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Back Surrender Your Sons Save as PDF
Chapters (43)
  1. Author’s Note with Content Warnings
  2. CHAPTER ONE
  3. CHAPTER TWO
  4. CHAPTER THREE
  5. CHAPTER FOUR
  6. CHAPTER FIVE
  7. CHAPTER SIX
  8. CHAPTER SEVEN
  9. CHAPTER EIGHT
  10. CHAPTER NINE
  11. CHAPTER TEN
  12. CHAPTER ELEVEN
  13. CHAPTER TWELVE
  14. CHAPTER THIRTEEN
  15. CHAPTER FOURTEEN
  16. CHAPTER FIFTEEN
  17. CHAPTER SIXTEEN
  18. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
  19. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
  20. CHAPTER NINETEEN
  21. CHAPTER TWENTY
  22. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
  23. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
  24. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
  25. CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
  26. CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
  27. CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
  28. CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
  29. CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
  30. CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
  31. CHAPTER THIRTY
  32. CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
  33. CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
  34. CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
  35. CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
  36. CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
  37. CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
  38. CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
  39. CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
  40. CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
  41. CHAPTER FORTY
  42. EPILOGUE
  43. Acknowledgments

I don’t remember fainting.

All I remember is cracking my head on the cold linoleum…the darkened school corridor filling with a crackling light…my eyes blurring…people running…Maryann frantically jumping on the phone as Clair tips a cup of water across my lips…the two women, thick as thieves five minutes ago, now spitting blame at each other…

The rest of my memories of that day remain smothered in fog, all except one detail: I wasn’t the first person to solve the riddle of my fog. They were.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

THE WOLF
AND THE CALF

TODAY

Being in the closet is like being stuck in some highly realistic dream. The dream has its own logic and makes perfect sense. To people outside the closet, outside the dream, things are simple and straightforward—but to us, they aren’t. And once we’re out, once we wake, thoughts that used to make sense now seem impossible.

How could I not have known about the Reverend?

Stanley Packard was a Nightlight camper for over a year. So was Ricky. So was Briggs. “No one has left Nightlight after only a week.” Darcy’s words are a stale cracker I keep chewing but can never swallow. Leaving behind the open expanse of the cliffs, the Reverend returns us to the claustrophobia of our inland jungle camp. He stares blankly at the twisting road, saying nothing. Ricky’s Playbill jostles in my pocket next to Bill’s Walkman and the Reverend’s teenage picture.

I should have known he was a camper.

Maybe I did. I didn’t know exactly, but seeing the young Reverend wear a camper’s uniform cleared the fog that has been squatting on my brain for five years. The thing I couldn’t figure out about myself, I also couldn’t figure out about the Reverend. Before I had any premonition the Reverend could be gay—before I even wondered it about myself—something inside me whispered, I don’t want to be him. I knew it on a subconscious, subatomic level. Whenever the Reverend argued with his mother in that farmhouse (when she was alive), whenever they snapped at each other in Sue’s Diner like an old married couple, whenever he preached hot hell about people like us in church…something tugged at my heart. Something that refused to fit. It was like I was the only one with good enough radar to sense the disturbance. I was twelve when I met the Reverend, and back then, the emotion I’d eventually call “gay” was just a nameless, gray fog in the back of my mind. Gay didn’t mean boyfriends yet or even fantasizing about other boys’ bodies. Gay meant loneliness. Omnipresent loneliness. It meant no future, no family, except you and your mother in your same Goddamn house until you both went old and crazy together.

Nothing would ever be new again. Just…gray.