Two Boys Kissing

Harry wakes up, excited that the Saturday of their big kiss has finally arrived. Tariq wakes up peacefully, his headphones dulling the sound of the alarm. Neil texts Peter as soon as he gets out of his shower. Cooper, however, is abruptly awakened; his father angrily confronts him about the messages on his computer screen. Many of the messages are sexual, and his father accuses him of being a “whore.” In his tirade, he even calls Cooper the anti-gay slur. Cooper begs for his father to stop, but the rage escalates, and his father shoves him against the wall. Cooper’s mother rushes in, and his father tells her that Cooper “sells himself” to men online. He shows her the messages, and Cooper lunges towards her to grab the laptop before she can see them. The laptop shatters against the floor in the process. Cooper’s father interprets this as an attack, and he punches Cooper in the face. Feeling trapped, Cooper flees from the house with his car keys and his phone in his pocket. He drives away before his parents can stop him. The chorus remarks, “You spend so much time, so much effort, trying to hold yourself together. And then everything falls apart anyway” (27).

Ryan waits until ten o’clock to call Avery, both of them anticipating the call. They talk and “begin to make plans, and a plan” (29). They intend to meet up and spend the day together, but the unspoken plan is that they are at the precipice of a new love and will have many days together. Avery agrees to drive back to Kindling to meet Ryan. It will be their first real date. 

Harry and Craig, along with their team, set up for their kiss in front of the high school. They chose the lawn in front of the school because it’s public and familiar, and because they would have access to water and electricity. They got permission from the principal to set up at the school. It’s Saturday morning and before any extracurricular activities have started, so the parking lot is empty. “The building has earned its indifference on this Saturday morning. It has seen many worse things than two boys kissing” (31). Their support crew includes Tariq, Harry’s parents, and Craig’s best friend Smita. Smita believes Craig is foolish to go through with this project, and she suspects it’s because he still has feelings for Harry, his ex-boyfriend. However, she supports their cause. Craig and Harry need to kiss for 32 hours, 12 minutes and 10 seconds in order to break the Guinness World Record for longest recorded kiss. They are motivated by something that happened to Tariq three months earlier.

After a movie one night, Tariq’s friends left him waiting for his father in front of the theater. While he was waiting, he decided to browse some shop windows, but some boys he didn’t know started shouting at him. He didn’t realize they were shouting at him at first and didn’t realize why. He assumed it was because he’s Black, but then he heard their anti-gay slurs. Soon, the boys surrounded him, and when he tried to push past them, they beat him up. The assault didn’t stop until a restaurant owner threatened to call the police. When Tariq’s father arrived moments later, he rushed Tariq to the hospital.

Cooper drives aimlessly, shaken by the confrontation with his parents. “Cooper’s loathing of everyone else—his parents, the people in his town, the men he chats with—is surpassed only by his loathing of himself” (36). The voices of the past tell the reader of Cooper’s happy childhood playing little league, and how quickly that happiness changed when he got to high school. His friends either moved away or stopped talking to him, and he found himself retreating online—not because he wanted to, but because it was his only source of connection. Now, with his laptop broken, that connection is lost, too. Instead of devastation, however, Cooper feels nothing.

Avery drives to Kindling, worrying about what he’ll say to Ryan. He remembers his failed dating attempts. The boy he dated, Jason, was someone he’d known for a very long time, and when they broke up, he shrugged it off. Avery hopes for something deeper.

Neil goes to Peter’s house and finds Peter still in his underwear, playing his favorite fantasy videogame. Neil isn’t interested in the game, so he works on Peter’s English homework, to which Peter objects. Neil deflects and suggests they get pancakes, which lightens the mood. They share an inside joke where they hop on one leg and shout “I-hop! I-hop!” (39). The chorus compares the boys’ humor to the way Oscar Wilde kept his sense of humor even at the end of his life, saying as his final words: “Either the wallpaper goes, or I do” (39). It was a remark borrowed by many of the chorus members at the end of their lives during the AIDS epidemic. The chorus urges queer youth to keep their humor: “When the end comes, there will be important things to say, for sure. But there will also be that last laugh, and you will want it” (40).