High-Risk Homosexual by Edgar Gomez

Author:Edgar Gomez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2021-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

Everything Is Sexy!

Savoy, where the bartender kept a shotgun on the shelf above the register “just in case,” wasn’t the kind of gay bar where anyone went to seriously fall in love, right? So we weren’t bad people, I told my best friend Arturo, hoping that saying so would be enough to make it true, the same way that it’s okay to say something mean as long as you follow it with, “Was that mean?” even if you don’t take it back. We weren’t bad people, because this wasn’t a joke: our competition to seduce the same guy. This wasn’t like those movies where the popular boy asks out the nerdy girl as a prank. I really did think the man we’d picked was beautiful, nursing a drink alone at the bar, one ear pierced like George Michael. And in the unlikely event that we did fall in love five feet from a loaded weapon, great. We’d have a shotgun-wedding theme. The Ke$ha track playing on the jukebox could be, like, our song.

But first I needed to get Arturo to focus and stop asking me about a conversation that happened twenty-four hours earlier. The one in which my boyfriend Eric dumped me.

“He said that? ‘You’re too femme’?” Arturo yelled across the low metal table between us. He placed his hands over mine, covering the fingernails I’d painted black in mourning. In the dark corner where we were huddled together, it must have looked like he was reading my fortune. “What does that even mean?”

“Come on.” I pried my hands out from beneath his. “Let’s do this before he leaves.”

Arturo leaned back and crossed his arms, the sleeves of his navy-blue hoodie stretched tight over his biceps. “I just need to know if I gotta go fight someone.”

“Relax,” I said. “Okay, no, he was too nice to say, ‘You’re too femme,’ but trust me, that’s what he meant.”

Eric thought my clothes were too . . . curated. My interests were too . . . indoorsy. “You don’t act like you anymore” is the exact phrasing he used to end things. I wasn’t me. I’d been so dazed that I drove straight to Dunkin’ Donuts and picked at a cruller for an hour, wondering, Well then, who are you? until I decided that most immediately I didn’t want to be a twenty-three-year-old having an existential crisis at a Dunkin’ Donuts and staggered back out.

“Whatever. I’m over it.”

“Good,” said Arturo. “That guy sucked anyway.”

“That guy,” I repeated. That was who he was now. I supposed that was who I was to him too, if he was talking about me with a friend. That guy. That guy who played him.

Listen, I never told Eric I was masculine. I just didn’t say I wasn’t. He assumed I would be, because Latino men, you know, that’s our default. I knew it the second he messaged me Hey papi on Grindr, like that would endear him to me. I knew he thought I’d be like all the tan boys on TV.

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