Had it not been for these creatures, he might not have been sure, because the other men going in and out of the bars looked normal to Bill. Some were in business suits while others wore Levi’s and leather jackets or polyester pants and Hawaiian shirts or tie-dyed tees and bell bottoms. He saw slender hippie boys and old white-haired, potbellied grandpas and middle-aged men who looked like they mowed the lawn on Saturday afternoon and then settled in front of the TV with a six-pack to watch the game, like his dad.

At first, he found it hard to believe these ordinary-looking men were gay. After observing them for a few, cold hours, however, he noticed, even among the most normal looking of them, small, delicate mannerisms as they walked by—the twist of a hand, the toss of a head—or heard in their otherwise ordinary voices the faintest sibilance. These gestures and inflections signaled to him that these men were not, after all, like his father or his brothers. They moved differently in their bodies than the men of Eden Plains, more loosely, more softly. Their maleness was undeniable but it was also less insistent. And here and there, among them, strode a few men more beautiful than any males he had ever seen outside the pages of magazine ads or the movie screen.

The beauties were, in their way, as distinctive as the swishes and like the swishes they carried themselves as if they knew they were on display. They seemed to Bill like actors, their every step and gesture more controlled and a little more emphatic than in ordinary life, as if in response to the commands of an unseen director. His heart broke a dozen times that night as he followed them with dazed and dazzled eyes, they were so magnificent and so utterly inaccessible.

More than a few men slowed when they saw him propped against a wall next to a pet store and gave him long, lingering looks, their eyes making a slow, shameless appraisal of his face and his body from the top of his head to the cuffs of his Levi’s. The attention excited and embarrassed him, forcing his eyes to the ground where he shuffled his feet on the dirty sidewalk, hoping that someone would speak to him. But no one did. Finally, cold and tired, but electric with arousal, he screwed up his courage and pushed through the doors of a bar he had already passed half a dozen times. Mounted above the padded, double doors was a neon mask and, also spelled out in neon, the words The Hide ’n Seek.