Dinner at the Class of 1939 Pavilion, first, where my arrival at the table is greeted with mock amazement designed to hide the real thing. Going to a FLAG meeting isn’t as easy as just showing up at the Richman F. But to assuage some of the guilt from Brian’s call, I head down there tonight. Monday nights are the FLAG meetings, and I’ve been avoiding those too. Brian used to say it was the gayest thing you could do while acting straight. We both loved sports, and though I liked the mechanics of football and the tactics while he liked to follow players and keep statistics, we both liked watching the guys’ butts onscreen. He was a theater arts major and I was English, so he got me to join the Forester Troupe and I got him to read Wilde. But Brian and I never lacked for things to talk about.

Comparing partners was always good for hours of talk, tossing back a couple beers in between bitchy and sometimes wistful commentary (“such a shame… that thick head on that cute ass”). He dated Micha after I did, and we both slept with this ringtail named Allen, who joined FLAG our sophomore year. Not that we didn’t have some partners in common. After that, we were too comfortable with our friendship to want to sleep together. Soon after that, he hooked up with Tad, and by the time they broke up (a memorable scene worth a story in itself), I was dating Micha. That first night, we were both hyperconscious of the “safe sex” talk we’d gotten at the orientation. He said it was because we were too much alike, but the truth is more prosaic. We didn’t sleep together or even fool around, then or ever. Brian and I closed the bar down, then went back to his dorm room and talked until four in the morning. After the meeting, we all went out for drinks.

Out of Position by Kyell Gold