- EKE was who you’d call in an emergency. Drew was who you wouldn’t. Chico was who would skip your funeral if he had better plans. We liked to rank each other on these scales, forming a group index of who was who. We maintained the illusion that we didn’t care who received the more flattering accolades (Salz was the smartest, Ricky the most beautiful), but we openly admitted to fighting for the bottom spots. There was equal joy in being the filthiest, the least reliable, the most likely to die young or say something inflammatory. We were self-aggrandizing, self-immolating creatures; ugly ducklings of our respective flocks who’d adapted, moved to cities, grown sharp and eager to cleave chunks out of each other with our beaks.
- DUCKY spent his last summer at home working the coat check at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a job which a few of us thought would be interesting. All he had to report from the experience was that it was where he learned the first true thing about gay men. He explained, the ones he grew up seeing on TV—eating soup and raising babies—were nothing like the boys of real life, who didn’t come to the museum for serious inquiry into artistic expression, or to cart around their families, but to jerk each other off in the bathroom or loiter in the female nudes (Gaston Lachaise, Aristide Maillol) calling the statues fat.
- ISAIAH learned everything he knew about the world from the internet: the acclaimed albums, what arthouse meant, the names of dead actresses. He said he watched lots of porn too. Isaiah grew up in Utah “around a lot of blondes,” which was his way of telling us he was raised a Mormon. We were impressed with his depth of knowledge, since he had to chisel it out of a monoculture; though at times the Latter-Day saint slipped through, like when he said that meeting us—in all our verve and indecency— was as big a discovery as Columbus and the Americas. We had to be the ones to tell him that this was a bad reference.
- VAN was a serial monogamist with terrible taste in partners, a trait that we used to believe was charming and now is just a little sad. None of us cared for his first boyfriend, Scott, who drank up all our liquor and didn’t bother to remember our names. Then there was the one who tried to encourage us to visit the gay bars in Tel Aviv, citing their freedom and inclusivity. Each time these guys turned out to be duds, he registered it like a shock. To Van, unfairness was a crime committed against him rather than a fact of life. He lamented the most universal woes—hangnails, damp clothes out of a semi-functional dryer, the weather—as if they were evidence that he was marked by God. We reasoned he would just have to suffer some more before he put things in proportion. He was good at suffering. The best we knew.
- RICKY tried to comfort Van on a night out immediately following a breakup. He found him crouched on the curb above a pile of discarded cigarette butts—socks wet, hair all slanted. “Pathetic,” Ricky recounted. He was Van’s opposite: Ricky fucked everyone and never lingered long enough to get attached. He told us he tried to pet Van’s back, like testing a pan for heat. There wasn’t a nurturing bone in his body. When this didn’t work, Ricky gave Van the advice that he thought he needed. “You have to get skilled at fucking and dumping people like they’re nothing. You find someone who loves you. Take advantage. Then let them sit around and be miserable,” he said, “you have better things to do.”
- CLAUDE held a launch event for his new poetry chapbook, vertebrae geographies, a collection of pieces describing the spines of boys he met in Europe. At the suggestion of someone Ricky was fucking, we attended the party, trying as we listened to discern if Claude was actually talented or if his success was just gay boy politics—the artistic ring of his name, his jawline, friends in high places. He read a few poems for everyone; and we understood which it was. Previously strangers to his work, we grew acquainted with the critique-silencing subject matter he liked to evoke at random: cancer, Donald Trump, flowery descriptions of blow jobs, judgment day, all washed down with a clumsy mention of AIDS. The pieces were complicated ways of saying simple things like Racism is Bad or It’s Okay to Not be Okay. That’s the thing about being beautiful; people lie to you.
- CARL was one of three Swedes we met at the event. They sat in the back, refilling their wine glasses, gossiping in croggy accents. We joined them, in doing so we inadvertently opened ourselves up to critique. Carl said that there was no good American Art. As it stood, all anybody did was try to tell the best sob story in the most digestible package. “It’s because of the Pop Tarts,” he said, “and the lottery tickets. Everyone is eating Pop Tarts and trying to win the lottery. That’s why your poetry is bad. You are malnourished and you think you are lucky.”
- DREW regularly drank himself silly then broke things: glasses, vases, and once he pushed Sarah’s cat off of the fire escape. Sarah was in charge of wrangling him; she said she found his clumsiness amusing, especially once it hit 2am and the aggression gave way to melodrama. He’d tell us all that the world was ending, social security drying up, and that the economy was going to rape us raw, then he’d text “i miss us” to the ex-boyfriend who gave him Gonnorhea. Sarah calmed Drew down by putting fried food in front of him: chicken thighs or tater tots. She believes all emotional problems are the result of a bad diet: not enough fiber or Omega-3s. Drew’s problem, in her words, was that all he ate was dick and cocktail cherries.
- SARAH played mother for all the boys: moderating gay guy peace talks, remembering birthdays, keeping track of all our biblical, four letter names. She was the pity giver, the watchful eye. Salz said he caught Sarah lapsing into a yawn while Drew complained wildly to her: impassioned, waving hands. Salz used to tell her that she should free herself from our minor dramas, abandon ship, and become a dyke. He believed most women would be better off as a lesbian.
- CHICO was a shockjock that talked so often of bumps and getting railed that none of us really knew where he was from or what he did for work. Still, bodies gathered around him at afterparties while he recounted tales from the road: sitting on the face of a married man in Atlantic City or cruising at the site of his grandmother’s grave. One of us wondered out loud if good sex was the meaning of life, if an orgasm was like talking to God. Chico disagreed. To him, sex was as regular and unsensational animpulse as blowing your nose to fight congestion. Basic body maintenance. “But my god,” he explained, “does it feel good to sneeze.”
- SALZ used to work at an independent theater on 2nd street. The job made sense for him: he was researching his dissertation on phallic signifiers in Production Code era cinema (The Lady Vanishes, The Children’s Hour, Hitchcock’s various sphincters), and he could use it as an excuse not to go out with us. Salz liked to disguise his prudishness and general social constipation with a busy schedule. Ricky had a thing for him, since he liked a challenge and was turned on by Salz’s stuffy arrogance. He said he just needed to be slapped or fucked or nudged out of his routine. Salz refuted this, saying Ricky was tacky and classless—which was rude but objectively true. Ricky told us he never stopped pursuing Salz because he could tell by his taste in movies that he was secretly a pervert. All of them, though veiled, were about sex. Ricky won over in the end. The two of them dated for three years.
- ANDERSON lived in a rent-controlled unit in the village like he was a character in a New York storybook. After Stan’s shifts at the bakery, he used to drop off bags of bread at Anderson’s apartment. It was on his way to the train and Anderson had a big dick; it was a relationship worth maintaining. They’d get naked, finish on each other, then lay in bed eating the stale baguettes. The apartment had the look of a witch’s lair: all dark wood walls and knick knacks. Anderson inherited it from an ex- boyfriend who added him to the lease shortly before being hit by a city bus, getting dragged for seven blocks, and then croaking. Anderson talked endlessly about the days he spent falling in love in the apartment, discovering that warm, unexpected place where another person can take you. Stan felt bad for Anderson, the death and all, but not that bad. While he nodded along, Stan fantasized about Anderson dying in some horrific, sudden way and leaving the place to him. Anderson’s stories always ended optimistically: how everything works out in the end, how connection is the only thing that matters, but Stan thought those were easy things to say from the comfort of a rent-controlled apartment.
- MARCO stayed with Salz and Drew a handful of times over a few years. He was an Italian living in Berlin, which meant that he was a slut. Each time he crashed on their couch, he found a new boy to marry for the week—they were all young, rail-thin, beautiful and desperate to be surrounded by the like. Then, upon leaving, Marco would invite them back to Berlin to stay with him—like he was a pollinator bringing the goods home. Each time the prospect flew overseas to visit him, he lost interest, told them they were just friends, then turned them loose on his city. Call it postcoital clarity. Salz didn’t understand why he did it, and Marco tried—and failed—to explain. He said he was looking for something in these boys, but he was never sure if he’d found it; he didn’t know what it was, or what it looked like.
- JOAN, Ricky’s mother, invited us to his childhood home in Jersey for the weekend. Half of our lot are artists, so they jumped at the chance for free food and a place to do their laundry, while rest of us came to meet Joan, who had become something of a gay icon in our circle because she was pointedly homophobic and liked to humiliate Ricky (“little dicky,” she called him) whenever he was feeling confident. Normally Ricky was boisterous and entrepreneurial—saying hi to total strangers, telling us which party we needed to hit—so it was initially quite funny to see him shrivel in her presence. At dinner Joan told us all about the punitive tasks she used to make him do to encourage him to be strong: clean out the gutters, paint the deck, put down the family dog. Then, before he ran off and locked himself in his childhood bedroom, she told us all about the time where he tried to hang himself with an extension cord at twelve years old. It snapped under his weight, so she made him start going on runs. After dinner, two of us sat with Joan in the backyard while the others were upstairs trying to coax Ricky out of his room. Outside, we took turns throwing pinecones into the fire and stepping back to watch them burst. It was a nice alleviation from the intensity of the night. That corner of Jersey was quite beautiful: billowy trees and manicured lawns. Salz said he could see why Ricky had such a hard time letting it go. After a few hollow seconds, Joan tried to explain herself. She’d been silent since dinner. “I used to think Ricky’s father was a fag,” she said into the fire. “He spent every open night with his buddies. Only listened to them. They’d go drinking near the highway, then he’d come home with burrs on his socks and yell at me for asking where they came from. I thought that might explain it.” She threw a cone into the fire. “But he wasn’t.It’s never an easy answer. All I can come up with is that a man’s true love will always be another man. Doesn’t matter if it’s his boss or his father. Men only love what they can respect, and he never loved me.”
Will Lyman — Portfolio 
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