Billy and the Kid

I was a closeted CEO. Then my college crush's shocking diagnosis kicked off the ache and 'Euphoria' of my second adolescence.

Email us at queerloveprojectsub@gmail.com to take “The QLP Questionnaire.”
Plus, find out how to submit your original personal essay to The Queer Love Project.

We pay our contributors, so your subscription and support is valuable! Thanks for reading.

Photo by Mathias Reding on Unsplash

I remember the day that I met him, the spring of my college sophomore year. It was the weird time of the semester when classes are almost over, but no one is in study mode yet for finals. A lot of time to just hang out. Before cell phones and text messages, a handful of places existed where we would congregate after classes.

Like any other day, I dropped my stuff in my room and headed down the hall to see what everyone was up to. Walking in, I remember being disappointed that the people I really enjoyed hanging out with weren’t there. Maybe the few in the room could sense the disappointment and, as I was trying to think of a polite way to excuse myself, one of them just pointed to a closed door and said: “They’re in there.”

I’d heard his name mentioned before but had never met him. He was Billy, the baseball player. I knocked, entered, and within seconds was sitting so close to him our knees were touching. He had just quit the team, he announced. He wanted to enjoy his senior year since Division III ball players weren’t exactly in competition for the majors, so it seemed pointless. “Fuck it,” he said, and we proceeded to take bong hits.

He was wearing a red polo shirt, chest hair poking out just above the button. His hair was thick, dark, and perfectly framed his face. It moved magnificently when he stood up to shake my hand, but it was his smile, his dimples, the perfect amount of stubble that I couldn’t help but stare at. Passing the bong around between the three of us, I got to know more about him. He was funny, with a contagious, sometimes whooping laugh. I could smell his breath, his deodorant, his shampoo, his laundry detergent. I could feel the heat radiating from him.

I finally had to just ask him why his clothes smelled so good (not weird at all). The answer: Hawaiian Breeze Gain and a liquid fabric softener that has since been discontinued. He borrowed my chapstick and kept it. The following year, I just started buying two tubes.

By the following fall, he’d come by my room in the fraternity house every afternoon, and he would often stay through dinner and a movie, before going home. A lot of the time, he would just sleep on the sofa, not wanting to make the trip. Our other fraternity brothers even started referring to us as the “Ambiguously Gay Duo” after the popular Robert Smigel short on Saturday Night Live. Going anywhere together, people often assumed that we were brothers.

We’d ride around in his old Toyota Land Cruiser, windows down, music blaring (we both loved reggae), and I’d feel a knot in my chest I couldn’t name. We were both smokers, but we didn’t like to be seen walking around campus smoking (his dad worked on campus and I, my mother’s son, thought it was trashy). One day, his father caught us; I felt like I was 14 again, waiting for him to step away from the car so we could exhale.

All Billy had to do was flash that smile and giggle and something in me would tighten. Soon I found myself worried when he didn’t show up at the normal time. I found myself jealous of his “other friends.” If he hooked up with a girl after a party, I was hurt. It was a crush—pure and simple—but in the 1990s, in the place we lived, I didn’t have the vocabulary for it. Instead, I swallowed the feeling and told myself I was lucky just to have a friend like him. He was a senior and already had his dream job lined up; he started to shift into adult mode. His having to be able to pass a drug screen when he started that summer really cramped my style.

We got high and talked for hours about nearly any subject. We shared our hopes and dreams, freely talked about the things we were scared of. There were times I’d look up and notice that it was the early hours of morning. That was an amazing year and the one I look back on most fondly. I had never had a friend that I had so much in common with or that I felt that close to. I chalked it up to one of those rare things, felt fortunate to have experienced it, and that was that.

+++

There were moments when the truth surfaced. A colleague’s hand that lingered on my shoulder, a locker room conversation I didn’t want to end, even a scene in a movie that made my chest ache while everyone else looked away. Each time, I pushed it back down. Living closeted wasn’t about denying desire once; it was about denying it every single day. You wake up, you go to work, you play your part—and every day, you keep a secret from yourself.

Graduation, career, marriage, children. I built an identity on top of silence, convinced that my attraction to men was just curiosity, admiration, something that would fade with time. It never did. So I got good at pretending, crafting the image of husband, father, and executive from a mold I had unconsciously studied my whole life.

I’m not a sports fan, but I made a point to study the basics of football and basketball—enough to fake my way through the conversations that would come Monday morning. I constantly watched my movements, choice of words, clothing, even a throwaway comment that someone might interpret the wrong way. It took me a long time to figure this out, but by pretending like that, I honestly didn’t know what the “real me” even looked like anymore. In hindsight, I had been playing a version of myself since elementary school.

It started slowly, sort of an imposter syndrome, a sinking feeling that I didn’t deserve my success, that I was a fraud, and that eventually everyone would figure it out. I could usually shake the feeling, even being objective, telling myself: “You’ve been doing this for 20 years; if they wanted you gone, you’d be gone.” These feelings would usually come right after Christmas, perhaps brought on by the new year, or my approaching birthday. Regardless, I would always push through, keeping the secret safe for at least another year.

Then in 2020, I suddenly couldn’t do it anymore. It started as anxiety that, by mid-2021, had reached the point of being nearly debilitating. The pandemic shattered any illusion of control I had ever had about my life and career. You could do everything right and the world could still be turned upside down in a moment’s notice. I had control over a hospital budget in the hundreds of millions, but when a nurse asked for another mask for the day, I couldn’t give it to her. Until that point, I thought that through sheer will and determination, I could make anything happen.

In the midst of this, I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize. It was Billy’s wife. He had married a law school classmate of my sister’s, so despite the time and distance, I’d see him every now and then. We’d stood at each other’s weddings, sent gifts and notes for each new kid and milestone. His wife told me he had been diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer, and that he didn’t want to fight. He was young. Too young. He should have had decades still ahead of him.

I was breathless. I knew what Stage 4 meant, even understood why he didn’t want to fight. It took me two days, but I finally called him. No text, no email—a real conversation. After that, we began talking or texting every week. Sometimes he’d share what scared him, sometimes we’d just fall into old rhythms. Now that we both had VA Medical Cannabis cards, we’d reminisce about old times. He sent me a song he was listening to during chemotherapy—Larry Marshall’s “Keep on Pushing.” I stopped cold. I remembered the track, vaguely remembered the words. In tears, I imagined him lying there listening to that song, willing himself to keep on pushing.

Finally, by early 2022, I couldn’t take it anymore. My anxiety had reached a point where I could barely function. I became convinced that people I was working with were out to get me. I even tried to resign, saying the hospital deserved better leadership than I was giving it. Fortunately, my employer wouldn’t let me do it unless I agreed to take some time off, then decide. I took a medical leave and started seeing a therapist and taking medication.

That time finally gave me just enough perspective to admit I couldn’t keep up the pretense. I spent hours imagining the worst that could happen if I came out: reputation ruined, a broken family, a lucrative career—basically my identity—thrown away. I still needed permission, though. I got that from the most unlikely of places.

I had seen parts of the first season of the HBO series Euphoria, but didn’t even know the second season was coming out. Being home, I made it a point to watch it. In an episode three flashback, a high school–age Cal (the character played by Eric Dane) is very attracted to his best friend Derek. It turns out to be reciprocal, and the montage ends with the two of them dancing at a gay bar on the outskirts of town. The next morning, Cal receives a call from his then girlfriend (now wife) that she is pregnant.

The viewer is left to presume that this is the reason Cal and Derek aren’t together. In episode four, a drunk, adult Cal returns to the same gay bar, cues up the same INXS song. Eventually he’s thrown out and returns home to confront his wife and kids for not allowing him to express his sexuality. The scene ends with Cal unzipping his pants and pissing all over the foyer floor, his family looking on in awe. Two things hit me right at that moment. Billy wasn’t just my friend; what I had experienced all those years ago wasn’t admiration; it was love. Perhaps one-sided, but love all the same. The second: I had to come out before I self-destructed. I could see myself in Cal. As raw and disturbing as the scene was, I knew I was heading down that same path. I could take control and do it my way, or wait for my own breakdown moment.

Two weeks before I was supposed to return to work, I came clean—at least, to my therapist, my wife, and my sister. I was willing to accept all of the consequences if it meant a chance for me to truly be myself. The pandemic let me see that we don’t have control over what happens to us. In a matter of a few weeks, the world ground to a halt. Billy helped me admit that tomorrow wasn’t guaranteed. His fight inspired me—he was facing down something that was going to ultimately kill him. It made my personal struggle seem pale in comparison.

But I still had to tell Billy. On his birthday that year, his family held a surprise party for him. I think we secretly all worried this was likely going to be the end, because everyone important to him was there. Afterward, a small group of closer friends went back to Billy’s house. We told stories, got high, drank wine, and laughed until the wee hours again. That night, with only a few people left, I told him the truth.

I told him what I’d been burying for decades—that I was gay, that my feelings for him had always been more than friendship. I told him about the nights he fell asleep on my couch, and I wished he’d stay in my bed. That I can still close my eyes and hear his voice, see those dimples, imagine running my hand through the thick hair he kept until the end. I told him I still use the same detergent his mother used because I wanted that smell on my clothes. I told him that when I looked at his photos on Instagram, I could see the sadness in his eyes, that I knew he was scared because he’d started using his “MBA voice,” talking about “circling back” with specialists, “researching other programs around the country.” That’s the voice he uses to reassure himself, not me. And I told him that sometimes, when I was with women, I still thought of him.

No. I wish that it happened that way. Instead, my sister, just before passing out, told the whole group why my now ex-wife wasn’t there with me. I was gay. Regardless, when it all came out, he didn’t flinch. He just listened, the way he always had. He called the next day to assure me it was OK. I like to think he already knew the other part. Like many things between us, it didn’t have to be said.

That was the last gift he gave me. His death just a few months later stripped away every excuse I had left. Continuing to squander my own life seemed like an indulgence. We are not guaranteed tomorrow. If he could face the end of his life with honesty and bravery, the least I could do was face the rest of mine the same way.

+++

I found that telling my wife and family I was gay was actually the easy part. It’s the stuff that came after that was hard. Suddenly I was 16 again—except this time with a mortgage, children, and a career behind me. Now that I had spoken my sexuality into existence, though, I wanted to experience it.

I joined an online group for gay men who had been married to women. I noticed several postings from someone about my age who lived not too far away. He seemed to be at about the same point I was, so I reached out. Did I secretly wish for what eventually happened? Of course. But my intentions were genuine. Two people going through something similar could help and support each other, and that’s what we agreed to do.

In hindsight, it was probably the proximity, the desires we’d both kept pent up for years, and the comfort of being with someone just as inexperienced. But what I wished for happened. That first kiss wasn’t smooth or perfect. It was clumsy, unexpected, and it lit something in me that had been waiting for decades. My chest burned, my hands shook, and all I could think was, “So this is what it’s supposed to feel like.”

All told, I think it lasted about six weeks. We attended our first LGBTQ Pride event together; at some point decided to hold hands, eventually we held each other as the event wound down. That night we went on a proper date, held hands going back to the hotel and, for the first time, I fell asleep with my head on another man’s chest.

And yes, he broke my heart. I wasn’t prepared for it—the silence where there used to be laughter, the absence of a message that should have arrived. I was stunned by how much it hurt. I was old enough to know heartbreak doesn’t kill you. But in that moment, I understood why teenage love feels like the end of the world.

To be a teenager in a man’s body is disorienting. You blush when you shouldn’t. You ache in ways that feel both ridiculous and holy. You get jealous like a high schooler but carry the weight of 40 years’ worth of silence. The emotions are raw, sharper than they have any right to be, because they’ve been waiting so long to surface.

Walking into a gay bar for the first time felt like walking into the cafeteria on the first day of high school. Everyone else already knew the rules, the codes, the body language. I stood there wide-eyed, feeling both too old and too young at once. Terrified, yes—but also exhilarated.

Dating apps weren’t much easier. My straight peers had left their teenage awkwardness decades behind; I was living mine in real time. Every message felt like passing a folded note across a classroom desk, waiting to see if the other person would circle “yes” or “no.” Each ping carried the thrill of possibility and the sting of rejection, magnified because it all felt brand new. Eventually I found that I was actually good at flirting; what to say came naturally. Closing the deal and consummating it are another subject entirely.

There’s humiliation in that second adolescence. You stumble, misread signals, fall too hard, too fast. But there’s freedom too. Straight people are locked into the choices they made at 17. We get a second draft. Mine came at a point where I had the hindsight and resources to indulge it.

I got to kiss someone and feel the ground shift. I got to let my body say yes after decades of teaching it to say no. I got to fall in love not as a theory but as something alive, with all its messy, awkward, ungraceful edges. First kiss; first time seeing someone naked; the first intimate moments all happening to someone who should have left all this behind in middle school. Sometimes I still wish I’d had the courage when I was young. I wish I’d looked at my best friend and admitted what I was really feeling. Maybe things would have been different. Maybe I would have spared myself years of pretending. But maybe it had to happen this way.

After Billy died, I couldn’t listen to the song he sent me during chemo, skipping it every time I heard the opening beat. So I decided instead to cling to another favorite of ours, Ken Boothe’s reggae version of “Everything I Own.” My fondest road trip memory with Billy was driving down to the coast of South Carolina for Spring Break—just the two of us, so high the car must have been driving itself. Halfway through that song, both singing at the top of our lungs, I reached up and opened the sunroof—to let some of the fun out of the car.

Maybe this memory, and my unspoken love for Billy, was part of the story that shaped me, that gave me the clarity to recognize love when it finally appeared. As someone who modeled what love looked like without the underlying feeling, perhaps I needed that experience. I needed to understand how it felt to be with someone who just gets me without explanation, who sees me for who I am, who I’m not afraid to bare my soul to. That’s what Billy helped me with, without knowing it. Maybe adolescence, however delayed, came right on time. I don’t know.

What I do know is this: There’s no expiration date on becoming yourself. There’s no statute of limitations on first love, or first heartbreak, or first joy. Gay adolescence in midlife doesn’t erase the years before, but it does reclaim them. It says: I get to feel this. I get to start again.

And so I did. I started again, clumsy and wide-eyed, stumbling through a second adolescence with all the intensity of the first. The difference is that this one was mine—not borrowed, not hidden, not disguised as something else.

There are only two pictures from that time I’ve kept all these years. One hangs in my office now. It’s an 8-by-10, black-and-white print that a friend took and developed herself. In it, I’m in the passenger seat of his old Land Cruiser, wearing Billy’s sunglasses and drinking a 40-ounce wrapped in a paper bag. I kept it hidden for years, even thinking it was lost. When I moved in with my partner, though, I found it in a box and hung it up. It reminds me of those days—of being young, of who I was—and reminds me to keep on living, for Billy, yes, but mostly now, finally, for me.

---

The QLP Questionnaire: Caleb Reed