The next week, I didn’t expect to go right back to my desk. I had “won,” but I knew I’d lost even the small place I’d carved out for myself at Shaw. They’d already replaced me since I was supposed to be in Greece. Besides, there was the issue of my security clearance. They gave me a new job that still wasn’t my old job, but at least I wasn’t handing out towels at the gym. My new job was supervising the new airmen, just out of training, who’d been assigned to maintain the dorms—changing lightbulbs, cleaning dayrooms, mowing lawns. At first it was fine. I drove around in a golf cart and made sure everything got done. But soon it became apparent how much damage the OSI had done with their little investigation.

   Everyone on base knew who I was, and what I was, and it didn’t take long for word to spread to the baby airmen I was supervising. Mostly it was just jokes: “Where’ve you guys been? You’re two hours late.” “Hey, don’t ask, don’t tell, right?” But a few of them stopped listening to me altogether. I’d assign them to clean a dayroom; they’d tell me I shouldn’t be wearing a uniform, much less stripes, and there wasn’t a goddamn thing I could do about it.

A month passed and new orders came, to Greece again. Somehow they still hadn’t filled the position I’d been assigned a year earlier. But I only got a day to celebrate before the orders were canceled. The Greece assignment required an add-on security clearance called the Personnel Reliability Program. The PRP is supposed to ensure only qualified people have access to nuclear weapons. Mine was denied because I had a food allergy. I guess you never know when someone will bring guacamole into the office and, bam, my avocado allergy sends me into a guac-fueled rage and I hit the launch button. You just can’t take that sort of risk. I knew then they were never going to welcome me back. My career was over. And that’s when I finally heard from Mikey.

   Because we couldn’t talk on the phone much—this was long before everyone had a cell phone—we used to send books. I sent him The Fountainhead because I thought Rand had some great ideas. (I was nineteen.) He responded with Of Human Bondage. I sent Slaughterhouse-Five. Mikey sent Catch-22. I sent Trainspotting. A few months later, he sent me Fight Club. We’d underline passages we liked, sometimes write notes in the margins. And we’d been doing this ever since I left home. So when I opened my mailbox and saw his blocky handwriting on a package, I didn’t open it in the mail room. I waited until the end of the day, and all day tried to guess what he’d sent me. When I got back to my dorm room and tore open the brown paper, I sat down and laughed—Oscar Wilde. I flipped through the book and found the passage he’d circled.

   Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.

My little brother had been with me through it all. We grew up together in the Family, slept in the same bed for years, had the same stepdad who would never think we were good enough to love. Mikey had seen the worst in me and still loved me because it was never a question—he was my brother. And he knew what I wanted, maybe understood more than I did why I joined the Air Force. I thought I’d find something in the military. I’d wear the same uniform as everyone else. They’d have to accept me because I was one of them. I’d find what every book I read, every movie I watched, told me I’d find: friends and maybe even a sort of family, a place where I belonged.

   But all I’d done was join another cult. And they didn’t want me any more than the last one had. And there was my brother telling me what I knew but hadn’t been able to admit: I’d never belong. But maybe that was okay. I stayed up all night reading. And I knew what I had to do. I wrote a letter.

* * *

—

A few days later, I walked into Colonel Young’s office for the second and last time. His secretary didn’t have to remind me to report. When he said, “At ease,” I handed him a piece of paper. I didn’t trust myself to speak beyond the required “reports as ordered” bit. The letter said, “I’m gay. Please process my discharge.” And on January 12, 2001, I was given an honorable discharge, and forty-eight hours to leave the base.

My DD 214, my service record, says, “Homosexual admission.” It leaves out the other part, that the Air Force was never going to let me leave Shaw Air Force Base, that they didn’t care who’d been threatening me, who’d torched my car, or what that person might do next. The paperwork doesn’t say that they would never accept me, that they gave me no choice.

   So I did what I’d been trained to do my entire childhood when we’d been ready to leave at a moment’s notice: I packed what I needed and tossed what I could do without.

And I tried to come up with a new plan for my life.

The Slide

When I met Jay, he had a mustache and an accent like Julia Sugarbaker, if Julia Sugarbaker’d ever bragged her family owned a double-wide. He lost the mustache eventually. The accent never faded, but did help when I felt like strangling him, which was often. He’s the sort of freak who wakes up in a good mood and thinks singing Bette Midler’s “The Rose” at the top of his lungs will improve yours. He was raised a Pentecostal in some backwoods strip mall with a trailer park on the Georgia-Florida border. He’d never seen snow. But the strip mall had a recruiting station. So he joined the Air Force, and got stationed about fifty miles north, at Shaw Air Force Base.