“There’s a considerable difference. You can be an atheist and still get sober. I’m an atheist myself. It’s a harder road if you believe there is a God and that he’s already condemned you because first you have to give up that belief. Whether or not you can depends on how brainwashed you’ve been by conventional religion. And psychologically,” he continued, “it would mean you have to stop hating yourself for being gay.”

“I don’t hate myself for that.”

“Oh, honey, of course you do. All of us do. How could we not? We’ve been taught to hate ourselves by our gay-hating culture. Taught in a thousand ways that we are abnormal and defective. It’s hard enough to expel that poison even if you don’t believe that some ancient bearded man sitting on a throne in the sky has already drawn a black line through your name in his book of judgment.” His tone was sharp, but his gaze was sympathetic. “There’s no such man, Bill. That God was a lie you were told to keep you in line. A lie.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Use your brain. Don’t you think the master of the universe, if there is such a thing, would have other things on his mind than who you fuck? Here,” he continued, digging into his coat pocket. “Here’s my card. Call me and we’ll talk about this.”

Bill took the card with a mumbled thanks. On his way home, he tossed it into a trashcan.

The flat was loud with Nick’s absence. Bill poured himself a glass of wine and ruminated over the phrase the AA speaker had used, “a disease of loneliness.” Whether or not it accurately described alcoholism, Bill thought it certainly applied to being gay. For him, two facts had emerged as being incontrovertibly true: one, he was homosexual and, two, it was a terrible life. Not day-to-day terrible because the days could be and were filled with obligations and distractions but all that was tap-dancing at the edge of an abyss which, when he stopped long enough to look into it, was bottomless and dark. Simon was wrong. This wasn’t about self-hatred or condemnation by God. It was simply the truth.

Waldo could yammer about making a family from his friends but what kind of family was it where you could be banned from the funeral of the person you loved most in the world? And friends? What kind of family was that? People drifting in and out of your life with no real obligation to you or you to them and no bond of blood or the intimacy of having grown up in the same household. That was real family. This gay community was nothing more than a bunch of outcasts who pretended to have chosen their status when everyone knew, really, there was no choice.