Carson Wolfe - I Take My Midwestern Pen Pal to a Gay Bar

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:01]I take my Midwestern pen pal to a gay bar.

[00:00:05]He's a scarecrow under disco lights, baseball cap, tequila shot in each fist, blue jeans hardened by years of lying beneath the pump truck jack, spilling oil in a city of men comfortable coming out with guns on their hips.

[00:00:20]If I wore his plaid shirt, I'd look gay and to role-play Brokeback, but he looks ready to storm the capital on the dance floor's edge, chewing his nails like tobacco, shouting over Gaga how neither of us belonged in a club full of pedophiles.

[00:00:35]I'm a long way from home and the sweet graham crackers he packaged in soft marshmallow to gift me a taste of his childhood.

[00:00:43]A parcel of Hershey's, handwritten summers on Lake Erie with the neighbor's son, a friend he pretended not to know outside of July, the month they took turns splitting wood, wiping their sweat on the same rag.

[00:00:58]He couldn't watch when the boy got on his knees to blow embers into a campfire.

[00:01:03]Nights spent shuffling closer, pressing together s'more after s'more until their fathers crushed their last beer cans.

[00:01:12]Book moths looked for light where there was none and barred owls muted the sound of promises whispered between two boys in a tent to never, ever tell.