By Marci Blackman
Before he started on T, sex with other guys was out of the question. Even in a hanging out with your BFF in his room kind of way, and it just sort of happens kind of thing. Eyes glued to the wide flat screen on the wall, watching the game, he just starts touching himself. As if you’re not even in the house, let alone sitting so close to him on the tiny sofa in his bedroom, and your knees brush against each other every time he strokes the gentle rise in his sweatpants. Absent-minded and slow at first, his hand almost appeared to twitch every now and then, more so than move, before building into a steady rhythm. You try not to notice, to remain as invisible as he’s treating you, and concentrate on the screen, but your eyes can’t help themselves, glancing back and forth between the players on the screen and his hand until you’re outright staring, licking your lips and staring. Besides, you don’t even like basketball. Before you know it, your hand replaces his, and he’s pushing the waistband of his sweats down toward his hips to free himself, and soon, your mouth is on him. His hand is on the back of your neck, encouraging you along. The referee whistles, and squeaks of rubber soles against the parquet floor on the screen sound a million miles away. The room takes on a hot and musty smell before things take that sudden and awkward you-just-fucked-your-best-friend turn after he comes, and you ghost each other for a while, walk the other way when you see the other approaching, nod rather speak when walking the other way is not an option. Not even in that kind of way, the way his best friend, Fabio, talks about his first time.
Before hormone therapy, even the slow creep of attraction to other guys never made it to his consciousness. He wasn’t repulsed by men, he just only ever saw them as reflections of himself, the self he wanted to be. From the time he was three years old, Isaiah “Zay” Stokes knew one truth above all others: he was a boy. Full stop. At fourteen, after he tongue-kissed Jamilah Sampson behind the equipment room at the south end of the football field during the freshmen picnic and got the tingles inside, he amended that truth to include the word “straight.”
Now, two years into his transition, not only did he scope out the basket of every cute boy he passed on 18th Street, but for the past four months, two times a day, three on his days off, he fantasized about Fabio while he masturbated.
Fabio on top of him, Zay’s legs pushed back over his head in a perfect pike position, as if he were executing a dive for the judges in the Summer Olympics.
Fabio was behind him, beneath him, picking him up and bouncing him on his cock around the room, the way he had seen in some of the videos they watched together.
Fabio talking dirty to him, pulling his hair.
Fabio choking him.
That’s as far as he had allowed himself to go, though: ogling crotches, watching porn, and pressing his face into the seams of his mattress until it was marked as if he had a scar, thinking about Fabio fucking him as he broke himself off.
“Mmmm…doesn’t really work that way,” Fabio answered when Zay told him he thought testosterone was making him gay. “That’s like saying Twinkies killed Harvey Milk.”
It was almost dusk. Streetlights flickered along the sidewalks as they passed, lingering odors of leftover Dosas, pulled pork sandwiches, burned kettle corn, and car exhaust fumes wafting around them as the food stands closed up shop for the day and the taxis rolled toward Valencia Street and the Mission. They were pedaling down Market Street to Tulan, Zay’s favorite Vietnamese restaurant.
On May 21, 1979, Daniel James White was convicted of voluntary manslaughter for the November 27, 1978 murders of Mayor George Mosconi and the city’s first openly gay supervisor, Harvey Milk. Although White was charged and tried on two counts of premeditated first-degree murder, in what has since become known as the “Twinkie defense,” his lawyer convinced the jury that at the time of the murders, White’s mental capacity to understand what he was doing was severely diminished by, among other things, consuming too much junk food. In addition to calling on White’s close friends and relatives to describe White’s mental mudslide from a health and fitness fanatic into a depressed junk food addict, White’s attorney presented psychiatric experts who spoke of the existence of a “substantial body of evidence” that large amounts of junk food consumed by “susceptible individuals” could cause those individuals to become “anti-social and even violent.”
“Dude!” cracked Zay, “Are you seriously comparing me and my sex drive to a murderer?”
“Exactly!” Fabio smirked. “Dan White was a murderer, not a voluntary manslaughterer, before, during, and after he ate six Twinkies. The sugar in the Twinkies simply lubricated what was already there. The psychiatrist who testified said as much when he said susceptible individuals—meaning the murderous tendency was already inside him; the Twinkies just brought it out. How many people you think eat five or six Twinkies or a dozen donuts in one sitting and NEVER kill anyone? I don’t know,” Fabio answered his own question, “but it’s gotta be in the billions.”
The comparison was harsh and flawed, but Zay understood what Fabio was saying.
He’d never even looked at guys before, Zay argued.
“Never? Never ever, ever?”
Not like that!
“Okay.”
Okay, what?
Fabio gripped his handlebars and shrugged. “I’m just saying we’re attracted to who we’re attracted to. Maybe finally being seen as who you are made room for you to see what you really want.”
Zay wanted Naima, he reminded Fabio, which also reminded Zay that their anniversary was coming up and that he needed to find her a gift.
From the moment she said, What can I get for you? the first time she took his order at the campus café, soft and raspy, in the way only black women can, like she really meant it, not just about his coffee order, but what she could get for him that might make his day—at least if not his life—roll a little easier, he knew that he wanted to grow old with her.
“Yeah, I know, you and Naima are ride or die, but that don’t mean you can only want one thing. I’m just saying maybe there’s a lot out there you haven’t explored because you were too busy trying to make people see you to notice it was there. That’s what happened with me—not with dudes, but other things. It was like before I transitioned, all I could see was this thick opaque shell glued around me. I couldn’t see past it. Then, when I finally broke free of it, there was this whole life on the other side I’d been ignoring. It had always been there for me; I just never paid attention to it before.”