Every True Pleasure: LGBTQ Tales of North Carolina

By Wilton Barnhardt

Some of North Carolina's finest fiction and nonfiction writers come together in Every True Pleasure, including David Sedaris, Kelly Link, Allan Gurganus, Randall Kenan, and more. Within the volume—featuring writers who identify as gay, trans, bisexual, and straight—are stories and essays that view the full spectrum of contemporary life though an LGBTQ lens. These writers, all native or connected to North Carolina, show the multifaceted challenges and joys of LGBTQ life, including young love and gay panic, the minefield of religion, military service, having children with a surrogate, family rejection, finding one's true gender, finding sex, and finding love. One of the only anthologies of its kind, Every True Pleasure speaks with insight and compassion about living LGBTQ in North Carolina and beyond.

Contributors include Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, Brian Blanchfield, Belle Boggs, Emily Chavez, Garrard Conley, John Pierre Craig, Diane Daniel, Allan Gurganus, Minrose Gwin, Aaron Gwyn, Wayne Johns, Randall Kenan, Kelly Link, Zelda Lockhart, Toni Newman, Michael Parker, Penelope Robbins, David Sedaris, Eric Tran, and Alyssa Wong.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Feb 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9781469646817

Book preview

Introduction

Wilton Barnhardt

I am sure somewhere there is a gay anthology concerning tales of San Francisco or New York City, the women of Northampton, the men of Fire Island, but I don’t think a single state has attempted a collection confined to its own writers. And, if you were placing a bet, you might not wager North Carolina would be first across that particular finish line.

Our state is known for the late Senator Jesse Helms, arch-homophobe, passionate blocker of AIDS funding, and for a legislature that wakes up each morning pondering the truly important issue facing North Carolina: how can we persecute, oppress, annoy, or insult our queer and trans citizens today? The infamous 2016 bathroom bill (HB2) may be cosmetically repealed for now, but the fine print dismissing civic gay and lesbian protections remains intact. And yet. This state makes an approximately happy home for hundreds of thousands of queer folk. Lesbian-owned downtown Asheville. The People’s Republic of Chapel Hill. Raleigh and Durham and their five gay bars. Winston-Salem and Greensboro, anchored in bohemia by UNC-G and the North Carolina School of the Arts. Wilmington, whose restored antebellum mansions are exemplars of gay taste. Charlotte, which is giving Atlanta a run for being the black gay capital of the country. The politicians can fulminate and fume, but many of us are getting on with our lives.

You may have noticed, glancing at the distinguished list of authors herein, that there are straight writers included too. The determining factor was the quality of the work rather than whether its author was a card-carrying LGBTQ writer. And just who is issuing those membership cards these days? Where I teach, at NC State’s MFA program, we recently had a young writer apply for admission in Poetry as a woman and then apply for admission in Fiction as a man—an individual presenting as gender nonbinary. Whitman has been borne out: we contain multitudes, living as straight and gay in different phases of our time on earth and, for some folks, transitioning to a different gender. The gay litmus test for LGBTQ-themed projects is increasingly problematic. We are in the Age of the Spectrum, for just about all human attributes. As one can assert on one’s Facebook status: it’s complicated.

The unifying principles among our writers gathered here was that their stories or personal essays be vital, keen, and observant, accurate to LGBTQ life as we find it in the twenty-first century, and that the writers be natives of, residents of, or connected strongly to North Carolina.

You’ll observe we have a few stories by science fiction or speculative-fiction authors (Kelly Link, Alyssa Wong, for instance). Some of that is due to the wealth of such writing that goes on in this state, but also it is hardly surprising that gay and gay-supportive authors historically have imagined an alternative reality to the discouragements of their present.

But there’s a third reason: genre and pulp and those funded-on-a-shoestring rags were always a step ahead of the mainstream publishing houses when it came to alternative couplings and notions of gender. Back in the 1970s, lesbian magazines out of Chapel Hill and Charlotte provided romantic fiction as well as practical advice about how to keep custody of one’s children in a discriminatory court system. I can name you three gay guys who attribute their coming out to Tales of the Cities, a San Francisco–set queer serial that was syndicated nationally, authored by Armistead Maupin, who grew up in Raleigh. It was the popular press, the genre publishers, who historically were the home for gay-friendly material across America. Early editions of Gothic-era potboilers like Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (forbidden love in the monastery!) and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (lesbian vampires!) reside in the Special Collections of Duke and Chapel Hill libraries. These titles made their way to North Carolina in the early 1800s, but it is tricky to say just how wide or deep their circulation here was.

In England there were gay novels (A Year in Arcadia, 1805) and quietly circulated gay pornographies (The Sins of the Cities of the Plain, 1881) that made the rounds. In France there was a midcentury flourishing of the topic among their poets (Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud) and Joris-Karl Huysmans, that one-man taboo-breaking machine. In America, publishers were more tentative. Joseph and His Friend: A Story of Pennsylvania by Bayard Taylor (himself not homosexual, it appears) features a male-male love affair without apology; it went into eight editions in 1870 despite the expected condemnations.

But as any Victorianist can tell you, even high-toned American Lit of the period was full to overflowing with barely disguised homoeroticism. A schoolmaster ends up adopting his bright young and parentally neglected charge in Henry James’s The Pupil; Edmund White decided to include that tale in the Faber Book of Short Gay Fiction even though there’s not one overtly homosexual reference in it. One finds a gay template in James’s Roderick Hudson, the mentor and protégé; The Bostonians scandalously presented to the world the Boston marriage, the era’s term for female lifelong partnerships. Sarah Orne Jewett, herself in a Boston marriage, created some of the most loving, affectionate female friendships in American letters; modern critics frequently refer to these platonic romances as proto-lesbian. (And in Jewett’s story, Martha’s Lady, it doesn’t seem we need the prefix proto- at all.) Walt Whitman wrote lines like

Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me it shall be you!

Broad muscular fields, branches of live oak, loving lounger in my winding paths, it shall be you!

Hands I have taken, face I have kiss’d, mortal I have ever touch’d, it shall be you.

Stephen Crane never finished Flowers of Asphalt—his friends begged him to burn it, and maybe he did. The plot featured a beautiful boy from the country who moves to the big city and engages in male prostitution. Many reckon that Willa Cather’s Paul’s Case (1904) is the first American story with a recognizably modern gay protagonist, though it features no love interest at all. Read it and you’ll recognize Paul instantly as a youth suffering from an excess of gay sensibility. Cather dressed as a man, liked to be called William, smoked cigars, and lived with fellow editor Edith Lewis for thirty-nine years. Nonetheless, both Cather and Whitman would go to their graves denying their endorsement of same-sex love to any who might inquire (as John Addington Symons did of Whitman). This is where the obligatory note is inserted by members of the heterosexual-scholarly-industrial complex that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century same-sex friendships were far more passionate than in our own time and that anywhere we might sensibly see gay affection or homoeroticism then we are surely, surely mistaken. Allow me to intone the words of any drag queen this weekend at Legends in Raleigh or The Scorpio in Charlotte: puh-leaze. Gayness is more than whether a certain sex act took place; it is a whole complex of love, lifestyle, and sensibility.

Gay literature without subterfuge began emerging from the American shadows in the twentieth century, with the women leading the way (Gertrude Stein, then Djuna Barnes), accompanied by a flood of imports from Europe (Andre Gide, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness) with American male writers emerging in midcentury (Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, William Burroughs, Paul Bowles, Truman Capote, and James Baldwin).

Perhaps the first overtly gay appearance in North Carolinian letters, somewhat unhappily, arrives courtesy of Thomas Wolfe in Of Time and the River (1935). Eugene Gant, known to us from Look Homeward, Angel, has become a long-winded prig—to my reading—and the only fun to be had comes from hanging out with the liveliest character in the book, Francis Starwick. Gant thinks Starwick is the literal life of the party in 1920s Paris. The whole earth seemed to come to life at once. Now that Starwick was here, this unfamiliar world . . . became in a moment wonderful and good. They have a fine old time gallivanting around Paris until Gant discovers Starwick’s homosexuality. Readers will wonder how he ever missed it. Gant scolds, he rages, he condemns him extravagantly (You are my mortal enemy. Goodbye). He banishes Starwick from his life in language that, Robert Penn Warren noted in his review, was a slush of poetical bathos. . . . The dialogue, the very rhythm of the sentences and the scene itself, scream the unreality.

Starwick gets off one last speech about how he envies Gant the writer, the artiste, who is open to the world and all its possibilities. Few modern readers will see much merit in that speech. Provincial, closed-minded Gant is no one to be emulated. Starwick openly bringing his lover to their revels seems far more world-embracing and admirable. Starwick had a real-life model, as did all of Wolfe’s important characters. Kenneth Raisbeck was a budding playwright whom he met at Harvard and with whom he indeed traveled to Europe. Raisbeck made no secret of his being gay, so the novel’s plot turn is especially odd. By the time Wolfe wrote Of Time and the River, Raisbeck was dead, strangled one night in a cemetery in 1931. A hate crime? A tryst that went terribly wrong? Three years after Of Time and the River, Wolfe himself was dead, from tuberculosis of the brain.

Carson McCullers is rightfully claimed by her hometown Columbus, Georgia, but she wrote The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) in Charlotte, living in Dilworth with her new husband. Though she styled herself in the coded lesbian attire of the day—the short hair, the man’s suit in Catheresque fashion—it is not clear whether her love affairs (with Gypsy Rose Lee, whom she claimed, with Anne-Marie Schwarzenbach) were ever truly consummated. But one can detect a species of gay loneliness in the mannish Miss Amelia (The Ballad of the Sad Café), who gets to watch her unconsummated marriage to Marv end with his running off with her (male) lover. There is also the repressed, soldier-obsessed Captain Penderton in Reflections in a Golden Eye. McCullers’s great subject was always the tomboy: Frankie in Member of the Wedding, and then Mick in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. [Mick] thought a long time and kept hitting her thighs with her fists. Her face felt like it was scattered in pieces and she could not keep it straight. . . . I want—I want—I want—I want—was all that she could think about—but just what this real want was she did not know.

Reynolds Price, born in Macon, North Carolina, did not discuss his homosexuality until late in his career, but made up for lost time with two elegant volumes of autobiography: Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back (2009), in which we learned of his affair with the poet Stephen Spender during his days at Oxford University; and Midstream: An Unfinished Memoir. Price helpfully explains why, throughout the production of twenty-plus novels, that gay subject matter had figured so rarely. I’ve been more steadily interested in exploring lives involved in complex families with lengthy histories which are endlessly subject to change and fate, and such lives are generally heterosexual, he writes. I’ve also observed that few readers are interested, over long stretches, in stories of homosexual life; and I’ve never scorned readers. This is the passage that set off, gently, respectfully, novelist David Leavitt, reviewing the memoir in the New York Times: I take as much exception, writes Leavitt, to Price’s assertion that same-sex relationships are ‘hardly promising as fictional subjects’ as to his exclusion of nonheterosexual lives from ‘complex families with lengthy histories.’ And yet I can’t help suspecting that when Price claims that ‘few readers are interested, over long stretches, in stories of homosexual life,’ what he’s really saying is that, as a writer, he has never been interested in stories of homosexual life.

Toward the end of Price’s astounding run of novel writing (nearly one a year in the 1960s and 1970s), he did permit gayness to figure in the final volume of the Mayfield trilogy, The Promise of Rest (1995). An estranged father and son from an old white family; the son dying of AIDS; his black lover (also infected) committing suicide; the father, who had a secret gay relationship earlier in life, wishing to micromanage his son’s death by keeping the mother away from him . . . This plot would seem to contradict Price’s queer-equals-boring assertion.

AIDS and its reign of terror has, in America, made for a regrettably long list of fine books. But chief among them is Rocky Mount native Allan Gurganus’s Plays Well with Others (2010). AIDS novels have been, understandably, exquisite and somber (Edmund White’s The Farewell Symphony, Andrew Holleran’s The Beauty of Men), but Gurganus’s story of bohemia in Manhattan in the 1980s manages the task of capturing the fun between (and sometimes during) the funerals. The novel’s plot is larger than AIDS though not losing track of the loss and rage of it. There is humor, camp, eroticism, that brand of gay deadpan drollery, bawdiness, and a lot about art and who and what produces it. Gurganus’s story in this anthology, Adult Art, is also masterful, capturing the truth known to all seekers of love that people and their desires do not fit into neat categories—that people afflicted with a special tenderness will seek each other out, whatever the travails.

As we negotiate the Trump Era, as purple-state North Carolina careens from red to blue to red again, a new generation of LGBTQ writers will continue to record and make art from those inevitable travails. Perhaps there will be more tales of triumph than defeat.

So, like all anthologizers, I must beg forgiveness for leaving out some notable people. There were far more stories and narratives on our desks at UNC Press than would fit in a comfortable volume. We have award- winning authors of national fame; nonfiction writers whose lives have been made into movies; young writers in their twenties just starting out—I strove to represent career diversity in addition to a variety of backgrounds and temperaments, fiction, nonfiction, and the rich ground in between. AIDS is mentioned in these stories but it is not a dominant topic, and some will find this a flaw, since this anthology may well be useful in queer studies or gay literature survey courses taught in the state. But there are many sterling collections of AIDS narratives and histories in print; this anthology seemed to me assigned a different task. You will read here of religion and how it’s wielded, parental relations (some good, mostly bad), young love and gay panic, surrogate pregnancies, military service, sibling relations, finding sex, finding one’s innate gender, finding love. In short, a full tour of contemporary LGBTQ life, and a lot of it set right here in North Carolina featuring North Carolinians.

Mostly, I wanted to collect a bunch of good things to read, and that I have done.

Navis

Excerpt from The Queen of Palmyra

Minrose Gwin

The second Saturday morning after we returned to Millville, Mama came into my room with a carpet sweeper, which she propped up against my bed. Okay, now, get on up and clean your floor. Make up your bed nice. Put on some decent shorts. It’s pickup day. She sounded briskly cheerful and smelled like cough medicine. She’d trimmed her bangs short, drawn her eyebrows in perfect crescent moons. She was wearing a pressed blouse of white cotton so thin you could see the scallops of her slip under it and a little blue checkered skirt that had the look of a nice clean dish towel wrapped over the points of her sharp little hip bones. Her three-inch-wide black patent leather belt was pulled in tight at the waist. She’d ratted her bob, and sprayed it down so that it looked like a little spaceship had landed on top of her head.

Cake orders had been coming in hot and heavy all week since Mama put out the word that the first pickup would be Saturday. Over the past two nights she’d been up to all hours rattling around in the kitchen. Sunday pickups were nothing special, with everyone in a hurry to get to church, but a Saturday pickup was something of an event. A flock of what Mama called her Cake Ladies came clucking in like pigeons. Usually they roosted a while, and Mama had a big pot of coffee ready. They stood jammed up against each other in our tiny kitchen, holding their coffee cups and saucers high so as not to spill. They leaned over their cups into one another’s faces and said things in half whispers.

This Saturday the cakes were lined up on the kitchen table. They rested on neatly cut pieces of cardboard with the edges of doilies peeking out from underneath like the wings of angels. The wholes on one side and the still-breathing halves with their waxed paper bandages on the other. From my bed, I could look across our little living room and see their iced tops hovering like puffy white clouds over the kitchen table.

In the kitchen Mama handed me a glass of orange juice and a piece of buttered toast and commanded me to eat over the sink. She didn’t want crumbs on her nice clean floor, which she’d mopped at three o’clock that morning. In the past it had been my job to open the door when I saw a lady coming up the path of stones Mama had put down when Miss Kay Linda, our landlady, complained that grass was getting tromped on. So I took my toast out on the front porch stoop.

Directly I spotted the first lady questing up the path, and soon they all arrived and were carrying on in Mama’s kitchen like she was hosting a family reunion. How much they had missed her! They were ever so happy that she was back in her rightful place as Millville’s cake lady. Nobody’s cakes could get within a country mile of hers. Don’t they look pretty all lined up like that? Martha, next week I think I’ll have a lemon. It looks so nice and cool. This one’s mother’s gall bladder getting taken out or that one’s baby’s cough has turned into scarlet fever or now the outside agitators are trying to stir things up over in Clinton, which was only upsetting the colored, who desire only to be with their own kind just like we do. We’ve been blessed with good colored people in Millville. Lord, down in Shake Rag, the last thing anybody wants is trouble.

When I heard them start on the colored, I opened the screen door and sidled on in, just in time to hear my mother say the word Negroes. She murmured it so lightly that at first I wasn’t sure what she had said. She was leaning up against the kitchen sink, one hand on the long row of ridges. The first time she said the word it sounded like a little breeze sashaying through the two rooms. It wasn’t Negroes really that she said, but Nig-ras with a kind of rasp to it. Once she’d said it, it did some business in the house, blowing out little chats here and there like candles on a cake. The ladies’ eyes folded over their cups as if to keep the coffee warm. They seemed to be holding in one big breath. Then Mama said it again, this time spreading it thicker. Negroes. What I mean is they appreciate being called Negroes.

Then a skitter of ladies snatching their cakes and putting their money on the coffee table. I held the door as they bustled out, their mouths pursed. Out at the curb they clustered, hissing and quacking. Only my mother’s friend Navis stayed behind. Navis typed the town’s tax roll and knew what everybody in Millville was worth. But in every other way she kept herself apart. She was shy with the other ladies. An oddball. She told Mama she hated to see the summer property tax season come around because her left shoulder ached unmercifully from throwing the oversized carriage on the manual typewriter down at city hall. In the summer she spent most of her spare time curled up on her Duncan Phyfe couch with a heating pad, her venetian blinds always tilted to the ceiling because of the glare on her eyes, which burned from all those little numbers. With no husband and children, which she said would have been horribly boring, she was different from Mama’s other cake ladies. Mama had always said she liked Navis because she said anything that came into her head. They wrote letters back and forth the year we were away. Before we’d left Millville, Navis had had a standing order for half a cake a week, just anything left over, darling, she’d say. After Saturday pickups she always outstayed the other ladies and had a second cup of coffee with Mama. They would take their coffee out on the front stoop and sit shoulder to shoulder with the canopy of clematis hanging over them and bees and wasps buzzing all around.

Navis folded her arms over her chest as the ladies scuttled down the stone path with their cakes. She stood there looking out until they’d all driven off. Then she ran her hand through her short red hair. What a bunch of nincompoops! she said. She came up behind my mother, who was now standing with her back to us at the sink, put her arms around Mama’s little waist, and pressed her head up against Mama’s shoulder blades. Martha girl, don’t think twice about it. They haven’t got a brain in their heads, not a one of them, and they’ll be right back on your doorstep next week. They wouldn’t miss coming over here for anything in the world. They’d miss the gossip, much less the cake! What else do they have in their miserable little lives in this hellhole?

Mama laughed a little. The two of them stood there for a minute. Then my mother’s body drooped and she leaned back and Navis held her weight. After a while Navis patted her shoulder, pushed her forward a little, gathered a half Devil’s Food off the kitchen table and slipped out the front door.

After Navis left, Mama went into the living room and collected a handful of dollar bills and some change from the coffee table. A piece of her blouse had come out of her belt. She undid her belt by pulling it with one hand and then releasing it. She threw it on the couch. Mama loved that belt. It showed off her little waist, and she pulled it so tight that the hole had become a slit. Then she tossed the dollars and some coins on the couch. Some fell on the floor. She didn’t pick them up but turned around and looked down at me. She had a fan blowing across the floor, first one side and then the other, the way she always did on pickup morning, so the dollars began to flutter here and there. I snatched them up.

She caught my arm and made me stop so I just stood there until she said what she was so bound and determined to say. Florence, listen to me, we say Negroes in this house. I talked to Zenie and Uldine and Gertrude about this, and that’s what they all said they like to be called. Negroes. Never colored. She grabbed at my head to make me look up at her. Do you hear me, young lady?

Yes ma’am.

I met her stare and we both froze solid for a minute. A heaviness landslid over me and I felt buried under it. Then some meanness rose up in me. From whence it came or why I do not know, but there it was, as full of itself as a peacock. You going to make Daddy say it too? I asked in a quiet little voice. I looked down at a knothole in the floor when I said it. I was expecting her to say in return don’t sass me young lady, go get in your room. Which would have been fine with me. I was getting more and more nervous about making up the fourth grade. Mimi had given me a list of states and capitals and state birds and trees. I had plans to settle in and learn them all that very day.

What my mother did instead of fussing was slap me right across the face. Not too hard, but hard enough to make me miss a breath. Hard enough to make my eyes tear up, which made me hate her guts even more.

Then she said what I thought she’d say, but when she said it, her face looked like somebody had snuck up behind her and pinched her. Don’t sass me, Florence! Go get in your room. Right now.

I could see she’d added the slap into the deal because I’d added something else into my badness. An extra ingredient, like the broken pecans Mama mixed in with her caramel icing at Christmas. Except that they were good. What I’d added was gravel. A mouthful of it.

I wanted to say I was sorry, but something in my mother’s eyes stopped me. She was trembling a little and looking down at me with both fear and surprise. I could see my reflection in her eyes, but it wasn’t the same girl I saw in my father’s eyes, the one with long blond hair that flowed like a river of gold. It wasn’t a girl at all. It was the serpent crawled out from under the rock. The old poison come home.

On baking nights in the days to come, Mama would plop her poison bottle out on the counter like another one of her ingredients. As she mixed and sifted and clattered her way through the night, she’d commence to singing. She had a sleepy voice, or maybe I was just sleepy while I listened to it. Sometimes she turned on the radio and sang along. Other times she just spooned and crooned her own way through the soft May nights. Her favorite song was The Wayward Wind, and she’d sing snatches of it over and over, how old Wayward was a restless wind that yearned to wander and how he’d left her alone with a broken heart. When she sang it, she pelted out the Now I’m alone with a broken heart and then hum a few more bars before starting all over again. Every time she sang it, it sounded a little different and a little sadder. It brought tears to my eyes, but it made me happy too because when she sang it, I could tell she was shooing her sadness out of the house and into the night.

Minrose Gwin, who was born in Mississippi, is an anthologist and editor (Norton’s The Literature of the American South; Remembering Medgar Evers), a scholar (The Feminine and Faulkner; Black and White Women of the Old South: The Peculiar Sisterhood in American Literature), and the author of a memoir (Wishing for Snow) and two novels, The Queen of Palmyra and Promise. Gwin is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; she lives in Chapel Hill and Albuquerque. www.minrosegwin.com

Gaydar

Wilton Barnhardt

Whenever Tyler has a rough week, I get a call. It’s either sitting on her sofa watching romantic comedies until dawn, eating Ben & Jerry’s, or we go to Countrytyme Cafeteria for some Southern comfort food, like Mom used to make, that is, if Tyler’s mom wasn’t a raging alcoholic train wreck and my mom had communicated with me in fifteen years because of the gay thing.

Dinner with Tyler means 90% her complaining about single motherhood, work, Brian being bullied at school, men, crummy worthless men, men who won’t commit, bad-in-the-sack men who nonetheless won’t return her calls, and, if we’re lucky, 10% what’s going on with me. But me and Tyler hanging out, I suppose, is another kind of comfort food.

We hit the cafeteria at the exact wrong time. I look over at the offerings in the steam tables . . . if I have the vegetable plate and no bread, then I can have a pie, calorie-wise. I see another solo mom with a two-year-old in a sling, a wheedling five-year-old girl pulling on one hand, pointing to the array of desserts, and a bored teenage son, maybe fourteen, already out of her command and control, an earring, spiky hot-pink hair. I look at him, and he looks at his mom and affects, ever so slightly, a weary expression. I raise my eyebrows faintly, telepathically signaling, Eh, dinner with mom and the siblings, what can you do? He holds our eye contact a second too long.

Tyler carbs out with baked spaghetti, mashed potatoes, a big yeast roll, and, seeing me get pie, says oh just this once she’ll have the lemon meringue—which is what she gets every time, though the justifications vary. We go through the whole line, point to items, take our little dishes, pay, and find a table without Tyler once pausing in her recitation, the villainies of Joanne. For a boss, she has no understanding of what it takes to be a single mother, she is saying.

I nod. Speaking of, I say, "did you see the single mom in the line in front of us? A toddler, a hyperactive girl, and a gay teenage son. Bet she has it easy."

The boy with the magenta hair? How do you know he’s gay?

He is.

Just because a boy wears eyeliner and has an earring these days, Mr. Everyone Is Gay, doesn’t mean he’s a homo. Brian gets up to stuff like that.

Tyler’s fork roams for bites of her pie and now mine, throughout her