The reason Lee always chose to meet his guests wearing a suit is that he wanted to present himself as if he was on a date and dressed to impress. Old World Lee would regularly meet new men in a stretched-out, faded t-shirt, ill-fitting shorts, and sneakers from Wal-mart. Placing a cloth napkin in his lap and enjoying the meal himself, new Lee flowed effortlessly and smoothly into engaging dinner conversation. “In the last two years, I’ve done almost every role in the community. I’ve been a Crafter and made wine, I’ve made candles, and soap and all kinds of body butters. I didn’t make any of those recipes but I’ve followed a bunch of ’em. I’ve been a Tester and let me tell you, we had these Chopped-like competitions to recruit our first chefs, we even had a host and judges, the whole nine. We wouldn’t just take a bite, we ATE like there was no tomorrow. It’s amazing that I’m not 300 pounds the food was so good. You definitely want to sign up to be a Tester. You get to test EVERYTHING, from hot sauce to new hybrid weed strains to cars and everything in between.”
“Turns out, I suck at sewing,” he chuckled. “I made an apron, the most basic thing you can make, and let’s just say it was NOT the best. On the plus side, I’m a helluva sewing pattern cutter outter. No, seriously, I just made that name up. But any way that I can help the people who can sew, the people who can design and create the clothes we wear, anything I can contribute that helps me look this good AND helps out others, I’ll do it.”
Taking on a more serious tone, he continued, “Anything that requires attention to detail is my wheelhouse and anything that helps the larger community is where I’ll jump in if I can. As a Builder I’ve made compost to build soil and I’ve helped build actual houses. I’ve been a Facilitator, a Transformer, I’ve helped Scholars, I’ve trained Nurturers how to work with our Stars.” Lee had to take a breath. “Sorry, I mean I have trained caregivers to work with our seniors. It’s funny how I’m so comfortable in this New-World and the language that we use that I forget that everyone hasn’t had the same experience or speak the same way as we do.”
Next, the entrée was served. Lee set the plate down in front of Marvin and his eyes said everything. “Sir, for your meal tonight, you have a portobello mushroom marinated steak with oh so sweet and tender caramelized baby cipollini onions,” he threw up a chef’s kiss, “sweet potato roses, and a tomato-basil summer squash blend. Everything is, of course, organic, home grown, and your meal is vegan, including your steak, as you’re just coming off your cleanse and you really should eat clean for a while but if you taste it, you’ll find that it tastes just as good as real meat. Cross my heart.” He gave a sexy wink and a nod of his head and, again, waited for the response.
The plate looked like something off the cover of a magazine. Expecting vegan steak to taste similar to cardboard, Marvin was blown away by both the taste and the texture. Dinner was beyond anything he had imagined and dessert, a white chocolate lava cake, was probably the most decadent, sinful thing he’d ever tasted. Marvin cleared his plate and Lee cleared the table. Marvin offered to help with the dishes and Lee would have no such thing, insisting that he relax on the sofa and watch TV or go out on the balcony and enjoy one of the handmade cigars that could be found in the humidor, or, he was more than welcome to enjoy the hookah pipe that had a variety of custom blends.
With the dishwasher loaded, Lee sat next to Marvin on the sofa. He had been flipping through the pages of one of the auxiliary In Loving Color books while Lee was cleaning up. It held images he had never seen before and he thought he had seen them all. It was, not at all ironically, the interracial book featuring men who love men, with images of Black men and white men, engaged in the most beautiful displays of erotic connection he had ever seen. Page after page showed interracial couples fucking, kissing, being intimate and loving in gorgeous photography. Marvin was getting aroused but he didn’t have the same obsessive compulsion for sex the way he had before The Shift any time he got an erection.
Lee brought the bottle of wine and poured Marvin another glass to finish it off. He took a sip and started to explain, “You know, I’ve read every In Loving Color story so many times I feel like I know the characters in real life. When I first got the book from my barber shop, and as I’m sure you know they were giving them away for free, and it had been hyped up for weeks before it was released, I looked at the stories and I was like, ‘Nah, they too long, I ain’t reading all that,’ and I just looked at the pictures. I couldn’t believe them. I had never seen anything like them in my life.”
“I started seeing people commenting online about how the book changed their life, their relationship. At the barber shop, at the gym, everywhere I went, people were talking about the stories, about the characters, about how they were having deeper conversations with their spouses. Even then, I still wasn’t motivated to read the stories. I went online and checked out the website and I saw that they had audio versions of the stories and workbooks and coffee table books with just photography, and even a relationship package that you could order. I wasn’t really feeling any of that. But when I saw the videos, I was hooked. They blew my mind. So, the videos, like they, they compliment all the stories, they don’t really tell the story, but they show the evolution of the relationship between the people who portray the characters. He stopped, “Oh shit, I’m sure you know all this. My bad.”
“No, no, go on, please,” Lee said. I absolutely adore hearing people talk about their In Loving Color experience. It’s so satisfying to me because not only do I love the book and all the stories and characters myself, but I’m family with all the people who represent the characters. I was there before the first picture was taken.”
That fact had never occurred to him before, Lee knew the people who portrayed the characters, he hadn’t just met them, but he knew them, he had seen the entire process evolve.
Marvin LOVED talking about In Loving Color. He was an In Loving Color snob. If he was at the barber shop and some dude was dissin’ it and calling it gay, or someone only offered superficial analysis, he immediately put them in a category of someone he didn’t like. “So, at the very beginning, when I first got the book, I thought it would be cool to have the book lying around when I invited a woman over and use it to get the panties, make her think that I was deep and sensitive. Then, one night, I said, ‘Hey, let me just read a story, see what it’s about.'”
“I read, It’s our Anniversary first, and I couldn’t stop reading, I couldn’t put it down. The things Anthony was saying, about being a Black man, it was like he was saying things that were in my head. I wanted a relationship like the one he had with Cherida so bad. So all this is happening in the now, not in the Old World, right, and I’m still holding on to the ingrained homophobia that was my reality for my entire life. I’m saying to myself that I’m not going to read any of the gay stories when I had a married white dude who was sucking my dick at work every day.”