Matt’s chest would tighten with secret longing. He remembered William’s warning not to confuse his feelings with love. Ok. But what exactly was the word to describe this ache? This neediness?
It occurred to Matt that, from William’s perspective, he was light years behind in terms of sexual maturity. That realization gave him empathy for his dormmates. They had all been tossed together into this new world and were all doing the best they could to adapt.
The high- and low- point of each day was watching William during chapel. Spotting him and studying him was exhilarating. Watching him interact with other people and knowing the two of them could not similarly interact in public was a kick in the gut.
Matt’s feelings were raw, his nerves jangled. Jangled like after riding The Wildcat, the deliberately rickety, wooden roller coaster at Frontier City, hauled up and hurled down, jerked right, then whipped left. Every day at chapel Matt bought a ticket and stood in line for that ride.
There was a mystery about William that Matt could not solve. How, in a homophobic state like Oklahoma, at a private Christian college (MCU obviously) where homophobia was amplified by the King James Bible’s constantly equating sodomy with ABOMINATION (a term so heinous it was used only for witchcraft, the antichrist, and fags), did the unapologetically effeminate William survive?
That was a question Matt hoped to put to William when they met at Johnnie’s on Friday, hopefully right before they drove to the country and Matt got to sodomize him.
Matt did not forget his theory that there were eighteen other gays in the student body besides William and himself. Chapel provided the perfect opportunity to search for them, like SETI scouring outer space for evidence of alien life. He desperately needed to find his tribe, the 2% of males who were born to love each other. For years he had felt like he was some freak of nature, the last living member of a dying species. Then he had met William, which had made him yearn even more for the company of his kind.
All around the chapel, students connected with their own tribes (orchestra, sports, computers). Even the misfit-toy kids found each other and moved to their own little island (a row near the back wall).
Matt could find no gays.
He couldn’t even reliably identify suspected gays. From TV, movies, and the broader culture he’d gathered that gays could be identified by their mincing orlight-in-the-loafers walk, by their over-coifed appearance, by lilting or lisping speech, and, of course, their generic “feminine” behavior. He’d spot the occasional guy who checked one of those boxes, but not the rest.
If there were other gays at MCU, and Matt believed there had to be, they camouflaged themselves well and were smart enough not to sit with other members of the tribe. Matt had not forgotten William’s reference to a secret gay fraternity. It could not be a fraternity of one, where William swapped hats to be president, secretary, and treasurer.
Matt knew he had to be missing some key information here. He had a manly gait and didn’t check any of the boxes on the gay meter. Yet at the freshman mixer, William had seen through his act and discerned the inner gay. How?
After chapel Matt went to lunch. Two more classes. History of something and Old Testament Survey. Then soccer practice.
For the next three hours, he would thrive in his element, his equivalent of the orchestra tribe.
He’d been in enough locker rooms to know what to expect: the uninhibited testosterone- and adrenaline-fueled jostling and swagger.
He’d been the new guy enough times to know and respect the pecking order. On this team, new guys were known only by the name of the city where they had graduated high school. (Matt was “Mustang,” which was infinitely better than poor “Idabel.”) New guys did not earn the right to be called by their name until they had either scored a goal in a game or blocked one.
Matt felt like a kid compared to the upperclassmen on the team, who seemed to fully embody manhood. He was used to that feeling too. He remembered being a gangly fifteen-year-old on a team with seniors.
His teammates were all Alpha Males, presumed straight (definitely straight acting—not checking any boxes on the gay meter). They assumed he was one of them.
He did not disabuse them of their error. Nor did he engage in their straight bravado.
Every day after practice, Matt went to the cafeteria, dining with his teammates. Thankfully these guys were not interested in each other’s majors. They didn’t have to bother with asking each other’s names and hometowns either, since those were rolled into one’s nickname. They had their own conversational topics which repeated each day as religiously as reruns ofMASH. They argued about whose favorite team was the best. They argued the merits of FIFA’s new back-pass rule.
These were the kind of guys Matt had thought attracted him. More than thought. While he had never allowed himself to have a crush on any of his teammates, the guys he had conjured in his mind during countlessfurious jacking sessions over the years had been amalgams of what he had seen and admired in locker rooms: tall, masculine, muscled but not beefy, softly furred guys.
It was shocking, then, how his mind constantly cycled back to the subject of William, how Matt could spring a boner just thinking of William’s sashaying walk, the way he swung his bony ass.
Matt was able to put William out of his mind during practice and dinner, sometimes even during his brief evening study time. But once he retired to his room for the evening, William dominated his thoughts and dreams.
He would stare at his phone, willing it to ring, wishing William were on the other end.
His dreams varied in their details, but had the same basic theme, much like the sermons during chapel differed as to the specific subject text, but always reinforced the theme that God loved people so much that He had no choice but to punish them for their sins.
One night Matt dreamed that he was in a large locker room crowded not only with his teammates, but with a few hundred other students, male and female. The non-soccer playing occupants of the room were lined along the outer walls, singing acapella hymns.
Matt and his teammates, in the center of the room, were stripping down post-practice, peeling off socks, shrugging out of their jockstraps, heading for the nearby showers.
The room was steamy and smelled of testosterone and sweat. Because it was so crowded, Matt and his teammates were pressed together, bumping shoulders, their swinging dicks dangerously close to each other’s bare asses.
The students around them were singing “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.”
What a fellowship, What a joy divine,
