A Single Moment On Prom Night Made Me Rethink Everything I Knew About Men

I’d had a long-term boyfriend until a couple months before prom, so Adam and I never had the chance to consider each other as anything more than friends — except for maybe what others saw: a fruit and his fly, a fag and his hag. As I caught a glimpse of him changing just feet away from me, his shirtlessness and my singleness seemed to suddenly amplify what I had hardly thought about when we were previously alone together: Adam was a boy.

Other boys snapped my bra straps against my shoulders in class, grabbed my sides aggressively in the halls, pushed my head into the water at the pool, chased me, poked me, kissed me and groped me both at school dances and outside of them.

Alone with a boy, my past traumas hummed up toward my heart in a flurry of fear. Maybe, I thought, he does “like-like” me. Maybe he is no different than the others. Maybe I am not safe.

At the end of junior year, after I was assaulted in an older boy’s car outside a house party, Adam was the only one I told about it. We met up on our favorite walking trail to go to our favorite local art museum, and no matter what we did that day — skipping, talking, standing in front of a piece of art — he maintained a loving space between us. You can keep that, he seemed to say, meaning my body. No boy had ever given me a gift like that.

But here we were alone, in a way we’d never been before. Not alone on the tennis court, or the art museum, or the creek trail, our pants hemmed with dust.

Now we were alone… on what felt like a date. Now we would undress and he would peek, looking to see if he liked what was under the satin hand-me-down dress that made me feel like Andy in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days at the start of the night, but now made me feel like what those men had called out their truck windows. Now Adam was stepping out of his slacks and casually throwing an “almost ready?” over his shoulder.

I heard myself offer a frail “yes” as I pulled my dress over my head, heart pounding, shoulders folded close to my chest in hopes they could fully collapse inward to hide my entire body. I spun around awkwardly to grab my tank top, but it was tangled in my tote bag. My breasts threatened to escape the shield of one arm while the other dug deeper for my shirt. But when I glanced up, cheeks burning with embarrassment from my nakedness, I found Adam fully absorbed elsewhere.

Adam was not looking. He was not even trying not to look. He was humming along to the Wham! song from our collaborative burned CD that was spinning in the car stereo. He looked up at the moon as he buttoned his jeans, his chest relaxed and exposed to me. I dropped my arms.

Looking back now, I know this is when I was certain Adam was gay. In the same moment, I was unexpectedly liberated. The moonlight fell on his bare chest and on mine. We were free to just be in each other’s presence — a boy and a girl, unbothered and completely safe.

We finished getting dressed and approved each other’s afterparty looks, grinning at the magnificence of being a slut and a fag together on a fun night. When we reached the door of the event, I could feel his love as he ushered me in with a phantom hand held just a few inches away from my back.