Sprout

1.

COLLEGE TRANSFORMED the landscape of my mind. I started reading Kafka, Paul Tillich, and Kierkegaard (after all, I was at a college with the second-largest collection of Kierkegaard materials outside of Copenhagen). Among the novelists I consumed were Eudora Welty, Salman Rushdie, and Barbara Kingsolver. Sometimes it felt like my head was filled with applesauce.

And there were gay men. Men who shook their hips, whose faces could shift as quickly as Play-Doh, who dressed as geishas—gay-shas (forgive me)—for Halloween. Men who, I thought, were more comfortable with themselves, and others who were, I thought at the time, too gay for me. Men who weren’t the model for the type of man I was, the type of Marlboro man I was trying to become.

I was a Brorby. I came from the prairie. I hunted and fished. I had killed things. I liked tackling and roughhousing with my friends. I liked trying to feel tough. I didn’t need to look tough, but I wanted people to know I wasn’t a pushover.

IN EIGHTH GRADE my social studies and physical education teacher, Mr. Fass, a Vietnam War veteran who had had my own parents as students, called me Muhammad Brorby, after Muhammad Ali. My parents had both been all-state athletes, and my sister—who, a decade earlier than me, also had the pleasure of having Mr. Fass—played volleyball and basketball. I was naturally athletic, so Mr. Fass liked me.

One day, during a lesson on the American Civil War, Mr. Fass belted to the class. “You had to be tough as nails to fight. Tough like Jim Brorby, Taylor’s dad.” My face flushed. “I mean, Jim Brorby was in school before we had wrestling. He would’ve been a good wrestler. He would’ve liked to hurt people and not get in trouble for it.”

Dad, my dad, the Harley-Davidson biker, the man with a Hulk Hogan handlebar mustache, the man whom I had seen cry only at his mother’s funeral. The man who once, while adjusting some shutters on the second story of our house, when I was about twelve, fell from a small stool. I was outside at the time and saw the stool start to jolt. Dad’s body did a slight lean forward and then catapulted backward. He fell like a watermelon from the sky. His shoulder glanced and broke a large, coral-colored flowerpot before he smacked the ground. A large gush of wind bleated from his body. His eyes bulged like a carp on the riverbank, fighting for air. He didn’t break his back, and we took him to the emergency room, forty miles away, in our own car. He refused to have an ambulance called.

The next day he went back to work.

ALTHOUGH MY COLLEGE might not have been as diverse as other places, compared with Bismarck, North Dakota, it seemed cosmopolitan—students from around the world, students from inner-city Minneapolis, students from suburbia. In some ways, I felt like the token frontiersmen: Davy Crockett from North Dakota.

In a humanities seminar during my sophomore year, I remember going through a unit on literature inspired by biblical imagery; the professor lectured on how “the devil is a snare.” He then asked if any of us had set a snare before.

I had, but I didn’t raise my hand.

While he attempted to educate us on how a snare not only is set, but how it works, I began to shift in my seat. He had it wrong. At the end of his talk, my hand shot up.

“Professor,” I said deferentially, “that’s not correct.” I proceeded to share how I had set snares with my cousin Shane in childhood, how I had helped him kill squirrels and rabbits. The room fell silent and tense as classmates—friends—turned in their chairs to look at me, the little ginger in the back, who had the temerity to correct our professor. Once finished, the professor looked at me from the lectern, a Pop-Tart in one hand, his cellphone in the other. I felt like an ass. Throughout college there were points, like this one, where I revealed too much of where I came from.

But, more often, I had professors who were tender, particularly tender male professors. Gentler, they seemed like the counterweight to my father—less Harley-Davidson, less authoritarian, less prone to raising their voice, modeling a certain type of commitment to the life of the mind and the life of engagement.

Jonathan Hill, whom I had as a first-year writing professor, and who would become my adviser, was the first man who unraveled my staid notion of masculinity. A Brit, Jonathan was educated at Keble College, Oxford, receiving both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree. He and his wife, Barbara, spent a year in Dublin, then Sweden, before Jonathan took a one-year position at St. Olaf. As he so often put it, “I came for a year and stayed for a lifetime.”

IN FIRST-YEAR WRITING Jonathan assigned books I had read before in high school—To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, Beloved, The Great Gatsby. This should be easy, I thought. And then we got to Lord of the Flies, a book I had read with Mrs. Lord-Olson my sophomore year of high school. Except, I realized, I hadn’t really read it.

Jonathan pulled off his glasses, rubbed his shiny head, which was ringed with a halo of gray hair, and began to read from page 44. Poised, Jonathan knew, perhaps due to the authority of his British accent, he had us gripped.

“Smoke was rising here and there among the creepers that festooned the dead or dying trees.”

Did I even know what the word “festooned” meant?

“One patch touched a tree trunk and scrambled up like a bright squirrel. The smoke increased, sifted, rolled outwards. The squirrel leapt on the wings of the wind and clung to another standing tree, eating downwards. Beneath the dark canopy of leaves and smoke the fire laid hold on the forest and began to gnaw. Acres of black and yellow smoke rolled steadily toward the sea. . . .”

My pulse quickened. Jonathan laid it on thick—leaned onto the table, his shoulders up to his ears.

“The heart of flame leapt nimbly across the gap between the trees and then went swinging and flaring along the whole row of them. Beneath the capering boys a quarter of a mile square of forest was savage with smoke and flame. The separate noises of the fire merged into a drum-roll that seemed to shake the mountain.”

One paragraph and we all remained silent, rapt, as Jonathan picked up his glasses, which resumed their perch upon his nose. We took a communal breath and began discussion.

I had missed the music of the language, the rhythm of the sentences, when I first read Lord of the Flies in Mrs. Lord-Olson’s class. But now, that music—how language could be used to not only tell a story, but to build imagery and tension through sound and syntax—adhered to my brain.

FOR THE FIRST FEW WEEKS of the semester, Jonathan allowed us to choose whether we wanted to submit creative or academic essays for class. We read a novel a week—always novels—and submitted a four- to six-page piece of writing as well. I always chose creative essays.

One that I submitted to Jonathan recounted a fly-fishing trip to Montana. When describing the moment a fly flits through the air, as it prepares to land on the water, I wrote that the fly “floated like a ballerina in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.” The following week, while visiting Jonathan in his office to go over my essay, I sat next to his desk in a low, wooden leather chair. Jonathan, glasses off again, deciphered the hieroglyphics of his own writing.

“Now, Taylor, I appreciate what you’re doing here in this moment. The focus, the clarity. I can see it.”

Whenever Jonathan spoke, I was entranced. He used language like no one else I had met—was it only because of his British accent?

“But this is too much,” he said. I nodded along as he spoke. “You need not be that specific. Tell us that the fly is like a ballerina—nothing more. You need not specify a composer, much less a particular work. It’s idiosyncratic.”

I thought I knew what he meant, but not really. Why couldn’t my brain work like his? No one in my family read books—at least nothing outside of Mary Higgins Clark or Stephen King. I couldn’t call up a family member and discuss William Shakespeare, much less William Golding. There was a thread to my family that felt like it was fraying with each passing week. Certain parts of me that had to stay silent, locked up in a little box—parts that I didn’t share.

2.

ON A COLD NIGHT, during junior year of college, I went to Pearl’s, a dive bar in the small downtown next to the Cannon River. At night, out on the overhang, the town of Northfield glowed—warm yellow from lamps reflected off the gray river, a few cars illuminated the ice on the streets into a stream of light. As I stood outside on the patio, the gurgle of the water helped conversation flow. After standing outside for a few minutes, I went back in to get another rail gin and tonic.

I pushed through a sea of warm, sweaty bodies, nodding and saying hello to friends. It was karaoke night, and someone was singing “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey. Someone always seemed to sing to Journey on karaoke night.

When I made it to the bar, I wedged between two barstools, placed my right foot up on the brass rail, and leaned onto the long mahogany bar. I waited to flag down the bartender. My friend Leslie sidled up next to me.

Leslie and I had first met while touring Olaf as prospective students our senior year of high school. Bashful, we both said we were interested in other schools.

“I’m certainly going to Wellesley,” said Leslie.

“Who would go here?” I said. “I’m going to Middlebury.”

The truth is, I wanted to go to Middlebury College, an idyllic school in the Green Mountains of Vermont. All the college guides said it was a mini-Ivy. But in 2006 Middlebury cost $40,000 a year, and St. Olaf was $35,000. I did the math and knew that St. Olaf would be $20,000 less over four years. No one had ever told me how financial aid worked. As the first in my family to go to college, I thought the sticker price was the price of admission. The next fall, as first-years, Leslie and I were in a sociology class together at St. Olaf.

“Hello, Taylor!” shouted Leslie as she pulled up to the bar. She gave me a hug.

“Hello, Lezzle-Dezzle,” I said, smiling.

Leslie let out a laugh. When she smiled, her eyes disappeared. Her blond hair swung back, barely brushing her shoulders.

“What are you drinking?” I asked over the din of Pearl’s.

“Oh, I don’t know. What are you having?”

“I’m having a gin and tonic. Let me get one for you.” I slammed my hand down on the bar to get the attention of the bartender, who was flirting with a classmate.

“What can I get you, bud?” asked the bartender.

“Two g-and-ts, please.”

“Sounds good,” he said, turning around to grab a bottle of Seagram’s.

Leslie and I waited, and I rubbed my foot along the brass rail. I looked down.

“How are you, Taylor?” asked Leslie.

“Oh, I’m good. I’ve got class at eight a.m. tomorrow.”

“God, that sucks.”

“Tell me about it.”

I kept rubbing my foot back and forth. The bartender was taking his time.

“Hey, Lez,” I said. Leslie looked over at me. “Can I tell you something?”

“Of course you can. What’s up?”

I breathed in and out, felt it rising in my throat. It was coming. I couldn’t stop it. Leslie looked at me.

“Taylor?”

I looked down at the floor and said it.

“Leslie, I like boys.”

“Haha,” she cackled. “So do I!”

Our drinks arrived. Leslie leaned over and kissed me on the lips.

“That’s so great!”

“Lucky man,” said the bartender.

“Thanks,” I said. “Put these on my tab.”

Leslie gave me a hug, and we turned and headed back into the crowd. She held my hand and a wave of relief washed over me. That wasn’t so hard. There was a bit of a sigh in my body. I breathed easier. She was the first person I told; this was the first time I said it out loud to anyone. It wasn’t so scary, I thought.

It was public: I am gay.

THE PREVIOUS YEAR the New York Times arts section highlighted a young, Peruvian tenor named Juan Diego Flórez. At thirty-five, he was the first person since Pavarotti to get an encore at the Metropolitan Opera, and the first person since the 1930s to have done the same at Milan’s La Scala, the grande dame of world opera houses. In the Times article Flórez looked enticing—young, lithe, with dark eyes and dark curly hair. Frankly, he was sexy.

He was starring in Donizetti’s comic opera La Fille du Régiment, known in English as The Daughter of the Regiment. I went to Jonathan Hill’s office to tell him about my new discovery. Florez was known for his rendition of a particular aria, “Ah! Mes Amis,” the four-minute mile of the tenor’s repertoire: there are nine high Cs, a feat even most of the greatest tenors can never pull off.

“Taylor, come back on Friday. I have something I think you’ll enjoy,” said Jonathan.

By this point, I had been to Jonathan’s house for lunches and suppers—homemade chicken noodle soup, tomato soup with Thai basil and a splash of black truffle oil, pork tenderloin with hoisin-sherry sauce—all of which Barbara, a formidable chef, prepared.

On Friday I rapped on Jonathan’s office door.

“Taylor, hello—yes, let’s stop down at the hall and then go upstairs.”

We walked down the hall together. Jonathan opened a hallway closet and retrieved a record player—yes, a record player.

“Let’s go,” he said in a voice so low no one else would hear.

We made our way to a cavernous room in the English department. The lights were off, but faint afternoon light trickled into the room through the alcoves of leaded windows.

“Let’s go toward the back of the room,” whispered Jonathan.

He set down the record player on a large seminar table in front of a stone fireplace. Jonathan unspooled the cord and plugged the player into the wall.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, whisking away into the hall.

I folded my hands. I didn’t have a clue what Jonathan had in store, but I couldn’t wait.

“Yes, here we go,” he said as he returned. He pulled out a dark vinyl from an album cover. “You’ll enjoy this.”

Through the warm crackling of the record, an orchestra began to play. It was “Ah! Mes Amis”—but whose voice? Jonathan and I leaned back in the caramel-colored captain’s chairs and listened.

I watched a smile form on his face. His eyes were closed. And there we were, my teacher and I, doing something we never did in English class: listening to music. Music—it was a passion of his and Barbara’s, our lunches and dinners often flooded with conversation about Beethoven’s quartets, Brahms, and Schoenberg.

WHEN THE THE LAST HIGH C crescendoed and the music finished, Jonathan emerged from a transfixed state. “Ah,” he said, as if savoring wine.

“Who was that, professor?” I asked.

“That was a young Luciano Pavarotti. Barbara and I saw him before he was a superstar. 1972. But of course he was always a superstar. Look at this, Taylor,” said Jonathan. He showed me the record sleeve. It was yellow, with a picture of the young Pavarotti. In strong, thick ink, the tenor’s signature was splayed across the cover. “When we saw him, we brought this along and thrust it toward him so he could autograph it.”

“Incredible,” I said.

“Well, there we are,” said Jonathan as he packed up the record player.

A moment, that’s all it was, but transformation can happen in a moment shared together.

I ACCOMPANIED the St. Olaf Choir as a CD seller my junior and senior years. In my senior year, the choir toured the East Coast, notably singing in Carnegie Hall. On our free day in Manhattan, I called to get rush tickets for the Met: Flórez was reprising his role in La Fille du Régiment. Few people wanted to attend, choosing other places to sight-see, but my friend Kirsten agreed to join me.

Being with her always reminded me of the book line where we first met. At the time—the first semester of college—I was so very homesick. It was so bad, in fact, that I’d call both my mother and sister each day, and the very sound of their voices reduced me to sobs. Then I’d crack a Diet Coke and weep next to my mini-fridge.

In the line that day, I turned to Kirsten, books piled to her chin, and asked, “Are you ready for this to hurt?” We both giggled nervously and walked back to our first-year dorm together. From then on, I was friends with Kirsten, stopping by her room regularly, making friends with her friends. We shared a love of dancing—bumping and grinding, twirling, dropping it like it’s hot. Our favorite dance of the year, Drag Ball, meant drag queens and bass-thumping music. Men and women dressed in drag—even my straight male friends, who were, let’s face it, hideous as women, joined in. I’d have faux butterfly tattoos on my shoulder, sea green eye shadow, channeling my inner diva. Kirsten would pencil on a goatee and wear a basketball jersey and baggy shorts, an off-kilter baseball cap on her head.

Now we were in New York City, going to see a star of the stage, the heartthrob Peruvian with the world-renowned voice. When we got to Lincoln Center, we entered the large lobby, where two massive Chagall tapestries hang, collected our rush tickets, and stood at the back of the hall. When the curtains pulled back and the audience began to clap, we held our breath as the lights lowered.

The opera began and soon it was time for that signature nine-high-C aria. Kirsten, unfamiliar with the opera, didn’t know when the aria was coming. On the way to Lincoln Center, I had informed her, over and over and over again, how incredible this aria was—and when the time came, I looked over at her, and poked her in the thigh: it was go time.

There was electricity in the audience as Flórez roamed about the stage. When the violins buoyed, he stood and faced the audience. There was one, there were two, there were three high Cs. Kirsten looked at me, a smile across her face. He went and went and went. When ”Ah! Mes Amis” finished, we erupted with the requisite Bravos! and whistles, too.

SINCE CARNEGIE HALL took over the CD sales for the St. Olaf Choir, the next day was another free day for me. I decided to go to the Museum of Modern Art to see Jackson Pollock’s paintings.

Wandering through the white-walled corridors, I eventually came around a corner and there it was: One: Number 31, 1950, that large splattering of white and black across tan-colored canvas. Like a magnet, it pulled me in, engulfed me, devoured me.

A family quickly left the room when I entered. I was alone with the painting. I sat on a small black leather bench and studied Pollock’s lines. I had never taken an art history or art appreciation class, but there was something primal Pollock did for me—was it chaos or order or spontaneity? I didn’t know. But I knew I liked it, that I couldn’t look away.

After a while a man came into the room. About five feet ten, trim, with a contoured blue blazer, white oxford shirt, its three top buttons unfastened, a curly tuft of brown hair around his head, dark, mahogany eyes.

He sat down at the opposite end of the bench. I looked over at him and we smiled. After a few minutes, he rose and walked in front of One: Number 31, 1950, temporarily blocking my view. His pants were tight, and I stared at the outline of his ass. When he reached the end of the painting, kitty-corner from me, he looked over his shoulder and smirked. I turned red and looked away. He crossed in front of me and sat back down on the bench, this time straight as a two-by-four, content, smiling, and looking ahead at the painting, his hands folded in his lap.

I wasn’t nearly as well dressed as he was, with a large peacoat over a camel-colored oxford shirt, black slacks, and a black, blue, and gold scarf. I had not come to the museum to try to radiate sex appeal.

Regardless, I sat up, breathed in, and rose. I walked in front of One: Number 31, 1950 puffed up like a goddam peacock. When I crossed in front of him and reached the end of the painting I, like him, looked over my shoulder. He smiled.

He rose, came over to me, grabbed my hand, and whispered, “Follow me.”

Somehow, we found a single-person bathroom. When we got in, he locked the door and smiled.

At this point, I had taken to carrying a condom in my billfold. I don’t know why—I wanted to have sex, but, like any repressed gay man from the prairie, I was too shy to find it on my college campus. I didn’t dare tell my partner I had never done it before. It was time for me to put my book learning about how to have gay sex to use.

Then we started in.

WHEN WE FINISHED, I said, “Thank you.” We washed up and left the bathroom—separately, of course. Suddenly, what Jackson Pollock was doing in all those paintings struck me on a different level.

3.

IN EIGHTH GRADE, I took second place in state wrestling. Or that’s what I told new friends in college. There was something about the close contact, about using my body to push and heave and pull against other boys, that appealed to me. But everyone on the team—including Matt (my future brother-in-law’s younger brother), Robert (a boy three years older than me), and my neighbor Mark—seemed to have a chip on their shoulders: they all seemed to scowl more than smile, and seemed to enjoy their newfound skills in overpowering people. Some boys on the wrestling team seemed to relish the ability to beat up smaller children. I had no need to beat up anyone. What I needed was a narrative to help change what I thought people perceived me to be.

In neighboring Minnesota, when I was at St. Olaf College, I began to test out my new made-up narrative. I gave credit to my father. Five hundred miles from home, I told my college friends that my father had pressured me to be in the sport, which, to my memory, he never did—but since he looked like Hulk Hogan, everyone believed me. Of course, he’d want his son in wrestling, they thought. And since I have a small frame, one that when I crouch has a low center of gravity, people believed me even more: I looked like I could’ve been a wrestler. I concocted the story of taking second place because taking first seemed like sheer bragging—plus, second place had a better punch line: I told people that I knew I could’ve taken first when I was on top of my (imaginary) opponent if I just whispered “I’m gay” in his ear. They would laugh. The joke seemed to work. They believed that I could’ve been a wrestler.

Throughout elementary and middle school, I played basketball. I practiced layups and free throw shots, played shirts versus skins, ran up and down the court to work on my stamina. But chasing a ball made me feel like a dog, and watching other teammates’ eyes widen and stare at my belly so they could anticipate where I would cut on the court made me giggle.

Football didn’t appeal to me. My father had knee surgery just before I entered seventh grade, the year I was eligible to join the team, and he kept saying it was because of the sport that he needed the operation. It didn’t help that when I slipped a football helmet on my head, I started to hyperventilate and panic because my vision was so limited by the hard plastic. Whenever I went to a football game, I thought the players looked like great heaving rhinoceroses as they slammed their bodies into one another, and someone inevitably got carried off the field.

Instead of wrestling, I joined the speech team in seventh grade. Mrs. Harrison, the frizzy-haired, full-bodied woman who had also been my music teacher, was our coach. I was the only boy on the team.

It was obvious I was not part of the community of boys, not part of their camaraderie. I wasn’t wrapped up in the world of the people I lived around. I wasn’t part of a team, really—or the right kind of team, at least. I was relegated to an activity where my winning or losing was solely based on my individual ability.

But I was good at it.

EACH MONDAY OUR small school would have announcements—reports from the sports teams, upcoming events, and who took what place in speech competitions. I began to dread Mondays because, on Saturdays, I would inevitably place in those competitions. It began with seventh and sixth places, then I slowly notched up, qualifying for the state competition in categories from Humorous Interpretation and Humorous Duo to Dramatic Duo and Poetry. And then the mocking would come. I had become a sissy, a faggot, a girl—because only girls, I was reminded by other boys, were on the speech team. My parents would gleam with pride when I’d bring home a shiny trophy each weekend, but I would bite my nails knowing I’d be harassed at school. With each Monday, I felt more and more uprooted: each week I felt a taste of glory, while the boys in my class, who had inevitably lost their football and basketball games, snarled with envy.

BUT THE TRUTH is I did wrestle in college, in a way. My first year at St. Olaf College I was in a saxophone quartet with a boy named Chris. I was a music major, and he was a chemistry major. With our two other new friends, Emily and Alex, we squared off and played arrangements of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos or Fauré’s Pavane. In high school, I had friends who loved music, but I was always first chair in wind ensemble and jazz band. Now, I struggled to keep up with Emily, Alex, and Chris. They were better than me, their fingers more dexterous.

After practice, Chris and I would make arrangements to play racquetball. We’d hurry back to our dorm rooms, change, and meet at the campus gym to check out rackets. We’d wallop the bright blue ball against the high walls, off the ceiling, trying to place it just so—right in the pocket, in the corner, close to the floor, which would kill the spin on the ball, making it impossible for our opponent to get there in time.

We played weekly throughout college, learned the intricacy of the rules and each other’s moves—Chris knew my left backhand was weak; I knew if I smacked the ball hard enough off the back wall, Chris wouldn’t sprint fast enough to reach it before it bounced twice. I’d get a point. We’d sweat and huff, sometimes we’d laugh and murmur Nice shot.

It was a competition, but in many ways it wasn’t. There was something intimate about running around a room, trying to get better, but there was also a type of joy in having an opponent who was close in skill to you, someone you knew you could beat on your best days, but you prayed that each day you played was your best day. Chris and I would often go into tiebreakers.

I CAN’T REMEMBER the year of college when it happened, but one day after we called it quits on the court, I put Chris in a headlock to give him a noogie—or maybe he put me in a headlock. Sweaty, we gripped each other and rocked back and forth. I asked him if he wanted to go to the wrestling room just down the hall so we wouldn’t get hurt on the hard wooden floors of the racquetball court.

He agreed.

We opened the door to the wrestling room, slipped off our shoes, wiped our sweaty brows with the back of our forearms, and walked across the soft mats to the far circle. We squared up, raised our arms in front of our faces, and shot at each other—sometimes we locked up right away, other times we shot at each other’s knees or belly.

I picked him up and tried to slam him, to put him on his stomach, to get on top of him to . . . well, to what? I’m not quite sure.

We tried to pin each other, but it seems that we were more interested in rolling around, in putting each other in holds, of sometimes making the other person tap out, or come close to tapping out and whisper in his ear, Ya done?

It was a different type of struggle, one that brought me closer to Chris, both physically and emotionally. From then on, we still loved to play racquetball, but there was always the assumption that wrestling matches would follow. There was no second appendage, no racquet; it was just our bodies, our hands, our sheer weight on the other person, trying to keep him down.

Sometimes we’d go for evening walks through the prairie that circled around the college and Chris would tell me what he learned in chemistry. By this point in our friendship, I had switched to an English major and raved about Lord Byron and the poetry of E. E. Cummings. We’d find some patch of grass in the darkness and roll around together. Or we’d get into it in our dorm rooms, the space cramped, the floor hard, our sweat pooling in the stagnant air. Wrestling was now a type of bond, the kind of camaraderie the other boys had had in high school. There was some urge in me that each time Chris and I were together, we had to get physical. I didn’t fully know what it was, but I experienced it as a type of overwhelming surge in my body—to put him in headlocks, to see if I could escape his holds.

No matter where, while we tossed around, I kept my ears open. I would sometimes turn my head slightly to see if I caught the subtle sound of someone coming—conversation flowing across the fields, the squeak of a shoe just beyond the dorm room door. I didn’t want to be caught; I wanted this to stay between Chris and me. Wrestling with him tapped something in me, something I hadn’t felt before.

I ALSO WRESTLED with other guys in college—former jocks more muscular than me. There was a deep satisfaction about pinning a guy who was stronger, someone who spent time lifting weights and building muscle; there was a self-knowledge that I knew how to use my body in ways a friend didn’t—that, if we got close, I could put them on their back, smile overtop them. A self-satisfaction that confirmed I could outmaneuver them. Sure, they could put more weight on a rack than I could, but they couldn’t pin me, make me tap out. There was pride in that for me, a boy who struggled with a type of inferiority complex about how small he was.

One of those other guys I wrestled with was named Tom. He was a few inches taller than my five-foot-six-inch frame, weighed about twenty pounds more than me, and had run cross-country and played soccer in high school. Tom was so fit he had veins like rivulets flowing across his biceps.

Tom would throw his hands up in front of his face, then snap them behind my sweaty neck, and we’d push against each other, his hot breath making my nose scrunch.

One day, during our sophomore year, the door to the wrestling room opened. The college wrestling coach walked in. He was a small, wiry Iranian man.

I immediately let go of Tom. My face flushed.

“No, no, keep going,” said the coach. “I want to see how you two work.”

Neither Tom nor I was ever on a wrestling team. Neither one of us had been taught to wrestle by a coach.

We refocused. I looked at Tom with a slight frown (Tom whispered to me that it was going to be okay), and we went at each other.

The coach would stop us, ask me to do a move—to repeat it, to try it faster. He never asked Tom to do a move.

Tom became a type of wrestling dummy for me to grab, to trip, to toss down on the crimson wrestling mat. It made me feel confident that I could outmaneuver men stronger, physically bigger, than me. That I knew something of the world of aggression and how to use momentum, how to leverage my small body against an opponent, not only gave me an outlet for any aggression stewing inside me, but it also gave me a private type of confidence that allowed me to not be so afraid of straight men. In wrestling, it seemed, I found I could hold my own.

“You should come to our practice tomorrow at five,” the coach said to me. “You’re a natural.”

I closed my eyes, swallowed, nodded, and thanked him for the invitation.

“You’re serious that you’ve not been coached before?” he asked.

I shook my head and told him no.

Afterward, as we put our shoes on, Tom smiled at me.

“Oh, look at you. You could be on the wrestling team, Mr. Tough Guy.”

I pushed him as we sat on the floor and tied our laces. We smiled at each other.

BUT I NEVER WENT to that wrestling practice because some type of embarrassment bubbled inside me. I had been spotted by a third party practicing my private pleasure with a close friend, and I wanted to keep wrestling a secret—my own worry over my homosexuality and the homoeroticism of wrestling kept me in check. I wanted to hold in that I found struggling against other men pleasurable, that I enjoyed being close to other men, that there was something inside me that wrestling disabused me of: that I was weak, easy to overpower. The act of wrestling men stronger than me, and realizing that I could beat them (I naturally knew moves my friends didn’t) reinforced that I, at heart, wasn’t a powerless little gay boy, that I could, if I wanted, hold my own against strong men. I knew how to press their elbows against their ribs so that they’d rip their arms up into the air to make me stop hurting them—I could then shoot into the hole they made, pick them up, and slam them down. The move was called a duck under.

I felt something else wrestling with Chris, something I didn’t feel with Tom or other guys, and as college progressed, Chris and I spent more time together—or I pressured him to spend more time with me.

I was friends with his many girlfriends—but I was friends with them so that they liked me, which would mean they’d say nice things about me to Chris, which was my ulterior motive.

Over time, something else was added to Chris’s and my friendship, something I had never done with another man—we started to cuddle. We’d lie down on the futon in my dorm room: Chris would be the big spoon and I’d push myself back into him, the two of us curled together like a pair of question marks.

I don’t remember when it first happened. I don’t even remember how it happened. The origin moment has faded from my memory, but it feels like it was always there, like we had always cuddled.

But we hadn’t, and we wouldn’t.

BY SENIOR YEAR, Chris and I lived in the same suite, with a common room with eight other men. We’d stay up late, play Super Smash Bros. or Mario Kart together on the N64. I’d eventually poke him in the rib when he’d start to fade, my signal that it was time to wrestle, and he’d jump on top of me. We’d roll around as quietly as possible. I prayed none of our suitemates heard us.

When my roommate would spend the night in his girlfriend’s room, I’d ask Chris to spend the night with me. I’d fold down the futon, throw a blanket or two and a few pillows onto it, and we’d settle in.

I knew Chris was straight, but I couldn’t tell why he’d submit to cuddling with me. Sometimes, as we were lying there, I’d ask him why we were doing this—why we were spooning, why we were sleeping next to each other.

“Because it feels good,” he’d say.

“It doesn’t bother you that I’m gay?” I’d ask.

“Of course not.”

I’d silently smile and press against him. I liked how he’d slip one of his legs between mine, how we fit tightly into each other. I liked when he wrapped his arm around my chest and held me.

THERE WAS A MORNING, though, where we were discovered. Early one Saturday, loud banging on my door snapped me awake.

“Taylor, is Chris in there?”

It was Chris’s girlfriend.

I shook Chris awake.

“Tara’s here,” I whispered sharply, my eyes wide.

Groggy, Chris woke up. “Shit,” he mumbled.

He put on his shirt, ambled over to the door, and slipped out.

I heard Tara’s voice say how she had tried to call him multiple times last night, how she was worried about him, how she had texted him. Why was he in my room so early in the morning? she asked.

I sat up on the futon and hunched over, shirtless, looking at the floor. This was it. We were found out—though, what exactly were we found out about?

Chris was straight, I was gay. We liked to wrestle, and we enjoyed sleeping next to each other. Chris confirmed over and over that we just liked to cuddle. That was it, nothing more.

I always thought Chris’s girlfriend, Tara, was a lesbian. Because she had a strong body, played softball, and seemed emotionally stifled and reserved, I projected stereotypes that she must be queer. And that made me think—or hope—that Chris might be gay. Maybe they were both keeping up a front, I thought.

It’s illogical, of course, yet at the time my love for my friend went into a realm beyond friendship. I grew up on a repressed plain where bonding happened in coal mines, fixing fences, or at the bars. Getting into fights was a more permissible way of showing emotion.

Wrestling now had become something else between Chris and me. It became more fraught.

AFTER COLLEGE, Chris and I both lived in the Twin Cities. He was in graduate school for chemistry, I for writing. There wasn’t a wrestling room anymore. Instead, late at night, we’d wrestle on the hardwood floor of my duplex. I hoped we wouldn’t wake my two housemates. Our wrestling began to happen so late at night that I’d always ask Chris to spend the night. Usually, he would.

By now, in our midtwenties, I knew I loved Chris, but I couldn’t say it. I didn’t want to lose his friendship, but my inability to express what I was feeling—channeled through increasingly tense wrestling matches—pushed Chris away.

So did my drinking.

I’d go out to gay clubs on the weekends and on weeknights. I loved the two-for-one nights of glasses filled with cheap gin and a squirt of tonic—how they fired down my throat, temporarily burning away the pain I was feeling inside.

I danced on top of cubes, watched men perform in a shower at the Saloon, and listened to drag queens lip-sync to Cher, Britney Spears, or Madonna at the Gay Nineties.

My gin-infused world was something I knew, coming from a long line of alcoholics: my great-great-grandfather drank himself to death; my great-grandfather drank heavily into his nineties and went blind; my uncle, a diabetic like me, drank until he died after his second divorce; and when my paternal grandmother’s siblings came back to town every summer, we locked the doors because, after drinking, they got violent.

Now, in the Twin Cities, I couldn’t cope with my overwhelming love for Chris. I’d slowly and drunkenly drive the East River Parkway home to my duplex. I traced the meandering Mississippi River in a drunken haze, passing underneath a canopy of oaks and maples. I’d focus on the curb and the dotted lines. I told myself to take it slow, that if I went slow, I’d be safe.

But sometimes I raced onto the highway, gunned my small Dodge Stratus, barreled toward . . . toward what? I didn’t want to die, not really, not yet. But I wanted love. And I wanted that love to be between Chris and me. Drinking was a way of dealing with my love for him.

CHRIS’S AND MY FRIENDSHIP came to a crashing halt on the night of my twenty-fifth birthday party. Friends in St. Paul hosted; I made cheese platters and charcuterie boards, taking those to their home along with cold bottles of champagne.

As the night went on, I began to wobble. I began to swish. My housemate James thanked the hosts, gripped my shoulders, slipped me out the door and into his car, and drove me home.

Two other friends were waiting for us as I stumbled into our living room, ripped my jacket off, and flung it against the wall. James’s eyes widened as I passed Molly and Sarah, a pair of sisters.

“Play something on the piano,” I stammered at James.

He began to play Bach when I returned from the kitchen with a gin and tonic. I plopped down onto the bench with James, looked at Molly and Sarah, and asked, “You want to know what Bach sounds like?” I started singing along to the melody. “This is what Bach sounds like with a dick in your mouth.”

No one laughed. I didn’t even laugh. I folded over onto my thighs, the gin and tonic in my outstretched hand.

I pushed up from the piano bench and stumbled into the kitchen, pulled out a half-empty gallon jug of milk, went into the dining room, which connected to the living room, and hurled it across the rooms. It skidded across the floor and stopped by Sarah’s feet.

I remember Chris eventually arrived. James mentioned that I was his problem; Molly and Sarah left for home.

“Okay, big guy,” Chris said as he wrapped my arm over his shoulder to help me to bed.

And then I woke up and it was morning. Chris was no longer there.

And Chris didn’t call me back for days, for weeks. He didn’t answer my texts. I felt he was ghosting me.

WHAT I EVENTUALLY learned from an angry voice message from Chris was that when he got me into my room that night, I went limp and fell on top of him on the bed, fully clothed.

And then I humped him.

Repeatedly.

I was told I didn’t kiss him; I didn’t even say anything. That, after a minute, I just rolled off him and passed out. Chris took off my shoes, placed a light blanket over me, and left.

That was the last time I saw him for years.

I CREATED THE WRESTLING narrative, I suppose, as an attempt to make myself seem exotic. In adulthood, with a move every few years, I had the opportunity to reinvent myself, which usually meant embellishing the boring real facts of my life: that I was a homosexual who loved listening to NPR, going to the orchestra, fly-fishing, researching fossil-fuel extraction, reading, singing Disney songs, and going out dancing. What no one expected—because it was an outright lie that I was skilled at making everyone believe—was that I was once a wrestler. The narrative fit into people’s perceptions of North Dakota: why of course I was on the wrestling team—what else was there to do? Wrestling, unlike polo or riding, is a lower-class sport, and yet there was a type of appeal for everyone—or at least so I thought—because it was hard-bodied boys in skintight singlets. Women sighed while thinking of muscular high-school wrestlers; men groaned, regretting they weren’t one. Though no one admits it publicly, it’s not the violence and power we’re attracted to in wrestling—it’s how much skin shows between two men hunched so close together.

I wanted to be a wrestler. So, I made up that I was.

But the imaginary story I told revealed a deeper story about myself: I wanted to be straight. Because only straight boys, I thought, were on the wrestling team. I wanted to fit in: it would have been so much easier to be straight when everything—every coyote, every pheasant, every person—struggled. I wanted to struggle a little bit less, and telling my made-up story allowed me to believe that, if only I had been brave enough to join the wrestling team, I would’ve found a way to fit into my small world. My lie became a way to continually beat myself up, the realization that if only I could have conformed and been what my town wanted me to be, I would have not been bullied, and I would not have fought to get out and go to college.

Another reason I wanted to be on the wrestling team was that I wanted my body to change. I wanted some insurance that I wouldn’t be bullied, that I would learn how to get stronger, how to hold my own, how to pump iron and get a body like my neighbor Mark. I liked the team’s little singlets, imagined wearing the skintight outfit, hoisting the straps over my shoulders and letting them snap against my skin before entering the circle and spinning and flipping against an opponent. I wanted to be on the wrestling team because it was hand to hand, close quarters, in your face. It was an individual sport, one where you tested your mettle against someone else.

But I didn’t crave wrestling to hurt anyone, to outright overpower them. I think I wanted to wrestle because there are so few opportunities for boys and young men to be close to each other. You don’t hug other boys in middle school. You don’t place your hand on their shoulders as a sign of affection. You punch them. You push them into lockers and smile. You test them through sheer brute force. But some part of my brain thought wrestling could exist on a higher plane—like, if you had the right teammates, they would find grappling to be a type of affection, not a kind that led to sex, but one that just acknowledged you were given permission to be close to another person of the same sex. That you were in some type of struggle together, that, as teammates, you were trying to make each other better.

Since the prairie is a place of vulnerability, both physically and existentially, where humans and animals must be resilient to survive its harsh conditions, I think I wanted to bring some fragment of home with me when I left for college. I wanted some story that I had dreamed up, one rooted to a type of physical prowess necessary for survival. Nothing, after all, survives on the prairie by being tender.

So, I fled.

But deep inside me was a yearning for home, for a way to return. For me, home is a place constructed by the beauty of milky buttes, of the bright song of the western meadowlark, of the elusive bobcat slinking through the river bottoms. Home, for me, is land. As I’ve so often said after leaving North Dakota, “I love the land, not the people.”

And perhaps that’s where this self-aggrandizing myth originated. I wanted a story of me battling against the bullies, rather than playing music through tears when I skipped study hall. I wanted new friends to believe that I was more complicated than what I perceived as my clichéd gay narrative of the little boy who liked the arts.

I wanted to rewrite my narrative to imagine there was a way that, if only I had been brave enough when I was small to stick my neck out and join the wrestling team, I would have liked living in my small town, at least on some level.

I wanted to find a story where a little gay boy could fit into the world he came from, rather than running to find a way to escape the prairie of his childhood.

A FEW YEARS LATER, Chris and I met at Everest on Grand, a favorite Nepali restaurant of mine while I lived in the Twin Cities. Over momos and chicken palak I shuffled and apologized to Chris. Now, in my late twenties, I admitted that I had been in love with him throughout college and graduate school. I didn’t dare say it during those years because I was afraid of losing our friendship, which I had done by pressuring him to wrestle with me and by growing jealous of his relationships with women.

Chris nodded, said he knew, but that in hindsight he, too, was getting something from our wrestling matches, our nights cuddling together on futons and in beds—not love, not in the way all those years earlier I wanted to love him, but something like comfort. Yes, something like that.

My shoulders relaxed. We smiled and ate our meal.

4.

IN MY FOUR YEARS at college, I tried to hide the fact that I came from western North Dakota. I tried to lose my Midwestern accent, use polysyllabic words, and read the “great books.” Like lignite coal, I smoldered into something else—and, I hoped, the change was to something bright and luminescent. North Dakota was not a place to write about. A benighted place with backward people, North Dakota, as I was told by the wider culture and college classmates, was empty, void of culture, of history, of meaning.

But Jim disabused me of that notion.

THE FIRST CLASS I took with Jim Farrell was Environmental History. I was briefly a history major, so I expected to encounter primary sources, arcane reading, and a plethora of footnotes. Jim, instead, gave us an essay that appeared in Minnesota Monthly, about one woman’s examination of shoes, particularly her great-grandmother’s shoes from nineteenth-century prairie life in the still young state of Minnesota.

The essay read well. It was infused with historical detail and meticulously researched—but no footnotes, no endnotes. What was the point of this? It wasn’t what I was used to reading as “history.” I had drunk the Kool-Aid of academe: researched writing should be dry and stuffy, and it should not read well—it should be a difficult task to decipher what any author was saying.

“This—this article—is how you might consider writing history,” Jim said. “Don’t you want to keep reading? Isn’t it engaging? It’s fun.”

And it was. It was a casual writing style I wasn’t encouraged to use in my other history classes. This woman wrote “I” statements: “I noticed my grandmother’s shoes,” “I felt a connection to her.” We, those of us who took college seriously, weren’t supposed to “notice” or “feel” in our academic papers for other classes. The text showed, the author stated—and there was no room for “me,” for “I” statements in academic writing.

JIM’S METHOD OF TEACHING was Socratic. Instead of “professing” his expertise, he asked questions that created conversation. “What did you think about this? Did you notice something unique in the reading? How do you feel about that?”

One day in Environmental History, after reading about big-box-store consumer waste, I was on fire for social justice.

“Why the fuck do people shop at Wal-Mart?” I bellowed naïvely.

My classmates chortled.

And Jim, in his quiet, wry way, made it into an educational moment.

“Why did you all laugh when Taylor said ‘fuck’? Is it because you don’t think we should swear in college classrooms? Where do we think we should be able to say the word ‘fuck’? Why don’t you laugh when I say ‘fuck’?”

“Fuck,” in this instance, became one of Jim’s notable “dense facts.” This was an idea Jim infused throughout his classes: everyday items represented more than just what they appeared to be—a bumper sticker is not just a bumper sticker, it is a social moniker. We believe the sticker is an individualized expression of ourselves—and bumper stickers are not only on car bumpers, but also on computers, reusable water bottles, guitar cases, or doors.

Pulling back the everyday to reveal patterns, social constructs, and problems, not only with bumper stickers, but with food waste, with consumerism, with education, and with how we treat the natural world, was what, according to Jim, education was for.

For several years, Jim hosted Dr. America, a short radio program on WCAL, the college radio station. Dr. America—Jim’s alter ego—oversaw the (wholly imaginary) American Studies Museum, where, for five minutes each week, he pulled out one of his curiosities—the Nike swoosh, the Mall of America, the saying “shit happens,” or the high heel—and peeled it apart, layer by layer, to reveal the cultural work inside the object. These musings were the basis of the second class I took from Jim: Introduction to American Studies.

In Intro to American Studies, we read Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams (Jim was the only non-English teacher I studied with in college who used novels, poetry, and essays to teach another field). We studied billboards, watched commercials, and debated Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

We kept a journal, too, something we had done in Environmental History. I noticed questions we used as prompts on the syllabus: “Why am I here? What’s education for? What are my goals in education? Why am I in this class? What are my goals for this class?”

Why was I there? Because it was an introductory class, sounded interesting, fulfilled a requirement, and would be, or so I thought, an easy A.

What’s education for? To get a good-paying job. After all, that’s what Mom and Dad often reminded me it was for.

What were my goals for education? To skate through with a decent GPA to get that good-paying job, maybe as a lawyer, or even a doctor.

Why was I in this class? Because I liked Jim.

What were my goals for this class? To not fail. To get an A. To do the work, but not all the reading.

I looked down the list of how the semester was organized and wondered how Jim’s brain thought up this stuff: “Why We Brush Our Teeth and Other American Studies Questions”; “The Truth About Stories”; “The Stories About Truth”; “The Truth About Commercial Stories”; “TV Stories”; “The F-Word and American Culture”; “Stories of Race”; “Stories of Color and Blindness”; “Stories of Citizenship”; “Toy Stories”; “American Dreams, American Stories.”

We read The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, by the Canadian writer Thomas King. In it, he wrote, “There is a story I know. It’s about the earth and how it floats in space on the back of a turtle. The truth about stories is that’s all we are.”

And I thought of the stories of my life—of hunting with Dad and Uncle Greg, the smell of gunpowder in the air after shooting at pheasant, pheasant we’d later throw in the Crockpot and slather with cream of mushroom soup. And I thought about the stories of my great-uncles, Uncle Frank and Uncle Pete, two men I never met, but about whom my Grandpa Hatzenbihler told such vivid stories that I’d swear they just walked out of the room.

Somewhere in me I knew what Thomas King meant, for it is stories that helped orient my life. Stories were bedrock. Stories—stories of others going to college—led me here, to St. Olaf. And now, too, I was creating a new story in my family: the ability to go to college. I went to professors’ office hours frequently because I craved their stories: How the hell did they wind up here? What is this thing called graduate school? Could that be part of my story? Can you really make a life reading and writing and still pay the bills?

TOWARD THE END of the semester, we each had to pick an item that symbolized American culture, write a one-page essay that dug into the cultural work and assumptions of that item, and be prepared to present the item and our essay as a part of the American Studies Museum, which was open to the rest of the campus for viewing the final two weeks of the term.

My classmates chose a basketball, a bottle of water, a baseball hat, a shopping bag, lipstick. I chose the bumper sticker that says “Shit happens.”

When Jim handed back the first draft of my essay, I flipped to the end and read C.

I went to Jim’s office, which was up a steep, narrow flight of stairs. I got winded each time I climbed the stairs to see him. A line of students waited outside his office.

After an hour, I was next.

“Come in, Taylor.”

I entered Jim’s windowless office. I found it odd—the guy who was known around campus for speaking about building design, about being outside, was tucked away in a cream-colored office with faux wood-paneled bookshelves. His office had no natural light, no windows, no fresh air.

“Jim, I noticed I got a C on this essay, and I’m not sure why.”

I waited for him to say it was because it wasn’t very good, that I wasn’t a good writer, that I probably shouldn’t even be in college.

“It’s because you haven’t written shit into your essay.”

“I’m sorry?” I asked, believing I misheard him.

“Aren’t you writing about a bumper sticker that says ‘Shit happens’? Don’t you think, then, that you need to write about shit?”

“But that’s not what the bumper sticker’s getting at. ‘Shit happens’ is a euphemism for the bad stuff that happens in our everyday life.”

“And don’t you think how we treat shit is part of the bad stuff that happens in our everyday life?”

Dressed in one of the too-large sweaters he favored—this one maroon with some holes in the elbow—Jim rocked in his chair, legs crossed, his top leg pumping up and down.

“I’m not sure I follow,” I said.

“I bet you do. You know that when you flush the toilet each morning your shit goes someplace. And you know that that shit and water must be treated—probably with a lot of chemicals, right? And you know that, somehow, once it’s broken down, it reenters the water system.”

“I do,” I said, but I didn’t really—partly because I had never really thought about it until this conversation with Jim.

“You need to do more research on what we do with shit once we flush it down the toilet because, you’re right, the bumper sticker is a euphemism. But I think you can drill down on what the sticker is literally saying: Shit happens. And it happens every day and, as you just proved, we rarely think and talk about it.”

A mountain of books sat behind him, and I thought, Has he really read all those books? Around campus I’d heard he was trying to write a book about how every facet of college life affects the natural world.

“Thanks for the help, Jim. See you next class.”

I was still frustrated—a damn C. When I called Mom to talk about school, her rejoinder was “Try harder.”

IN THE SPRING of my senior year, I registered for Campus Ecology, my last class with Jim. It was an environmental studies course that asked us to look at our place—the college campus and surrounding prairie—and delve into the environmental and socially constructed world and work of college. We toured the campus power plant, met with the facilities director, read Wendell Berry (the author of The Unsettling of America), and graffitied the campus with annotations about the environmental implications of—excuse me—taking a shit, eating without a cafeteria tray, or turning down the heat. The class asked us to wake up to moral responsibility and our everyday actions.

We kept a journal about a spot outside—our “plot”—documenting the plants, the animals (human and otherwise) and the happenings. We were supposed to notice and articulate how the plot changed over the course of the semester. We were to pay attention.

We read a book called Earth in Mind. The author, David Orr, had come to St. Olaf my sophomore year and lectured about meeting with potential 2008 presidential candidates and shifting their views on environmental issues. Tall, with deep blue eyes and a band of hair circling his shiny head, David spoke with a slight drawl. He talked to us about the warming trends in the atmosphere and about the “precautionary principle,” a metric that asks stakeholders to consider environmental impacts multiple generations into the future when making decisions, challenging us, as college students, to lead the charge in making environmental issues the issues in that upcoming election. But I hadn’t read Orr until now.

When I did start reading Earth in Mind for class, I stopped on page 11: “Fifth, there is a myth that the purpose of education is to give students the means for upward mobility and success.”

Isn’t that what an education is for? I wrote in pencil in my copy.

The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as our culture has defined it.

There was something there, something that pulled at the silky part of me: the world desperately needed more “storytellers, and lovers of every kind.” It needed “people who live well in their places.”

I loved the landscape of western North Dakota. I knew the stories of Lewis and Clark. I knew stories of picking juneberries in July with Grandpa and Grandma Hatzenbihler. I knew stories of catching emerald-colored walleye and tadpoles in backwater pools.

But it was the final sentence in this passage that stung me: “And these qualities have little to do with success as our culture has defined it.” I wondered if “success” might be a construct. My parents had spent the entirety of their lives working jobs they hated—might it be possible for me to find a job I loved? Might there be other qualities to work—pleasure, challenge, effort, enjoyment, good colleagues—beyond the pay scale?

And I thought about how Mom and Dad would talk about the houses on Fox Island, the wealthy part of Bismarck on the Missouri River: how the housing development was filled with doctors and lawyers, “successful” people; or how big someone’s yard was (even better if they had acres of land around their house); or how people could retire before sixty (those people were “successful” by my parents’ standards).

I put a “Q” next to this passage in Earth in Mind to save it for use in a future paper. Something in that paragraph snagged me.

HOWEVER, IT WAS another writer whose work I read in Campus Ecology, not an academic, who helped me fall in love with my home on the prairie.

By the time I read Paul Gruchow, during my senior year of college, he had been dead six years, having taken his own life near Lake Superior. Gruchow was a man without a college degree who, I later found out, had taught at St. Olaf College. In Jim’s class we read Grass Roots: The Universe of Home, published when Gruchow taught in Northfield. It is a collection of essays with magical names, such as “The Transfiguration of Bread,” “Snails Have Faces,” and “Naming What We Love.” We weren’t assigned the entire collection, but it was the essays that Jim left off the syllabus that changed the nature of my thinking.

One night I pulled my copy of Grass Roots from my briefcase. Earlier in the semester, I had accidentally spilled coffee along the bottom of the book. The pages, slathered sepia, had now congealed. They crinkled as I turned them. I looked over the table of contents and turned to the essay “What the Prairie Teaches Us”:

The prairie, although plain, inspires awe. It teaches us that grandeur can be wide as well as tall.

Young prairie plants put down deep roots first; only when these have been established do the plants invest much energy in growth above ground. They teach us that the work that matters doesn’t always show.

The work that matters doesn’t always show.

Jim was the only professor on campus whose classes gave me permission to express my values. In English classes I argued about what the text said, in philosophy I got a headache, in mathematics I learned about Babylonian “widgets.” While all of these created a patchwork of curiosity in my liberal arts mind, Jim was the only truly interdisciplinary teacher I encountered. Jim continued to ask his students confounding questions: “What is a real education?” “What are our expressed values (those we say with our mouths) compared to our operative values (those we express with the rest of our bodies)?” “What is the good life?” “Is college life part of the supposed ‘real world’?” Jim taught us that the work that matters might very well be the work of understanding why it is we do what we do and how we might reenvision the world.

Gruchow’s brief essay continued, and I noticed each paragraph began with a declarative sentence. As if he were laying bricks, Gruchow builds a wall of assertion, something to defend the prairie, my home bioregion: “The prairie is community,” “The prairie is patient,” “The prairie grows richer as it ages,” “The prairie is tolerant,” “The prairie turns adversity to advantage,” “The prairie is cosmopolitan,” “The prairie is bountifully utilitarian.”

There’s something I came to trust in Gruchow’s voice, something that unearthed the particular of place—like listening to someone who has spent a lifetime paying attention. If he can do it, I wondered, could I? Could I learn all of this from looking at grass?

THE OAKS AND MAPLES began to bud out as April rolled around during my final semester. While walking across the quad, I went to an Adirondack chair, set my bag down, pulled out my phone, and sat down. I could hear wind chimes ring. Classmates sunned themselves on blankets, the first nice day of the year. I called my sister, Tanya.

“Hey, what’s up?” she asked.

“Do you have a few minutes to talk?”

I asked her how her husband, Mike, was; what Logan and Noah, my nephews, were up to.

I glanced around. No one was that close to me, and the couple who was nearest, snuggled up to each other on their blanket.

“Sheba Queen, can I tell you something?”

“What’s up, Nerdbomber?”

I looked up. The tops of the trees swayed in the midday breeze; a smear of white trailed an airplane high above me.

“I’m gay.”

There was a pause. I looked around to see if anyone heard me.

“Aren’t you surprised?” I asked.

And then she laughed.

“C’mon, Taylor. No, I’m not surprised.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Why not?”

“Nerdbomber, everyone knows you’re gay as soon as you open your mouth.”

We busted out laughing.

“Plus, you loved wearing Mom’s high heels. And do I need to tell you how often you watched Mary Poppins or twirled in aprons that Grandma Brorby made for you?”

“Okay, I get it. But I don’t think we should tell Mom and Dad—do you?” I asked.

“No, I think let’s keep this to ourselves for a while.”

We kept talking as if nothing happened because, in a way, nothing did—my world changed, but my world didn’t change. It was as if I told my sister that I liked pistachio ice cream instead of rocky road. I sank into my chair as Tanya and I chatted away. I watched the couple on the blanket and breathed a sigh of relief.

5.

THE EVANGELICAL LUTHERAN CHURCH in America, the church of my childhood, approved the ordination of openly gay clergy in 2009. Before this, people like me couldn’t come out of the closet to openly serve as pastors.

I didn’t want to be a pastor, but somehow that same year, my senior year at St. Olaf, I was in the process of applying to seminaries and theological schools. I had a short list: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the University of Chicago. I knew this was ambitious, but I wanted a big city, a better chance for me to be me, a place far away from the childhood prairie.

For some reason, my plan was to get ordained, serve as a pastor for three years—even though church-basement potlucks made my stomach churn—and then hightail it out of the parish to get a PhD and become a professor: being a pastor, should teaching fail, would be a safe fallback plan. Pastors read, wrote, and were with people at pivotal moments in their lives. It would be good enough—and there was job security: the church needed pastors without white hair.

I needed options, multiple safety nets. No one in my family had finished college, much less gone on to graduate school. For the second time, I was stepping onto a new and unfamiliar path. No one in my family could help me or give me advice. I needed some sense of stability.

In childhood, my family went to church only on Easter Day and to the candlelit Christmas Eve service. We didn’t pray before meals, and I didn’t pray before going to sleep. I did have to go through confirmation classes, where we memorized the books of the New Testament by doing hand motions.

The reason I was raised in the Lutheran church was that my mother, when she was nineteen, got pregnant; Dad was twenty. Instead of placing her child with Catholic Charities for adoption, as others in her family had done, my mom walked down the aisle of my father’s Lutheran church, a billowing white bump growing beneath her wedding gown.

The Catholic church wouldn’t marry my parents.

My sister arrived three months later. It would be ten years before my parents had their second and last child.

AS I’VE MENTIONED, I called my mother and sister every day during my first semester of college. I couldn’t do it, I told them. College was too hard. I didn’t know how to study. I didn’t know how to write college papers. I cried in the shower so my eyes wouldn’t burn red and make my roommate worry about me. I found study nooks in the library where my tears quietly slid down my cheeks. I was thankful my roommate’s and my beds were bunked so that I could turn toward the wall as my pillow became damp.

I ping-ponged between them, my mom and sister. As soon as I felt stable and hung up with one of them, a great wave of sadness would wash over me. I’d be on the phone, dialing the other’s number.

Desperate, my mother told me to go visit the college pastor. “That’s what he’s there for,” she said.

When I knocked on the pastor’s office, a giant figure emerged. When he asked if he could help me, I blurted out that I needed someone to talk to.

“I’ve never been this far away from home,” I said. “I don’t know how to study. I don’t want to be a music major anymore. I can’t do this,” I said as my arms flailed around me.

Pastor Benson looked at me, opened his private office, gestured for me to come in, and closed the door behind us. He asked me if I had any friends. I knew one junior boy at the college, a guy from back home, but he already had friends, I said. I told Pastor Benson that three of my best friends from high school went to school at the University of Minnesota.

“Why don’t you go up there for the weekend?” he asked.

I protested, said it was because I didn’t have a car. That I was supposed to be here, studying, learning how to be a college student.

“There’s a shuttle that you can take up to the Mall of America. You can hop on the light rail, ride it to the Twins stadium near downtown, close to the U’s campus. Your friends can meet you there. If you can’t figure that out, I’ll drive you to your friends and pick you up myself.”

That weekend, I saw my friends from high school. I choked backed tears and counted the minutes until I would have to take the light rail back to the Mall of America on Sunday, and then the lonely forty-five-minute shuttle ride out of the Twin Cities, back to Northfield. I didn’t want to leave my friends. I wanted comfort, some semblance of stability in the new rockiness of my college life, a life far away from home.

I started seeing Pastor Benson every two weeks. When I looked at his bookshelves, I noticed he had more novels than religious texts. He told me he had been an English major in college.

AT ST. OLAF COLLEGE, there was daily chapel. Classes stopped for twenty minutes as a dusting of students, faculty, and staff drifted throughout the pews of Boe Chapel, a large limestone, gothic building anchoring the campus.

Eventually, I began to go to chapel. I listened to professors talk about social justice, about how the Bible promises an abundance of life, not a life of abundance. I heard Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings quoted as often as St. John or Jesus Christ. I started to read the whacked-out stories of the Old Testament—staffs slithering into snakes, being down in the dank hot belly of a fish for days, God being wild inside the whirlwind while stumping Job with ecological questions.

By then, I was an English major. I knew I wanted to hang out with Satan in Hell in Paradise Lost. I read the underpinnings of religious thinking in Marilynne Robinson’s writing and Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. Religion, particularly Christian thinking, infused the writing I read in my English classes. I laughed at Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. I felt the heartbreak in Toni Morrison’s sentences in Sula and the indignation of racism in James Baldwin’s prophetic essays. It seemed everything I read related to everything else and each work, in turn, related back to me—or at least to what I was feeling.

Yet, I never prayed in private, thought of God as some active force in my life. Sure, I recited the Apostle’s Creed, and I prayed when directed to in daily chapel or during Sunday worship services—but I thought of those more as ritual, meditations, a way of entering a spiritual space of connection with other people. This cerebral form of religion connected back to my book learning, the music of sentences. All this learning frayed the thread that bound me back to my family.

MY MOTHER’S FAMILY are devoted Roman Catholics—rosaries, confession, saints. I remember one of my mom’s sisters once coming inside our lake house after a fire, telling me that studies showed that when priests prayed over the bread, it was later found to have bone fragments in it—it became the literal body of Christ.

At twelve, I listened patiently before getting more marshmallows for the fire.

She said nothing of the wine becoming actual blood. Church wine never tasted metallic to me.

Later, when she and Mom visited me in college, I remember that she would not go up to receive communion from Pastor Benson. She could receive communion only from a Catholic priest, she told me, and Pastor Benson was a Lutheran pastor.

With Mom’s family, it felt like I was back in the sixteenth century, still locked in the religious battles of the Reformation.

IN HINDSIGHT, I’m not fully sure why I applied for seminary—I knew I wanted to teach, not preach. I liked the idea of shaping a classroom into a safe place to explore complicated thoughts and emotions.

Walking into a parish felt like navigating a political minefield.

But the gravity of being the first to finish college weighed on me: I had to prove that I made something of myself. Parish ministry was stable. It was needed in the small towns where I came from. I figured, if anything, some parish in western Nebraska would need a pastor.

But I also loved Pastor Benson’s care, his attentive ear. I watched joy wash across his face whenever a college student chose to be baptized. I loved memorizing hymns, their ancient melodies connecting me across time and space to friends and people long dead. And reading. I wanted a profession where reading was bedrock, where I had time for contemplation, where I could call upon my learning to help others in their time of need.

6.

AFTER COLLEGE GRADUATION the days all blurred together. Suddenly, it was already August, and Logan, my older nephew, was turning five. I washed up after my shift at a food supply warehouse and headed over to my sister and brother-in-law’s, who had moved to Bismarck from Seattle three years earlier, for cake and ice cream.

It was a family event—my parents, Mike’s mother and aunts, my Aunt Shelia and her partner, Al, and me. A cake, lit with five candles, rushed by me. My sister took it toward Logan, whose face beamed.

The Pfliger Sisters (what everyone calls Mike’s aunts and mother) launched into a harmonized version of “Happy Birthday.”

Logan blew out the candles and smoke swirled into the air.

My sister, round with the twin boys she was expecting, grabbed the cake to take back to Mike for him to slice in the kitchen. I followed her.

As Mike cut frosted red, blue, and white pieces of cake, I loaded them on plastic-coated paper plates to hand to Tanya.

“Did your aunt Raylene call you?” Mike asked me.

“No.”

I gave him a puzzled look.

My mom’s younger sister, Aunt Raylene, and I were close, but with five children of her own, we never talked on the phone.

Tanya returned to get two more pieces of cake.

“You didn’t tell Taylor Raylene called?” Mike asked Tanya.

Tanya shot Mike a glare. My stomach turned. I looked at Tanya.

“What’d she want?” I asked.

Mike continued to load cake on the plates as I handed them to Tanya.

Silence.

Frustrated, I grabbed a plate and went into the living room.

“How’s summer going, Taylor?” asked Mike’s mom, Charlene.

“Oh, it’s fine. It’s good to work at the food supply warehouse. I’ve got to save money before moving east,” I said.

“Yes,” said Mike’s aunt, Claudia, who had been my sixth-grade teacher in Center. She taught me about the Romans, the Greeks, and the Beatles. She exposed me to history and the world beyond the wheat fields in my backyard. “We hear you’re going to Princeton Seminary! Can you believe it? Little Taylor Brorby from Center, North Dakota, going to Princeton!”

The Sisters squealed.

“You must be so proud, Jim and Denise,” said Judy, another aunt, with a glittering smile.

“Yup,” Dad said in a clipped, gruff voice.

THE TIME PASSED and the sun sank toward the horizon.

“Well, I have to go. Nearly nine,” I said. “Have to work early in the morning.”

The Sisters each gave me a hug and I bent down to hug and kiss my nephews.

“See you at home,” said Dad.

AT HOME, I TOOK OFF my socks and threw them in the laundry room. I flexed my feet, which had a few broken and callused blisters from my steel-toed boots. I stood against the kitchen counter for balance and massaged a foot at a time.

The phone rang.

I stretched my arms and back as the garage door rumbled open.

The caller ID read VETTEL. I knew it was Aunt Raylene.

I ripped the phone from the wall and went down the stairs to meet Mom at the door.

“I’m going to bed; Aunt Raylene is calling. Good night; love you.” I handed her the phone.

I entered my room, turned my nightstand light on, stripped to my underwear, and got into bed. I grabbed Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life from my desk and pretended to read. I leaned my head to the side. Mom’s voice reverberated down the hallway.

I looked around my room. My five-pound-ten-ounce bass, two ounces heavier than the one my dad had mounted, glowed on the wall. Above my closet was a long strip of paper with BRORBY painted in Floridian sea life from a family trip to the Keys, and in front of me was my sister’s cross-stitch of freshwater fish—walleye, catfish, bluegill—framed on the wall.

Suddenly, Mom went silent.

I pretended to read.

I heard the phone beep and a whisper. “Jim.”

I curled my toes and pulled my comforter up over my belly.

What was that call about? I wondered. Why were there whispers in the house, why was Aunt Raylene calling everyone, but not calling me?

Muffled footsteps came down the hallway, and a sharp knock rapped on my door.

“Come in,” I said softly. I cleared my throat. “Come in,” I said again.

Mom opened the door, and they both stood in the doorway. Mom adjusted her glasses and stepped into my room. I put down Annie Dillard. Mom moved and sat on the edge of my bed as Dad leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. The comforter stretched tight against me.

Her voice quaked a bit. “Taylor, I just got off the phone with Raylene, and she’s worried you might be gay.”

Lie, I thought. They don’t know. You haven’t told them. Just say you’re not. You only have a month left with them. Just do it—say you’re straight. You don’t even have a boyfriend. Tell them later, when you’re far away, when you’ve found someone for life.

“Why does she think that?”

“She said you’ve posted some articles online about gay clergy getting ordained. Are you? Are you gay, Taylor?”

Time stopped. Or maybe it roiled. Heat climbed up my throat and I couldn’t stop it. This was the moment I feared—feeling trapped, at home, on the prairie. I had heard—read—the stories of gay children disowned by their families. It was my own fear: I knew my parents loved me, but I worried their love only extended so far.

“Yes. Yes, I’m gay,” I said.

Mom’s eyes widened. For the next wash of time, I talked about the mistranslated passages in the Bible, how I had known I liked boys since I was fourteen. Mom cut in.

“But we don’t know any gay people.”

I breathed in.

“You lived with one for eighteen years.”

It’s as if she had a stomach pain—she didn’t wince, but it was as if she almost folded into herself. Or did her head do an ever so subtle twitch? I couldn’t tell.

I rambled, tried to focus. In the back of my head was the worry over pedophilia associated with male homosexuality.

“But you don’t have to worry about me with the nephews.”

Silence.

Mom looked away.

Now my eyes widened. Heat again as my voice raised.

“You’d worry about me with my nephews?”

I smoldered out. We stopped talking. Dad turned and left the room. My bed shifted as Mom got up.

Silence again.

I turned out my light and couldn’t hear their voices. It was clear outside my window. The moon was a bright pearl against a gray curtain of night.

THE NEXT MORNING, I had to be to work at 5:30 a.m. I left in the cool morning air before the sun rose. Dew glistened on dark grass.

I listened to NPR as I drove the still silent streets of Bismarck. My back and shoulders ached, like I just had come from a massage.

In the U.S. Foods parking lot I sent out a text: Came out last night. Seemed to go all right. No drama, Thank God. I pressed send and sent the text to my sister and friends from college.

I brought my phone with me as I entered the large steel warehouse.

“Brorby, get on the forklift,” hollered my boss, Ron.

The food was already in, and it promised to be a long day.

“Fucking more shipments than we can handle,” yelled T.W., a small, round, balding man. Sometimes T.W. brought a steel bat into work and whacked his, and others’, forklifts.

We zoomed and whipped throughout the day, unloading ice cream, raspberries, liquid smoke, and coffee flavoring.

I switched to the highman to load food on the shelves. Two thousand pounds of mozzarella in fifty-pound boxes. Three thousand pounds of cheddar. Two hundred gallons of ranch dressing. My back burned.

“WRAP IT UP, BOYS,” yelled Ron close to six p.m. No one talked as we left work, knowing we had less than twelve hours before we’d be back at it.

I checked my phone—texts of support from everyone. I started the car and drove home. I pulled in, slammed the car door, and walked into the entryway.

THE HOUSE WAS QUIET. I sat down my lunch pail and unlaced my oil-stained steel-toed boots. Sore, I used the smooth banister to climb the stairs.

Mom was in the kitchen and Dad was sitting on the left side of the table, which was odd since he normally sat at the head. Wheel of Fortune wasn’t on, and, for some reason, I knew to not even say hello.

Dad looked out the sliding glass doors as I sat down at the head of the table, between my parents.

Mom brought a plate of steaming corn on the cob to the table.

I grabbed a cob and a pork chop. I cut the cob and corn. In chunks, it toppled onto my plate. I began cutting my pork chop into cubes, trimming the fat, which I knew Dad would later eat off my plate.

Dad cleared his throat.

“I’ve got one thing to say.”

I kept cutting. I couldn’t look at him.

“It’s not okay for you to be this way.”

“Okay,” I said. Just clear your plate, then you can leave. Focus on eating. Just eat and leave, I said to myself.

Goose bumps rolled across my back.

“Now I don’t read much,” said Dad, more confidently, “but in the Bible I know it says God created man and woman and He said, ‘Be together.’ ”

“I don’t think it quite says that,” I said, timidly.

“It’s that liberal college and all those liberal ideas it put into your head,” said Mom.

Don’t raise your voice. Just eat—and don’t raise your voice.

“I don’t think being gay is liberal or conservative,” I said. I quickly crammed bites of my food into my mouth.

“Where are you going to live? People get killed over this.”

“Where, Dad? Where do people get killed for being gay?”

“In Wyoming. Some guy got killed over it in Wyoming.”

“His name is Matthew Shepard. I don’t live in Wyoming. I don’t go to unsafe places.”

My corn and pork got smaller.

“How about those guys from college, are they gay? Any of them your boyfriends—Chris, C.W.?” asked Mom.

“No, they’re just friends.”

My throat dried. My eyes blurred. My voice got smaller.

“I’m done eating.”

I scraped my food in the garbage and put my plate in the sink.

I LEFT. The August heat hit me as I trudged the mile to my sister’s house. I slapped away the tears that flowed down my cheeks. At one point, my knees buckled. I’d been slamming my feet hard against the ground as I walked. I couldn’t yell, couldn’t scream. I was in public and needed to keep it together.

WHEN I GOT TO Tanya’s house, I walked through the open garage door, past strewn Frisbees and bikes and bats, and pounded on the door. It opened.

Logan stood there.

“Uncle Taylor, why are you crying?”

I crouched and looked him in the eyes. I grabbed his T-shirt to bring him close, and I looked him up and down.

“Oh, buddy, sometimes people say some things that make us sad.”

“Why, Uncle Taylor?”

“I don’t know, buddy, I don’t know.”

“But why, Uncle Taylor. Uncle Taylor . . .”

“Everything okay?” said Tanya from up the stairs.

I stood up and looked at her. “Supper didn’t go so well,” I said, holding my face in my hands.

“Mike, watch the boys,” yelled Tanya, who waddled down the stairs.

We got in her van as Tanya drove us south and out of Bismarck.

“What happened, Taylor?”

“I don’t know. I thought it went okay last night. I came home and they teamed up on me.”

We got to General Sibley, a campground south of town and pulled into the parking lot next to some cottonwood trees.

For the next three hours I cried. Tanya cried. We screamed. We blew our noses.

Eventually, it got dark and we left the campground.

“Do you want to stay with us?”

“I have work tomorrow. I’ll go home and go right to bed.”

Tanya pulled into Mom and Dad’s driveway. The house was dark, except for the entryway light.

“It looks like they’ve gone to sleep,” she said. “Call whenever. I’ll come get you. Come over tomorrow. I love you.”

I OPENED THE DOOR to a quiet house, took off my shoes, went to the bathroom and showered. My tears seemed unending.

I dried off, went into my room, and gently closed the door.

AFTER WORK THE NEXT DAY, I came home and there was a note in Mom’s handwriting.

Went to Sturgis for the bike rally. See you next week.

I cried out into the quiet house.

7.

FOR THE NEXT three weeks my father lived at our house on Lake Sakakawea; Mom and I avoided each other in Bismarck. I kept going to work at U.S. Foods and, on some days while I loaded Kool-Aid packets, liquid smoke, and rolls of paper towels onto the shelves, I cried. I tried to cry whenever I worked in the freezer or refrigerator. I figured the cold air would make it less apparent that I wept. My coworkers could tell something was up, but when a few asked me about it, I shrugged it off, said it’s private, and, to my surprise, they didn’t heckle me or ask any further questions.

Each night I came home and quarantined myself in the basement; Mom stayed upstairs.

I came up for leftovers from supper well after she ate. She stayed in her and Dad’s room in the evenings.

TOWARD THE END of August, she scheduled a family therapy session with a Catholic counselor. She could only get a time during the early afternoon, so I asked for time off from work. Tanya joined us.

The day came and I tossed my lunch pail into the car and drove to the west side of Bismarck. The counselor rented an office space on the other side of the street from Lowe’s, Best Buy, and Texas Roadhouse. It was small. The office reminded me of being in a home design show from the 1990s, which was how the counselor dressed—a floral-pattered shirt, business slacks. I could smell her hairspray and was inclined to not like her as I didn’t think I should have had to be there. It was my parents who were the ones that needed counseling, not me.

TANYA AND I sat on a leather couch on one side of the room and my parents sat on the other. Dad had chew in his lower lip and crossed his arms. Mom sat nearest to the counselor. Tanya and I leaned back in the couch.

“So, Denise, you scheduled this because you and Jim recently found out Taylor is a homosexual.”

“No, they didn’t ‘find out,’ ” I said. “I was outed by my aunt.”

Everyone but Tanya turned and looked at me.

“I just want to make sure we get the facts straight.”

“So, your sister told you that Taylor was gay?” she asked Mom. The counselor had one of those lilting voices that sounded like it’s always on the verge of crying.

“She said she was ‘worried’ I might be gay,” I said.

“All right,” said the counselor. She looked at me and smiled. “Now, Jim or Denise, was this a surprise to you?”

Dad sat there stiff as Stonewall Jackson.

“I mean, it was,” began Mom. “We never thought of him that way. He was just Taylor. I mean, he didn’t really date, or if he did, we didn’t hear about it. I mean, I guess we should have known, looking back.”

“Can you say more about that? What do you mean ‘you should have known’?” asked the counselor.

“It’s just that Taylor wasn’t like the other little boys around him. He didn’t really want to do sports,” said Mom.

“What concerns you about Taylor being gay?” The counselor leaned in and rested her elbow on her knee.

Mom looked up at the ceiling.

I stared directly at her.

“That he won’t have a normal life. That he won’t have children. That being this way will make his life harder. I mean, he couldn’t even tell us this. That hurts.”

“I couldn’t tell you this because I knew this was how you’d react,” I said.

“Do you worry that Taylor might go to Hell for being gay?” asked the counselor.

Dad didn’t speak. I can’t remember what Mom said because I was too focused on the question.

Mom cried. Dad just stared out the window.

“It’s just that our children never had to hear no. We gave them whatever they wanted,” said Mom.

I looked over at Tanya.

“When Taylor wanted piano lessons, we bought a piano and put him in lessons. When he needed a saxophone, we bought him a new one. They never had to hear no,” Mom said as she tried to wipe away her tears.

“I’m sorry,” I said as I sat up and looked over at the counselor, “But I thought we were here to discuss my being gay, not what my parents did or didn’t buy me.”

“This is what your mom wants to talk about right now,” said the counselor. She smiled and nodded at me. “So, we’re going to go there right now, okay?” The counselor placed a hand on my mom’s shoulder as she wept.

I sat back in the couch and crossed my arms just like Dad. Two Brorby men, both pissed, who now refused to talk.

In that moment, I thought back to the night I lost my thumb in the accident at Bobcat. That night, four years earlier, back at home after the surgery, while lying on our green cloth couch, I pressed my face into soft pillows. They absorbed my tears. I cried out, gulping for air like a fish out of water, my left thumb bandaged. The octave key for my saxophone.

The thumb was now shorter. I wouldn’t know until weeks later, when the bandages were removed, how much shorter. Short enough that it could no longer rest on the octave key, which meant it slowed my technique, which meant we would have to scour the country for an instrument repairman to rebuild my saxophone.

I would eventually give up saxophone, and music, after my first semester of college. The pain of my diminished technique, the trauma pulsing through my body whenever the nub of my thumb missed the octave key, was too much for me.

“It’ll be all right,” Mom had tried to reassure me, the night of my accident.

“But what about music?” I had cried into the pillows.

Our living room went silent.

When I rolled over, peeled off the pillows and wiped my face, my mother looked at me and said, “Remember—you agreed to work there. It paid well. You should’ve been more careful.”

THE THERAPY SESSION eventually ended.

“Now, I want you all to stand up and give each other a hug,” said the counselor with a smile.

Dad snorted.

“There’s no way I’m giving fucking hugs,” I said as I grabbed my lunch pail and walked toward the door. “Have a good day,” I smiled at the counselor. “I’ll call you later,” I said to Tanya.

“Feel free to come over for dinner,” she said as I walked out the door.

I LEFT THE BUILDING and hit the early afternoon August heat. The pavement wiggled in front of me. I made my way to my car, hopped in, turned on the ignition, and drove away from the counselor’s office.

On the way back over to U.S. Foods, I pulled in to a photography shop’s parking lot. I parked the car and turned off the engine; my chin pushed down toward my chest. The parking lot lines blurred. I couldn’t read the shop’s signage. I looked left and right and began to cry.

That twine that connected me to my parents now felt so thin. How was I going to do this? I was leaving for the East Coast in ten days. I knew no one there.

I stepped out of my car, found a half-drunk bottle of water in the backseat, opened it, and splashed a bit of water on my face. My eyes were bloodshot when I looked in the side mirror. I rubbed my hands up and down my face and my stomach slowly stopped jolting. My tears, for a moment, stopped.

I opened the car door, got inside, started the engine, and drove back to work. The twine still held on to something, but I didn’t quite know what.

EARLIER THAT SUMMER I had begun the “call” process for the Lutheran church. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), the largest and most liberal group of American Lutherans, had revised its position on ordaining gay people the previous year. In the past, though the church would ordain homosexuals, they would have to remain celibate.

My synod, the Western North Dakota Synod, was perhaps one of the most conservative regional organizations of ECLA congregations in the country. Throughout the summer, before meeting with my Candidacy Committee, I had expressed my concern to the synod’s director, Beth, over my being a homosexual.

The Candidacy Committee in the ELCA serves as a type of sounding board for the candidate seeking ordination. The committee asks questions of the candidate and supports them in their journey throughout seminary. The ELCA believes that not only must the candidate have a call from God to serve in ministry, but that that call must also be confirmed by people apart from the candidate.

Beth, a bright, quick-witted, compassionate woman, affirmed that the committee would be supportive and that, at the end of my meeting with them, she would ask me whether there was anything else I would like to share in case it didn’t come up.

“There’s no way the committee can block you from seeking ordination, Taylor, since the ELCA now affirms the ordination of gay people.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. I never imagined myself in front of a congregation, but it was 2010, another year of the Great Recession, and I worried about job security. Dad had been laid off the year before, when the coal mine where he worked closed. I wanted the security that was supposed to come with a college degree, but I also wanted the expansiveness of a liberal arts education to continue. I chose seminary, perhaps insatiably, so I could study more languages, history, philosophy, and literature. I wanted to understand people’s values and where they came from. It wasn’t so much that I believed in God. It was that I didn’t know what it was I wanted to do for a job. But I knew that being a student was a job I could do well.

WHEN THE DAY CAME for me to see my Candidacy Committee, we met in an elementary-school classroom in Bismarck. The committee was made up of two men and three women, one of whom, Sarah Heindrich, was a professor of Old Testament at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Over the course of the two hours of questioning, it felt like I was testifying at a Senate hearing.

I was asked how I first felt a call.

“Well,” I said, “it’s not like I woke up one night and the moon came in through the window and my hair stood up on end and I heard the voice of God say, ‘Taylor, my son, you must be a preacher.’ ”

We all laughed.

“My sense of call comes from the academic tradition of our faith—I mean, Martin Luther had a doctorate, and I believe in serious study, and serious questioning, of our religious texts. I believe the church needs rigorous, curious preachers.”

Then other questions came—my relationship to the church, how I interacted with people of multiple generations, and so on.

As our time wound down, we hadn’t approached the church’s stance on gay ordination.

I eyed Beth.

“Well, I think that nearly does it,” she said. “Taylor, is there anything else you believe your committee should know before we move along in the candidacy process?”

I took a breath. “Yes.”

And I looked down at the tiled floor flecked with brown. It felt like forever before I raised my head.

“I believe it is important for my committee to know that I am a gay man.”

Before I finished my sentence, Dr. Heindrich slammed her palm down on the table and did a vigorous fist pump. She stood up and pointed to me.

“I’ve been waiting for you for thirty years.”

I was stock-still before laughs echoed around the room. I sank into my seat and felt relieved.

After Beth and I left the room, I hugged her.

“Thank you for making that easy for me,” I said.

“You knocked it out of the park, Taylor,” she replied.

8.

WEEKS LATER, the sun was setting by the time I landed in Newark. I gathered my suitcases from baggage claim, purchased a ticket, and boarded the train.

A woman who had been a year ahead of me at St. Olaf promised to meet me at the Dinky stop. The Dinky connected the town of Princeton to the main rail line that passed between Philadelphia and New York City a few miles to the southeast. But I hadn’t purchased the additional ticket for the Dinky spur train, thinking my train ticket was good for my entire route.

“I should let you walk the three miles from this stop to Prince­ton,” huffed the middle-aged conductor. “When we get to Princeton, you damn well better purchase the ticket. No freeloaders ride my Dinky.”

I nodded my head and looked out the darkened window. As we screeched toward Princeton, black leaves were backlit by telephone poles. I rested my head against the cold glass and practiced my breathing. I was so far from home, but home was now always on my mind.

WHEN I MET KATIE and told her about the conductor, she just shook her head, took my carry-on bag, and threaded her arm through mine as we began to walk from the train station into Princeton. We started to chat.

“How far is it to—”

“Hey, you! Did you already forget what I told you?”

Katie and I stopped, turned around. Katie smiled at the conductor, adjusting her coral trench coat.

“Sir, we’re with the seminary, and this is one of our special guests.”

“I don’t care who he is, he’s—”

“Sir!” Katie narrowed her eyes. “Have a good night.”

We turned around and began to walk away. Katie squeezed my arm tightly and we giggled.

WHEN WE GOT to campus, Katie showed me to my room in Brown Hall, a two-hundred-year-old colonial building complete with cupola and columns.

“I’m having my boyfriend bring over a pillow and a blanket for you,” she said as we stood outside of my dorm room. “He’ll have a key to help us get into your room since it’s too late to go to the housing office.”

Once in my room and settled, I turned on the lamp on my desk, opened my suitcases and began to place my clothes in the chest of drawers. Outside my window, the seminary’s campus was lit. I could see a few people walking under the lamplight near the chapel. I had done it: I had made it to Princeton from a trailer house in coal country.

THE NEXT MORNING, I went to the seminary post office to retrieve three large plastic totes I had mailed from Bismarck. When I arrived and said my name, a wiry old woman behind the plexiglass window raised her eyebrows and pointed behind me. There were my totes.

“You’ll need a dolly,” she said. Suddenly the small door next to her Plexiglas window opened. “Here you go; bring it back when you’re done.”

I lugged the dolly up the stone steps and out of the post office, set it up, locked it in place, and went back to retrieve my totes.

As I wheeled across campus, people smiled at me, introduced themselves, asked me where I was from. “North Dakota?” they’d say. “I’ve never met anyone from North Dakota.” I’d smile, tell them there weren’t many of us from there, and that I was glad to be the first North Dakotan they’d met.

The leaves were still lush and green, lolling in the early morning light. The sun hit the white colonial chapel at just the right angle that I needed to shield my eyes when I passed it.

WHILE I WAS UNLOADING my totes, someone knocked on my door.

A tall and gangly guy entered, introduced himself, and shook my hand. “A few of us are going to go for a walk in a bit. Albert Einstein’s house is just down the block, and we thought it’d be fun to get to know the area. You’re a first-year, yes?”

I nodded, thanked him, and said that I’d join them another time.

He smiled and said he’d see me around.

I closed my door again and kept unloading my totes. I pulled out my sheets and made my bed. I hung up my winter coat and found the pictures I had wrapped in its pockets. I placed a photo of Tanya and me, set in a small silver heart-shaped frame, on the bookshelf over my desk. It was a picture I knew well: I, at seven, rested on Tanya’s left shoulder. My front teeth were missing. We both had wide smiles. My dimples showed, my typical childhood buzz cut flared against the dark background. Tanya wore lipstick and her pearly teeth glimmered in the shot. Her luscious red hair was curled and just touched her shoulders.

Tears streamed down my cheeks and dripped onto my desk. I sat down and began to sniffle. I then choked back sobs and bent over in my chair, holding my face in my hands as my shoulders heaved.

THE FIRST WEEK of classes passed in a fog. I couldn’t remember the name of any saints in my church history class. There were people called preceptors, doctoral students who would teach special breakout sessions to help us understand the material covered in large lectures. I couldn’t focus on Hegel in my philosophy class or manage to understand what we were covering in Greek. It felt like I was being pulled underwater, that no matter how much I tried to lock the trauma of the prior month in a box and shove it deep in the closet of my mind, it’d rip open.

One evening, while perusing Princeton University’s art collection, I sat in front of a lithograph called In the Spring, 1941, by Grant Wood. A sturdy man in overalls, hands at his hips, smiled out from the lithograph, rendered in graphite, toward me. He was laying posts to build a fence. A few sheep were grazing in the background near a barn.

I stared at the man, who reminded me of a young Grandpa Hatzenbihler, which then reminded me of shelterbelts, of farming, and of Oliver County. Before I knew it, I stood up and rushed away from the drawing; a few people turned and looked at me. I heard murmurings as I rushed by, a hand up near my eye, catching my tears.

I passed through the glass doors of the museum and out into the night. I walked over to an oak tree and sat in the dark, out of the lamplight, and again held my head in my hands. I sniffled, hocked a loogie, and cleared my throat. I wiped my eyes.

I tried to shake the memories of back home. After all, I was here, at Princeton Seminary, where I heard I would be able to take classes at the university from people like Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, and John McPhee. I wanted to teach, but my upbringing taught me to have some type of insurance. I wanted this, to be here, I told myself. I wanted to make my family proud, though now I didn’t know if they ever would be, if they would ever forgive me for my being gay.

A FEW DAYS LATER, on a Saturday, I quietly practiced Ancient Greek in my dorm room. There were puffy clouds outside my window as some seminarians snapped a Frisbee across the quad.

“Alpha-beta-gamma-delta-epsilon,” I murmured to the tune of “Mama’s Little Baby Loves Shortenin’.” “Zeta-eta-theta-iota-kappa-lambda.” I even threw in a slight clap and bobbled my head from side to side. “Mu-nu-xi-omicron-pi-rho—” And then I stopped. I began again. But again, I stopped after “rho.” I got up, stretched my arms, looked out my window, and sang to myself. It wouldn’t come. I couldn’t break through to sigma. I couldn’t finish the alphabet.

I sat down on my bed and began again. And again. And again. I was like a broken spoke on a wheel—I could get only so far before jamming up. I refused to open my book. It was only twenty-four letters. I tightened my fists. I pounded on my thighs slowly, like I was practicing a fingering for piano. But I couldn’t get it.

I picked up my phone, found Pastor Benson’s home phone number in the white pages online, and called him. His wife, Carol, answered. When I told her who was calling, she said she’d go get Bruce.

I barely spat out the words before I fell into sobs. I told Pastor Benson what had happened the prior month, how I couldn’t keep track of my studies, how I was failing to get a grip.

“There is nothing to get a grip about, Taylor,” he said. “You’re hurting, you’re in pain. It’s okay to cry and be upset right now.”

I continued to cry. I told him I didn’t know what to do. I was at Princeton, for god’s sake.

“Taylor, it is okay to not be there.” There was a pause. “You could take a leave, come back later, once things have settled down. You don’t have to do this right now.”

I continued to cry on the phone.

At the end, Pastor Benson made me promise to call him and tell him what my plan was once I had time to think about it.

When we hung up, I walked over to my window. The Frisbee was still flying across the quad. I wiped my nose with the back of my hand. In the distance, people laughed. I stood there for a minute, or an hour, turned back toward my closet, opened the doors where I had stacked my three plastic totes, began to fold my winter jacket, and filled each bin. I went over to my desk, pulled out three sheets of white paper, uncapped a black Sharpie, and wrote my home address in Bismarck on each piece of paper. I laid them atop the totes’ lids, pulled a roll of tape from my desk drawer and secured the labels to the lids.

I was going home.

9.

BISMARCK ALWAYS SEEMED gray that fall. I didn’t know what to do. After moving back to Bismarck, I became almost immediately desperate to get out, but I didn’t know how.

Eventually, I went back to my former high school, walked through its gray hallways and into the marbled foyer where the principals’ offices were. I asked the secretary if I could see Mrs. Hill, the kindly assistant principal, a petite woman whose hair was dyed red, who drove a red Cadillac and, often, wore red. I told her that I planned to apply to master’s in education programs and that I wanted to student-teach at Bismarck High School.

“It’s difficult to get you into the classroom when you’re not affiliated with a college, Taylor, but let me see what I can do,” she said.

A FEW DAYS LATER it worked—I was in. From September to the end of November, I taught three classes. For AP and sophomore English, I was at the side of my former teacher Mrs. Lord-Olson, discussing the green light in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby or how Brutus was just having a bad day in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Basic English 12 was team-taught with the Special Education Department and Mrs. Sukauskas; it was a class where, among other things, we each drew our own version of the “monstrous hell-bride” who is Grendel’s mother in Beowulf. In Literary Magazine, I helped Dr. Warner teach students about meter and rhythm in their poetry and prose.

Every Monday through Friday after school, I walked two blocks from Bismarck High to the public library, and stayed there until it closed. I told my parents that I had so much grading to do that being in the library would help me focus.

The truth was, I didn’t really have any grading. I went to the library and roved the internet for jobs in Minneapolis, or other graduate programs to apply to. I spoke with job counselors from St. Olaf about which schools I should apply to for a master’s in education—anything to get me out of Bismarck, to recover from the shell shock of being outed.

At nine o’clock, I’d gather my bag and notebooks, maybe check out a book on Handel or Brahms from the library, walk back to the high school parking lot, hop in my red Dodge Stratus, and slowly drive home along the oak- and elm-lined streets.

There, I’d park my car, shut off the headlights, and take a deep breath. I’d open the car door, gather my things, pop the key in the side garage door, and slowly slip into the house.

Mom and Dad were always already in their bedroom. The din of the television in their room carried down the hallway.

They were generous in wanting to feed me well. On the stove would be leftover pork chops, lasagna, or baked chicken. I’d quietly remove a plate, open the silverware drawer, spoon some food out of its container, and slink downstairs, where I’d eat in silence. We rarely saw one another.

By the time I rose in the morning, Mom already had left for work. I quickly showered, made a lunch for the day, snagged my book bag, and shot out the door before Dad woke up. If it was too early for me to go to the high school, I spent some time in Starbucks, waiting for my coffee.

Every other Friday, after teaching, I got in my car and sped toward Minneapolis. I tried to explain to my friends there what I was going through: why I was no longer at Princeton, what I was doing living back in my parents’ basement, how I was going to get out.

Most Saturdays and Sundays I wandered the large rooms of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. I’d sit and look at Van Gogh’s olive trees, painted in those thick, luscious brushstrokes against a backdrop of a lemony, pulsating sun, or Monet’s grain stack, which seemed as if it had been rendered with a feather dipped in soft pastel pinks and browns.

I’d sit for hours, gazing off in the distance, somewhere beyond the paintings I was in front of, and surging with worry about how I was going to survive. My parents weren’t being abusive, but I didn’t give them much chance for conversation. Avoidance was my solution to the issue; distance was a way for me to feel safe.

On the weekends I was in Bismarck, I drove south from our house, toward the University of Mary. Designed by the celebrated Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer, the university is perched on a large bluff high above a bend in the Missouri River. There, I’d drive to the university library, park my car, and wander into the CD collection. I’d grab a few recordings of the Brahms symphonies by Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic or Beethoven’s symphonies with Carlos Kleiber and the Bavarian State Orchestra, and then plop down at a carrel with a multidisc CD player. I’d pop a CD out of its case, set it in the slot, and the player would suck it in. I’d put on my headphones, press play, close my eyes, and try to escape to a different world.

Sometimes at the library, I’d leave my carrel and dawdle over to the large glass windows. I’d sit down there, mesmerized at the changing light over the Missouri River Valley. The cottonwood trees, now apricot, were slowly beginning to fall; the bones of the trees were set in sharper relief. The Missouri River pressed south; the slopes on the western line of the horizon gleamed gold when the sun struck just right. The view was an ever-changing canvas of color and texture, something that, though shifting, helped me feel rooted to the reality that, somehow, I was going to get out of my parents’ basement.

ONE NIGHT, after I got home from the Bismarck library, Dad was sitting at the darkened kitchen table waiting for me. I jumped when I came into the kitchen.

He looked at me.

“How are you affording all this?” he asked.

“All what?”

“Going to the Twin Cities and stuff like that—your gas, the meals, whatever it is you do down there.”

I adjusted my bag on my shoulder.

“I have some money in my savings account.”

“Well,” he said, “you’re certainly not making any money student teaching. Are you leeching off your friends?”

I looked at him.

“You are, aren’t you?”

“I’m not, Dad. I’m barely spending any money.”

He leaned across the table.

“And what are you going to do when it runs out? When are you going to get a real job?”

I turned, shuffled out of the kitchen and down the stairs, flicked off the entryway light, and disappeared into the basement.

LATE ONE NIGHT, Kari Lie, a Norwegian professor I’d had in college, who lived in Minneapolis, shot me a message on Facebook.

“Hey, I see you dropped out of seminary—what’s up?”

I told her about my saga, how I was back living at home. How I was miserable.

“You should come live with me. I have a basement area and a nice, blow-up mattress. I need a house sitter in January anyway when I’m on vacation in the Caribbean. How about when you’re done with student teaching you move in?”

I couldn’t believe it. I agreed, right then, and thanked Kari. I felt a bit lighter as I began to make plans to leave Bismarck—finally, a way to escape.

ON MY LAST DAY of student teaching each class threw me a surprise party. I received a tie, autographed with each student’s name, from Mrs. Lord-Olson and drawings from Mrs. Sukauskas’s class. Dr. Warner’s Literary Magazine was the last class period of the day.

Two female students. Amanda and Dania, went up front and stood behind a podium. The whiteboard, streaked with blue and red and green markers glistened behind them.

“Mr. Brorby, we have something for you,” said Amanda.

Music began to play. Some students started to sway in their desks. I couldn’t place the tune, but it sounded familiar.

Eventually, Amanda and Dania began singing original lyrics to the tune of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” I closed my watery eyes to listen. They were singing about me.

When it came to the chorus, the entire class of twenty turned in their seats, looked at me, and belted: “Mr. Taylor Brorby is awesome! Mr. Taylor Brorby is awesome!”

I let out a crackling laugh, held my hand over my mouth, and tears flowed down my cheeks. Students pounded on their desks, “Mr.-Taylor-Brorby-is-awesome!”

At the end of the song, the students pulled out cans of silly string and sprayed me. Goopy ropes of pink and green hung off my shoulders. Amanda raced toward me and placed a crown atop my head.

I held my face in my hands, smiled, and thanked them. That’s all there was to do. They didn’t know how they kept me going those few months, how they took a bit of the gloom away, how coming into my former high school with my book bag gave me a few hours away from the pain that worked its way out from my stomach, up my side, into my shoulders.

But now it was over, the vast expanse of what-to-do-next was on the horizon of my life. I was moving to Minneapolis, but then what . . . what was there for an English major to do during the height of a recession? Where would I find stability beyond the bloodlines of family?

In that moment, between the tears and laughs and silly string, I stood before my students and felt fleeting joy replace the tension. I could breathe. I could breathe.

THE NEXT MORNING was gray and foggy. I didn’t waste any time and filled my Dodge Stratus with clothes and as many books as possible. With each load my shoulders relaxed, and yet my chest was still heavy. I was again leaving home, worried that this would be the yin and yang of my life.

When I finished loading the car, I stepped into the bathroom to shower. I turned on the water to cover up opening a side drawer in the vanity. In it were large bottles of Tylenol, Advil, and Excedrin. They glowed in the bright light. I took each bottle from the drawer and shook them gently. There were enough pills. I lined up the pills like little soldiers on the counter and then walked over and sat down on the toilet lid. I told myself that I could take them, that I could then get in my car and by the time they’d kick in, I’d be zooming down I-94. It’d be a fog. It’d be a blur. It’d all be over quickly.

And then I heard my parents’ door creak open.

For some reason I told myself I couldn’t do it while they were awake—that, somehow, even if I stashed the bottles, they’d find them, that they’d then call the state troopers or that they, themselves, would fly down the interstate in their GMC pickup and catch me. That I’d then be locked up in some psychiatric institution and would have to enter some rehabilitation program.

Somewhere, deep inside me, I knew my parents still loved me, even if they couldn’t accept having a gay son.

I didn’t contemplate taking the bottles with me and stopping at some rest stop along the interstate, sitting in my warm car on a cold day near the prairie pothole region of east-central North Dakota, taking pill by individual pill while watching Canada geese and trumpeter swans bob along in the small lakes of that mirrored landscape. I didn’t, when it came down to it, want to be a headline:

LOCAL MAN OVERDOSES AT REST STOP.

FAMILY MOURNS MAN’S SUICIDE.

I didn’t want to die, but I didn’t know how to live in this new tension with my parents. I wanted to be alive in the bright beautiful world that now was tinged with pain—like a sliver in the supple part of my hand, something I couldn’t remove, couldn’t pull out, something that wouldn’t leave, or leave me alone.

I slowly put each bottle in the drawer, closed it, stripped out of my clothes, showered, dried, and dressed. Then I crept out of the front door and drove away.

10.

MY SHOULDERS CAME UP to my ears as I stepped out of my car under a clear, moonlit Minnesota Christmas night. I wrapped my scarf around my neck as I tromped through the bright snow to press the doorbell. My old English professor, Jonathan Hill, and his wife, Barbara, came into view in the breezeway, and opened the door.

“Merry Christmas,” they said, welcoming me into their warm house.

It was my first Christmas without family.

LIFE WAS UPSIDE DOWN.

I’d been living in Minneapolis in Professor Lie’s house for a month. I slept on her air mattress in the basement, the space heater blasting, while I applied to temp agencies for work. I rarely called my parents, and when I did, there was anger in my mother’s voice as well as in my own. I felt that things were now insoluble.

Just a few years before, while I was adjusting to being away at college, we’d talked on the phone every day.

Until college, I had been away from my parents only three times. Twice to diabetic camp, when I was six and seven, where I met other chronically ill children. The other time was the two-week vacation to stay with Tanya and Mike in Seattle.

But now, phone calls home made me depressed. They weren’t comforting. I wanted my parents, but my mother’s once warm voice was now icy. She didn’t berate me for being gay—she would dig deeper, cut me in more slant ways. “I can’t believe you won’t come home for Christmas,” she’d say. I’d make up some excuse, like I didn’t have enough money (which was true), or that I had some job (I didn’t) that was making me work right before and right after Christmas Day.

Won’t. You won’t come home. Her words were true. I wouldn’t come home. Couldn’t. There was a knee-jerk reaction inside of me to get in my old Stratus, gun it out of Minnesota and across the high plains of North Dakota, and go home for the holidays. But there was something deeper, something more primal—a feeling that home was no longer safe. It had now become a tenuous place, a place where my presence made everyone go silent.

When I escaped to Kari’s basement in Minneapolis, I can now see that I was depressed—I lay on the air mattress for most of the day, the gentle buzz of the space heater warming my back. Other than that, it felt like all sensation had left my body. Color was muted. Food tasted bland. On my side for hours, gripping a pillow, I’d stare at the wall. Some days I was too numb to cry.

BUT NOW, at Jonathan and Barbara’s, the smell of caramelized brussels sprouts, savory roast beef, garlic cream-laden mashed potatoes filled the house.

Their niece, Madeline, was visiting from London. A sleek, fashionable woman ten years older than me, Madeline was a vocalist. And as Barbara finished the final touches on Christmas dinner, Jonathan, Madeline, and I sat down to discuss music.

Madeline’s group was rehearsing William Byrd, Thomas Tallis, and Claudio Monteverdi. These were names I had never heard of until high school, when I started checking out classical music CDs from the local libraries in Bismarck. I was raised on Led Zeppelin, Garth Brooks, and Shania Twain. At fourteen, Dad and I went to the Alerus Center in Grand Forks for a joint AC/DC and Aerosmith concert. We rocked and jammed as, even in the nosebleed section, I could see the crater that was Steven Tyler’s mouth. I looked over to Dad and we both smiled.

As I listened to Jonathan and Madeline compare the virtues of Monteverdi and Tallis, my mind drifted five hundred miles back home, across the snow-covered tallgrass prairie, the tabletop-flat Red River Valley, the sleek, mirrored prairie potholes, all the way to the cold, thin, liminal place of my imagination: the Missouri River, this time of year looking as if it were dolloped with whipped cream. I was there. I could see it. But I wasn’t—and I couldn’t.

Home was, and is, for me, a sensation—thinner air, dust on the skin, dryness, eroded hills and buttes, a sheer amount of weather whirling across the canvas of sky. It’s overwhelming. It can knock you out. Home, inevitably, always reminded me of how small I am.

But I now felt small in another way, a way that provoked pity. I don’t remember if I had told Jonathan and Barbara exactly what was going on—if I had emailed them with vague phrases like Can’t go home for Christmas or Things aren’t so good with my parents. I had certainly told them I was back in the area when they knew I was supposed to be out east, studying the Bible.

My mind remained around my parents’ oak table. Cousins, aunts, and uncles, no doubt rolling dice, playing cards, laughter from a group of relatives with cream-heavy bodies whose bloodline to me now felt thin. My nephews—five, two, and twin newborns—learning the hard reality: Uncle Taylor doesn’t come back for Christmas.

But it’s not just Christmas. It’s Thanksgiving, birthdays, the Fourth of July.

In childhood, the Fourth of July was spent at our lake house. Cousins wailed as they flew across the wake of our boat as Dad madly whipped them in circles, the tube, weighed with flailing children, skipping higher and higher. S’mores—gooey and warm—spread across our cheeks as our faces glowed by flickering fires. Firecrackers snapped throughout the evening before the big batteries of fireworks blazed the sky green, purple, and orange.

To this date, I still have not spent a holiday with my twin nephews.

There is no way to escape this pain. The birthday season begins with two nephews in August, the twins in September, my mother’s in October, mine in November, Thanksgiving, Dad’s birthday in early December, then Christmas, New Year’s, my sister’s birthday in January. Each year is a six-month gauntlet of memories that could have been, times when I’ve thought—even for just a moment—of getting in the car and showing up with presents. Then I remember: my presence is not welcomed by all.

AFTER OUR CHRISTMAS DINNER of beef, sprouts, potatoes, and other steaming side dishes, Barbara went into the kitchen and Jonathan smirked at Madeline and me.

Barbara hurried back with a dark mound of what looked like a cake.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Christmas pudding,” said Barbara, “and here’s the cream to go with it. But don’t begin just yet.”

Jonathan’s smirk widened into a smile.

Barbara returned with a steaming steel pot.

“Jonny, would you do the honors?” asked Barbara, handing him a pack of matches.

Madeline and I exchanged bemused glances.

Pouring out of the pot and across the pudding was warmed brandy. Barbara circled the pudding and, when the last drop hit the pudding, said, “Now, Jonny.”

“A flambé,” clapped Madeline as a blue flame tore around the pudding.

“But wait,” said Jonathan, who passed around British crackers. “And these, too.” He passed each of us a paper crown to wear as Barbara rolled her eyes. “Now cross hands,” said Jonathan, “and hold tight, and—pull!”

We yanked. Our crackers exploded.

In that moment I was there, in southeastern Minnesota. I heard the crackle of paper. I smiled and laughed, smelled the warm pudding. I was there, and I was so far away from home.

AFTER A FEW WEEKS of searching for work and living in Kari’s basement, I stumbled into a master’s program in liberal studies, starting in January, at Hamline University in St. Paul. The routine of class, of homework, of having to say something—anything, some type of obligation—distracted me, if only a little, from the chasm I felt growing between me and my parents.

In February, I moved to South Minneapolis to house-sit for another St. Olaf professor; he and his wife were away for the semester in Estonia on a Fulbright. Even though I was in a master’s program, I kept applying to seminary programs out east and in Chicago. I couldn’t accept the fact that I had dropped out of Princeton and wasn’t on the original plan I had envisioned for myself: master of divinity, ordination. I had planned to go to a prestigious seminary followed by a prestigious PhD, because prestige is what separates those who leave home from those who stay, or so I thought at the time. I wanted my parents to be able to say, “Oh, our son, he’s at Princeton—and then of course he’ll go onto Harvard for his PhD.” I wanted them to still be proud of me, as they had been after my jazz band concerts in high school, or when I was voted Nicest Senior Guy in my high school graduating class. I wanted to check all the right boxes: college, master’s, doctorate. I wanted to transcend what I perceived to be the limitations of the small coal country town I grew up in and then teach in some hallowed halls of knowledge, where people talked about visiting the latest Rothko exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art or about an upcoming trip to Austria to hear the Vienna Philharmonic. The intellectual world I craved existed somewhere well beyond the periphery of the prairie where I was planted, the prairie I paradoxically still yearned for, a place for me to feel rooted, still, and call home.

THE GRADUATE CLASSES helped get me out of my head for a while, but, eventually, I began to slide backward. After hemming and hawing I decided, for the first time, to go to counseling. I couldn’t keep asking my friends to deal with the miasma of my life. The church I went to in South Minneapolis—warm, welcoming, what we all called the “party” church—could get me only so far. I needed help, and though I believed I could just “push through it,” I made an appointment with a counselor at Hamline.

When I called my mother to tell her I got into another Ivy League seminary, she responded by saying, “I don’t know why anyone would want to go there.”

In my next session, my therapist told me I needed to stop communicating with my parents because they weren’t supportive.

But my parents had been supportive in the past. During high school, whenever they’d return from parent-teacher conferences, my stomach flipped when I asked them how the conversations with my teachers went. They’d stay silent as they’d climb the stairs in our split-level house.

“We can barely fit our head through the door we’re so proud,” Mom would burst out.

“They all love you, buddy,” Dad would affirm.

And my father, a graveyard shift welder, wept at my college graduation. It was one of the few times I saw him wear a tie. He wiped his eyes. “I’m so proud of you, Taylor,” he said.

Earlier, at the start of my senior year of college, my parents had made the one-thousand-mile roundtrip to hear me give a three-minute opening convocation speech as student body president. I can remember the band playing “Fanfare and Grand March,” a determined tune written for band and organ written by Timothy Mahr. The cymbals and trumpets echoed off the vaulted ceiling of Boe Chapel. And as I processed, there they were, Mom and Dad, all the way from Bismarck, their eyes pooled with tears as I smiled and walked by on the way to give my remarks.

My parents, it’s so clear to me, did everything they could for me, yet they could not in any way prepare themselves for who I really was.

IN THE FALL OF 2011, at Hamline, I took a class called The Essay, a required course in my program, but one I was hesitant to take as horrific images of the academic essays I wrote in college came to mind.

We began reading pieces like William Hazlitt’s “On the Pleasure of Hating,” which made me laugh out loud as Hazlitt sounded like some fashionista giving a model a dressing-down; or Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” which rocked my mind, or Nancy Mairs’s “On Being a Cripple,” which echoed my own struggle with diabetes and the burden of having a disabled body in a world that isn’t designed for bodies of different abilities.

These essays were different from the academic essays I wrote in college. These essays jolted me awake, pushed me into a personal realm with these authors; these essays helped me believe that I might have something to say, that I might want to be a writer.

And yet, each fall I was at Hamline I continued to apply for seminary programs and kept getting in. I never left again for seminary, though; I’d always choose to stay in my program at Hamline. I couldn’t leave, for some reason. I finally had a community in my church in Minneapolis; old friends from St. Olaf lived in the Twin Cities. I felt stable. I felt settled, even if my relationship with my parents was on shifty soil.

MOM AND DAD rarely called me, nor I them. I’d open my phone, scroll down my list of contacts, and look at Mom’s name on my screen. My thumb would hover over the call button. I’d then set the phone down, cup my face in my hands, shake my head back and forth, and practice taking long, slow, deep breaths.

When I did talk to Mom, there’d be crackling silence. Cautiously, I’d ask how they were. “Fine,” she’d reply. “And you?” I’d start to tell her about classes at Hamline, or how I was working on my writing, how I thought I could maybe work at being a writer. But that part of the conversation never lasted too long—my mother had to go, had some errand to do, had some place she’d rather be than talking to me. I can now see it must have been too much, her boy continuing with life, struggling along in the one place, school, where he ever felt safe and secure.

And over time I stopped calling, almost completely. Sometimes I’d send a text, but even that felt too difficult. The weight of messaging Mom—the person I’d call when I was homesick in college, the woman who cried at graduation—was too much. Her short texts, her short words, now felt like barbs hurled from home. I wanted to apologize—but for what I did not know.

11.

FROM THE SACRISTY I heard the din of church members, family, and friends of the grooms entering the sand-colored Christ Church Lutheran in Minneapolis’s Longfellow neighborhood.

I hung my blazer in the closet as I grabbed a white robe. Kristine, my pastor, entered—more light always seemed to fill the small sacristy whenever she was around.

“I love your shoes,” I said, catching a glimpse of her bright yellow flats.

“Oh, thank you, Taylor,” she said, as she sashayed back and forth.

I called us the A-Team whenever we led worship together, whenever I was scheduled to be assisting minister, the person who holds the worship book, announces the prayers, and models perfect behavior for the congregation.

That day, though, I knew I had to be on—the gays were there. It was my and Christ Church Lutheran’s first gay wedding.

Kevin and Will, the two grooms, invited the entire congregation. It was a traditional Scandinavian wedding—no attendants, only Kevin and Will, Kristine and me, in front of everyone. Two wooden chairs for the couple were placed off-center in the chancel.

All eyes were on us.

While going over the order of the wedding the night before, Will’s mother, a poised and coiffed eighty-year-old, sat in the second row of pews. When the moment came in the rehearsal for the grooms to say “I do,” Will’s mother shouted, “Now you boys say it loud enough so everyone can hear!” Will, in his forties, was reduced to a blushing four-year-old.

We all laughed.

On the wedding day, organ music resonated throughout the church—a midcentury modern building, the last project designed by the famous Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen. Known as the Church of Light, Christ Church Lutheran’s simple, asymmetrical design gleamed with sunshine.

In the months after dropping out of seminary, while searching for secure footing once I’d moved to Minnesota, I’d started attending weekly worship at Christ Church, whose small congregation embraced me.

Kevin and Will were two of the first people who welcomed me, greeting me at the door with warm smiles during the tumult of recovering from . . . from what, exactly? Feeling abandoned? Ashamed? Like there was no place for a gay son in my family? I had called aunts and uncles on the phone. They had cried to me, the weight of their Catholic upbringing making them believe I was to spend an eternity burning in Hell.

I fastened the collar of my robe, which made me feel like I was locked in a sauna. I removed a long cincture that would girdle my waist from the closet and looked at Kristine.

“I always feel like cattle whenever I wrap this rope around me,” I said.

THAT FIRST FALL and winter away from home, Kristine’s sermons had kept me grounded.

Kristine wove poetry from Ezra Pound and from Jack Gilbert (a poet I hadn’t heard of) into her sermons. And, each week, she reminded us that we were loved, that God was with us in the light and in the darkness. There were times, sitting in my pew behind Howard and Erla, a quick-witted, white-haired couple who had been married for sixty years, when I looked down, when it seemed as if Kristine were speaking only to me, reaching out toward a young man who wondered why he was gay, why—if there was a God—God would make him this way.

Kristine, in her weekly sermon, let me know that I was loved.

“TAYLOR, WE BETTER go downstairs and get to the narthex. The processional is getting close,” Kristine smiled.

“You look great, Kristine.”

“Thank you.” And we hugged each other. Our robes billowed behind us as we flitted down the stairs.

When we walked into the narthex, Kevin and Will were there, suited and staring into a filled sanctuary. They bit their lower lips.

The organ swelled as we took our places toward the back of the processional—a line of Will’s family members. Some of Kevin’s family, I learned the night before, had not been supportive of him.

I opened the worship book.

As we processed, the church filled with song.

Let us build a house where love can dwell and all can safely live, A place where saints and children tell, how hearts learn to forgive.

The entire congregation was there. My vision blurred as I caught the eyes of friends, their eyes also puddling with tears.

THIS WAS 2011, and two men could not yet legally marry in the state of Minnesota. Weeks earlier, Kevin and Will had driven to Decorah, Iowa, where same-sex marriage was already legal, and tied the knot in a small ceremony. But on this day, we gathered in Minneapolis to sing the happiness of their love, to share in their commitment, to pledge to them our loyalty in their happy union.

WILL’S FAMILY FLOWED into their pew as the couple and Kristine and I continued up to the chancel, where the grooms soon stood in front of their chairs, a small table between them.

When the hymn ended, I sat in my chair as Kristine warmly welcomed all who were gathered, telling us that there would be a Scandinavian feast of salmon, cheeses, meatballs, and good beer and wine waiting for everyone after the wedding.

I spotted Howard, who winked at me, and Erla, who gently lifted her hand and waved at me, in their pew.

“This is a day to celebrate,” said Kristine. “And we here at Christ Church know how to party. Please sit back and relax as we celebrate this union between two men who are so dear to us here at Christ Church Lutheran. Welcome, everyone.”

As various friends and family read from scripture and as we stood and sang hymns, I snuck a glance every now and then at Kevin and Will. They held hands, sometimes sang, and sometimes held back tears.

And then it came, the time for the two to be wed.

Kristine and I walked from the side to the center of the chancel, where the couple, still holding hands, joined us.

I cracked open the worship book as my eyes went back and forth between Kristine and Kevin and Will.

When the vows came, my breath quickened.

“Will, repeat after me,” said Kristine. “ ‘I take you, Kevin, to be my husband from this day forward.’ ”

I felt a surge of heat under my collar, the pooling of tears in my eyes. A man had publicly said he would take another man as his husband. I was there—right there—and one of the first to hear him say it.

It was the gift Kevin and Will gave to me: to be so close, so present to the beginning of their marriage.

“Now, Kevin, repeat after me.”

There was a stillness in the nave, as if we all were watching a miracle unfold.

“Taylor, will you please hand me the rings?” asked Kristine.

“Now, Will, repeat after me: ‘Kevin, I give you this ring as a sign of my love and faithfulness.’ ”

Will slipped the glinting band around Kevin’s finger. Their eyes were only on each other.

“Kevin, please repeat after me: ‘Will, I give you this ring as a sign of my love and faithfulness.’ ”

I looked at Will’s mother, who held her hand against her pearls, lifted a handkerchief, and dabbed her eyes.

At that moment I thought of my own mother—what it would be like for her to be here now, what it would be like if she were at my own wedding, if I were to get married. I shook my head quickly, looked back at Kevin and Will, and smiled.

KRISTINE STEPPED BACK, lifted her hands above her head, and looked at the entire assembly. “Kevin and Will, by their promises before God and in the presence of this assembly, have joined themselves to one another as husbands. Those whom God has joined together let no one separate.”

An eruption of amens and thanks be to Gods rang around the church as Kevin and Will kissed.

We clapped and whistled, and, for a moment, it seemed that all was well, that everything was now possible for me: I had a model before me of two men getting married, in front of an entire church filled with supportive people. I began to think that perhaps my life was beginning to change, that the clasps of the straitjacket of pain was loosening its hold.

12.

THE SNOW SLOUGHED off the railings of Lake Street Bridge as I wrapped my hands around the steel. Goose bumps crawled up my arms. I shook my head and climbed on. I used a neighboring lamp for support so I wouldn’t slip. I heaved higher up each railing.

A hand gripped the back of my jacket, yanking me down from my perch on the rails of this bridge between Minneapolis and St. Paul. I could hear small ice sheets in the Mississippi grind against one another that January night, sometime after two in the morning. The snow fluffed away from my body as I landed, hard, on the cold pavement. Like Clarence Odbody, the angel in It’s a Wonderful Life, who rescues George Bailey, the bicyclist who stopped me from killing myself extended his gloved hand and asked me where I lived. Just up the road, I told him. We began to crunch through the snow, under amber light, the streets muffled, the snow still falling in large clumps.

For three years I had struggled to speak to my parents. Life would be easier in exile from the dry buttes of the prairie. Here, I was in a verdant landscape where enough water fell, where people were more open-minded about my being gay.

That night, however, I’d been determined to end it all—to put out the coal burning beneath my breastbone, the lump of pain I tried to keep hidden.

BUT THIS NIGHT the weight of my exile, the weight of knowing that if only I were straight, they’d still love me, was too much.

Earlier, after my housemates had gone to sleep, I put on my peacoat, gloves, and hat and walked along the Mississippi River while the snow floated like butterflies in the black night. There was a numbness in me, some stoic resolve. This, what I was about to do, would silence my pain, would put a stop to the nights of banging out hymns on the piano, escaping my emotions by lifting weights in the gym, grinding against men on dance cubes at the gay clubs in downtown Minneapolis—all those attempts to live in my body instead of my mind. I would fall the sixty or so feet and smack into the cold, black river—it would knock me unconscious, the weight of my wet coat, gloves, and snow boots would pull me under. My lungs would fill with water. It would all be quiet, would all end quietly.

I looked at the glistening skyscrapers upstream, in downtown Minneapolis, as I walked along the Lake Street Bridge. No cars drove by; the neighborhood businesses were dark.

Four bridges upstream, in 1972, John Berryman, a major “confessional” poet, had jumped and waved to university students before he shot down and disappeared into the churning Mississippi.

There would be no witnesses, no second thoughts, for my suicide. It was time.

I couldn’t cry anymore on the phone to my sister.

Long, lingering silences crackled across the telephone when I called my mother, if she answered at all.

I no longer spoke with my dad.

A YEAR BEFORE, I’d been published for the first time. I wrote a commentary about being outed for Minnesota Public Radio and meditated on the shortest, most life-changing phrase: I am gay.

Stupidly, once it was published, I emailed the piece to my mother. I thought, in some corner of my mind, that the piece would show her my pain, that it would serve as a type of signal flare shot into the sky, a desperate plea, a message that I needed help—that I needed their love, and that their renewed love would prevent any further ideations of suicide.

But this was not to be.

Later that year my parents came to visit me in Minneapolis. During our meals we only heard our scraping silverware. When a smiling young waiter came up to us and asked the table how we were doing, one of us would sharply blurt, “Fine.” We’d hide behind our menus, quickly give the waiter our order, and then pass the time by sipping our beer or water, avoid one another’s eyes, while waiting for our food to arrive.

During one supper, I offered my father a taste of an IPA, my favorite kind of beer. As the suds foamed across his mustache, his face crinkled. “Too much flavor,” he said.

When I took them to my favorite spot for brunch the next day, the Birchwood, a small farm-to-table restaurant nestled between neighborhood houses, my father couldn’t find anything on the menu to eat. I suggested basic eggs and toast and coffee. He replied that they didn’t have the right eggs or toast or coffee.

My parents spent the rest of the day shopping while I sulked in my duplex, alone.

The Sunday of their visit was Mother’s Day. Robin fledglings chirped; the oaks’ leaves had begun to whistle in the wind. I invited my parents to my church before we would go to a special brunch. I had made a reservation weeks earlier. I wanted Mother’s Day to be a type of new beginning, a reconciliation like Paul wrote in his second letter to the Corinthians. If God forgave me my trespasses, maybe I could find a way to forgive my parents theirs. And I thought they would want to reconcile, too, to come back together, to find a path toward healing—after all, they had made a four-hundred-mile drive from North Dakota to spend the weekend with me.

That morning, I was assisting minister, and after the first hymn, during the announcements, the pastor mentioned that I had an op-ed in the local paper.

During the passing of the peace, I made my way into the sanctuary to hug and shake the hands of my friends. My white robe billowed behind me.

When I shot over to my parents, my dad stared straight ahead. My mother pulled me in and could only sharply whisper, “What did you write this time?”

AFTER THE CHURCH SERVICE, I couldn’t find my parents, and I ran out to their car with a glass vase filled with flowers for my mom.

They stood beside their shining silver Buick.

“Aren’t we going to brunch?” I asked, feigning a smile.

Dad guffawed and opened the door to the driver’s seat and got in.

My eyes widened. I looked over at Mom, dressed in a sleeveless, ankle-length cotton dress.

“We have to get on the road to get home,” she said. “It’s going to be a long drive.”

I looked at the ground and blinked hard before looking back up at her.

“I got these for you,” I said, holding out a bouquet of tiger lilies and white daisies.

“Why?”

I leaned back slightly. “Because it’s Mother’s Day.”

Mom opened the passenger door, got in, and shut it. No hug. No goodbye.

They drove off.

I still held the vase of flowers.

AFTER THE BICYCLIST dropped me off at my duplex and watched me close the door, I heard him peel down the snowy street as I whacked my boots clean of snow.

I walked into my duplex, removed my peacoat, hat and gloves, and took off my shirt as I passed through the living room and dining room and into the short hallway toward my bedroom. I opened and quietly closed the door, finished undressing, and fell onto my bed. The sweat from the night soaked into my sheets. I sat up, leaned my elbows on my knees, held my head in my hands, and felt an electric numbness spark across my feet. I didn’t cry, but I looked out my window, past the hedgerow toward the warm lamplight beneath the towering oak trees, and watched the snow continue to fall in the still, cold night.

IN MAY 2013, SWEAT POOLED at my temples as I lifted my arms up and out of my black graduation robe and tried to adjust my mortarboard. The newly budded leaves hung limp on the branches, and I flapped my arms like a pelican to try to get a breeze under my polyester robe. We began the procession from the gym to the front of the blond-bricked Old Main at Hamline University. I had made it through graduate school.

As we walked by the shiny silver bleachers, I heard Grandpa Brorby and his second wife, Jean, call my name. I looked at them, smiled, and waved. Grandpa smiled and snapped a picture.

“We’ll see you afterward!” shouted Jean.

I smiled again, nodding, and Grandpa put his two pinkies in his mouth. A sharp whistle shot at me. I shook my head as Grandpa grinned at me.

A few weeks before, when I’d texted Mom to see whether she and Dad would like to come for my graduation with my master’s in liberal studies, she responded, “I don’t think we’ll have time.”

THE TUESDAY BEFORE my graduation, I sat on the cold marble floors of the Minnesota State Capitol. Together with friends from Christ Church Lutheran, I marched around the lobby, singing songs in support of same-sex marriage. In late February HF 1054, officially titled “Marriage Between Two Persons Provided for, and Exemptions and Protections Based in Religious Associations Provided For,” was introduced in the Minnesota legislature to legalize same-sex marriage. Days before we went to the Capitol, it had made it through the House. Now, this day, it was up to the Senate to pass it and move it along to the governor’s desk, and Governor Mark Dayton had promised he would sign it into law.

That morning, when I entered the towering rotunda, whose cobalt dome was ringed by renditions of Timidity and Minerva advising the American Genius in Edward Simmons’s murals The Civilization of the Northwest, a wave of chants washed over me: “Now is the time, this is the year!” Activists on both sides, those waving rainbow flags and those shaking pink signs with black silhouettes of a man plus a woman equals a baby, were crying out.

I stood in the midmorning light and took deep breaths as I read signs that read DON’T ERASE MOMS AND DADS and GIVE LOVE A CHANCE. There were men and women holding rainbow Mardi Gras beads and small children clutching rosaries.

Throughout the day I walked around the levels of the rotunda, smiling at some people, looking away from others. I found a quiet spot near a portrait of Minnesota’s thirty-fifth governor, Albert Quie. I pulled a sandwich out from my backpack and sat down on the floor. Would it happen today? Would Minnesota become the second Midwestern state, after Iowa, to legalize same-sex marriage?

I watched videographers and news reporters record reels in the quiet recesses of the Capitol. College students snapped selfies with their arms wrapped around each other. I quietly chomped on my salami sandwich when two women sat down next to me.

“Mind if we join you?” asked one of them, a woman with cropped gray hair and glasses.

I shook my head, my mouth full of sandwich. I swallowed quickly.

“Not at all. Please. I could use some company. I’m Taylor.”

“I’m Anne, and this is my wife, Joan.”

“It’s great to meet you, Taylor,” said Joan, a tall woman with shoulder-length silver hair.

When the pair sat down, Anne leaned over toward me as she pulled out a bag of almonds.

“Now, are you with us or against us?” she asked in a light, disarming tone.

“Oh, I’m with you,” I said earnestly. “I’m gay.”

“Thank fucking god,” smiled Joan. “With all these religious nutjobs, and these poor children holding those damn pink signs about Moms and Dads, we get worried whenever we see a solitary man.”

“You don’t have anything to worry about with me,” I laughed. “I sashayed out of the womb.”

Anne and Joan laughed.

THROUGHOUT THE DAY, the three of us told one another our coming-out stories and talked about how things stood—or didn’t—with family members and what the legalization of same-sex marriage would mean to us. Joan and Anne laughed easily; they leaned in and listened when I spoke.

“What do you think, Joan? Should we adopt Taylor?” asked Anne. “He’s certainly cute with all that red hair.”

I blushed.

“Do you want to get up and make a round?” I asked the pair. “I’m getting kind of stiff.”

“Oh no, we’re fine,” said Joan. “If you want, you can leave your backpack here and we’ll watch it. What do you think, Anne, let’s camp out here for the rest of the day—”

“Look what she did there,” burst in Anne. “Camp!”

The three of us laughed.

I shook my head.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes, you two,” I said and began to roam around the rotunda.

In the late afternoon, more people had gathered inside the Capitol. Pastors with long rainbow stoles walked the corridors, priests clutched their rosaries as they prayed with their flock. A man on the second floor of the rotunda strummed a guitar and sang, “Give love a chance.”

For a minute, I stopped, closed my eyes, and listened. The Capitol sounded like a cete of crying badgers.

WHEN I RETURNED, Joan was resting her head on Anne’s shoulder. Both women had their eyes closed. They rose and fell like a gentle wave as they breathed together. Then, suddenly, people started to gather near the west corridor steps. I snagged a college student.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“We think they’ve decided,” he said, walking away.

I turned to Joan and Anne, crouched, and rubbed Anne’s shoulder. She shook herself awake.

“Hi, Anne, I just heard that they think they might be making an announcement. They think the Senate has decided.”

Anne jolted. Joan’s head bounced off her wife’s shoulder.

“What the hell was that about?” Joan moaned, her eyes still closed.

“Honey,” said Anne, “it’s time. They’ve decided. It’s time to get up.”

I gripped Anne by the hand, said, “One, two, three,” and helped hoist her to her feet. Joan gathered their bags and, when she was ready, I helped her up, too.

We made our way to the stone steps and waited.

Suddenly, a page burst high into view atop the steps. He cupped his hands and shouted.

“It’s passed!” he cried. “It goes to the governor tomorrow!”

What I remember is tears. I remember hugs. I remember rainbow flags streaming around the corridors. I remember, in that moment, feeling that the world had changed.

THAT SATURDAY, I was the first in the long ceremony to graduate, and when I walked across the stage, I felt a little taller: I had done it. I received my master’s degree, another first in my family.

I could hear Grandpa and Jean yell when my name was called. I waved to them.

AT THE GRADUATION RECEPTION, I introduced Grandpa and Jean to my thesis adviser, Patricia, a small woman with cropped chestnut hair and walnut-colored eyes. When she smiled, her eyes shimmered, and her white Chiclet teeth shined. Pat had advised me in writing about whether the canon of Western literature encouraged consumerism. I looked at the mead hall in Beowulf, the celebrations of feasts in the Book of Psalms, the opulent English gardens in Emma, the glittering glamor of Gatsby’s life in West Egg. My conclusion? Of course, literature encouraged us all to be good little consumers—I had learned that years earlier from Jim Farrell.

Pat stepped back after shaking Grandpa and Jean’s hands. “Are you Taylor’s parents?” she asked.

I looked down, feigned a smile, and kicked at the grass.

“Oh, no.” Grandpa laughed. “We’re his grandparents.”

“You must all be so proud,” said Patricia.

I looked up at Patricia, who smiled at my grandpa and Jean.

“You bet we’re proud,” said Grandpa, wrapping his arm around my shoulder. We smiled, the two smallest Vikings in the Brorby family, and gripped each other tight.

I hadn’t told him—not yet—that the grandson he was proud of also had a secret.

13.

ON VETERANS DAY, when I was twenty-six, I sat with my mother’s father, my eighty-eight-year-old Grandpa Hatzenbihler, in Denny’s on the south side of Bismarck, near the civic center and Kirkwood Mall. I had brought my great-aunt Frances, my grandpa’s sister-in-law, along as backup. I planned to tell him I was gay.

We sat at a table surrounded by booths filled with Vietnam War veterans, Korean War veterans, and a wraithlike gaggle of World War II veterans—heroes all, but many of them now using canes or gripping walkers.

Aunt Frances—who was a combination of Betty White’s charm and Maggie Smith’s sharp tongue—looked ladylike on the outside, but she could cut you down if she had to. She ordered toast and sausage, I ordered a ham and cheese omelet, and Grandpa ordered his favorite pumpkin pancakes, timely for the season.

I brought Aunt Frances as backup because her granddaughter was gay, was married to a woman at the time, and had twins. My grandfather, Aunt Frances had told me, adored Bethany, my cousin, and her wife, whom he nicknamed Spike because of Adrianne’s gelled, spiked hair.

When I’d phoned her to ask whether she would come to lunch with Grandpa and me, she said, delightedly, “I wouldn’t miss it.”

When our food arrived, I told Grandpa I had something to say. Aunt Frances, uncharacteristically, kept her head down and remained quiet.

I turned to the man who, when I was a child, threaded worms on my hook to help me catch crappies. The man who taught me to waltz, who came to each of my jazz concerts in high school and rocked in the bleachers while I wailed on my saxophone. The man who, my mother later told me, wept the day he asked for help loading a trailer and my twelve-year-old hand was pinned under the weight of attempting to slide the trailer onto the hitch.

In childhood card games among Grandpa, Grandma, and me, he would feed me cards, helping me win in cribbage. Grandma Hatzenbihler, who believed children shouldn’t be helped if they were to play adult games, scowled.

My grandpa, who helped me build playing card forts, testing their strength by turning on a rotating fan, me cranking the knob, the wind blasting against the clubs, spades, diamonds, and hearts.

He built great paper airplanes, turned on the ceiling fan, and let me hurl the planes into the blades. The planes shot like rockets around the room as Grandpa and I yipped and hollered.

Sometimes he strapped ski goggles to his face, leaned back in our old La-Z-Boy loveseat as I rolled between obstacles like an American Gladiator as he shot Nerf darts at me.

When I close my eyes, I can still see him lowering those tall branches of juneberries to me in the dank coulees of Oliver County. There was a muffled ring as, berry by berry, he and I filled our Bridgeman ice cream pails with the purple fruit, which Grandma would later bake into pies or kuchens. Grandpa and I would drop the berries atop a mound of vanilla ice cream, stained purple from the juice.

Now, I held his skillet-sized hand while Aunt Frances sawed away at her pork sausage. I cleared my throat.

I looked directly into his warm eyes. “Grandpa, I date men,” I said and paused. “Grandpa, I’m gay.”

He pulled his hand away, cut his pumpkin pancakes. I heard Aunt Frances’s cheap knife scrape her ceramic platter.

“Taylor, the priests say it’s against our religion, but screw what the priests say—you’re my grandson.”

I sighed. My eyes watered. I stole a glance at Aunt Frances, who smiled.

She sniffled.

I wiped my face.

Grandpa bellowed, “Try these pumpkin pancakes, they’re fabulous.”

I GAVE AUNT FRANCES my arm as we stepped out into the blustery November day.

“Hold on to your hair—or what’s left of it,” chuckled Grandpa as the wind whipped flurries around the parking lot.

Aunt Frances clenched my forearm. When we got to Grandpa’s white van, she patted it and whispered, before hopping up into her seat, “The Lord was with us today, Taylor.”

WHEN I DROPPED Grandpa off at his tidy, two-bedroom apartment in Bismarck, I walked him to the door. In the rock bed along the sidewalk to the door was a stone sign: welcome to grandpa’s house. I could hear he had left the television on. He turned, this man I spent more days with in childhood than anyone else, his cream-filled belly now smaller than I remembered it as a child. His arms opened, as they always did, and, for a minute, I swear I ran to him as I remember doing at the old house in Center—me bursting through the door from the garage, where Grandpa kept live minnows and brewed chokecherry wine, into the bun-scented warmth of the kitchen, his great ho-ho-ho’s booming as I ran and threw myself into his arms.

I threw myself into his arms again. My head rested on his shoulder. I turned my head, trying desperately not to let my voice crack, and whispered, “I love you.”

“Ho-ho-ho,” he boomed, as always. “I love you, too. I love you, too.”

A FEW DAYS LATER, I came out to Grandpa Brorby, my father’s dad, over the phone. He now lived in Michigan, and I hadn’t seen him since he and his wife, Jean, came to my master’s graduation in St. Paul.

I didn’t know when I next would see them, so I’d decided it was finally time to tell him.

I called him from behind a pair of Dumpsters in Bismarck. If he rejected me, I wanted to be hidden, someplace where no one could pass by and see me crying.

I’d tried to call him the day before, but Jean answered the phone. Jean updated me on her latest hobby—making rugs out of old plastic bags—and how guitar lessons at church were going. She told me that Grandpa wasn’t home, but that I could try him later.

“There’s something important I have to tell him, Jean,” I said.

After a brief silence I blurted out that I was gay.

Jean asked me if she could talk to Grandpa first. I told her she could. She said that I should call back the next day, that he would be home then. She’d make sure of it. I hung up the phone and sighed.

So, there I was behind the Dumpsters for the second day in a row. I took a few deep breaths and called my grandpa.

“Hello, young fella,” came the booming, silvery voice I had always known.

“Hi, Grandpa,” I said.

“Now, Taylor, Jean told me what you’re going to tell me, but I have one thing to say before you say anything. . . .”

I caught my breath. My eyes watered as I looked down at the ground.

“You are my grandson and that’s all I know. I love you because you’re you.”

Of course, I cried. I said, “Oh, Grandpa” over and over again. The man who sang in our small-town musicals, who made me a small oak box where I kept the lump of coal and the 1896 Morgan silver dollar he gave me when I was eight, who used Brylcreem to part his hair just so, came through, transcended what I thought—had experienced—men of the American West were capable of—loving gay people.

TO GROW UP as a gay boy on the prairie is to live in a type of peril. For me, it always felt like I was swallowing the burning coal of who I was—if I conformed to my small town’s expectations of hating school and playing football or developed a love of killing (not hunting), then I could be accepted. But I had grandpas who taught me to love dancing, and Grandpa Brorby loved sawing and sanding and shaping cedar chests, entertainment centers, and cornered shelves with wooden bows. He loved creating beautiful things.

Whenever I walked down the street to my grandparents’ house, Grandpa Brorby was in his woodworking shed. Grandma would give me a pair of bright orange earplugs so I could say hi to him before coming inside to have lunch with her.

I can still smell my grandpa’s woodshop: planks of cedar floated overhead on rafters, an occasional piece of maple or cherry propped against the back wall, a small iron stove warmed the room.

Grandpa would wave, smile his wide smile, and turn off the band saw. He would hold up his pointer finger, turn around and, inevitably, pull a Tootsie Roll out of his pocket. He did this for everyone—he even had two Tootsie Rolls painted on his golf cart. To me, he was Grandpa; to everyone else he was the Tootsie Roll Man.

THREE YEARS AFTER I came out to him, while visiting his home in Michigan, Grandpa Brorby took me to his basement workshop. He cut small crosses out of his favorite myrtle wood. I remember his planks of myrtle wood from my childhood in Center—how he’d keep them hidden, using them only for his most precious, small projects.

Now, here in Michigan nearly twenty-five years later, his supply had dwindled. When I asked why he loved myrtle wood, he told me how easy it was to use, how forgiving—that when you put varnish on top of it, it shines like glass. He showed me how steady the wood stayed in place as he maneuvered around the words and phrases he carved in his small crosses: JESUS; i am the way, the truth, and the life. He bit his lower lip while carving the standalone “t” in truth, the “ruth” becoming one, singular movement.

“The truth of the matter is, Taylor, cutting out ‘truth’ is fucking hard,” he snorted.

IN THAT MOMENT I thought about both my grandpas, men of the Greatest Generation—Grandpa Hatzenbihler the farmer and Grandpa Brorby the coal miner. When I told them the truth, I was nervous, but it wasn’t hard: I didn’t have to cut the truth out. I just had to share it. And in those moments—in those small, quiet moments in Denny’s and over the phone—my grandpas told me their truth: they loved me.