“I don’t know how I could have gotten through it if I hadn’t seen your show,” he said through near-tears and a quaver in his voice. I was not just speaking for myself then, but for this man’s brother, and this man himself, who, as a black man at Harvard, must have also struggled to belong. His vulnerability cut through time and paired with the strength I mustered to get through that performance he saw, to assert not just my reality but one of the many possible worlds for those of us who lived outside society’s expectations.

—

My preoccupation with Ralph continued amid this hubbub, as I managed to attend these monthly social hours some graduate students organized for Harvard and MIT affiliates, knowing he would likely be there. While the two of us made polite conversation, I did find some humor in thinking our situation Austenesque, the way we made small talk as if we were just casual acquaintances, even when we meant so much more to each other, except that social convention prevented us from being together. Though after I made plans to do an art internship at the Getty in Los Angeles for the summer, and maybe move to New York after that, I figured it was just as well that the two of us didn’t become entangled.

I’d also started going out with an Irish MIT postdoc named David, red-haired and uncomplicated, someone I could just hop into bed with and hop out without getting tied up in knots. The Wednesday between the two-weekend run of Dancing Deviant in early May, I managed to get myself out to the last MIT–Harvard gathering at Napoleon’s, a gay piano bar in downtown Boston. As I came in, David and Ralph happened to be sitting next to each other on barstools, so I decided to stand between them.

“I had to ditch my paper on Henry VIII to get here,” I said.

“Now that’s a fascinating chapter in British history,” Ralph replied, as he informed me about the beheading of Anne Boleyn, an event that does not appear in the play, and how Henry was responsible for the Protestant Reformation. I had the growing sense as he went on that Ralph was showing off, that he once again had shed his usual discretion for my benefit, and I couldn’t help but be pleased because this meant that he still liked me. I listened with rapt attention as Ralph told stories about Henry’s subsequent wives, how he ended the succession of kings when he couldn’t sire a legitimate male child, so England wound up with Elizabeth the First as queen. Ralph’s erudition continued to enrapture me, the range of topics he could talk about and how he made me feel like all this knowledge was within my grasp, as he spoke with no trace of superiority or condescension.