“—been pushed to three,” he says, and points at the partition. “Fellow’s in there already, though. Don’t know if there will be a priest,” he says, and when you ask why not, Marlen smirks. “Fellow played for the pink team,” he says, and it’s the way Marlen has said “fellow” twice that’s made his dumb politeness go mean. That super stale line about the “pink team,” it makes you angry, worried that something more’s come out in the news, something intimate maybe about you and Tampico, or even just Tampico himself, but you have no reason to worry: Marlen only watches TV from when he gets home until bed, then reads a bit of the Bible. He does not, you are guessing, own, like, a real phone. He’s talking to you like he knows you, because he voted for you he knows you, thinks that while he wouldn’t seek you out as a buddy, you’d fit in just fine with the other lightweights at his wife’s church or something—and it’s true that Marlen has every right to assume what he assumes as you have a super long record of Opposing Equality; received a 0% Human Rights rating in your first term from the ACLU; vote regularly to roll back existing protections for people of varying sexual orientations; opposed the repeals of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell; toed the line during the long, vocal battle for DOMA; and even now are having your staffers write at length about your support for an amendment to the Constitution banning gay marriage (and abortion) for good in Plaine Truth—and whenever pressed to further address why you don’t support the freedom to marry, especially now, when it’s law, you just shrug and say, dumbly, and with the requisite intransigence compelled by your Party, some laws were meant to be changed back.

Because you’d rather not get into it with Marlen in the exact same way that you’d rather not get into it with anyone. Because, like, you are Not Gay, and how many times must you say it? And you don’t appreciate it when your staffers tell you to stop posing so gay in pictures, and stop dressing so gay in your cowboy outfit just like the one Reagan wore, and stop combing your hair that old-fashioned way that’s so gay, and stop laughing so gay, shaking hands so gay, smiling with a tilt of your head so gay, and you’ve worked pretty hard to fight this, and you even had photographers follow you once, into a gym, to photograph you doing something “manly,” and you were, like, lifting weights in a tank top, showing your guns, and what could be more manly than that? You have no idea why everyone singles you out all the time when there are plenty of people you know, people in positions much more powerful than yours, who vote one way in public and live another in private, and it’s hard to blame them; like you, they do not see themselves as hypocrites, they have simply seen how America works, have seen the oily machine of her power, and their desire to be included, to be a part of her Greatness, is so strong that they will create for themselves an Image.