Tango

Tango by Justin Vivian Bond

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Authors: Justin Vivian Bond
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Mall on Wednesday night. Every week as a special treat the folks at Brook Lane loaded everyone in a van and took them to the mall for supervised shopping trips. Sue Suvramanian bought me a copy of a Beaux Arts poster at the head shop, which I hung in my room next to a needlepoint of a hummingbird on a gold lurex background with cherry blossoms that Lesley had made for me during her summer at her uncle’s house in Ohio. I looked forward to our visits at the psychiatric hospital, and there was
something about driving away at the end of each visit that gave me the feeling that I was finally gaining some control over my own life. I had more things to think about than some homophobic dumbass who wanted me to suck his cock a couple times a week and who looked like he was coming apart at the seams.
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    IN A WAY I WAS LUCKY BECAUSE MY FEARS about my sexuality were less intense than my need to express myself. Somehow I found ways to free myself, if only in my mind, by drawing, writing, making people laugh, and socializing. More and more I was able to leave my parents’ world where everything was described as overemotional, where most of my feelings and actions were invalidated, to places where the very things that my parents held against me were celebrated. I don’t think Michael had that. He wanted more than anything to be popular, but the way he learned to get attention was through verbal assaults and an ungrounded bravado. People grew weary of him. I know I did.

    Things were changing quickly. We both had access to cars, and I found myself making out with him, sitting in the parking lot at the school down the road from our house, which I thought was very dangerous because the last thing I wanted was for anyone to see us together. His brazenness started to border on recklessness. Not only was he being much more vociferous at school and more indiscreet—evidenced by the note in Mrs. Swisher’s class—he seemed to be almost desperate.
    He would drive by my house, gun his engine, or lay down rubber. Sometimes he would set off firecrackers in his yard. Anything to get my attention. I tried my best to ignore him. Occasionally I would break down and see him, but by now it wasn’t desire that was driving me to get together with him; I felt like I had to calm him down like one would when feeding an insistent cat, or taking a dog for a walk. I think in a way I was weaning him and myself from what had become, in my mind, simply a bad habit.
    When I was with Mary, although I was playing the role of a boy, I felt more comfortable
sexually and more feminine than I ever did with Michael, with whom I actually sometimes played the role of a woman. Being with Mary showed me that there is a big difference between acting like a woman and feeling like one. At the time, all of this was so confusing. I could tell Mary wanted to make love to me, and I knew that I wasn’t ready.
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    ONE THING I WAS CERTAIN OF WAS THAT I HAD to end it with Michael Hunter once and for all. But he was persistent. We met each other a few more times—in the tree house, his car, various places—until finally one day, we were in the school yard. We climbed up a tree and, as he stood on a branch several branches below me and gave me a blow job, I realized that I couldn’t do it anymore. I wasn’t turned on and I’d had enough.
    We climbed down out of the tree, got on our bikes, and before we went our separate ways I let him have it. “Michael, I’m sick of you running around telling everyone that I’m a faggot, that
I’m gay, that I’m some sort of a freak. Meanwhile you go around saying things to girls as if you’re some sort of straight guy. You’re not. I told you I wanted to stop doing this and yet you keep bothering me, and why is that? Because, like it or not, you are a faggot, and you can’t do anything about it. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but over the last

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