Page 35 of Country Road Romance

“That’s so sweet of you, Joyce,” he said, flashing her his megawatt smile. “Is there anything we can do to help?”

Joyce gave him a mock-stern look. “We don’t ask company to help cook here. Jared, why don’t you take Charlie around and show him the property while your father and I get dinner ready?”

“If you’re sure,” Charlie started to say, but this time it was Jared’s turn to interrupt him. Grabbing Charlie’s hand he pulled him outside, calling out to his mom over his shoulder.

“We’ll be back soon!”

They walked for a bit in silence, and it was only when they were several steps away from the house Jared realized that he was still holding Charlie’s hand. He dropped it like a hot potato.

What were you thinking?

To distract himself from what was almost an intimate moment, he took the time to point out all of the rustic pleasures his parents’ place afforded: the small flock of chickens and ducks pecking near their little house (“they call it the Taj McDuck,” he told Charlie with a little chagrin), the garden (now faded and filled with corn husks at this time of year), and the numerous Halloween decorations that his father insisted on putting up around the property (including, much to his mother’s chagrin, those giant blow-up dolls in the shapes of black cats, pumpkins, and ghosts). As he did so, he found himself feeling a bit reflective about his relationship with his family and with West Virginia as a whole.

“ You know,” he said into the silence that had settled around them, “I talk a big game about loving it here, but sometimes I’m more than a little ashamed of being from West Virginia. I even broke up with a boyfriend because he called my parents rednecks.”

This got a laugh out of Charlie. “Your parents might be simple country people, but they’re definitely not rednecks. And neither are you, for that matter.”

“I’m glad that you understand the difference. You’d be surprised how many people don’t.”

“Oh, believe me, I wouldn’t.”

He was surprised to see sadness on Charlie’s face, and he almost reached out and touched his cheek, to see if he could coax a smile out of him. Something still held him back, some fear that doing that would be a step too far.

“They must be pretty awful to you in Hollywood,” he said instead. “I can’t imagine them welcoming someone from West Virginia with open arms.”

“They all weren’t so bad,” Charlie said, with a peculiar intensity in his voice. “In fact there were quite a few of them who came from backgrounds similar to mine. And a lot of them were gay, too. They told me that it was better to just go along to get along. That it was better to stay as ‘circumspect’ as possible.

“I guess you took that advice to heart.”

Jared could have kicked himself for saying that outloud but, rather than getting mad about it, Charlie shook his head.

“To you it must look like I left all of this behind, while you’ve stayed here to fight the good fight.”

Jared started to interrupt, to insist that it wasn’t like that at all, but Charlie kept talking.

“I should tell you that I don’t blame you for feeling resentful. For a long time Ididgive up on West Virginia. I didn’t care about the people back here, and I wanted to forget where I came from. It just seemed like it would be easier that way, rather than trying to make peace among the different parts of my life. It took talking to some of my friends back here–who didn’t give up on me, even though I’d largely given up on them–to convince me that I might not have as much of the right idea as I thought I did. They convinced me that I was being exactly the kind of person that I’d always said I wouldn’t be.”

He chuckled sadly and softly. “It also took some long hard looks in the mirror for me to see the truth of things, and I didn’t always like what was looking back at me.”

Well, at least some of my suspicions have been confirmed,Jared thought smugly, but then felt bad about it.

“So, I ended up coming back home for a few weeks at a time in between shoots. I had to do it privately, or at least that’s what I thought at the time, because I didn’t want to make a big dealabout it. I’d done a lot of work to make sure that people didn’t know that much about me. In Hollywood it’s usually a lot easier to keep parts of your private life private so that everyone else can project what they want onto you.”

While Jared was of course quite flattered and honored that Charlie was sharing this part of himself, he was also a little strange having someone who was still basically a stranger be so open about his life and his feelings.

“It wasn’t long before I was sending donations and trying to build up some sort of infrastructure for young queer people in the state, Charlie went on. “This would have been…in the mid-2000s, I guess? I was still getting my feet in the business and trying to figure out just what it was that I was going to do with my career. The Romance Network was grooming me to be a part of their regular lineup, and this seemed like a good way to spend all of that money that was coming in.”

This time the urge to caress Charlie’s face was even stronger, but still he resisted.

Jared, you’re going to have to either pull the trigger on this or let it go,he thought, followed quickly by,I’m not imagining this, am I?

Then Charlie shot him a knowing little look, and he realized that no, he wasn’t imagining it. For the moment, though, Charlie was intent on telling the rest of his story, clearly trying to get through it as quickly as possible.

“So, it just kept growing. I was able to do at least some good, but this was in the lead-up to the 2008 election, and that’s when things started getting ugly. There were a lot of groups that faced some backlash and pressure. Public libraries started telling me that they didn’t want to get in any sort of trouble. And stopped returning my calls. It was the same with a lot of the other nonprofits that I’d been involved in. They just didn’t want to have to try to grapple with the vitriol that always came withbeing publicly seen associating with anything even remotely resembling gayness.”

He sighed. “So, I finally just decided that enough was enough. If I wasn’t going to make any headway in West Virginia, then I could at least try to make a difference where I was in California. That didn’t always work out either, but at least I felt more in control there.”

“So…you just gave up on West Virginia?”

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