12-26-2025, 10:11 AM
Chapter 1
My first week back at school was a little depressing. Not that I had anything against school, but the summer had been good to me and I was sad to see it go by.
Colorado is purely a winter getaway destination, so many summer trips took students out of the state. They probably appreciated getting a break from the frigid air and the 1,500-meter mountains on every horizon. And when all those students left, I practically had the whole city to myself. No lines at the theaters, no waiting for takeout, and far fewer obnoxious customers.
I was still working at The Movie Dome, but since half of our town's disposable income was spent in Cancun or Orlando, business was slow, and I spent most of my time meticulously organizing the DVDs on the shelves and reading Twelfth Night behind the air-conditioned counter. (James gave me the complete works of Shakespeare for my seventeenth birthday, and I devoured the comedies like crazy. I once tried the tragedies but only got halfway through Othello before throwing it on the floor and declaring, "Let me guess, he goes berserk and kills everyone and then kills himself." Even Shakespeare could be predictable, I guess.)
Business picked up towards the end of August, when the other high school students returned from their trips with golden tans and sun-bleached hair, but James was still in New Zealand. Following his split with Crystal in June (a mutual agreement, he emphasized), he declared he needed to "get away from it all," stuffed a backpack full of all his bare essentials, bought the bare necessities, and booked the next flight to Wellington.
He'd send postcards over the summer, sometimes with odd little gifts like a whalebone carving of a tribal warrior, but a return date was always his and his alone. Until then, the house, the Tacoma, and the DVD player were mine. I left the couch alone, though, out of some primal superstition that he might burst through the door at any second and throw me to the floor with a judo. Not that he actually knew judo, but a guy who loved pushing his brother around could have done that.
I knew about judo. Well, only five hours at that point. I had to quit taekwondo because it was too much of a sport and not the art I'd expected. I tried kung fu, but I almost let it dominate my life. I do like judo, though. It's simple; the physical challenge and practice consist of grabbing, throwing, and pinning the other guy.
Aside from martial arts, movies, and the male sex, my focus was on founding and running the first gay club at my high school. Not that I was really "out," but I wanted to help other boys who were even more hidden than I was.
Dawn, however, was very much out there. He was the frontman and probably the president of the club, and damn, was he gay. He was a skinny flamer with bleached hair falling in his face, a penchant for girls' pants, and impeccable posture. He had that slight lisp typical of a gay man and always a detached look in his dark eyes, as if he were pondering what it would feel like to see the hot, heavy breathing beneath that last sweet belly. He was kind-hearted, but a man so big that he really turned off people who weren't patient enough to put up with him. And no, his first name wasn't Dawn. He was born Seymour Goldman. But if you called him that, you'd find out what it feels like to get beat up.
I met Dawn at the Movie Dome over the summer. He got my old job when I became assistant shift manager. During our conversations, he mostly pointed out all the "cool" guys. When we walked into the place, we discovered we also shared the same sexual orientation as high schoolers. He was the one who had the idea to start the club, and I agreed on the condition that I handle the paperwork and he took care of recruitment and club activities. Since I was the only resident at the time, we used my house as our base of operations. We made a lot of progress after holding some unofficial meetings, and all we needed was approval from the student government to get official recognition and funding.
But the resistance did not come from the student government or faculty or from a community outcry, but from the scribblings of a pretentious news hunter who was brave enough to come upstairs to my study one afternoon.
“Kyle,” Dawn said in a sing-song voice, the one he used to pronounce almost every name. He opened the door to what had been Brian’s old room, stuck his head through, and asked, “Are you busy?”
I sat at the far end of the room with my back to the window, behind a hardwood desk I'd bought at a flea market. That, and the bookshelf next to it, were my only contributions to the room. The bed, the dresser, the weights, and everything else were exactly as Brian had left them.
I took The Taming of the Shrew to the desk and said, "No, what's wrong?"
He stepped sideways through the half-closed doorway and stood upright, with the posture one might expect from The Nutcracker Suite. That day he was wearing a white shirt with blue vertical stripes, the ends of which flapped over his very tight jeans. “A reporter from the student newspaper came by and asked questions about our club, and I told him to talk to you.”
"Where is he now?" I asked.
Dawn opened the door with a jerk of his hand, stepped aside and stretched out his hands to see a stout young man on the other side of the door who was smiling the whole time as if he had just pulled a dozen roses out of a hat.
The young man tried to ignore the strange inferno beside him. He wore a grey jacket over a brown T-shirt and blue jeans, and had a black bag slung over his shoulder. He wore thick-rimmed, square glasses that were dark brown like his curly hair, and he seemed about as excited to see me as a snake about a mongoose.
"Are you Kyle Wilson?" he asked with icy indifference.
“Are you the reporter?” I replied.
“My name is Barton White,” he said, stepping out the door and grabbing a chair from the foot of Brian’s bed and pulling it up to my desk. He sat down and said, “I’ve been assigned to cover the new clubs that have opened this year, of which The Closet Club is one.”
Completely out of the picture, Dawn turned on her heel and floated back down, leaving me with the grim-looking Barton White.
“Are you having problems with the location?” I asked.
“It’s a bit off the beaten track, which doesn’t bother me,” he replied. “I’d rather not be seen here.”
"You don't seem very enthusiastic about your task," I said.
“Unofficially, I think you’re gay.” “The club is an insult to our school,” he explained, looking coldly into my eyes. “They’ve managed to defraud taxpayers of school fees, fueling deviance and promiscuity among students.”
“For the record,” I replied sharply, leaning forward and folding my arms on the desk, “one of the tenants. The special thing about our club is that it is not a dating agency or a pimping place. It is a safe place for gay students to be themselves outside of a society that is trying to free itself from the unknown.”
White's eyes narrowed as he stared at me and leaned back in his chair, as if trying to find a way to admonish me without jeopardizing his interview. He admitted defeat and instead reached into his pocket, took out a small gray tape recorder, and placed it on the desk between us.
“Do you mind if I end our conversation?” he asked.
“No, just try to keep it.” “I’m a professional,” I replied. “I don’t like discussing sexual ethics with people.”
White grinned sinisterly as he took out a small notepad, opened it, and clicked a pen in his other hand.
“The Closet Club seems like a deliberately ambiguous title,” he began, reading his question from his notepad. “Why all the secrecy?”
"We didn't choose the name for secrecy, but because the school board wanted us to choose a title that wasn't an explicit reference to homosexuality. The title is still clear to those culturally aware of what it means to be 'in the closet,' but it looks better on a business report than Queers Club."
"And why are we meeting in a house instead of on campus like the other clubs?"
"Being gay is a big deal for many students, and sometimes they don't want others to know. They still need to get used to the idea and need a chance to make sense of it. Sometimes they're afraid of physical or verbal abuse, sometimes they're unsure whether they're actually gay or not. We want to protect them from real problems and also avoid creating problems where none should exist."
"They are obviously not afraid to admit their homosexuality."
"Well, I'm not going to shout it from the rooftops, but I'm not going to lie about it either. I used to be very afraid of my sexual identity, since no one else in my life was gay and I had no one to answer my questions. But after finding many answers and surviving many embarrassing moments, I feel it's wise to share these insights with students who might not know where to look."
Weiss crossed one leg over the other and tapped his lower lip with the spirals of his notepad.
"Does he have any particular experience that stands out to you?"
"Come to our weekly meetings, and you can hear my story and the stories of other members."
"Are you ashamed to be gay?"
"No longer."
"Would you take it back if you could?"
"I can't, and no. It's not like I even had a choice."
I could feel his words boring into me, like a crow testing the vitality of a carcass. His eyes kept glaring into mine, trying to detect a weakness. Then his lips thinned treacherously.
"What about the boys you say are 'insecure'? Do you ever feel guilty about endorsing such a lifestyle for people who still have a chance to be normal?"
He found it.
"Normal? What the hell do you mean? What do you mean by that? That I'm some kind of freak?"
"Only in America. In Greece, I listen, it's perfectly acceptable to rape other boys in the ass."
"That's inappropriate!"
I leaned forward to reach the tape recorder, but his hand shot out and covered the buttons, forcing me to slide back in my chair. Our eyes never wavered from each other's malevolent gaze.
"Do you realize you're exhibiting normal human behavior?" I growled. "Because you're not. You're behaving like—"
"I'm acting like a journalist and you have a fit over a question you weren't prepared for. Although, excuse me for the last comment. It was unfair to the Greeks."
"What the hell is wrong with 'you'?" I asked. "Did you lose a bet or something?"
"I told you I'm here on assignment."
"Then Chris has completely lost his mind. If you want me to answer any further questions, please email them to me. But the interview is over."
“Thank you for your time, Mr. Wilson,” White said as he stood up, putting his recorder and notepad back in his pocket and turning towards the door. “See you in the headlines.”
As he closed the door behind him, I sighed in despair and reached for Sir Toby and Viola, thinking, "I'm going to give Chris a good thrashing for his stupid reporter."
My first week back at school was a little depressing. Not that I had anything against school, but the summer had been good to me and I was sad to see it go by.
Colorado is purely a winter getaway destination, so many summer trips took students out of the state. They probably appreciated getting a break from the frigid air and the 1,500-meter mountains on every horizon. And when all those students left, I practically had the whole city to myself. No lines at the theaters, no waiting for takeout, and far fewer obnoxious customers.
I was still working at The Movie Dome, but since half of our town's disposable income was spent in Cancun or Orlando, business was slow, and I spent most of my time meticulously organizing the DVDs on the shelves and reading Twelfth Night behind the air-conditioned counter. (James gave me the complete works of Shakespeare for my seventeenth birthday, and I devoured the comedies like crazy. I once tried the tragedies but only got halfway through Othello before throwing it on the floor and declaring, "Let me guess, he goes berserk and kills everyone and then kills himself." Even Shakespeare could be predictable, I guess.)
Business picked up towards the end of August, when the other high school students returned from their trips with golden tans and sun-bleached hair, but James was still in New Zealand. Following his split with Crystal in June (a mutual agreement, he emphasized), he declared he needed to "get away from it all," stuffed a backpack full of all his bare essentials, bought the bare necessities, and booked the next flight to Wellington.
He'd send postcards over the summer, sometimes with odd little gifts like a whalebone carving of a tribal warrior, but a return date was always his and his alone. Until then, the house, the Tacoma, and the DVD player were mine. I left the couch alone, though, out of some primal superstition that he might burst through the door at any second and throw me to the floor with a judo. Not that he actually knew judo, but a guy who loved pushing his brother around could have done that.
I knew about judo. Well, only five hours at that point. I had to quit taekwondo because it was too much of a sport and not the art I'd expected. I tried kung fu, but I almost let it dominate my life. I do like judo, though. It's simple; the physical challenge and practice consist of grabbing, throwing, and pinning the other guy.
Aside from martial arts, movies, and the male sex, my focus was on founding and running the first gay club at my high school. Not that I was really "out," but I wanted to help other boys who were even more hidden than I was.
Dawn, however, was very much out there. He was the frontman and probably the president of the club, and damn, was he gay. He was a skinny flamer with bleached hair falling in his face, a penchant for girls' pants, and impeccable posture. He had that slight lisp typical of a gay man and always a detached look in his dark eyes, as if he were pondering what it would feel like to see the hot, heavy breathing beneath that last sweet belly. He was kind-hearted, but a man so big that he really turned off people who weren't patient enough to put up with him. And no, his first name wasn't Dawn. He was born Seymour Goldman. But if you called him that, you'd find out what it feels like to get beat up.
I met Dawn at the Movie Dome over the summer. He got my old job when I became assistant shift manager. During our conversations, he mostly pointed out all the "cool" guys. When we walked into the place, we discovered we also shared the same sexual orientation as high schoolers. He was the one who had the idea to start the club, and I agreed on the condition that I handle the paperwork and he took care of recruitment and club activities. Since I was the only resident at the time, we used my house as our base of operations. We made a lot of progress after holding some unofficial meetings, and all we needed was approval from the student government to get official recognition and funding.
But the resistance did not come from the student government or faculty or from a community outcry, but from the scribblings of a pretentious news hunter who was brave enough to come upstairs to my study one afternoon.
“Kyle,” Dawn said in a sing-song voice, the one he used to pronounce almost every name. He opened the door to what had been Brian’s old room, stuck his head through, and asked, “Are you busy?”
I sat at the far end of the room with my back to the window, behind a hardwood desk I'd bought at a flea market. That, and the bookshelf next to it, were my only contributions to the room. The bed, the dresser, the weights, and everything else were exactly as Brian had left them.
I took The Taming of the Shrew to the desk and said, "No, what's wrong?"
He stepped sideways through the half-closed doorway and stood upright, with the posture one might expect from The Nutcracker Suite. That day he was wearing a white shirt with blue vertical stripes, the ends of which flapped over his very tight jeans. “A reporter from the student newspaper came by and asked questions about our club, and I told him to talk to you.”
"Where is he now?" I asked.
Dawn opened the door with a jerk of his hand, stepped aside and stretched out his hands to see a stout young man on the other side of the door who was smiling the whole time as if he had just pulled a dozen roses out of a hat.
The young man tried to ignore the strange inferno beside him. He wore a grey jacket over a brown T-shirt and blue jeans, and had a black bag slung over his shoulder. He wore thick-rimmed, square glasses that were dark brown like his curly hair, and he seemed about as excited to see me as a snake about a mongoose.
"Are you Kyle Wilson?" he asked with icy indifference.
“Are you the reporter?” I replied.
“My name is Barton White,” he said, stepping out the door and grabbing a chair from the foot of Brian’s bed and pulling it up to my desk. He sat down and said, “I’ve been assigned to cover the new clubs that have opened this year, of which The Closet Club is one.”
Completely out of the picture, Dawn turned on her heel and floated back down, leaving me with the grim-looking Barton White.
“Are you having problems with the location?” I asked.
“It’s a bit off the beaten track, which doesn’t bother me,” he replied. “I’d rather not be seen here.”
"You don't seem very enthusiastic about your task," I said.
“Unofficially, I think you’re gay.” “The club is an insult to our school,” he explained, looking coldly into my eyes. “They’ve managed to defraud taxpayers of school fees, fueling deviance and promiscuity among students.”
“For the record,” I replied sharply, leaning forward and folding my arms on the desk, “one of the tenants. The special thing about our club is that it is not a dating agency or a pimping place. It is a safe place for gay students to be themselves outside of a society that is trying to free itself from the unknown.”
White's eyes narrowed as he stared at me and leaned back in his chair, as if trying to find a way to admonish me without jeopardizing his interview. He admitted defeat and instead reached into his pocket, took out a small gray tape recorder, and placed it on the desk between us.
“Do you mind if I end our conversation?” he asked.
“No, just try to keep it.” “I’m a professional,” I replied. “I don’t like discussing sexual ethics with people.”
White grinned sinisterly as he took out a small notepad, opened it, and clicked a pen in his other hand.
“The Closet Club seems like a deliberately ambiguous title,” he began, reading his question from his notepad. “Why all the secrecy?”
"We didn't choose the name for secrecy, but because the school board wanted us to choose a title that wasn't an explicit reference to homosexuality. The title is still clear to those culturally aware of what it means to be 'in the closet,' but it looks better on a business report than Queers Club."
"And why are we meeting in a house instead of on campus like the other clubs?"
"Being gay is a big deal for many students, and sometimes they don't want others to know. They still need to get used to the idea and need a chance to make sense of it. Sometimes they're afraid of physical or verbal abuse, sometimes they're unsure whether they're actually gay or not. We want to protect them from real problems and also avoid creating problems where none should exist."
"They are obviously not afraid to admit their homosexuality."
"Well, I'm not going to shout it from the rooftops, but I'm not going to lie about it either. I used to be very afraid of my sexual identity, since no one else in my life was gay and I had no one to answer my questions. But after finding many answers and surviving many embarrassing moments, I feel it's wise to share these insights with students who might not know where to look."
Weiss crossed one leg over the other and tapped his lower lip with the spirals of his notepad.
"Does he have any particular experience that stands out to you?"
"Come to our weekly meetings, and you can hear my story and the stories of other members."
"Are you ashamed to be gay?"
"No longer."
"Would you take it back if you could?"
"I can't, and no. It's not like I even had a choice."
I could feel his words boring into me, like a crow testing the vitality of a carcass. His eyes kept glaring into mine, trying to detect a weakness. Then his lips thinned treacherously.
"What about the boys you say are 'insecure'? Do you ever feel guilty about endorsing such a lifestyle for people who still have a chance to be normal?"
He found it.
"Normal? What the hell do you mean? What do you mean by that? That I'm some kind of freak?"
"Only in America. In Greece, I listen, it's perfectly acceptable to rape other boys in the ass."
"That's inappropriate!"
I leaned forward to reach the tape recorder, but his hand shot out and covered the buttons, forcing me to slide back in my chair. Our eyes never wavered from each other's malevolent gaze.
"Do you realize you're exhibiting normal human behavior?" I growled. "Because you're not. You're behaving like—"
"I'm acting like a journalist and you have a fit over a question you weren't prepared for. Although, excuse me for the last comment. It was unfair to the Greeks."
"What the hell is wrong with 'you'?" I asked. "Did you lose a bet or something?"
"I told you I'm here on assignment."
"Then Chris has completely lost his mind. If you want me to answer any further questions, please email them to me. But the interview is over."
“Thank you for your time, Mr. Wilson,” White said as he stood up, putting his recorder and notepad back in his pocket and turning towards the door. “See you in the headlines.”
As he closed the door behind him, I sighed in despair and reached for Sir Toby and Viola, thinking, "I'm going to give Chris a good thrashing for his stupid reporter."