After a half hour they begin dancing together. At first its nothing more than what me and Maura or half the club is doing. Then they get closer, hold hands more. Now there is no doubt they are lovers. I wonder if Dean had to work himself up to this, telling us—that’s what he had been doing the whole night—that he was gay. There was only one friend I had who ever verbally told me she was gay. We traveled forty miles south to the nearest real city from our college, went to Olive Garden and, in a very round about way attempted to say she was a lesbian. She kept stopping and starting until finally I cut into the conversation and said, “You’re a lesbian. Right? Good. Let’s eat.”

You can hardly blame friends for not just coming out and saying it. So Dean was coming out and being it. Half the night he was the straight laced character I’d see every day sort of struggling with this new identity. Pulling out a few dance steps now and again, holding his boyfriend, the two of them walking off for a few minutes now and again, and then Dean sitting there looking like he was almost ready to leave and this wasn’t his place at all.

Dean, suddenly pulling out with some crazy rhythmic move I couldn’t copy in a million years if I tried and then grinding against his boyfriend. And there is this look on his face like, “I’m going to screw the hell out of you.” Only it’s Dean the bland boy from church. It’s not the fact that he’s a homosexual that’s taking me by surprise. It’s the fact that he’s sexual at all.

We always thought of him as just little guy, sort of silly, possibly bland. In a way I wonder if that’s not what the culture we grew up in does too. He’s a man, with a man’s desires. But the desire is for another man and that’s just not acceptable in our culture. So we cover it up, and it only pops out under a disco ball in a crowded dance club.