No 'Happy Endings'

Since love has always felt impossible to attain, I tend to resent queer love stories because they don’t (or can’t) portray the reality and the complexity of my life.

Each week, The Queer Love Project publishes an original essay. Want to submit your essay and add to our growing archive? Find our submission guidelines and more here.

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Buy Lester’s book, Rage: On Being Queer, Black, Brilliant . . . and Completely Over It

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I had one photo of us together. It was the last time we saw each other. We had gone to a book reading event in Red Hook, Brooklyn, featuring—as David would later remind me—Rufus Wainwright and other artists reading selections of their poetry from a collection curated by my boss at the time, the editor of Out magazine. I don’t remember much of that night except how nervous I was to ask for a picture of the two of us as we rode the subway home to our respective destinations.

I had met David only three months ago, but there was something there…wasn’t there? We had only hung out a few times, and he was only in the country till May while he finished up his PhD, then it was back to the U.K. for him, ending any possibility of us being…anything. After a few hangs, in a fit of romantic bluster, I sent him a long text telling him I had feelings for him. It was something like three pages long. I held my breath and pressed send. He responded with a long text of his own, saying that he had feelings for me, too, but because he was leaving the country soon, he didn’t want to start something he couldn’t finish. I took a screenshot of that text and kept it as I would a locket, a cherished token, proof-positive that I could really like someone and they could really like me back. It was a new feeling.

With those texts between us, we went to Red Hook. I remember it now. I remember him, in his tight black shirt and tight blue jeans, bulging everywhere, that big juicy ass jutting out at an angle as he leaned against a railing outside the event, reading some thick tome. As I walked up to him, I cursed and thanked the universe for this brilliant tableau: a beautiful man reading. And waiting for me.

On the subway ride home, I wanted to be bold. I wanted to invite him back to my place because he was leaving and who knew when we’d see each other again, but the most I could muster was to ask for a photo. I made a funny face, too self-conscious to just…be with him.

David and I kept in touch over the years. He left in 2016, but rarely a month went by when we didn’t text or have a video call to catch up on each other’s lives. This summer, 2024, I moved down to Brooklyn, for what was supposed to be a few months but is now looking permanent. I have a book coming out, my first book, and among other things, I write about David in it — in an essay called, “The Impossibility of Love.” That essay was actually an expansion on another essay I had written, also about David, for Out.com.

After a series of disappointments and heartbreak, David came along and gave me hope—hope that there could exist, out there, somewhere, someone for me, even if it wasn’t or couldn’t be him. But all those years of transcribing my personal turmoil for public consumption resulted in a whole ass book. That was already reason to be excited when David informed me earlier this summer that he was visiting New York and wondered if he could stay with me. My heart nearly fluttered out of my goddamn throat.

Could this be it? I wondered. But how? And why now? Then I thought I was making more of this than what it was. We’re just friends. Good friends. And that’s all I should expect. David was coming the last week of August. My book was coming out two weeks afterward. I was probably under more stress than I realized. I both dread and eagerly anticipate when meeting someone and they ask me what I do. Everyone is so impressed when you write a book, but then I feel self-conscious, as if the mere mention of it comes off as bragging. I struggle with humility. And not having it.

David arrived early Monday evening. He was in New York for a week and some change and all he came with was a duffel bag and a backpack. I have other friends who pack heavier than that for a day trip, let alone a week—that would require several trunks. Then I remembered, Of course, it’s David. He is nothing if not practical. He’s a lawyer and a professor, after all, just someone who thrives on logic and structure. I am not that person.

David and I had always been fundamentally very different. I’m Black; he’s white. I grew up poor; he did not. I dropped out of college; he got his PhD. I drink and do drugs; he literally never has done either. I can be quite prickly, as a Scorpio. He can be rather chipper, as a Libra. I’m bitterly leftist, he’s  proudly centrist. I think we both realized the exact same things across the four or so days we spent together.

I was a bit cranky on Monday, even though David was coming, and I was overjoyed to see him. I was cranky because I was horny. And I had put out of my mind the idea of David and I doing or being anything. Just out of my own sense of self-preservation. Eight years is a long time to hold a torch, and I worried about ruining it somehow. But then almost as soon as he shows up, the motherfucker takes his shirt off and pretty much leaves it off for the rest of the time we’re in my apartment. What was I supposed to do with those big British tits in my face? And just a few feet away from me, he slept on my couch in his underwear. His cute little briefs. I thanked, but mostly cursed, the universe yet again.

On Tuesday, I made him breakfast and we ate it on my terrace. Then I took him to my gym in Chelsea, the gayest gym in the gayest neighborhood in arguably the gayest city in the world. David had never been to a steam room, bless her heart, and so I convinced him to give it a try. He lasted about seven minutes, but later marveled at the guy who kept pacing back and forth, in and out of the steam room, cruising coyly between the mist. After the gym, we got lunch at Whole Foods and went to eat it on the High Line, and I informed David, to his horror, about the planned 16-foot pigeon sculpture being installed there in the fall.

We then walked down to Washington Square Park, headquarters of New York University, where I had dropped out after my sophomore year and where David had finished his PhD. After a brief respite, the heat was back in the city, but I didn’t mind because David has always been someone with whom I can talk about almost anything: politics, art, theater, underrated late-’90s screen gems. Even though he’s a very private person, sometimes he lets me in. Other times, I just let it be. I never have to worry about awkward silences with him, so the walk was hot but breezy.

Because I had decided that we were only friends on this trip, I decided to be more like I am with my other friends that I don’t want to sleep with, that is to say, a bit cunty. Poor David. He lightly accused me of being mean to him various times throughout the day, and I replied he was being mean to me. He wasn’t. I kinda was. Tuesday night, we just stayed in and chilled and went to bed, he on the couch, me in my bed. Again.

Wednesday we split up and did our own things. David visited a friend, I had a doctor’s appointment, and we planned to meet up at night to see Oh, Mary! on Broadway. We laughed our heads off; Cole Escola is a comedic genius, and I thought, OK, this was a nice trip. It was nice to see David again. We had a good time. David would be leaving Thursday morning to visit with other friends. He had been mine for a few days and it was nice.

We got some Chinese food, and I showed David The Comeback, Lisa Kudrow’s seminal one-season 2005 comedy series later revived for a second season in 2015. He had somehow never seen it, but if he loved Oh, Mary! I figured he would have to love The Comeback. He seemed taken aback by how cringey the show can be but by the end of the pilot, I think, well, he got it.

And then we went to bed. I was very horny by this point, so I went to the bathroom and took care of business, as it were, and turned in. Then a short while later, David asked me if I was still awake. I was. My back was to him as I laid in bed, and he faced me lying on the couch.

“Well, I find you very sexy,” he began, and I thought, Oh shit, then said, “I find you very sexy, too.” He went on about how he didn’t know why we didn’t act on that night eight years ago. I thought I was the only one who thought about that night: Red Hook, Rufus, and reading. I turned in bed to face him. He explained, very logically, that while he didn’t think we were romantically compatible and he didn’t want to jeopardize our friendship, he still thought I was very sexy. And he didn’t want to wait another eight years. We were on the exact same page. The whole time.

In my head I was screaming, OH MY GOD IT’S HAPPENING!, but I managed to get out, “Well, do you wanna cuddle or…something?” He got off the couch, got in my bed, and I immediately regretted masturbating earlier. But eight years is a long time to carry a torch and it burned brighter than it ever had. Finally those big British tits were in my face. At one point, we had stood up from the bed to step into the light, and as he went down on me, I saw the little grey hairs he sometimes worries about. I thought it was about the sexiest thing I’d ever seen. We had grown older, we had lived separate lives on opposite ends of an ocean, and yet…and yet…and yet, we still had a deep passion for each other. It was unexpected but so beautiful it made me want to weep at times.

I never get “happy endings.” I fall for guys and I never hear from them again. Or they move to Europe. But with David, it felt less like an ending and more like a beginning. Instead of jeopardizing our friendship, I think it deepened our friendship. We reached a whole other level of intimacy and, therefore, understanding. While we’re not romantically compatible, we’re platonically and sexually compatible, and it feels like that’s what we always should’ve been.

The next morning, I was cleaning the kitchen to the dulcet tones of Nancy Wilson, and when David woke up, we picked up where we had left off the night before. At times, over the years, I felt so foolish crushing on some guy I had hung out with a handful of times eight years ago, who lives over 3,000 miles away. But I dreamt of a morning like this—beautiful, perfect, expertly scored.

This was real life. This was my life, and not some movie, as I had imagined my relationship with David in the book essay, “The Impossibility of Love,” as a sort of indictment on queer love stories. Queer love stories that never have boys that look like me, boys lonely like me, at their center.

Love feels and has always felt impossible to attain for me, so I tend to resent queer love stories because they don’t, or can’t, portray the reality and the complexity of my love life, or of queer love in general. So I felt the need to preserve this one beautiful, perfect New York August night-turned-morning, so that I can always reference it and remember it. And maybe to remind myself that if I took a chance every now and then, maybe love wouldn’t feel so impossible. 

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Lester Fabian Brathwaite is a staff writer at Entertainment Weekly and, for some sadistic reason known only to him and his therapist, has been a professional writer for almost 15 years. He has contributed to The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and The Advocate, among other publications, and has also served as senior editor for Out magazine. Rage is his first book and is available for purchase here.

Each week, The Queer Love Project publishes an original essay. Want to submit your essay and add to our growing archive? Find our submission guidelines and more here.