“I thought so, too.”
“They say you hit those benchmarks and you’re fine.”
“That’s what they say, until they say something else. Anyway—” Safie shuffled the air with her hand—“I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
“You’ll be fine—I’m sure of it.”
Safie looked toward Colin and Priya, bent close in their row. “Is something going on there?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing,” I said. “Seems like an odd choice, for Priya at least.”
And then—“Here you are.”
I looked up. Stephen. He pulled me in for a hug, mashing my arms to my sides. I felt on display, there in the front of the room.
“It’s just a lecture,” I said.
“Well I’m excited about it. But I thought we were coming over together?”
“Oh fuck. Sorry.” I had completely forgotten. “I was writing all day. I lost track of everything.”
“It’s fine, I figured,” he said, but I couldn’t tell if he meant it.
“Well, we’re all here now. Let’s grab some seats,” Safie said. “While we still can.”
Stephen squeezed my arm, mouth a straight line. “Have fun with it.”
Some minutes later, Hal scrambled in, apologizing for running behind. I stepped aside and gave him the podium. He welcomed the assembled group. You would think he was recounting the history of NATO, the gravity with which he spoke of the humbling experience of being in charge. The display of false modesty made me think of Cassie. Fake, for Cassie, was the greatest insult that could be attached to a person, a band, an outfit, an idea. Listening to Hal drone on, I felt grateful Cassie had inoculated me against the great fakes of the world.
Hal had asked Susan to introduce me after his opening remarks. I knew this because she grumbled about it for weeks, as if it were something I had done to her. But Hal must have forgotten, because he launched right in, reading from a printout of my faculty page and butchering the titles of two of my publications. Susan grimaced in her seat. She lifted a sheet of paper from her lap, folding it in half, and then half again.
Hal finished his remarks and I stepped forward. It was a full house, a bigger crowd than I expected. Some colleagues I recognized, and students from various classes. I stole a glance in Tyler’s direction. He leaned forward, eyes intent. Waiting for me to begin. I held back a smile and looked down at the pages in front of me: They glowed a brilliant white.
“If you have come to hear a heartwarming story about queer resilience,” I started, “you have come to the wrong place. There areno heroes here.” Some laughter. “But if you are looking for the stories of some very bad gays, you might leave satisfied.” Laughter again, the room warming up.
“This project started, like many, as an argument, this one with a colleague from grad school. We often got into a debate about how to tell gay stories. In fiction and films, this colleague felt, gay life only appeared as tragedy. Why, he would ask, must gay stories always end in misery and death?
“A movie came out a few years ago—I won’t go into it, you know the one—and this colleague could not have been happier. The story tracked two well-adjusted white gay guys living problem-free, well-adjusted lives. When I heard about it, I thought, well who wants to see that?” More laughs. “Most of America, it turned out.
“I was annoyed. I hated this desire to make gay good, to take everything messy and troubling about queer sexuality and recuperate it into some sanitized version. And so I decided to commit myself to finding the worst gays possible—unrepentant murderers, preferably repeat offenders—and spend all my time with them.
“So tonight I’ll share a bit of what I have found so far. This is not an account, though, of why these figures killed. I will leave that question to the dubious science of forensic psychologists. Instead, I want to think about why we find these stories fascinating. What they tell us about how we imagine depravity—sexual and criminal. And, ultimately, what we can see in these stories about ourselves—or as French philosopher Michel Foucault might put it, the ‘mirage in which we think we see ourselves reflected—the dark shimmer of sex.’
“I am going to focus on a case from 1924, the kidnapping and murder of a young boy by the infamous maybe-lovers, Leopoldand Loeb. Let’s see what we can learn from these extremely bad gays.”
The room broke into bright applause. From the front row, Stephen grinned—wide and warm—and Safie winked. I smiled back and lifted my eyes toward the middle of the auditorium: Tyler—upright, smiling, clapping along.
Safie and Stephen hung back, chatting with Priya and Colin as the crowd filtered out. Hal said some genuinely kind things while congratulating himself for thinking of me. “Looking forward to the book,” Susan said, which felt like praise but also a threat, but I took the compliment. Marissa from class had brought her mother, who looked like she couldn’t shake a foul stink from her nose and said it was a “very interesting topic.” Marissa’s face contorted in apology, and I smiled and thanked them for coming.
“We really enjoyed it,” Charles said, as he and the others made their way down. “When this one—” he squeezed Tyler’s shoulder “—insisted we spend Friday night at a lecture, I wasn’t so sure.”
“Really, just fascinating,” Lauren said. “I would never be able to do that. Thinking out loud like that, with an audience.”
“You do it all the time in court,” Addison said, laughing.
“For a bunch of legal bureaucrats and corporate hacks. Nothing like this.”
Tyler, who had been standing beside them, finally spoke.
