Forbidden
He hates these feelings. They aren't right. Society says they're wrong, his friends say they're wrong, even his mirror says they're wrong, and he believes it so much that he can't even look at himself.
But he feels this way anyway, even if it's forbidden.
To love another man is something he always has trouble trying to describe. He will tell you that it's wrong, just like society says, just like his friends say, just like his mirror says. Religion says it's a sin, but God has always been full of crap and a hypocrite because his own son was a bastard child. So he doesn't listen to religion, and he will not tell you about it. He'll tell you instead that love is neverendingly a pure feeling, uncontrollable, something you've got to trust but never want to out of fear. But these words are just pieces he's picked up from the romance supplements in the evening edition of the New York World. Anyone who knows better will know that they are just lies spewed out by a parrot. He's always been one. The deep down honest truth is, love is a bitch, love is pain, love is what drives him to carve his lover's name into his skin every night with a knife he filched from Tibby's a few months before he stopped going there altogether. He was originally going to use that knife to protect himself from some of the others. The haters, the lynchers, the bastards, all of them that hate these feelings.
But now there's no one here to protect him from himself.
At night he'll look over and watch him on his back, one arm dangling over the side of the bed, sleeping soundly, breathing rhythmically. His chiseled looks are frozen in stone, making him even more beautiful then he looks when he's awake. He sleeps on his side, hoping that when he wakes up his breathing statue will always be the first thing he sees.
In the morning he cannot face himself in the mirror.
The only thing he hates more than these feelings are the actions that go along with them. Again, he could easily blame this on society and its cohorts, but he won't. He blames it on the manwhores on the darkest street corners who jeer at him as he slips a few coins into their eager hands, because they say he can suck and palm just as well as they can but won't do it out of a threadbare, falsified veneer of self-respect. He lets them do it to him, and he just leans against the cold blocks of stone, biting his lip until it bleeds, trying to withhold back the whimpers and moans, his mind focused on his one and only true lover. He knows the money they get is better than what he gets now working for the World, but he can't genuinely think of kneeling down in an alley like they do with only the distant threads of streetlight at a customer's ankles to keep him company, not with a sleeping sculpture, his own Adonis, waiting for him at home. After pulling up his pants he goes home and drops them again in a locked room, letting the imitation steel slice into his skin, letting it form the name, bloody and jagged and reversed when he looks at it in the mirror.
He knows that his lover would hate him if he knew he felt this way, if he knew that he did this. His lover says that faggots will burn in hell and deserve to have their heads bashed in with rocks, all of those things the people he wants to defend himself from say. That is why his lover will never know, never learn how he feels, why they will never be lovers like he wants them to be. But he likes the word, likes the way it looks when it dances across his mind and the way it sounds when he whispers it under his breath, so he uses it anyway.
One night on the lamplit alley they drag him back between two buildings, so far back that he can't even see the dimmest glimmers of light, and they strip him down and call him all the things his lover would, if he knew who he was. He can't find his knife, thinks he left it under his pillow, can't do anything to defend himself, so he lies there and cries like the faggot they say he is. They want him to feel ashamed, and he does. He has never felt so despoiled, never in his life. When he opens his eyes at the first abating of pain, the thick, inky blackness keeps him from making out the outlines of any tangible figures, but he can tell that they're gone because he's the only one breathing. He fumbles for his clothes and with effort, manages to cover himself enough to stumble home through the back alleys. As soon as he gets home he throws himself into his little locked room and discovers that no, the knife isn't under his pillow, it's buried under a rumpled towel. He looks at it in the light, watches it gleam like it never would in that alley. He traces the sharp edge with his finger, and this time he drives it in deeper than ever before, this time making the letters round and thick, picturing his statue and how stone could never be penetrated by a simple table knife. But he is flesh and blood, and it runs down his skin and drips onto the floor. He mistakes fading consciousness for something beautiful and ethereal, a relief from the guilt, as if for the first time in his life what he feels is right.
The next morning Morris Delancey is found dead by his brother, and through the caked blood and bruises, he can see "Oscar" carved deep into his thigh.