Glass Roots: The Blue Hour Gospel Section 1

A Swing set seen through a rainy window

This may come as a wild shock but I decided to start the book off with….wait for it….my youth. I know, what a crazy concept! While mildly unoriginal it was massively important to talk about that time since it really set the stage for what comes later.

Examining how queer people experience childhood and early adolescence is important because these years are when social norms around gender, belonging, and desire are first learned, enforced, and internalized (Especially for those of us who came before the Facebook/Instagram/Tik Tok era). For many queer individuals, this developmental period is shaped by personal identity formation that may have been driven by silence or the absence of language to describe their experiences, which can affect self-understanding well into adulthood. Thinking about these early years helped ground me for what comes after. It felt super important to me to be able to talk about queer life in lived reality, showing how family, school, peers, other gay people and our culture collectively shaped the uneven conditions under which young people come to know themselves. Hence also the title “Glass Roots”, because this is a time when unknowingly as children we are learning our roots and what makes us part of the collective. For queer kids before the internet boom those roots were fragile because while there was pockets of queer life, for those of us living in small towns or who only had hetero role models, the roots were brittle and sharp.

My opening piece in Glass Roots “Inheritance Without a Name” ended up being special to me because of course it was the first piece I wrote for the book, but because it really got me reflecting on each moment of my life. I’ve also always been fascinated with time (how it works, why it exists, how is it measured, all the way to the sci-fi of it all with how many timelines exist). I also believe that coincidences can be signals, like messages past around without realizing it, so I wanted to take this opportunity to look at all the signals I started to experience, and start building them into the world of what would eventually happen to me. I hope after reading it you find a piece of yourself in the static.

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Inheritance Without a Name

Before we have language, we have noise, static curling between stations, whispering questions we don’t know how to answer. We learn to speak, but the words were never meant for us. So we sit close to the speaker, not for the song, but for the hush just before it. We dance with the windows open to the pulse of static. These in-between moments of what we’re told to say and what we dream to say have always held me.

The blue-tinted second before the streetlights flicker on.

The breath caught between school bells.

The exhale between vinyl tracks.

I’m not sure now that I ever felt things start. Only shift. Echo. Return. The noise became the map, looping old memories into new disguises. Each moment is just a repetition dressed in a different light.

Eventually, the next song plays, and we’re expected to know the chorus. Groups begin to rise from the sand. At recess, the girls made room for me in their whispered hush while the boys played loud and violent like war. Each group’s games are like radio stations I could never tune into clearly. Teachers watched me like a crack in the glass, threatening the perfect portraits of who we were supposed to be.

“You’d be happier with the boys.”

“You’d be more popular if you played with the boys.”

“Why are you with the girls? Do you want to be one?”

I didn’t just have to perform boyhood; I had to rehearse it. Mimic it like choreography. The steps were off, the shoes didn’t fit, but if I didn’t trip in public, no one seemed to mind. It was always about appearance; about not disturbing the frame.

But outside of school, there was a boy. A best friend, and with him, there was no script, no performance. We shared popsicles and cartoons, floated through summer afternoons without needing to define. He asked no questions, offered no corrections. He was a hum that was soft, constant, warm. With him, I felt something like ease, like knowing exactly when the streetlights would come on, not by the time but by the feel. The breath the world seems to take before it fades the spotlight and lets you remember who you’re supposed to be.

And then, time did what it always does. Different schools. Different friends. And one day, without warning, we stopped calling. His noise didn’t echo anymore, it just vanished. Until then, we were close in the way boys are allowed to be until puberty, when even eye contact becomes suspect. Without the right words, all that remained was the hum left behind by absence. Everyone else called it just growing up. But that’s what language is, safety barriers lining the path, so you don’t trip over the sides.

Track eight. Or maybe nine.

The boys knew it by heart.

“Watch this,” they sang.

Grainy skin. Loud girls.

Moans like fire alarms.

This is what adults do.

This is how you learn.

This is what you want.

But it wasn’t the girls I watched. Not really. I said I did. Nodded. Laughed. My role already assigned. But it was the men who stayed with me long after the screen dimmed. The curve of a forearm. The way a hand hovered before contact. The tension in the quiet moments, where nothing moved but everything was about to. Still there was no language for it, but something inside me leaned toward that silence. It felt like breath held too long, not out of fear, but want.

My body began to recognize things before my mind did. A heat that built without warning. A stillness that asked to be noticed. I didn’t understand what it meant, I only knew I couldn’t look away. That maybe, buried inside all the noise, was something that belonged to me. So I tried to want what they wanted. Kept memorizing the lines. Pressed play over and over. But it never landed. The whole thing felt like trying to speak with someone else’s tongue. Every scene left me outside myself, like I was watching from behind glass. Maybe I wasn’t learning something new at all, just watching the same silence, over and over, wearing a different costume.

When my parents found what I’d been watching, they were afraid. I don’t blame them. I was afraid too. Not of what I’d seen, but of how much sense it made. And how much I couldn’t say. They thought it was about sex. But it was never about sex. It was about survival. I needed proof that two men could touch, and the glass wouldn’t shatter. That someone like me could want and still be whole.

High school raced past in a blur of expectations I hadn’t agreed to. Everyone else seemed to find their rhythm. They practiced kissing in the cafeteria, passed notes folded into secrets. My rhythm was always a little off. Awkward dates, missed cues, a kiss that landed wrong. Still, the girls I dated called me sweet, so I thought maybe I was just in the same song, a few beats behind. Maybe that was enough.

But each year ended the same way, with yearbook signatures that read like eulogies signed in glittered ink. Don’t change. I’ll miss you. Like they were mourning someone I’d already buried. Like they were writing to a ghost that didn’t match my exterior. I read it all like scripture for a life I hadn’t lived.

There was never a pause. No chance to step back and parse the lyrics. Heterosexuality wasn’t just expected, it was a sub-performance inside the main show, another costume layered over the lines I’d already learned to recite. I was always out of sync. Saying the right things, hitting the marks, but always missing the tone. Straightness was a role I never auditioned for, but somehow got cast in. No script. No exit cue.

And then it happened.

The neon glow of a heart floated up on a desktop screen. He said he was forty-five. Maybe older. I told him I was eighteen. I wasn’t. But he called me beautiful. Like it was permission. Like it was proof I had finally been seen. Finally, the lyrics matched the sound. Finally, the static gave way to a signal. I thought it was romance. I didn’t realize it was the beginning of erosion.

But the funny thing is it still was never about sex. I wasn’t looking to be touched. I was looking to be witnessed. I wanted what the other kids had: a kiss to practice, a note to fold, a secret that belonged only to me. It felt, for a moment, like this was finally my song. Like I’d found the version written in a key I could sing. But I was naive to think his needs matched mine. What felt like revelation to me was just routine for him. We weren’t singing the same chorus. While I searched this silence for a name, he searched it for consent.

And it didn’t matter; not then, and not with the others that followed him, that this peaceful water was making me disappear. Because queer boys like me learned early: love was something you had to steal in pieces from strangers. Not because you wanted to. But because no one ever taught you how to hold it.

Now, driving these familiar roads as the sky shifts from light to blue, I keep the windows down. The cicadas hum in chorus with the music escaping my speakers. And then my playlist skips. A temporary loss of signal. Just a flicker. A momentary hum, like a reminder that there will always be an in-between. And still I lean in, waiting for the sound to return, hoping for something more than the silence.

The seats no longer occupied by the ghost of warmth are filled with family, with laughter, with the kind of closeness I once only imagined. And yet, as the next track begins, I wonder if I’ve always lived in the seconds before the music. In the flicker. In the static. In the hush between the notes. Maybe that’s where queer memory lives; not in the crescendo or the chorus, but in the pause that holds everything just before or after it’s spoken.

Even now, with all my clarity, I live between songs. Between the end and the beginning. Between silence and gospel.

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I still think this piece is special because its really what life was like in the simplest terms. And no matter how many times I think about these moments I find I have a new perspective, and see them in a new way. The remaining portion of section 1 is told through some of these different perspectives. Pictures, an atlas from a quite kid, a conversation, and a fable. The medium can change but the signals are still there, and maybe one of these signals will reach someone else who might start to feel the smallest bit understood and seen.

If we want to understand queer life honestly, we have to look more carefully at its earliest chapters, because so much is shaped there long before self-acceptance ever becomes possible. It’s in childhood and early adolescence that many queer people first learn whether they are safe, whether they are legible, and whether their inner lives can survive the distance between what they feel and what the world allows them to name in that moment. Giving greater attention to these formative years is not only an academic necessity but a moral one: it’s how we begin to build conditions in which fewer queer young people are left to struggle in isolation, and more are given the language, recognition, and care they need to remain fully present in their own lives.

Cover Design: Brian Futter