Lean on me...

Last night I woke up in the middle of the night. Once I’m awake, it takes a while to get back to sleep again. As I stared up past the ceiling, my mind wandered to a good memory. It’s one that I’ve kept to myself for a while now. It’s one of those few moments where I did something despite my fears of being “gay.”

Last night I thought about Joe H. Mr. H and I were in AFROTC. He was in the year ahead of me. I’ll say this now: I have never had any attraction to H. He is, though, one of the greatest guys you could ever be fortunate to meet. He was one of my primary motivators that got me as far into the program as I did. Sometimes, I wonder what he is up to.

In 2001, the cadre arraigned a Spring Break trip to Washington D.C. It was only for a few days. Three if I remember right. Cheap too. Think $40 or so. To get there, we would be taking a chartered bus which is where that moment happened.

After a few hours of talking and me being introduced to “Office Space,” most of us settled down to catch some sleep since we had left East Lansing at absurd time in the morning. I can’t sleep very much when I’m on a road trip. There’s too much to see and I don’t want to miss it so I took a window seat. H took a seat next to me and eventually he fell asleep. A little while later I felt a thump on my shoulder. H made himself comfortable by leaning on my side as he slept. I let him. Believe me, my mind was going a million miles and hour in the one second it took for me to decide to let him rest.

Should I shove him off? My first reaction was to do just that. It was “gay.” I couldn’t let some guy lean on my like that. Guys didn’t do that. Doing anything that would seem gay was something to be avoided—even amongst cadets. Should I let him go on? He wasn’t making me feel uncomfortable. In fact, I was happy that he was able to become more comfortable using my side ‘cause those seat back really weren’t designed properly.

So then I start running the scenarios. If I shove him off, he’s going to wake up and possibly feel embarrassed. If I let him stay there, he’d eventually wake up on his own and most likely correct the situation. Then that would go two ways. He would either say nothing or he would say, “why didn’t you wake me up?” My solution was to doze of myself. Worse case scenario in which he or anyone else confronted me, I could say that I didn’t even realize it.

The whole thing wasn’t some sick idea of getting close to a guy. I don’t have any sexual attraction to Joe and I never had. But for once, I wanted to do something for him. Even if really was nothing it was still that one small thing that would happen for just a short while. One guy could lean on another for comfort without it having to be all… slimy. It was back to a time when siblings in a car would sleep on each other.

He slept there for a while. I felt him wake up and like one of the scenarios I thought up, he moved himself off my side and fell back asleep using the seat back. Inwardly I smiled. One day, I hoped, someone more important will come into my life and they would be able to lean on me and be completely okay with it. So would I.

Here, a few of us broke off from some other groups to go tour the Capitol Building.

In every photo that was taken from me, I have a wicked case of Kim Jung-il hair.