On Aug 10, 2018, at 1:13 PM, Kevin Grolton <kevin.grolton@gmail.com> wrote:

Tim Kuhn!

I know you’re on vacation now which is fun! I’ve been thinking about how awesome it was to see you (clothed!) and hang out with you and Kevin at Abby’s wedding. For a long, long time, probably longer than you would have assumed, I’ve felt badly about how I left things with you all those years ago. That day before SpaWorld, I actually had just seen your name on Clarence’s email list and said to my friends in the car “Oh it’ll be weird to see Tim at the wedding” because I DID expect it to be weird. Even before running into you at SpaWorld, I expected seeing you at the wedding to be awkward because in my mind, you would have had every right to avoid me and not want to talk to me. That’s what I prepared for, because that’s what I thought I deserved.

Turns out, after not seeing you for a decade, I’d forgotten about the essential Tim-ness you reminded me of as soon as you shouted “Kevin Grolton!” in the hallway. I was so touched by how open and friendly you were – what’s more, how awesome Kevin was! Even the brief amount of time we were together at the wedding, I was really glad to have been at a table with you guys. I’m sincerely excited about you guys moving to DC, especially if you end up near me, because I don’t have a lot of gay or queer friends in the city – Abs and C are in Baltimore, and many of my other gay friends have left DC (which is an unfortunate reality of friends in the city – a lot of people are transient). I think it would be great if we could be friends – I’d love to share some of my favorite parts about DC, get to know you and Kevin better, and introduce you to some cool people I know in the city.

Nathan will be here for a visit at the beginning of September, and then moving here in February. He’ll be figuring out the city for the first time too, so maybe we can all go on city adventures together.

Enjoy your time in New Orleans, and I hope we hang out again soon!

Kevin

******

My response:

Kevin G!

You know, I was mad at you for a long time. I secretly kept the Rat’s Ass shirt as a form of mild revenge, tbh.

Recently, though, I’ve been coming to terms with a lot of really bad things that happened to me over the last couple decades —

The scariest being, right after graduating from Hood, a group of four strangers with a baseball bat followed me home threatening to kill me, calling me a faggot. They saw me holding Kevin’s hand when he came to visit me one weekend, I think.

That singular event ruined my entire life.

And, like, acknowledging that made me realize you and I were always on the same team. We were asked to date under the most impossible circumstances, two openly gay boys in Trump country. I think our upcoming friendship could become something really important to me, because, I can tell, you understand what I’m going through in a way no one else can.

Not even my husband.

Don’t worry, friend. I’m not mad anymore. I think I’m just as excited to become friends again, too. I have a growing community of gay men around me that I’m equally excited to introduce you to.

As the Neo-Nazi rally this weekend shows, it’s a time when we must surround ourselves with our own kind, our own people. I’m excited to add one more person to the group that I call home.

Take care of yourself, Kev.

I’ll check on you after the rally to make sure you’re okay 👍🏻

(And I’m so excited to be here in New Orleans! It’s Kev’s birthday weekend!)

Sent from my iPhone