This is the kind of story you read when you are sad,
something about two boys
who fell in love with one another and could only
touch each other in the dark
because they were taught that loving someone of the same gender
was unacceptable, unheard of, akin to walking through fire
and coming out on the other side unscathed.
We met at a Black Keys concert as Dan Auerbach
gripped the microphone
like a flower’s roots grip the ground, crooning into it like a lover,
and the first thing you said to me after we kissed drunk
in the bathroom was Qu’ils mangent de la brioche,
or “let them eat cake.” Did you know, you asked,
that Marie Antoinette did not really say that? It was
another French princess instead.
And all the while your tongue was inside my ear, your fingers
between my legs, colder than a cooler full of beer
rattling along in the back of a truck on a desert highway.
Tell me more, I said. Please do.
So you informed me, passionately, that Nelson Mandela
never spoke the words Our deepest fear is not
that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that
we are powerful beyond measure. Oh no, you breathed,
those were words from a novel written by Marianne Williamson.
And this is the kind of story you read when you are heartbroken
and lonely and desperate for love, how you spot two boys
clutching one another underneath the concert lights at the corner
of the stage, down in the mosh pit where no one else can see them.
How their faces as they stare at one another are upturned,
rapturous, full of a joy and longing that you used to think
could only be found in the likes of Romeo and Juliet,
or Adam and Eve.
This is the real tragedy, I think: not that Marie Antoinette didn’t say that
or Nelson Mandela didn’t say this, but that we forbid a love between
two people simply because they are the same gender,
because we are so goddamn afraid
that they could love better than us, and in fact they do.