instead of whispering it.”
“Boys like us get used to having to lie about everything else just so we can tell the truth about ourselves.”
Gatsby looked back at me how any boy in the world would want to be looked at—as though there was such infinite possibility in me, such infinite light, that I was one endless, longest day of the year.
But unlike Gatsby’s parties, where I felt like a hayseed, everyone here had a generous air to them, like we’d all come in out of the rain together.
We’d gotten swept up in the impossible magic of so many hearts being fearlessly themselves.
Do you remember telling me growing up how things are always interesting when you’re paying attention?
I would have sworn to a priest that Gatsby’s smile pulled light in through the windows.
I was a moon for him to throw sunlight on.
Tell him that a man who hates anyone brown or Black is no man you want for a husband.
“You think I’m gay?” I asked. “Aren’t we all?” Martha gave me a smiling glance. “Young and gay and radiant, and ready for all sorts of gay exciting things?” I tapped the window as though starting a toast. “Gay and radiant, all of us.”
every word they call people like us is an insult. That really tells you something. Even gay, they say it as an insult. Even lesbian. But I don’t much care how they use it. It’s our word.”
I tried to acquaint myself with the idea that an insult could be reclaimed into something softer, something fit for the space inside a heart or between sheets.
“People are very threatened by women who do well for themselves,
Gatsby and I may have been nothing to men like Tom Buchanan, but men like that did not know we were as divine as the heavens. We were boys who had created ourselves. We had formed our own bodies, our own lives, from the ribs of the girls we were once assumed to be.
It had to do with the splinter of cynicism I carried in my heart. Some people wore their broken hearts with careful grace. I didn’t. The pieces of mine scraped against everything, and everyone could hear the grinding noise, even if they didn’t know what it was.
But now the word “lesbian” feels like a beautiful song on my tongue and I just want to sing it at all hours.
We grabbed suspenders and shirt collars and the buttons on undershirts like the only way to hold each other together was to tear each other to pieces.
“Fairy,” he said. “It’s a word I forgot to tell you about. It’s a word they use for boys like us. They mean it to be an insult, but I take it to mean there’s something magic about us and they know it.”
You don’t owe us anything for seeing you as you truly are.
