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waiting room while Tricia visited, mostly because
    he had nothing else to do at 1:30 in the afternoon in a city where he no longer lived. He made another feeble attempt to leaf through his notes, but, despite his father’s avid advocacy on their behalf, still couldn’t get inside the heads of the completelashuels.
    Even as he stewed over his words, he knew he had to concede to
    his father one point: Max Abraham, as well as Noah’s mother, had
    made his coming-out process an easy one. Even in their liberal and generally secular precincts of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the
    family dynamics involved in announcing one was gay were usually
    fraught with fear and loathing, both internal and external. But that wasn’t Noah’s experience. Maybe it was the innate decency of his
    parents, he thought, or maybe it was their interactions with openly gay men and lesbians predating Stonewall. Or maybe it was the distance they placed in their relationship—even when Noah was a
    child—that allowed his parents to step back and look at him not as the end product of their commingled DNA, but as just another person, the way they would have barely raised an eyebrow upon learn-
    ing the same news about a neighbor’s child. Whatever, he thought;
    the important thing was that after he gathered his courage and told his parents he was gay at twenty years of age, they had given him their support. The revelation didn’t necessarily make them any closer,
    but it wasn’t awkward, and it didn’t drive them apart.
    It just . . . was.
    In that sense, Noah knew—once again—that he was privileged.
    He wasn’t treated as an embarrassment, or even as the wayward son
    who was dating someone his parents didn’t like. He was treated the same way he had always been treated, and while that also left someW H E N T H E S T A R S C O M E O U T
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    thing to be desired, he had always believed that a person can’t miss something that they never had.
    Still, he was perplexed. A lot of people faced bigger adversities
    than the completelashuels. But the complicity of the complete-
    lashuels in the great silence surrounding the lives of gay men and lesbians angered him. When they hid in their closets, and even
    worked against their own interests, they made people like Noah do all the work. They could feel safe celebrating a Friday Happy Hour at
    JR’s because he did their work for them, and helped free their lives in the hours they weren’t glued to both their desks and their self-denial.
    In a sense, Noah felt he was working overtime to make their lives
    easier. And while Max Abraham had a hardworking son, he didn’t
    like working quite that hard.
    He glanced at a clock on the generic white wall of the waiting
    room and was surprised to see that a half hour had passed. Tricia
    would be ending her visit soon, which meant that Noah would have
    to prepare himself for an afternoon of strained small talk with his father’s trophy wife. In his head, he began preparing topics, a task complicated by the fact that he really didn’t know his stepmother
    all that well. Max and Tricia had been married for five years, a period coinciding with his self-imposed exile in Washington. They
    really hadn’t had time to bond in the interim. This, Noah sup-
    posed, would have to be that time.
    He ticked through possible small-talk topics in his head. Politics would be taboo, as would homosexuality. Family issues would also
    be verboten; the last thing Tricia needed to hear was a litany of his problems with her husband. However, her family was an option; Noah knew little about them, except that they were all still living a remarkably unremarkable existence in Buffalo. Of course, he also
    knew almost nothing about Buffalo, beyond snow, the Bills, and
    chicken wings, so if they had to go in that direction, Tricia would have to carry the conversation.
    Since Noah had little interest in interior design, gardening, and
    social gossip—the usual interests of the Park Avenue