Page 18 of Flames and Flowers
Usually, the more I cared about someone, the less I said about them in public.
If I cared about more than one someone at the same time, I went mute.
About Ashley Player and Danica Vola, I hadn’t said a motherfucking word. Because I knew what happened when I spoke about these things.
I’d learned.
The woman who left me over a tweet was willing to marry me, up until then. We were engaged, until a comment on social media forced me to tell her the truth about myself, and she changed her mind.
I was wrong to keep things from her. That was a major life lesson—that I couldn’t keep secrets from someone I loved. But yes, I’d kept them from her.
Back then, Iwasin the closet, so to speak. As in I hadn’t admitted to anyone other than the men I messed around with that I was into men. And I never came strutting out of that closet like some people I knew did. I wasn’t loud and proud about it. I wasn’t ashamed of it, either. I was a realist.
That was what I told myself.
By the time I was in high school, I knew exactly who and what I was and who and what I wanted. I was never confused about that part. I’d been crushing on boys as long as I’d been crushing on girls. It was undeniable.
But I had secrets.
I managed my secrets by floating between peer groups; I got along with everyone and belonged to no one.
No one really knew who Matt Brohmer was.
It was important to me to be mysterious, because when you’re a mystery, even when someone hears the truth about you, they can never be sure.
I’d carried that air of mystery with me throughout my life.
Even in the spotlight, no one could say for sure what I was about. They said I was a “nice guy.” And sure, I was nice. It really wasn’t all that hard to keep your mouth shut, avoid doing and saying shit that hurt other people.
But I could shut right down, close myself off, fucking vanish into the shadows when someone took a swipe at me. At what wasmine. And my secrets were fucking mine.
Maybe I’d learned early on that keeping secrets was necessary. A survival mechanism.
My parents were straight-laced and religious, and after my father finally put down the bottle, he got addicted to another poison. Every Sunday he dragged me into church with threats of kicking me out of the house if I didn’t go. When I was sixteen, my mom told him that I was gay, and he sent me to a religious camp where they drilled the lessons of a closed-minded, resentful God into us for hours on end. And what that God resented the most? Gay kids, apparently.
I’d already known for many years that neither my parents or their God would approve of the truth about me. It wasn’t easy to sit them down and say,Mom, Dad, it’s true. I like guys. But wait, there’s more. I like guys and girls. Together.
But I did.
I told them, when I was twenty-four. And predictably, they disowned me. My dad, who’d at least mellowed out since the cancer, simply told me that if I insisted on continuing with this “behavior,” I would be dead to them and they’d never speak to me or speak my name again.
That was the last conversation we’d ever had. Hard to have a conversation with someone when you’re a ghost.
These days, all I had left of my parents—my entire family, actually—was that fucking song in my head and the damage they’d done before they left me.
So maybe Ash was right that I had daddy issues and mommy issues. But I wasn’t afraid of them finding out about me anymore. They knew.
Other people knew, too.
I’d been kicking around in the world, figuring things out, long enough to test the waters a time or two. I knew what happened when people learned my secrets. The whole range of reactions from utter disapproval and abandonment to loving acceptance, and everything in between.
And here was where Ash was wrong.
It wasn’t that I wouldn’t own who and what I was, and tell the whole goddamn world who I was with. I’d do all of that and more.
But only for love.
Love.
