Queer Boys Are Still Having Sex

by Thomas Kearnes

Cecil has an innate sense of direction. We meet at the park off Forty-third Street. I don’t know the neighborhood. Cecil has lived his whole life in Houston. I asked him last time, at the last park, if he was giving me a time-lapse tour of H-town’s greenery. His tight, friendly grin made me feel smart but small.

“I so envied his, his—faculty. With the butterflies.” We’ve been walking two or three minutes. He has a disarming tone, as if trying to sell you an appliance you actually need. I would listen captivated to him tell me we’ve no future, none whatsoever. “They just stayed, like out of respect, atop his outstretched hand.”

“He and the princesses of old-school Disney.”

He turns back to me. Always keeps a few paces ahead. I watch his plump behind, each side hitching then falling, a rhythm he maintains whether he slows or presses forth.

“What was it like, watching Snow White and Cinderella on the big screen, Boomer?” He doesn’t laugh, but merriment soaks his voice. I wish this were a mere infatuation.

Actually, I’ll turn forty-four next month. We both know there will be no party.

“NYC Nurse Begs Gay Men to Stop Tricking During Pandemic.” I’d never heard of the online zine featuring this plea. It was wedged into my newsfeed. Between an old classmate’s phoned-in defense of Trump and a colleague’s restrained confession that her last pizza tasted like cardboard. I read it. I typically let headlines suffice, but witnessing anyone walk that tightrope between bigotry and benevolent alarm—American journalism offers few comparable thrills.

“Gay sex, by definition, is transgressive.” Paulson exhaled a smoke cloud white and dense like midnight snow. “No true fag would have it any other way.” His name wasn’t Paulson. I checked his wallet while he showered. I wanted so damn badly to blow clouds of my own. But then I’d have to confess, and it shattered me to imagine Cecil’s brow clenching in dismay. His refusal to express his hurt. His pale blue eyes falling out of focus as if I were a mirage he knew must be discounted. “We fuck until we die, and if we’re lucky,” he continued, pausing perhaps to assure I remained enraptured, “the sex will be our protest, the one too loud to ignore.”

“I’m really beat.” I didn’t convince even myself. “I work in six hours. I should sleep.”

Paulson grimaced. His teeth were starting to rot at the edges. I hated him. I’d fucked him anyway. “Tame the transgressive and you forfeit faggotry, my friend.” He’d forgotten my name. No proof, of course, but nihilism thrives in the absence of evidence. “Hope things work out with your crush.”

I shouldn’t have pointed out that snapshot of Cecil and myself. Our arms around one another, I held a kelly green sixty-day chip to my eye like a monocle. The picture captured Cecil laughing, his pointed chin thrust down, his lips still full.

We’ve left, and I only now realize it, the park itself. Most Houston parks are a mite puny—arthritic playgrounds and wilting landscapes. I need a damn cigarette.

We’re strolling through a neighborhood, modest and bland households shyly nesting beside more robust, colorful ones. No neighborhood in this city can sustain a coherent identity for more than half a block.

“Ooh, ooh! Check this out!”

I’m a dunce with car models. If an automobile promises passage from A to B, I turn the ignition and forget its exterior. Cecil’s latest love interest appears to be a Camaro. I forget whether it was a movie or TV program, but sometime in my childhood, I watched a shopworn stud slip into the driver’s seat and screech away to his next adventure. That’s the only reason I know it’s a Camaro. My presumed ignorance tickles Cecil, however, and I wouldn’t dream of depriving him.

He hops from foot to foot, his calves bulky with muscle. The vehicle is parked just a few feet outside a shut garage. The blinds are open. It’s a goddamn pandemic. The car’s owner must be inside.

“This is the jam, Boomer. This vehicle was made with love.” He strokes the fender, reverent as a blind man traversing Braille. “If this artwork sat in my garage, I’d be too busy admiring it to ever hop behind the wheel.”

He’s made love to strangers’ cars before. At least once per walk. We’ve been meeting twice a month since March. We meet in the mornings because summers here are for suckers. He peers through the driver’s side window, no doubt frustrated by the extreme tint job.

I remain on the sidewalk. “The owner might pop up any moment.” I’m hoping he hears good-natured chiding, but my nerves condense in my gut. “What the fuck will you say if he catches you?”

“That he has a fine, fine vehicle.”

“I doubt your opinion will carry much weight.”

He sidles up to me, his fanboy urges satisfied.

“You think with this face, I’ll catch any shit?” His index finger circles his rectangular head. He’s handsome. He knows it. His straight, copper-golden hair remains parted at the side, locks dipping into his right eye. I’ve checked out his Facebook profile. This hairstyle dates back to junior high with him. He’s tall, at least six-foot-one. Milky white skin is gratefully blemished by a dusting of crimson on each cheek. He dresses like an undergrad forever postponing laundry, but that, paired with his amiably jerky, wide-swinging limbs, tempers his cornfed good looks. It bears repeating—he knows he’s attractive, but I wonder whether he knows why.

“You’re quite fond of yourself.”

“Very unkind.”

“I say it with love.”

Cecil turns left onto a street named after a tree that grows nowhere near the Gulf Coast. I follow. His ass twitches and mesmerizes. I’ve no idea where we are.

Not long after Cecil agreed to sponsor me, I started watching porn sober. Before, porn tempted me only when I tweaked. I refused to ponder whether my new “sanitized” viewing habit was a half-hearted stab at jolting my libido. I felt like a newly quit smoker huffing a dive bar’s cloudbank of secondhand sustenance.

I’d stopped dope, and my social calendar, like those of any neighbor without a death wish, had cleared overnight. I had money. I’m a book editor. I worked remotely long before circumstance conferred it du jour status. I rented whores. They came to my home. Cecil has never been to my home.

One boy I preferred far more than the other three. His name was Duncan. I didn’t care enough to inspect his wallet. I opened my door to find him wearing a mask. Generic baby-shower blue, cheap cloth, bands that hugged his ears. I’ll do whatever you ask, he promised, but the mask stays on. How can selling your ass remain transgressive if one insists the terms are his to establish? More to the point, since when has prostitution been deemed a legitimate path to self-worth?

I ordered him to recline on my love seat. Aside from a rolling black office chair and a plain wooden straight-back, I had nowhere to park guests but upon the shag carpet.

Tell me about your first trick, I demanded. Tell me why men pay hundreds to pound your ass. Tell me whether I’m attractive. Guess which photographs include male friends I’ve never fucked and which feature boys who served no other purpose. I shove the snapshot of Cecil and I (and my sobriety chip) into Duncan’s face. Do I have a chance with this kid? Any chance at all? Don’t take your eyes off me. I’d always told myself that even moderate wealth renders a faggot’s looks irrelevant, but I still refused to gaze into the mirror when alone.

I stroked myself during his replies. Should he join me, he wondered. I insisted he slip off the mask. After all, neither of us had mentioned condoms. Why fret over one virus if you won’t at least feign fear over its predecessor. It didn’t matter if he complied. Nothing whores did mattered.

“Stay to the left!” The jogger voices his dismay. He scurries past as Cecil and I concede the dirt-and-gravel path. Somehow, we’ve wandered back into the park proper.

“It’s always gratifying to hear etiquette known and respected.”

“Oh, yes,” I say. “Only Grindr offers more gentlemen and chivalry.”

Actually, I adore Cecil’s high regard for civility. I also don’t wish to be anywhere near when it dawns on him that he’s alone in his affections.

“At least we won’t make that mistake again,” Cecil offers.

“Until our next walk.”

“Speak for yourself, Boomer.”

I want to believe the niceties and pleasantries Cecil embodies somehow grease the gears as souls pass from this world to the next. I have no trouble envisioning my friends’ friction-free ascent to the heavens. But myself? Isn’t the whole point of pandemics to thin the herd?

“You know…” I don’t know why I’m voicing my observation. Perhaps because I know Cecil will listen. “Six months ago, if you mentioned the virus, people assumed you meant AIDS.”

“English is a language. Languages update.”

“They evolve.” I’m so deeply desperate to keep pace.

“Why don’t you write?”

“The best writers reveal their souls.”

He smirks. “You can do that in the rooms three times a day, every day.”

“It’s much easier when you’re speaking to men whose stories are the same damn sad as yours.”

“A gross oversimplification.”

He believes—he believes in the rooms. I believe in whatever room includes him.

We both know I’m in love.

“I dunno.” He walks backward, facing me. To no one’s surprise, we’ve again drifted to the path’s right perimeter. “Maybe it’s for the best another virus has bumped us from the spotlight.”

“I go days without thinking about my status.” Sadly, I sometimes fuck on those days.

“I’m glad to know someone who’s lived with the virus as long as you.” He smiles, and it quakes with a rare vulnerability. “You give me hope.”

I want to depart then disappear then die.

“To the left, pretty boys!”

Obviously, once Mayor Turner ordered a city-wide shutdown, His House was forced to shift its many twelve-step meetings to cyberspace. The tweakers emerged every night at eight. I preferred to view these gatherings via a grid of members, like the tiers of singing puppets at the end of The Muppet Show’s opening number.

The facilitator each night expressly forbade members from recording our confessions. Zoom, of course, featured a dainty red dot at the bottom of the screen, allowing our tortured tales eternal life.

I’ve amassed at least thirty complete meetings.

Simon, a young dude, perhaps even younger than Cecil, edited each confession I most wished to conserve into a Mobius strip of helplessness and hope. In return, I kept a few boxes of his shit. The dealer, who had taken him in after his parents tossed him out, didn’t want Simon to mistake his apartment for home.

Last week, he messaged me on Facebook. Someone had robbed him at gunpoint. My alarmed response, insisting on details, went unanswered.

“You have a thing for Cecil, too.”

This was months ago. We’d just met, Simon and I. Unveiling my recordings to him, I’d already confirmed he’d severed ties with everyone from His House. He’d always aspired to be a film editor, he said. It was a dark pleasure when a strange man offered to indulge your worst impulses.

“Don’t be daft.” I wouldn’t look at him. I kept my gaze trained to the screen. “I’m old enough to be his father.”

“That didn’t stop us.”

Simon fucked me his second visit because of course he did. His parents were about to kick him to the curb. My compassion, I wasn’t proud of it. An orgasm, I’d always felt, was a gift easily given—however easily forgotten.

“Back when I was still dating Marlon,” he began, “we went out to dinner after a meeting.” His fingers tickled the keyboard, slowly assigning shape to my obsession. This had been early last year, he noted, before the pandemic. “I was sitting across from him, from Cecil. And I remember thinking, if I could just get my shit together, maybe I could land a guy like that.”

I smiled. “Or maybe even Cecil himself.”

Simon grimaced, lifted an eyebrow. He was tweaked. I didn’t think I’d ever encountered him sober. He implored me to tell no one from His House about our encounters, and especially his swan dive back into active addiction.

I can’t recall the specifics I gave Simon when he asked me to detail my attraction to Cecil. I told him the truth because I knew it would die with him. It’s simple to open your heart when the operating theater stands empty.

Cecil continues treading backwards, like a mutt determined to remind his master he hasn’t been left behind. I’m smiling. I’m listening. I don’t know where we are. We travel alongside a wide creek bed.

“I have an idea for a story. You could write it, Boomer.”

“I don’t write books, bud. I edit them.”

“Tomato, to-mah-to.”

He works at a restaurant, part of a local chain that serves basic American cuisine but not at basic prices. Cecil dubs it Denny’s in Denial. He makes nine bucks an hour but insists the tips more than compensate. I wonder how he reconciles his jones for nice rides with his refusal to relinquish a dead-end, downtown distraction. Early on, before the shutdown, I asked if he came from money. He answered honestly, not even thinking to apologize. I can’t imagine a life I don’t forever attempt to redeem.

Another barista had come down with the virus, he tells me. Their manager sent the whole staff to one of the pitifully few testing sites in Harris County. Even antibody tests, it seemed, would do.

“I was sitting there in my car. A/C blasting, smooth jazz on the dial. The nurse was tricked out—mask, face shield, some unholy cross between scrubs and a Hazmat suit.”

At work, I’m known for my skill in dissecting a narrative. I know when a story works. I know when a story doesn’t. Whichever the case, I can always articulate why. But this is Cecil’s story, and I’ve forgotten myself. I am so goddamn grateful for this respite.

He’s grinning. The good part, here it comes. “She jams the cotton swab up my nostril, and I feel her twist round and round. Slowly, though. Like a seduction, almost.”

I’m keeping pace with him now. I imagine his face descending toward mine. He and I, still but hardly stagnant, upon this gravelly path that starts somewhere and ends somewhere else. I imagine that kiss denied me almost seven months. I imagine his thick torso, square hips in motion. I imagine waking next to him, his first words that day intended for no one but me.

“I was thinking, You’re inside me. You’re deep inside me. No matter what happens next, nothing can unravel that bond. It’s erotic, right?”

I smirk. I must break the spell. “Surely, the several hundred others she swabbed left with happy pants, too.”

“You’re a cheap date.”

“That test costs a hundred and thirty bucks,” I say. “Fifth Ward hookers don’t charge half that.”

“My boss reimbursed me.”

“Who’s the cheap date now?”

Cecil is a sex addict. His tweaking dovetailed perfectly into the predilection. Earlier during our walk, he let loose another nugget from his doper days: while at a water park with his older brother and some friend, he snuck off to the men’s room. There, he forced a shard of crystal up his butthole. I found the image so unbearably carnal, so craven, part of me knew it was damn fortunate he refused to fuck any addict before his first year of sobriety.

At least, that’s his story. Perhaps it’s true. Or perhaps he wishes to spare my feelings. I’m not sure which abyss into which I’d rather tumble on the drive home.

I’d kill for the nicotine beneath someone’s fingernails at the moment.

It was sometime in May, in yet another park, that I showed Cecil my heart. We’d embarked on the trail, he already deep into some anecdote I was too terrified to follow. His jovial tone turned earnest. I seemed down, he said. I always tell myself that as long as a man can read the emotions on my face, all else is negotiable. That’s not the only lie I tell myself.

My words left me in a torrent. I knew this would short-circuit his sponsorship of me, but I’d developed feelings for him. I expected nothing in return, I insisted. I did not mention the word love. After all, the phrase “I love you” was really a question. We pressed onward in silence for a moment, ten moments, a lifetime.

“How does it feel to be vulnerable in front of someone?” he finally asked. I wasn’t looking at him, but I knew he was looking at me. Cecil wasn’t one for emotional displays. His crass response to my confession was not, I assured myself, a show of disregard.

But I bolted anyway. Calling out over my shoulder, I didn’t bother with excuses. I said I simply could not walk another step. I glimpsed his face, him still rooted to the place where I’d abandoned him. Was he hurt, confused, shocked—that was one roulette wheel I had no wish to spin.

Inside my shitcan Nissan, I cried. Four days later, when I summoned the courage to call, he made no reference to our last encounter. In the rooms, gratitude is the most vaunted emotion. Perhaps that’s what I felt as we began to speak like the friends we’d never ceased being.

“Limit yourself to nightly network news,” Cecil advises. “It’s easier than you think.”

“Nothing kills my buzz like scrolling through Facebook’s newsfeed.”

“Poor choice of metaphor.”

“Shove it up your ass.” I’m so happy to be alive and coherent. “Provided there’s room.”

“You go for the jugular, Boomer. Are you this ferocious when seducing a dude?”

He’s looking at me. He hasn’t forgotten. My desire has become part of our lore, our schtick. I could tell him anything, I think. But then he might respond in kind. I’m not convinced I can truly know a man and still love him—and I suspect no man who walks this planet can claim otherwise.

“Sooner or later, my friend, it’ll be your turn to tell a story…”

I don’t respond. I don’t engage. I don’t exist.

We’ve reached the ramshackle parking lot. Its fifty or sixty slots seem deeply naïve this year. His Civic rests inside the slot bordering my car. I arrived first. He knows what I drive. Parking beside me, amid a sea of other spaces, couldn’t have been chance. We always embraced hello and goodbye before His House was forced into hiatus. To be honest, the pandemic has done little to hinder this. The last couple of times, though, he insisted on elbow bumps. I hold out my arms.

He chuckles. “You know better than that, Boomer.”

We’re standing three feet apart. Neither of us donned a mask at any point during our stroll.

“Cecil, I’m going to hug you. You’re going to let me. We’re gonna live to be wise old queers.”

He looks at me as if seeing me for the first time.

“Well-played, sir,” he replies. “Let’s hug it out.”

I’m smaller than Cecil, my scalp reaching no higher than his chin. He exudes, beneath his clothes, a warm fleshiness. I promise him we’ll survive this. He scoffs, convinced he’s young, rich and invincible. His naivete touches my heart so directly, I wonder when that last happened. He feels safe, and I once again imagine how I’d bear the weight of him as we drifted toward sleep. I’m not the first to end our embrace.

Once inside my car, I grab my pack of Camels. I make it a point to never smoke around Cecil. Still, I feel his arms around me. Before I know it, I’m puffing a cigarette. Not wanting to leave quite yet, I turn the ignition so that the radio ripples to life without disturbing my engine’s slumber. Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” clomps and shimmies from my speakers. I was in junior high when this hit the radio. Cecil would greet the world not for another six years.

Maybe he needed to know how hard I’d fight for him to hold me.

Pick up the receiver, I’ll make you a believer.

The sudden bleat of a car horn jolts me, and my Camel snaps in two between my fingers. Dammit. I glance out my passenger window as I reach over the seat and fish out another smoke. There’s Cecil, wagging his finger and treating me to the constipated schoolmarm expression I might love more than his smile.

He rolls down his window, gestures for me to do the same. The twinkling tunes favored by his smooth jazz posse get stomped by my sinister synth-pop goosestep. Neither of us speak for at least thirty seconds.

“Seems like an Eighties artifact,” he observes.

“Fresh from the time capsule.”

I’ve lit another cigarette. These two smokes, the broken one and the one clenched between my lips, must surely count only as a single infraction. Cecil quit smoking a year ago. The last fuck he told me about was in April. I need to know—what man did his mouth last call home?

The smoke drifts through the passenger window and into his Civic. He playfully waves an open hand close to his face.

“I’ll see you at the meeting,” I call out.

“Your ass better show up at birthday night.”

He’s rolling up his window. I’m rolling up mine. Maybe my words will not survive the journey, but if they remain unspoken, I fear—I know—I will not survive mine.

“Love you, Cecil. Be good.”

That instant, I peel out of the parking lot and hope I won’t need GPS to relocate Forty-third Street. My cheeks ache, I’m grinning so hard and wide. My heart thunders like raging bison across a pasture. I’m evolving, like a virus. I’m frightened. I want nothing but for him to know he is loved.

Thomas Kearnes is the Literary Lambda nominated author of the story collections Texas Crude (Lethe Press) and Death by Misadventure (Dark Ink Books). His work has appeared in Foglifter, Berkeley Fiction Review, Adroit Journal, jmww journal and dozens more. He lives and teaches English in Houston