“He had wedged his thigh between her legs, and she felt her feet leave the earth, felt the dampness of the building soak through the back of her dress. Gravity rearranged itself so that leaning back against the theater’s slippery verticality was enough to keep from floating off into the night.”
“Kurt enjoyed picturing their shock, the dim-witted thieves, as they unzipped the black canvas bags. Right about now they’d be squatting on the floor of some desolate apartment with Ziplocs of marijuana on the coffee table and a broken TV. One of them, most likely named Cletus, spreads the flaps and sees, gaping up, the putty-colored face, the serenely closed eyes, the plastic sheeting vomiting forth from the O-shaped mouth of a Plastic-American brother, and he, Cletus, screams like a little girl, or like the junkie he is.”
“Ulf, the museum director, whose hand she’d shaken on the way in, who had offered her a sympathetic and conspiratorial nod, announced loudly from the information desk in Danish, then English, that the museum would close in ten minutes. A few people began to leave—the boys with the sneakers followed their parents toward the exit—but there were still twenty people now, maybe thirty, clustering together near the windows, feigning interest in the wall plaques and photos of carnivorous plants.”
“Markus is a gifted crier. We just say, “Tell us how your grandfather would feel,” and he gushes like Miss America. “My grandfather would be so proud of me,” he says, and blows a kiss to the sky.
Or we ask if he feels that his whole life has been a struggle. He says, “I just feel like my whole life has been just this huge struggle,” and then he starts snorting and choking and holds up a finger.
The producers love the criers, and they love the cocky bastards, and they love the snarky gay men. The others, we try to get drunk. We flirt with the straight guys, if there are any. If necessary, we feed them lines.
“ When Carlos asked why I would risk my whole career for Peter Torrelli, I told him he had to understand that in those last three years of high school, Peter and I were the only two gay boys in Chicago. Because I really believed it, back then, and twenty-five years of experience proving otherwise was nothing in the face of that original muscle memory: me and Peter side by side on the hard pew during chapel, not listening, washed blind by the sun from the high windows, breathing in sync. It didn’t matter that we weren’t close anymore, I told Carlos. The point was, he’d been my first love. I’d never actually loved him, but still, listen, believe me, there’s another kind of first love.
