The Like-List

“Matt,” he whispered from the top bunk. “You still awake?”

It was the beginning of another school year, which meant it was still light outside.

Yep,” I said back. “Why?” 

“You need a girlfriend.”

This wasn’t new information. I was continuously hounded by my big brother Tim to make a move on a little darling. I was all of nine years old … although I’m guessing at that. When I look back on my life, it’s difficult to tell the difference between nine or ninety-nine. I wasn’t an old soul as much as I was just old.

“What about Christy Whitaker?” he asked. “She brought a pack of Bubblicious to school every single day for her last boyfriend.”

“What flavor?” I asked. “I only like raspberry.”

“Who cares? Just tell her that.”

We were cozy enough inside our bedroom, a stack of bunks three high. But our home was made of driftwood, and together, we floated down Midnight’s river with unsettled eyes and un-compassed hearts. There was no riverbank to grasp hold of, and we didn’t know how to hold on to each other—something we never figured out. This was before any of us knew about any of us.

There were three boys in my family: two straights and the one in the middle bunk, which belonged to me. I’m not sure how the beds got divvied up—I’m guessing oldest to youngest, top to bottom—but I didn’t mind it. I liked the middle bunk. Someone above me, someone beneath me.

“I do like Christy’s braces,” I said, after giving it some thought. “She has the wrap-around kind, not the stick-on kind. Plus, her hair is feathered.” Popularity was a draw for both of us.

“And she’s best friends with Becky Vance,” he said. Becky was on the student council. She helped run the school store, which meant in the mornings, she got to go into school before the rest of us. I’d have given my eyeteeth to walk those halls alone.

“She’s a grade ahead of me though. Is that weird?”

A royal blue crushed velvet bedspread was pulled near my chest. Wispy, late-summer boy arms folded crossways against the heavy fabric that could change from dark royal to light royal by dragging my fingers against the grain. Sometimes I’d try to scratch my name into the bedspread. But crossing two T-s horizontally never worked while following the grain of the fabric, so I’d end up with the word “Mall” instead of “Matt.”

“Who cares?” It was his go-to response for most things. “I’m telling you, I know she’ll bring you a pack of gum. She’s done it for every one of her boyfriends.” I needed to think this through.

The opulent royal blue fringe my mother chose was sewn onto the bedspread's edge with her 1980s Singer. We weren't allowed to touch her sewing machine because she knew we'd take it apart out of curiosity and it would end up in a million little pieces. In my mind, I can still see the various stitch patterns etched into its side.

I loved my mother then and now. Truly, I was fascinated by her. She was a brilliant vocalist. She was kind and quite beautiful. Before I was born, she was even a high-fashion catalog model. It wasn’t a stretch to find me sitting at the edge of the tub in her bathroom, watching her layer thick, black mascara onto her lashes before curling them upwards with a medieval-looking device that surrounded her eye socket. I spent a lot of time with her, while my brothers lived out a more predictable form of boyhood.

Sitting on a bucket in the basement, I watched my mom feed the monochromatic trim and bedspread into the Singer. She held her foot gently to a small, hinged pedal on the floor, and the machine whirred while a blurred needle jabbed at the fabric like a pogo-stick on crack.

It’s one of the few times I remember my mom doing what I’d come to believe was maternal. It’s what she wanted more than anything—to be a stay-at-home mom. To cook, clean … to add trim to our bedspreads. To sit in PTA meetings, eat butter cookies afterward, and sign up as a room-mother for our classroom parties. But instead, she worked like the dads, from 7 AM to 3 PM in a factory filled with car parts and foul-mouthed men. It’s what I’d come to believe was paternal—the stuff of men. The stuff of pock-marked, oily skinned men who smelled of month-old bedsheets. But that’s a story for another day.

“Men are supposed to provide, Matthew.” I learned this from her. But provide what, exactly?

“So who are you going to like? Just pick someone. Gimme your top two choices.” Tim had slung himself over the edge of the top bunk, his head now upside down, a few inches from my face. 

“I don’t know how to decide!” I told him, then added Missy Huffman and Valerie Moore to the list.

Most nights, we’d crawl into bed and talk about our day—who was next in line for a fistfight after school, or how we couldn’t wait for pizza day. On other nights, like this one, we’d work on my like-list.

Both of my brothers had a knack for picking girls. They didn’t need a like-list. Knowing which girl they liked was intuitive. They just … knew. But deciding on which girl to like always left me floundering … even after I was grown.

Regardless of the pressure from my older brother and my desire to please him, I never wanted a girlfriend, even though I knew I was supposed to want a girlfriend. I liked laughing with girls on the playground, and I LOVED the koala bear squeezies they attached to their pencils. I liked when one of them came to school with their hair in braids or hanging down their back rather than the same boring ponytail. But I didn’t have a desire to hold hands with girls. And I didn’t want to steal a kiss from them between the two unattached garages next to our school. 

But none of this mattered to my big brother. With the popcorn ceiling less than twelve inches from his face, he’d rattle off the more and more names of cuties, while I turned each one over in my mind.

What kind of tennis shoes does she wear?

Is she funny?

What cool things does she have in her pencil box?

When there aren’t romantic feelings drawing you, these are the things it comes down to. A fully outfitted pencil box. Must be funny. Can run fast during recess.

But with Jesse Newsome, I would’ve needed only to see the line of dirt in his neck and he would’ve made the list. Or to hear the exuberance of his laugh, which I’m pretty sure was my very first addiction. His pencil box could’ve been empty for all I cared. He could’ve worn tennis shoes from K-Mart, and never told a funny joke, not even once. Still, he would’ve made the like-list. If I’d only known how, I would’ve made him my boyfriend.

But so many of us didn’t know better, did we? Something that has become a point of accusation for those who just don’t understand.

You KNEW you were gay! they remind us. Now you’ve gone and made a mess of things.

Without the necessary resources, I’m not sure you can truly know something that was so unprecedented in the lives of 1980s Midwestern queer kids. As under-resourced gay boys, we betrayed our bodies over and over, forcing ourselves to love women out of responsibility rather than desire. Why? Because we owed this to our brothers, sisters, ministers, aunts, uncles, cousins, parents, grandparents, teachers, employers, best friends, and the Midwestern towns we grew up in. They wanted us to land a girl, to marry a girl, til death do us part. And so, we did.

We stood at altars and wept, not because we didn’t love them, because we did love them. But we knew if we allowed ourselves to love boys, our families and friends would leave us. Would throw us out and we’d be alone. How do we know this? Because when the time came, that’s what happened.

Being who we are was never a choice until we made it one. We loved our families. We loved our friends. So, we chose them instead of ourselves.

In 1990, I was part way through my freshman year at a conservative Christian college in Ohio. Collegiate men with hairy limbs walked the halls of my dormitory like sex-gods. To them, it was much ado about nothing. For me, it was much ado about everything.

The things I saw, felt, feared, and felt again burst in my bloodstream, ran through my veins, and mutilated the DNA of hope, survival, and sanity within me. And I would go on living this way for another twenty-six years.

My husband recently told a story about liking a boy at summer camp. He said that when he was young and this sort of thing happened, he’d begin looking for an alternative in the form of a girl. He’s not alone. This is something gay men talk about while reminiscing on the past. Sometimes we laugh about it, and keep it casual. But often, when we’re alone and thinking about the women many of us ended up dating or marrying, our laughter dispatches sorrow to the mistakes we knew we were making … or didn’t know we were making … or should have known we were making. I suppose this mixture of grief and newfound relief is a different type of PRIDE. We can’t go back and wouldn’t want to, but the echoes of the pain we’ve caused keep finding new memories to bounce off of. They are beginning to fade. But my god, much too slowly.

I didn’t grow up gay. I grew up afraid of gay. Afraid of everything, really. To this day, fear wakes me in the dead of night with ghost stories and creaks in the floorboards of my heart. I have to remind myself that apparitions are just angry memories, that’s all—that they’re only huffy because they know their time is through. Then I remind them that they’ve only ever belonged to me. That I created them. Own them. That I’m responsible for feeding them. And while they used to eat me alive (and sometimes still try) they can barely open their mouths anymore. It’s why they wait for me in the wee hours … until I’m asleep, or distracted, or having a bad day.

Am I still afraid? I am. But I’m not afraid of the fear. So, if they must, they can bring it the fuck on because I can catch up on my sleep tomorrow.

I am determined to live my life in love, not fear. Tell me I’m not alone.

PRIDE is a celebration. And to me, the best celebrations are the back-to-life kind. The kind where we realize that something we thought was dead, isn’t. When that barely living thing slowly raises its head, climbs to its feet, and gathers its mourners to suit up for battle.

That's what happened in 1924 when our first activist, Henry Gerber, who had been committed to a mental institution for homosexuality, began advocating for the civil rights of gay people. That is PRIDE. That is Stonewall. That is queer marriage, trans rights, lesbians in leather, fags in pearls, and middle-bunk boys who tore up their like-lists, found their Jesse Newsomes, and made out with them between the two unattached garages next to their schools.

For surviving it all, and finding our way, I am DAMN proud of us, and you should be, too.

Without enough examples for how we could live, still, we found our way. It wasn’t easy, but we did it.

This is why we’re so fucking proud.

It is 2024, and I believe there’s a stack of bunk beds somewhere, maybe even three high, with an older brother dangling himself over the edge of the top bunk, asking his little gay brother about his like-list.

“So, who are you going to like?” he asks. “Just pick someone. Gimme your top two choices.”

Without an ounce of fear, this young gay boy says, “I think I’m gonna go with either Lucas Johnson or Elijah Davis. I mean, Lucas is cuter, but Elijah is nicer.”

“Go with Elijah, little bro. You deserve someone nice.”

And this is PRIDE.