Red, White, page 32
You pinned the flag to my lapel and said, “We’re rooting for you.” As I stand before you today, my hope is that I have not let you down.
Years ago, I met a prince. And though I didn’t realize it at the time, his country had raised him too.
The truth is, Henry and I have been together since the beginning of this year. The truth is, as many of you have read, we have both struggled every day with what this means for our families, our countries, and our futures. The truth is, we have both had to make compromises that cost us sleep at night in order to afford us enough time to share our relationship with the world on our own terms.
We were not afforded that liberty.
But the truth is, also, simply this: love is indomitable. America has always believed this. And so, I am not ashamed to stand here today where presidents have stood and say that I love him, the same as Jack loved Jackie, the same as Lyndon loved Lady Bird. Every person who bears a legacy makes the choice of a partner with whom they will share it, whom the American people will hold beside them in hearts and memories and history books. America: He is my choice.
Like countless other Americans, I was afraid to say this out loud because of what the consequences might be. To you, specifically, I say: I see you. I am one of you. As long as I have a place in this White House, so will you. I am the First Son of the United States, and I’m bisexual. History will remember us.
If I can ask only one thing of the American people, it’s this: Please, do not let my actions influence your decision in November. The decision you will make this year is so much bigger than anything I could ever say or do, and it will determine the fate of this country for years to come. My mother, your president, is the warrior and the champion that each and every American deserves for four more years of growth, progress, and prosperity. Please, don’t let my actions send us backward. I ask the media not to focus on me or on Henry, but on the campaign, on policy, on the lives and livelihoods of millions of Americans at stake in this election.
And finally, I hope America will remember that I am still the son you raised. My blood still runs from Lometa, Texas, and San Diego, California, and Mexico City. I still remember the sound of your voices from that stage in Philadelphia. I wake up every morning thinking of your hometowns, of the families I’ve met at rallies in Idaho and Oregon and South Carolina. I have never hoped to be anything other than what I was to you then, and what I am to you now—the First Son, yours in actions and words. And I hope when Inauguration Day comes again in January, I will continue to be.
The first twenty-four hours after the speech are a blur, but a few snapshots will stay with him for the rest of his life.
A picture: the morning after, a new crowd gathered on the Mall, the biggest yet. He stays in the Residence for safety, but he and Henry and June and Nora and all three of his parents sit in the living room on the second floor and watch the live stream on CNN. In the middle of the broadcast: Amy at the front of the cheering crowd wearing June’s yellow HISTORY, HUH? T-shirt and a trans flag pin. Next to her: Cash, with Amy’s wife on his shoulders, in what Alex can now tell is the jean jacket Amy was embroidering on the plane in the colors of the pansexual flag. He whoops so hard he spills his coffee on George Bush’s favorite rug.
A picture: Senator Jeffrey Richards’s stupid Sam the Eagle face on CNN, talking about his grave concern for President Claremont’s ability to remain impartial on matters of traditional family values due to the acts her son engages in on the sacred grounds of the house our forefathers built. Followed by: Senator Oscar Diaz, responding via satellite, that President Claremont’s primary value is upholding the Constitution, and that the White House was built by slaves, not our forefathers.
A picture: the expression on Rafael Luna’s face when he looks up from his paperwork to see Alex standing in the doorway of his office.
“Why do you even have a staff?” Alex says. “Nobody has ever tried to stop me from walking straight in here.”
Luna has his reading glasses on, and he looks like he hasn’t shaved in weeks. He smiles, a little apprehensive.
After Alex decoded the message in the email, his mother called Luna directly and told him, no questions asked, she would grant him full protection from criminal charges if he helped her take Richards down. He knows his dad has been in touch too. Luna knows neither of his parents are holding a grudge. But this is the first time they’ve spoken.
“If you think I don’t tell every hire on their first day that you have a free pass,” he says, “you do not have an accurate sense of yourself.”
Alex grins, and he reaches into his pocket and produces a packet of Skittles, lobbing them underhand onto Luna’s desk.
Luna looks down at them.
The chair is next to his desk these days, and he pushes it out.
Alex hasn’t gotten a chance to thank him yet, and he doesn’t know where to start. He doesn’t even feel like it’s the first order of business. He watches Luna rip open the packet and dump the candy out onto his papers.
There’s a question hanging in the air, and they can both see it. Alex doesn’t want to ask. They just got Luna back. He’s afraid of losing him again to the answer. But he has to know.
“Did you know?” he finally says. “Before it happened, did you know what he was going to do?”
Luna takes his glasses off and sets them down grimly on his blotter.
“Alex, I know I . . . completely destroyed your faith in me, so I don’t blame you for asking me,” he says. He leans forward on his elbows, his eye contact hard and deliberate. “But I need you to know I would never, ever intentionally let something like that happen to you. Ever. I had no idea until it came out. Same as you.”
Alex releases a long breath.
“Okay,” he says. He watches Luna lean back, looks at the fine lines on his face, slightly heavier than they were before. “So, what happened?”
Luna sighs, a hoarse, tired sound in the back of his throat. It’s a sound that makes Alex think about what his dad told him at the lake, about how much of Luna is still hidden.
“So,” he says, “you know I interned for Richards?”
Alex blinks. “What?”
Luna barks a small, humorless laugh. “Yeah, you wouldn’t have heard. Richards made pretty damn sure to get rid of the evidence. But, yeah, 2001. I was nineteen. It was back when he was AG in Utah. One of my professors called in a favor.”
There were rumors, Luna explains, among the low-level staffers. Usually the female interns, but occasionally an especially pretty boy—a boy like him. Promises, from Richards: mentorship, connections, if “you’d just get a drink with me after work.” A strong implication that “no” was unacceptable.
“I had nothing back then,” Luna says. “No money, no family, no connections, no experience. I thought, ‘This is your only way to get your foot in the door. Maybe he means it.’”
Luna pauses, taking a breath. Alex’s stomach is twisting uncomfortably.
“He sent a car, made me meet him at a hotel, got me drunk. He wanted—he tried to—” Luna grimaces away from finishing the sentence. “Anyway, I got away. I remember I got home that night, and the guy I was renting a room with took one look at me and handed me a cigarette. That’s when I started smoking, by the way.”
He’s been looking down at the Skittles on his desk, sorting the reds from oranges, but here he looks up at Alex with a bitter, cutting smile.
“And I went back to work the next day like nothing happened. I made small talk with him in the break room, because I wanted it to be okay, and that’s what I hated myself the most for. So the next time he sent me an email, I walked into his office and told him that if he didn’t leave me alone, I’d take it to the paper. And that’s when he pulled out the file.
“He called it an ‘insurance policy.’ He knew stuff I did as a teenager, how I got kicked out by my parents, and a youth shelter in Seattle. That I have family who are undocumented. He told me that if I ever said a word about what happened, not only would I never have a career in politics, but he would ruin my life. He’d ruin my family’s lives. So, I shut the fuck up.”
Luna’s eyes when they meet his again are ice cold, sharp. A window slammed shut.
“But I’ve never forgotten. I’d see him in the Senate chamber, and he’d look at me like I owed him something, because he hadn’t destroyed me when he could have. And I knew he was going to do whatever shady shit it took to win the presidency, and I couldn’t let a fucking predator be the most powerful man in the country if it was within my power to stop it.”
He turns now, a tiny shake of his shoulders like he’s dusting off a light snowfall, pivoting his chair to pluck up a few Skittles and pop them into his mouth, and he’s trying for casual but his hands aren’t steady.
He explains that the moment he decided was this summer, when he saw Richards on TV talking about the Youth Congress program. That he knew, with more access, he could find and leak evidence of abuse. Even if he was too old for Richards to want to fuck, he could play him. Convince him he didn’t believe Ellen would win, that he’d get the Hispanic and moderate vote in exchange for power.
“I fucking hated myself every minute of working with that campaign, but I spent the whole time looking for evidence. I was close. I was so focused, so zeroed in that, that I . . . I never noticed if there were whispers about you. I had no idea. But when everything came out . . . I knew. I just couldn’t prove it. But I had access to the servers. I don’t know much, but I’d been around the block enough in my teenage anarchist days to know people who know how to do a file dump. Don’t look at me like that. I’m not that old.”
Alex laughs, and Luna laughs too, and it’s a relief, like the air coming back in the room.
“Anyway, getting it straight to you and your mother was the fastest way to expose him, and I knew Nora could do that. And I . . . I knew you would understand.”
He pauses, sucking on a Skittle, and Alex decides to ask.
“Did my dad know?”
“About me going triple agent? No, nobody does. Half my staff quit because they didn’t know. My sister hasn’t spoken to me in months.”
“No, about what Richards did to you?”
“Alex, your father is the only other person alive I’ve ever told any of this to,” he says. “Your father took it upon himself to help me when I wouldn’t let anyone else, and I’ll never stop being grateful to him. But he wanted me to come forward with what Richards did to me, and I . . . couldn’t. I said it was a risk I wasn’t willing to take with my own career, but truthfully, I didn’t think what happened to one gay Mexican kid twenty years ago would make a difference to his base. I didn’t think anyone would believe me.”
“I believe you,” Alex says readily. “I just wish you would have told me what you were doing. Or, like, anybody.”
“You would have tried to stop me,” Luna says. “You all would have.”
“I mean . . . Raf, it was a fucking crazy plan.”
“I know. And I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to fix the damage I’ve done, but I honestly don’t care. I did what I had to do. There was no way in hell I was going to let Richards win. My whole life has been about fighting. I fought.”
Alex thinks it over. He can relate—it echoes the same deliberations he’s been having with himself. He thinks of something he hasn’t allowed himself to think about since all this started after London: his LSAT results, unopened and tucked away inside the desk in his bedroom. How do you do all the good you can do?
“I’m sorry, by the way,” Luna says. “For the things I said to you.” He doesn’t have to specify which things. “I was . . . fucked up.”
“It’s cool,” Alex tells him, and he means it. He forgave Luna before he ever walked into the office, but he appreciates the apology. “I’m sorry too. But also, I hope you know that if you ever call me ‘kid’ again after all this, I am literally going to kick your ass.”
Luna laughs in earnest. “Listen, you’ve had your first big sex scandal. No more sitting at the kids’ table.”
Alex nods appreciatively, stretching in his chair and folding his hands behind his head. “Man, it fucking sucks it has to be like this, with Richards. Even if you expose him now, straight people always want the homophobic bastards to be closet cases so they can wash their hands of it. As if ninety-nine out of a hundred aren’t just regular old hateful bigots.”
“Yeah, especially since I think I’m the only male intern he ever took to a hotel. It’s the same as any fucking predator—it has nothing to do with sexuality and everything to do with power.”
“Do you think you’ll say anything?” Alex says. “At this point?”
“I’ve been thinking about it a lot.” He leans in. “Most people have kind of already figured out that I’m the leak. And I think, sooner or later, someone is going to come to me with an allegation that is within the statute of limitations. Then we can open up a congressional investigation. Big time. And that will make a difference.”
“I heard a ‘we’ in there,” Alex says.
“Well,” Luna says. “Me and someone else with law experience.”
“Is that a hint?”
“It’s a suggestion,” Luna says. “But I’m not gonna tell you what to do with your life. I’m busy trying to get my own shit together. Look at this.” He lifts his sleeve. “Nicotine patch, bitch.”
“No way,” Alex says. “Are you actually quitting for real?”
“I am a changed man, unburdened by the demons of my past,” Luna says solemnly, with a jerk-off hand gesture.
“You fucker, I’m proud of you.”
“Hola,” says a voice at the door of the office.
It’s his dad, in a T-shirt and jeans, a six-pack of beer in one hand.
“Oscar,” Luna says, grinning. “We were just talking about how I’ve decimated my reputation and killed my own political career.”
“Ay,” he says, dragging an extra chair over to the desk and passing out beers. “Sounds like a job for Los Bastardos.”
Alex cracks open his can. “We can also discuss how I might cost Mom the election because I’m a one-man bisexual wrecking ball who exposed the vulnerability of the White House private email server.”
“You think?” his dad says. “Nah. Come on. I don’t think this election is gonna hinge on an email server.”
Alex arches a brow. “You sure about that?”
“Listen, maybe if Richards had more time to sow those seeds of doubt, but I don’t think we’re there. Maybe if it were 2016. Maybe if this weren’t an America that already elected a woman to the highest office once. Maybe if I weren’t sitting in a room with the three assholes responsible for electing the first openly gay man to the Senate in US history.” Alex whoops and Luna inclines his head and raises his beer. “But, nah. Is it gonna be a pain in your mom’s ass for the second term? Shit, yeah. But she’ll handle it.”
“Look at you,” Luna says over his beer. “Answer for everything, eh?”
“Listen,” his dad says, “somebody on this damn campaign has to keep their fucking cool while everyone else catastrophizes. Everything’s gonna be fine. I believe that.”
“And what about me?” Alex says. “You think I got a chance in politics after going supernova in every paper in the world?”
“They got you,” Oscar says, shrugging. “It happens. Give it time. Try again.”
Alex laughs, but still, he reaches in and plucks up something deep down in his chest. Something shaped not like Claremont but Diaz—no better, no worse, just different.
Henry gets his own room in the White House while he’s in. The crown spared him for two nights before he returns to England for his own damage control tour. Once again, they’re lucky to have Catherine back in the game; Alex doubts the queen would have been so generous.
This particularly is what makes it a little funny that Henry’s room—the customary quarters for royal guests—is called the Queen’s Bedroom.
“It’s quite . . . aggressively pink, innit?” Henry mutters sleepily.
The room is, really, aggressively pink, done up in the Federal style with pink walls and rose-covered rugs and bedding, pink upholstery on everything from the chairs and settee in the sitting area to the canopy on the four-poster bed.
Henry’s agreed to sleep in the room rather than Alex’s “because I respect your mother,” as if every person who had a hand in raising Alex has not read in graphic detail the things they get up to when they share a bed. Alex has no such hang-ups and enjoys Henry’s half-hearted grumblings when he sneaks in from the East Bedroom right down the hall.
They’ve woken up half-naked and warm, tucked in tight while the first autumn chill creeps in under the lacy curtains. Humming low in his chest, Alex presses the length of his body against Henry’s under the blankets, his back to Henry’s chest, the swell of his ass against—
“Argh, hello,” Henry mumbles, his hips hitching at the contact. Henry can’t see his face, but Alex smiles anyway.
“Morning,” Alex says. He gives his ass a little wiggle.
“Time’s it?”
“Seven thirty-two.”
“Plane in two hours.”
Alex makes a small sound in the back of his throat and turns over, finding Henry’s face soft and close, eyes only half-open. “You sure you don’t need me to come with you?”
Henry shakes his head without picking it up from the pillow, so his cheek squishes against it. It’s cute. “You’re not the one who slagged off the crown and your own family in the emails that everybody in the world has read. I’ve got to handle that on my own before you come back over.”
“That’s fair,” Alex says. “But soon?”
Henry’s mouth tugs into a smile. “Absolutely. You’ve got the royal suitor photos to take, the Christmas cards to sign . . . Oh, I wonder if they’ll have you do a line of skincare products like Martha—”
“Stop,” Alex groans, poking him in the ribs. “You’re enjoying this too much.”
“I’m enjoying it the perfect amount,” Henry says. “But, in all seriousness, it’s . . . frightening but a bit nice. To do this on my own. I’ve not gotten to do that much, well, ever.”
