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Part Two of Three. Read Part One here. First published in PQMonthly.

When I woke up that morning, getting into a physical altercation with a bigot was the last thing I thought I would be doing. I had been minding my own business, puttering around my house, when the word “faggot” came through my open windows on that hot day. It was barked in a harsh male baritone in the context of a conversation, and then it was repeated again. It had startled me so much to hear that ugly word in my own space, in the last place I would expect to hear that word of hate, that I had spontaneously stood up from a sitting position in the middle of my living room. I stood there for a minute, let the feelings wash over me.

I had felt defeated. Small. Less than. I felt helpless. I felt ashamed: this is just the way it is. This is what your neighborhood, what your city, is really like. You will always hear this word through your open window. I felt like I did that time the bullies loomed over us underclassmen at Denny’s, so many years before. I felt the way I did when my friend Helen told me in high school that my secret crush and his best friend intercepted the note I wrote to her, telling her that I was deeply infatuated with him.

At the time I panicked. I’m sure I spent the night unable to sleep. I went to school the next day, terrified that every single person in the school now knew I was gay. Helen told me hurriedly that Mark wanted to meet me later. I went to the meeting meekly, scared that he would be there with all his friends, that he would want to fight me, that he would want to “kick the faggot’s ass.” I could not have been more surprised when he apologized for grabbing the note from Helen, and although he didn’t reciprocate the feelings, he and his friend promised to keep my secret. They did end up keeping that secret, all the way through my graduation.

I remember how I felt that time, like it was yesterday. I wasn’t out in high school. Hell, no one was in Albuquerque High School in the late 80’s…except Jack. I remember Jack’s first name and what he looked like clearly, his sometimes-colored, short-cropped hair, his fashionable Chelsea boots. I remember how he walked down the halls of our high school: with a sense of purpose, like he owned the place, his head held high. Amazingly, I never saw him bullied or beat up, but in retrospect it seems inevitable that he did. “When you put it all out there”, as my friend and former classmate Tara said about Jack, “there’s really nothing left to pick on.”

Without either of us realizing it, Jack influenced me maybe more than a little bit. He was without question the first peer I ever saw who was proud of being queer, and unabashedly out in a time and place that was hostile to him. I regret not getting to know Jack.

Back in the present day, I set my watch, my glasses down on a table before I left my apartment, stepped out of my building into the summer sun. I looked to my left, and there was not one but two figures sitting in the shade, just below my window. I took a deep breath and walked toward them.

With every step I got more information about the people below my window. With every step I grew calmer and calmer, my fists loosened, my fingernails no longer pressing into my palms. With every step I knew this wasn’t going to go at all how I thought it would.

I reached them, one man and one woman, him reclined on the grass of the lawn, and she sitting in a portable chair. I stood in front of them, regarded them. They were both elderly, his voice from inside had sounded like the voice of someone in his 30s or 40s, but not this man easily in his 70s. Neither looked up at me, they just gazed into the distance, silent now. I cleared my throat.

“Hey, has anyone passed by here?” I asked, knowing full well no one had.

The man looked up at me, directly in the eye, and spoke. “No, it’s just been us here for a few minutes.

Hearing his voice, it confirmed my suspicion: the voice that I had heard was this voice, was his voice. I decided to just be direct: “Did you just say the word faggot?” I emphasized the last word, but almost garbled it. My mouth formed around it, spat the word out as if the word tasted vile. I never say the word, even in the company of friends…some of whom can pull off saying it in a funny context, us all tacitly acknowledging that we don’t mean it in a hateful way. Apparently I never got used to using the word in any context, much less jokingly.

“No, uh.” The man sighed, seeming to make a decision. “Yeah, uh, you may have heard me at my, uh, most passionate…”

I cut him off. “Well, someone gay lives here”, I pointed at my apartment, “and it’s me. I don’t want to hear that word in my home.”

He was visibly startled. “I, uh, know a couple of homo- uh, fagg- uh, gays and they’re ok guys.”

“I don’t really care what you think about your friends. I just don’t want to hear that word in my house, okay?”

The woman next to him never looked over, just gazed off into the distance. Whether in obliviousness or embarrassment or spite I’ll never know. “Okay” said the man in a small voice, and looked confused.

I walked back in, and they left the lawn shortly afterwards. The thing that struck me was how confused he was, and it wasn’t due to age. No, he was sharp as a tack. It was that he didn’t even know what words to use for gay people. I wondered what that felt like, to grow up in an environment where it was okay to hate, to be surrounded by friends and family who agreed with the words you used, and then suddenly be in a world where if you use those same words, strangers will come up to you and confront you. What a charmed, privileged life I’ve been living, if I’ve only had to call out homophobes and bigots these few times in my life. Some people have it worse. Some people have it way worse.

I got out my High School yearbooks, got on the computer, and started the search for Jack.

To be concluded in Part 3. If you liked this, then you’re broken forever! Come, take my hand and be more broken: read about my 30-day dating cleanse, or that one time I turned 41. Whatever you do, don’t read about that time I may or may not have gotten crabs.