I’d thought gay love was about fucking.
But then, one day I got out of the shower and saw my pubic hair. A once healthy coral reef of black curls, thinned and decimated down to the point where I could part it, and there was my bare, naked pelvis, plucked like a rotisserie chicken.
Ethan was taking care of me that chemo cycle, and I asked if I could show him. It felt more like eight-year-olds playing doctor than abject exhibitionism. He saw what I meant. Instinctively, he pulled his own briefs down to compare — a lush, vibrant garden of bushy, healthy curls.
He was in his briefs because he was happily playing along to my insistence that my white blood cells (WBCs) and red blood cells (RBCs) were doing OK, but my gay blood cells (GBCs) desperately needed gay boy cuddles (GBCs again) and Ethan was the type to say yes whenever he could say yes, finding ways to hold me even though I couldn’t lie on my side — the intestinal pain was too much — and one afternoon, he was asleep and I was awake, and I wondered if all that time we hadn’t spent fucking, a rancor I’d nourished, had kept me from seeing him as he was, his love for what it was: a sweet young man happy to hold me and my big stupid heart.
Michael Nagle is a queer, Sri-Lankan American writer living in Los Angeles where he’s undergoing treatment for metastatic colon cancer. He is deeply interested in how getting raw, messy, naked, and honest on the page can help all of us as a collective move through the harshest of life’s winds and come out the other side better able to love each other.
Image Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/Guillaume Seguin
