The Fancy Dancer

love people, you love the world. What the fuck do you know about love? You don’t even love yourself, because if you did, you could be honest with yourself. I just dare you to get in bed with me, you holier-than-thou faggot, and I’ll show you what love really is.”
    He delivered this boiling little sermon in such a controlled whisper that none of the penitents waiting in the pews outside would have thought anything unusual was going on in the confessional. Vidal had been smart enough to trap me in the one spot where I couldn’t get away from him without making a scene. I sat there pressed into the comer of my booth, feeling as trapped as if I were being fed into the cutting knives of a baling machine.
    “You’re crazy,” I said. “Get out of here and leave me alone.”
    “You know I’m not crazy. You know I'm right, don’t you? All these weeks I've been playing along with you, waiting for you to wake up and realize that you were attracted to me. And the other day up there, I kissed you and you liked it, didn’t you? You didn’t stop me, did you? And the only reason you didn’t let me go any farther was that you were scared.”
    “So you lied to me,” I said. “You didn’t want help at all. It’s the oldest trick in the book. Women play it on priests all the time.”
    “At first I wasn’t after anything. At first I thought you were probably straight, and I just wanted to be near you. I saw you walking down the street one day, and you were looking so butch and so free, with your skirt and your blond hair blowing in the breeze, and I fell for you. I went crazy thinking about you, I drank, I got in fights. But I didn’t go around you because I don’t go in for rough trade—”
    “Rough trade?”
    “That’s when you throw a pass at some stud and you don’t really know if he’s gay, but you’re willing to take a chance. I don’t go for rough trade, see? But finally I got so crazy I thought I’d just try hanging around you. Do you know how gorgeous you are? If you went to Hollywood and walked down Highland Avenue in that cassock of yours, you’d have every queen in town chasing after you ..
    “Will you shut up?”
    “You shut up, or everybody in church is gonna hear 94
    us. So I got to know you, and at first I didn’t have any intentions. But after a while I could see you warming up to me and I thought to myself, Holy Christ, this stud’s as gay as I am, and he’s coming up to that big moment. Remember I told you about that minute that comes, when you know? Maybe it happens when you’re fourteen, and it doesn’t happen to some guys till they’re nineteen or twenty, and guys like you till they’re twenty-five or thirty. But it comes, and when it does, you have to decide which kind of lies you like better. Even being a closet queen is less of a lie than knowing you’re gay and staying straight. Don’t talk to me about lies ..
    He stopped to catch his breath. His head was leaning against the lattice, and the dark wavy hair was pressed through, just like on that first night. In his breathing I could feel the enormity of the emotion that he’d built up all through these weeks.
    I sat there in a state of shock, my fingers playing idly with the fringe on my bitterroot-embroidered stole.
    “And you liked it when I kissed you. Didn’t you?”
    I closed my eyes and put my hand over them. A fine trembling was going up and down my body. One time last fall I’d been driving too fast to Helena, and the highway was wet, and the Triumph spun off into a ditch. The trembling I felt at that brush with death was the same as now.
    “Yes,” I said, in such a low voice that he probably had to strain to hear me.
    “Did you ever have any kind of sex with a guy?”
    “No.”
    “But you must have had sex with women.”
    He questioned me as pitilessly as some Inquisition lawyer. All that remained was the formality of confession before being burned at the stake. Wounded into a state of shock, I answered his questions.
    “I was engaged once, like you. She was a Helena girl, you wouldn’t know her name. I’d really convinced myself that I was in love with her. And I felt that everybody expected it of me. Sometimes I felt real homy too, and I thought she was what made me feel that way. A couple of times I almost went the whole way with her, but somehow I just couldn’t get into it. I realized that if I married her, everybody would expect me to perform. And I also thought that it was religion