This used to be my go-to anecdote when warming up to strangers in bars: the one about my pageant for the repairman. It had been my parents’ first color television, a Zenith workhorse in a wooden case, complete with…
By the time I met my husband, Matt, in 2010, the story of my pageant for the repairman was already a well-rehearsed bit. Back then, if a person identified as anything other than straight, it still went without saying that this identity had materialized in the closet. Introductions among us delved into lines of interrogation, aimed at determining one another’s lingering proximity to said closet. Things that seem so innocuous today—say, posting a photo from a bar online—could get a friend fired, evicted, disowned. We had to be careful. But dreariness was never an attractive trait, so we dressed up the stories we told about ourselves with humor.
It is difficult to overstate the dizzying swiftness of the paradigm shift that took hold. On the same ballot used to elect Barack Obama in 2008, a majority of Californians voted to outlaw same-sex marriage. By the time of his reelection, “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” had fallen, the Defense of Marriage Act was on its last legs, and a majority of the American public agreed: we weren’t so terrible, after all.
Suddenly, it felt a little silly to ask whether a person was out to family. Wasn’t everybody? They weren’t. They still aren’t. But this has become less fashionable to discuss. Old people did that, in the before times.
I wrote my first draft of “Pageant Queen” in 2018 after noticing a tonal shift in the chitchat around queer bars. Our collective suffering had never been doled out in equal measure, but the disparity only seemed to have grown worse. Clearly, some felt passed over by progress, left behind by luckier peers who found their ongoing suffering to be tedious. Occasionally, others were flippant jerks who seemed hell-bent on proving the former camp correct.
Like most of my writing, “Pageant Queen” needed to be set aside for a period before I gained enough distance to revise it. In the first draft, I hadn’t even mustered the courage to package it as nonfiction, afraid that I had embellished it so much, I’d lost any thread of truth. I called it fiction and tacked on a melodramatic ending. I still wasn’t sure what the story was ultimately about.
In early 2024, it struck me that some of my anxiety about aging was perhaps hypocritical in light of attitudes I myself had espoused as a younger man. In college, I complained to older gays that too many narratives produced since the dawn of the AIDS crisis had trauma-mined queer suffering rather than promoting our joy. I was being a brat. Now I wondered, was I still being a brat, just an older type of brat, recasting his own run-of-the-mill midlife crisis as signs of an unprecedented generational rift?
There it was, the hole in my earlier drafts. I’d been striving too hard to give answers when the truth was, I didn’t have answers to give. I wrote the final draft with only my questions in mind, and the result, I hope, is something truer.
RYAN KRISTOPHER JORY is a multigenre writer originally from Flint, Michigan. His writing has appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, MoonPark Review, and Necessary Fiction, among others. His flash was longlisted for Wigleaf Top 50 in 2019. He studied creative writing at the University of Michigan, where he received a Hopwood Award for his short fiction in 2006. He earned a master’s in creative writing from Miami University of Ohio before relocating to California in 2009. Ryan presently resides with his husband in San Diego. Find him on Instagram or Twitter @ryankjory.
