"Queer as Faith"
by Nathan Gunter

Queer as Faith is Nathan Gunter's unconventional, thought-provoking, and sometimes raw column about struggling to live authentically in the real world.

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This edition:
Room By Room

"Ow!"

Brian drops the table down and it pins his hand against the railing on the steps leading up to the patio. His face takes on a disturbing shape.

"This is the last thing, and then we're done for the day," I remind him. He nods, hoists the heavy table back up, and begins to push toward me. I stumble over the step leading into the front door but hold my grip as best I can.

"Where is this going?" I ask through gritted teeth. My forearms are burning.

"Just right inside, there," he says, and I set it down. It thuds a little too loudly on the living room hardwood for either of us, but we are relieved to have it done.

"So that's all the heavy stuff," I say, placing my arms on my hips and looking around satisfactorily at what looks at once like a starter home and a warehouse. A box sits on the dining room table marked 'Booze and Underwear.' A plastic tote on the ground bears a masking tape label that reads 'Kitchen Stuff: Tasty and Fragile.'

"Let's just go get the pizza and head over to Jaye and Laurie's for the football game," Brian says, surveying the same damage. "We can start to unpack later."

"I guess we do have the rest of our lives," I say, rubbing my eyes. When I open them again, Brian is staring at me wearily, smiling.
 

 
When we first met it was over dinner, and it was very cold within and without. He had emailed me to say he liked my column, and we began talking. I thought, "Here is someone with whom I would love to swap stories." So we met at an Italian place in north Oklahoma City and talked. I told him that I had just had my heart bruised for the umpteenth time by a boy, and we commiserated on The Problem With Gay Men for awhile as if it were a well-known text, like Romans, or Dante's Inferno.

My friends fell in love with him pretty quickly as well, because anything they needed was quickly at his disposal. One night, Laurie complained that her car's air conditioning had gone out.

"I can fix that for you, no problem," he said after taking a look under the hood of her little Ford. "I'll run by tomorrow on my way home from work and pick up the parts, and we can have you air-conditioned by tomorrow night."

Laurie beamed, and looked at me sideways. I pulled her aside. "What?" I asked.

She shook her head as if I had asked her which of her kittens she was expecting to bake in a casserole later on. "Nothing," she replied, shrugging.
 

 
"We can just spray-paint that black," Brian says, gesturing to the hideous brass chandelier in our new dining room. "It'll go with the little shades."

I nod agreement but am too weak to contribute any decorating ideas. The seller left the gorgeous red curtains and wooden blinds behind, and for now, this will do, because we have each other, and are too tired to want anything more.

"I really think we should make a habit out of having people over for dinner once a week," Brian says, imagining the dining room table covered with plates and candles, rather than screws, CDs, and winter clothes, and surrounded by people, rather than boxes. The thought makes me smile.

"I want people to feel welcome here almost anytime," I say, feeling more hopeful than I remembered feeling in awhile, though my arms and back are aching.

"Almost anytime?" Brian laughs.

"I'm not sure I'm well enough to have people just walking in unannounced," I say, backtracking. Brian nods agreement, and I remember why I love him, and us.
 

 
The last time I lived with someone it was a disaster. We shared a broom closet in New Haven for five months, three of which we spent broken up and fighting but too poor and busy to find new places to live.

So, we developed a schedule. He would awake before me - I slept on the couch, as we only had one bedroom - and leave for class. I would get up after he left, walk up Whitney Avenue to class, and be home and done with my work in time to be asleep - or, more often, pretending to be asleep - by the time he got home.

He moved into the apartment two weeks before I did, and when I got there, it was fully decorated and arranged, and there was no room for my stuff. Also, he had made friends and had several offers for dates, and his life was all decorated as well. There was no room for me, and so I ended up sleeping on the couch for months, drinking the tiniest bit of gin - a bottle, say - every night to get all the voices singing the same tune. Once the buzz started to wear off I would lay with my face down on the couch pillows and cry.

No one ever visited. I ordered either pizza or Chinese food every night. Tuesday night I would catch the train to New York, hang out with my friend Liz, who was living in Manhattan while she attended drama school, and come back on the last train Wednesday night, always disheveled.

House centipedes used to crawl across the wood floors in that apartment. When I saw them I would smash them angrily to pieces with my biggest shoes. Sometimes, they left stains.
 

 
As we are pulling up the shelf paper in the kitchen I begin to wonder how I am going to do it. I stole a ring of Brian's to show to Jaye, who works at a jewelry store, to figure out what size to get.

As a political statement it doesn't suck, but this is not why I am doing it. I am doing it because I can look back on every road I have taken in the past quarter century and see that they have all led me here.

Mom was with me when I got the ring size from Jaye. She did not seem to get it at first; she had accompanied me to the jewelry store to get her watch fixed.

"What are you looking at over here?" she asked.

"Nothing, really," I said nonchalantly. I prefer to break news to someone as if it is information they have had days, weeks to ruminate upon. "They don't have a good selection of men's wedding bands."

She looks at me for a second but I don't return the glance. "Huh," she says, sounding only mildly surprised. After all, in the past year I have met someone, fallen in love, and bought a house. Really it was a natural progression.

Every time one of us shows signs of growing up she gets a little twitchy, yet she hugs me tightly around the waist as we leave the store.
 

 
When I was twelve my cousin Robert had a visitor while we were staying with my aunt and uncle in western Arkansas. Robert is over twenty years older than me but has lived at home as long as I can remember. His visitor one weekend was an older guy who unnerved me deeply, because he spoke to me like an adult.

"What does it mean to you that someone is your friend?" he asked one morning. He and I had arisen early and I, in my arrogance, had joined him in my first-ever cup of coffee, so deeply sugared and creamed that it seemed like something you might pour over pancakes.

I shrugged my surly twelve-year-old shoulders. "I don't know," I said. "I guess it just means that they are always there for me."

Immediately The Impress Everyone Police in my mind began to chide me, because this man was intelligent and savvy, well-dressed, and from Seattle, for God's sake! But I could come up with nothing better.

Later, on a trip to the kitchen, I saw Robert and John standing at the sink. I ducked down low so they could not see me, and watched as they exchanged quick, affectionate pecks on the cheek. It was like someone had just shone a little light in front of me. It was like finding buried treasure.
 

 
"I've always wanted a dedicated listening room," Brian says, standing in the den. There is a stone fireplace and a glass-fronted cabinet down here, and it is cooler than the rest of the house because it sits just below ground level.

He handed me the second bedroom in the house, said, "This is your writing space," and then stepped away, and because of that, I will soon have a room in which the only sound will be the clicking of my keyboard and the occasional sound of David Wilcox or Patty Griffin through my speakers. The music will help me to look a little less crazy as I rock back and forth like a heroin addict, trying to figure out the next plot development or snappy piece of dialogue.
 

 
It was on the day that I finished my first novel that I figured out that Brian was the one. I had spent four months hurting because a guy broke my heart, and he was only the most recent of a parade of men I let walk into and out of my life, taking pieces of me, my self-esteem, and my lack of fear with them.

So when I met Brian I ignored the sideways looks that friends like Laurie gave me and pretended that what we had was nothing more than friendship. I figured that, while he was a wonderful man, once I fell in love with him, fangs would descend from his palate and he would rip another chunk right out of me.

So we stayed friends, and I kept him at arm's length, because this is minimum safe distance for someone like, who needs so deeply but trusts so little. I took him to concerts, and he took me to movies.

He came to a show of a songwriter friend of mine, K.C., who performs at a bar in Oklahoma City. I had finished my novel on the day she was set to have a concert, and Brian was so happy for me that he offered to buy all my drinks.

Jaye and Laurie came to the concert with us, as did my mother. K.C. started playing an upbeat waltz she wrote with her husband:

You are to me
What the sunlight is for stained glass.

Jaye and Laurie got up and started dancing in the middle of the bar, showing all the decorum of a married couple who, three years after their wedding are still very much in love.

"I wish I could find something like what they have," I thought to myself.

Brian's seat was directly behind mine. I could feel him watching me. I felt like the lights had turned on me, and I started sweating. I resolved not to turn around. Jaye and Laurie kept dancing. They don't know how to waltz. They move to some other beat, somewhere between the two of them.

Fear leapt up. I closed my eyes and cast my head toward the ceiling, toward the music. I prayed for the merest bit of faith, waiting to feel different. I felt like I was being dared. I did the only thing I knew to do: I prayed one of the best prayers in the world, "Help me. Help me. Help me."
 

 
I became a believer when I was seventeen. I wasn't raised in a churchgoing family, and as a result I have always been the type to search very hard for my own answers. It used to infuriate me when Christians would proselytize to me. Clearly - clearly - I was too intelligent, too savvy to play along.

Also, I liked boys, and, as far as I could tell, this was a problem for Jesus, who, judging by the scared looks in the youth group kids' eyes, was coming back next Tuesday to send half of us to hell and to count everyone else's money.

So you can imagine how shocked I was when Jesus started tailing along after me. Faith is like this; finally you just let it in, because it has become a part of you, and because it requires so little and provides so much.

My conversion story itself is so lame that it makes me ashamed to tell it. My best friend in high school had brought me to church camp with him one night just after our graduation. Jesus had been tailing along after me for months at this point, and, being the Good Little Boy that I was raised to be, I went out and bought every book that seemed reputable and that did not have a cover that looked like a motivational poster.

I read Otto's The Idea of the Holy first, followed by Letters to a Young Poet and, for good measure, Atlas Shrugged. The latter I hated, the former two I ruminated over for months.

But something in me started to turn this night. My friend laid his hand on my shoulder during a time of quiet prayer, and I felt like the inside parts of my chest had started to melt and leak out.

Then the camp people started playing some cheesy contemporary Christian song and I almost got up to go have a cigarette. Instead, I decided that what was happening in me was more important than how cool I felt or looked, which, for any seventeen-year-old, is a major step. I sat there and asked Jesus to hang out inside and walk with me, because I did not know the way on my own.
 

 
"It's really hard to find," I say into the phone, staring down the street, waiting for Erica's car to pass by. Finally, it does.

"Okay, you just passed it. Now, at the next stop sign, make a U-turn and come back, and take a right."

"This is hard to find," Erica says, irritably.

"Which is part of why we like it so much," I say. "No people cruising up the street at obscene hours of the night."

Her car turns up the street and I hang up the phone. I have walked down to the corner to meet her so that she will be sure to turn at the right place.

She grins and unlocks the door. I hop in. "It's four houses down on the right," I say.

"I have to warn you that Brian's grandmother and her friends are here to see the place," I say, "so if they accidentally get the impression that you are my girlfriend, just go with it."

She gives me a weird look; she has never known me to in myself. "It's his grandmother!" I exclaim. She shrugs and climbs out of the car.

A gaggle of old women flood out of the house and onto the front porch just as we cross the front lawn. They are cackling like geese, and Brian is in the middle of them, laying on the charm. I suddenly wish my grandmother knew I had a house, or was in love, and I wish that we did not have to fight these battles and put up these disguises.

In my best gay shreik, I exclaim, "Are you laides leaving so soon?"

They keloid around me and say their friendly goodbyes - "What a good friend you are to Brian to come over and help him put together all his furniture!"

I smile, and let it pass. We don't all need to hop on the train to Politicsville. We just need to help each other put together furniture.

I give Erica the tour, and she stares at me in wonder. She held my hand through all of those romantic disappointments. She warned me against taking back the boys who had hurt me but wanted to come back.

Erica is going to get married pretty soon. She and I used to get drunk together and complain about how there are no good men out there. We used to worry about getting old and being alone. We used to worry a lot. She knew that I liked boys before I did. She also knew that I was a believer before I knew.
 

 
Erica got pregnant three years ago. We were living together at the time. The father vanished pretty quickly. Every night I gave her back rubs and we watched Leno. When she miscarried, on the first cold weekend of the year, I wondered how we would survive. I still do not know how we got through, except for one brief story.

After she got out of the hospital, Erica went to her parents' house to stay for a few days. I went to see how she was doing. She was laying in the room she had had since high school, and her mom had hooked up a television in there so she would not have to lay there and think.

When I arrived I showed up with Cokes, which she had not been allowed to drink while pregnant, and a small bouquet of flowers. I put the flowers in a vase next to her bed and we each popped open a can of Coke. I held her hand and we lay there silently, watching television, praying our guts out that it would hurt a little less a little later on.
 

 
The song built toward a crescendo.

I could still feel Brian staring into me, and Jaye and Laurie were still dancing, their noses buried in one another's shoulders. Something in me was longing much harder and more deeply than I am accustomed to or comfortable with, and I shifted uneasily in my seat.

I imagined what it would have been like if Glinda the Good Witch had told Dorothy right at the beginning: "See those shoes there, on the witch where you dropped your house? They're your ticket home."

Sure, the movie would have sucked, but how happy would Dorothy have been?

The faces of every man that had ever hurt me, and every man I had ever hurt, floated up at me. It was like being in Hell.

I thought back a few nights previously, when a good friend had told me that Brian was really cute, and why was he still single?

My breath caught in my throat. Seconds ticked. The drummer beat out the last measures of the song, and I took Brian's hand in mine and stared deeply into his eyes. I had never noticed before then how brown they were.
 

 
On the back of the house is a sun room. This really was the thing, more than any other, that sold us on living here. On sunny days the light makes it warm, and you can stare out at the back garden.

The house will come along, and at some point it will be a home instead of a wreck. I worry, after we spent a weekend sniping at one another and at our dear friends, that there may, someday, not be enough love to go around. So I am hoping to store up some extra in the walls, and the floors, to write some down and stick it by the phone, to run some up the flagpole and to plant some more in the garden.

I figured out which ring to order.

After we have finished for the day, Brian and I sit on the steps just inside the sun porch. I am raking my hands through his hair, and I kiss him on the back of the head. "When it rains we'll be able to sit out here and watch," Brian says

"That'll be good."

He squeezes my hand. "I'm sorry I've been so bitchy this weekend. This move was stressful."

"I know. It's okay."

"Do you still love me after all this?"

I laugh a little. "It may mean that I'm super screwed-up, but if possible, I love you more."

"You may be a little screwed up. But I'm glad."

The backyard is richly landscaped; the former owner was an interior designer. Brian takes my hand and leads me out into the grass and we stand.

"This is our backyard." He looks at me like he tends to, like he is amazed that I even exist.

"Our backyard." I look around. "I don't know how to take care of any of this. I don't know how to make it grow."

"We'll figure it out," he says, squeezing my hand.

A cool breeze blows the sweat off our faces, and I lay my head on his shoulder. A car passes on the street. Children shout. Minutes pass, and I do not notice.
 

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