This photo was taken at my college graduation.

At the time, I thought graduation meant certainty.

I thought the hard part was over. That adulthood would arrive fully formed. That college had been about accomplishment, friendship, independence, maybe even reinvention.

I didn’t understand yet that so much of college is really about becoming someone before you have language for who that person actually is.

You spend years trying on versions of yourself.

Some fit.

Some don’t.

Some survive only because the people around you expect them to.

And some quietly follow you for decades before you finally understand what they meant.

Mother’s Day always makes me think about transitions like that.

The people who packed the car, worried from afar, answered late-night calls, and somehow let us become ourselves without knowing exactly who we’d turn into.

College graduation feels similar. An ending that doesn’t really feel like an ending yet. More like standing in sunlight at the edge of something you don’t understand.

That feeling found its way into Line & Verse long before I realized I was writing about it.

So today felt like the right day to revisit the Graduation Chapter from Freshman Year.

For anyone graduating. Missing someone. Looking backward. Or simply wondering how so much time passed so quickly.

For readers of Line & Verse, you may recognize where some of these feelings eventually found their way into fiction.

And if you’ve been following Ethan back to Westmore in Sophomore Year:

Chapter 6 is now free.

Funny how becoming never really stops.

Further Reading

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Purchases there support independent bookstores—and help sustain this work.

If you prefer to read on your Kindle, you can purchase Line & Verse, Book 1 from Amazon. Paid Subscribers can also download a copy of the eBook version here.

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Firsts:

Author’s note: This is the third essay in a series about firsts and what it feels like to come out later in life. If you’re just finding this series, you may want to start with the earlier essays about my first hookup and my first trip to New York.

I had never visited the Florida Keys before, despite even living in Florida for about 3 years early in my marriage. I knew a couple of things about Key West:

1. Ernest Hemingway and his six-toed cats

2. The southernmost point of the continental U.S.

3. Chickens wandering the streets

4. And the fact that it was “gay,” according to my parents

It was that final point that stuck with me over the years.

In 2024, freshly out, in my first serious relationship with a man, and newly unemployed with a handsome severance package, I decided I was going to visit the gay meccas. P-Town was fun, but while I’m sure one can participate in as much debauchery as they want to, it’s not really just out in the open. Key West seemed the opposite, and more like what I was looking for.

Key West was the first time I stepped into a place where sex wasn’t just implied.

It was visible.

Not in a shocking or scandalous way. Just casually, the way other places might casually display cocktails or beach towels. It existed in the open air of the place, like humidity. Something everyone understood was part of the environment.

By the time I arrived there, I had already crossed a few personal thresholds. I had come out. I had had my first experiences with men. I had been to New York and felt what it was like to exist in a city where being gay was completely ordinary.

Key West, though, operated on a slightly different frequency.

This wasn’t anonymity or urban infrastructure. This was something closer to celebration.

Or maybe indulgence.

We stayed at Alexander’s Guest House, a charming gay guesthouse tucked into a quiet residential block. Directly across the street sat Island House, which had a very different reputation.

Island House is not subtle.

Even if you’ve never been, you’ve certainly heard stories. The website makes the tone clear. The photos feature beautiful men lounging around pools, perfectly tanned and impossibly fit, as if the entire property were populated exclusively by swimsuit models who also happened to be extremely relaxed about nudity.

It looked… intense.

When planning the trip, I had quietly decided it might be too much. My boyfriend at the time wasn’t particularly interested in the more open parts of gay culture, and I suspected Island House might feel overwhelming.

So we stayed across the street.

And then immediately bought day passes.

That ended up being the perfect arrangement. We could experience the place as much as we wanted, then retreat back to Alexander’s when we’d had enough.

Although, as it turned out, “enough” took longer than expected.

The first thing that struck me about Island House wasn’t the sex.

It was how normal everything felt.

The marketing photos suggested a pool deck filled with twenty-five-year-old fitness influencers. The reality looked much more like real life. Men of every age, shape, and body type lounged in the sun, talking, drinking, drifting between the bar and the hot tub.

Some were naked. Some weren’t.

No one seemed particularly concerned either way.

There were couples. There were friends. There were men clearly meeting each other for the first time. Occasionally someone would disappear inside or to a secluded area with someone else and then return later looking relaxed and slightly amused.

It was all incredibly matter-of-fact.

Standing there watching the rhythm of the place, I had a realization that surprised me.

I liked it.

Not the spectacle of it. The casualness.

People weren’t sneaking around or pretending something else was happening. They weren’t apologizing for their desires or hiding them behind layers of plausible deniability.

They were just… living.

And somewhere in the back of my mind I remember thinking, with a kind of quiet curiosity:

I could get into this.

The rest of the trip unfolded like a series of small discoveries.

One afternoon we went on a clothing-optional sailing trip with Blu Q Key West, which sounded far more daring in theory than it felt in practice. Once everyone had taken their clothes off and the boat was underway, it became surprisingly unremarkable.

A boat ride, some snorkeling, a little swimming.

With a lot more sunscreen.

At one point the first mate leaned over the side of the boat while several passengers enthusiastically volunteered to help him with something that did not appear to be nautical in nature. The rest of us watched the horizon and pretended this was perfectly normal.

Which, apparently, it was. Though we had at least twenty years on most of the passengers, they made us feel welcome. They were there for a gay bachelor party and could easily have ignored us. Instead, they invited us to join them as they made the rounds on Duval Street.

Later that night we wandered through New Orleans House, where the deck overlooked the street and music spilled out into the humid air.

Again, the same feeling returned.

Not shock.

Recognition.

We came back the next day for the clothing optional pool and the impromptu naked water volleyball tournament.

What surprised me most was how comfortable I felt in my own skin there.

For most of my life, I had assumed that environments like this were built for people who looked nothing like me. Younger. Thinner. More perfect.

At the very least, they seemed much more comfortable with it than I was.

That assumption evaporated almost immediately.

The men around the pool didn’t look like the advertisements.

They looked like people.

Men in their thirties, forties, fifties, and beyond. Men with soft stomachs and receding hairlines. Men laughing with their friends or flirting badly at the bar.

Men who looked, in other words, a lot like me.

In talking to them, I found we had more in common than not. The man in the lounger next to mine (wearing nothing but a sharkstooth necklace) was an interventional radiologist. His partner a lawyer.

It was strangely liberating.

The realization crept in slowly but unmistakably: I wasn’t too old for this. I wasn’t too bald or too out of shape. These people weren’t the caricatures I’d been taught to imagine. I wasn’t outside the ecosystem I’d spent years imagining from a distance.

I could participate.

And that possibility changed something in me.

My boyfriend and I experienced the trip a little differently.

He was older and seemed to view the more open parts of Key West culture with a kind of amused detachment, as if it were something slightly beneath him. He wasn’t interested in playing with other people, and we had already agreed we were exclusive.

That part wasn’t a surprise.

What did surprise me was how much the environment awakened my curiosity.

Not recklessness.

Curiosity.

I wanted to explore the edges of this world. To understand how it worked. To see what it felt like to step fully into it, even briefly.

He seemed content to observe it from the outside.

That difference introduced a small but unmistakable tension between us.

At the time I didn’t fully understand what it meant.

Later, I would.

One night another couple staying at Alexander’s invited us to a gear night they were attending. Leather, harnesses, music, the kind of environment that once would have terrified me.

Instead, I found myself oddly calm.

This wasn’t the caricatured world I had imagined growing up. No one was trying to intimidate anyone else. People were friendly, welcoming, curious about one another in the same casual way people always are when they gather in spaces built for connection.

The entire culture operated on a kind of quiet consent.

People knew what they were there for.

And if you didn’t want to participate, you simply didn’t.

No one cared.

By the end of the trip, I realized something had shifted.

New York had shown me that it was possible to exist in the world as a gay man without being noticed or scrutinized.

Key West showed me something slightly different.

It showed me what it looked like when desire itself wasn’t hidden.

Where people gathered specifically to explore it, celebrate it, and occasionally indulge it a little more enthusiastically than they might at home.

It was a kind of freedom I hadn’t known existed before.

I also realized something else, standing by the pool one afternoon at Island House, watching the slow choreography of the place unfold.

I had spent most of my life assuming there was a narrow window for experiences like this. That if you didn’t figure yourself out in your twenties, the rest of the world would quietly move on without you.

Key West suggested otherwise.

People were arriving there at every age.

People were discovering things about themselves at forty, fifty, sixty.

The timelines were far less rigid than I had believed.

Eventually the trip ended, the way vacations always do. We packed our bags, flew home, and returned to our ordinary lives.

But something stayed with me.

Not the specific experiences, although those were certainly memorable.

It was the realization that entire worlds had been operating quietly alongside the one I thought I understood. Cultures, communities, and freedoms that had always been available if I had known where to look.

I had finally started looking.

And once you see that kind of possibility up close, it’s very hard to pretend it doesn’t exist.

Further Reading

II keep a running collection of books that shaped this project on Bookshop.org.

Purchases there support independent bookstores—and help sustain this work.

Stay Connected

• 📖 Subscribe to Caleb Reed for weekly chapters and essays.

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This weekend I learned something that unlocked a memory I hadn’t thought about in at least thirty years.

The creator of Heated Rivalry, Jacob Tierney, was once a child actor on Nickelodeon’s early-’90s series Are You Afraid of the Dark?

When I saw the clip, something in my brain immediately lit up.

Not the plot.
Not the episode.

Him.

And it took me about two seconds to realize why.

I’m pretty sure I had a crush on him. I would have been about 13 at the time, so it makes sense.

The strange part is that I had absolutely no idea that’s what it was at the time.

When you’re a closeted kid, attraction doesn’t show up as attraction. It shows up as fascination.

You don’t think, I have a crush on him.

You think:

He’s my favorite character.
I like the episodes he’s in.
He’s funny.
He’s interesting.
I hope he’s in this one.

Your brain records the signal, but it files it under the wrong label.

Looking back, my childhood viewing habits suddenly make a lot more sense.

There was Budnick on Salute Your Shorts, played by Danny Cooksey. Bright red hair, permanent smirk, always stirring up trouble at Camp Anawanna.

There was Ted on Hey Dude, played by David Lascher, leaning casually against a horse stall with the floppy ’90s hair that made him look like he’d wandered in from a teen magazine photo shoot.

There was Billy on Fifteen, played by none other than Ryan Reynolds. Imagine my surprise when I saw Van Wilder years later. What a glow-up.

There was Big Pete from The Adventures of Pete & Pete. Played by Michael C. Maronna (he also played one of the McCallister kids in Home Alone). Thoughtful. Slightly awkward. Always narrating the strange anxieties of growing up.

And apparently there was also Alex, played by Jacob Tierney, quietly telling ghost stories in the first season of Are You Afraid of the Dark? while some kid in South Carolina watched Nickelodeon and thought he just really liked the show.

It turns out I didn’t just like the show.

I liked the boys.

But looking back now, the thing that really stands out isn’t just that those characters were cute.

It’s that they had real emotions.

They argued with each other.
They worried about hurting someone’s feelings.
Sometimes they cried.
Sometimes they apologized.

They cared what their friends thought of them.

That may not sound remarkable now, but compared to the rest of the culture at the time, it was very different.

The boys around me were supposed to be tough. Unbothered. Competitive. If they had feelings, they were expected to swallow them.

But the Nickelodeon boys didn’t do that.

Budnick could be rebellious and sarcastic, but he still cared about his friends.
Ted might act cool, but he worried when he hurt someone.
Big Pete spent half the show narrating his own anxieties about the world.

They were funny, messy, and emotional in ways that felt strangely real.

For a kid growing up in the late ’80s and early ’90s, that was a completely different window into what boyhood could look like.

Another thing younger readers may not realize is that when I was a kid, television wasn’t really made for us.

Not the way it is now.

Before cable expanded, TV was mostly programmed for adults. Kids got a few hours of cartoons on Saturday morning, and that was about it. The rest of the time you watched whatever the grown-ups were watching.

News. Sitcoms. Crime shows. Prime-time dramas. These shows followed a strict formula and the men depicted in them fit a certain type.

Then along came Nickelodeon.

For the first time, there was a channel that treated kids and teenagers as an audience worth programming for all the time, not just for a few hours on Saturday morning.

And the tone of those shows was different from almost anything else on television. Many of Nickelodeon’s early programmers came from Canadian television and public broadcasting—very different creative environments from the American Big Three networks.

Instead of action heroes or competition, you got stories about:

kids working at a ranch
summer camp friendships
suburban weirdness
ghost stories told by nervous teenagers

They were shows about relationships.

Which meant the boys on those shows were allowed to do something boys in the real world often weren’t encouraged to do.

They were allowed to feel things. That was a completely different window into what boyhood could look like.

And for some of us, it mattered more than we realized at the time.

(And yes, like many institutions that shaped childhood in that era, Nickelodeon later had its share of ugly revelations behind the scenes. None of that changes what those shows meant to the kids who watched them at the time.)

For a while, at least, those stories gave us something that didn’t exist many other places in the culture.

They showed boys who were allowed to feel things.

There was one other thing Nickelodeon gave me that I didn’t fully appreciate at the time.

When the kids’ shows ended, the channel quietly turned into Nick at Nite.

Suddenly the same television that had spent the afternoon at summer camp was showing sitcoms from decades earlier.

I Love Lucy.
The Dick Van Dyke Show.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Leave it to Beaver.

As a kid, I didn’t realize I was watching a kind of living archive of television history.

I just watched it.

Which means that somewhere along the way I ended up seeing most of the classic television shows from the 1950s and ’60s, the sitcoms and dramas of the ’70s and ’80s, the rise of cable in the ’90s, the era when HBO turned Sunday nights into prestige television, and now the streaming world where entire libraries of content exist at the click of a remote.

It’s a strange cultural vantage point.

There aren’t that many people alive who can say they’ve watched that entire arc unfold in real time.

From black-and-white reruns
to Nickelodeon summer camp sitcoms
to HBO redefining television
to streaming platforms dropping entire seasons overnight.

We’ve seen all of it.

The funny thing is that when I was a kid watching those Nickelodeon shows, I had no idea I was also learning something about myself.

I thought I was just watching television.

It turns out I was paying attention to the boys.

The ones who felt real.
The ones who had emotions.
The ones who didn’t quite fit the tougher version of masculinity the rest of the culture seemed to prefer.

At the time, they were just my favorite characters.

It would take a few more decades to realize they were also my first crushes.

The last thing I’ll say about all of this is something I find a little strange to think about sometimes.

Our generation may have quietly witnessed the entire rise—and possible decline—of television as the central form of entertainment in American life.

When I was growing up, television was the thing.

Families planned evenings around it. Entire cultures formed around certain shows. People talked about what had happened on television the next day at school or at work because everyone had watched the same thing the night before.

There were only so many channels. Only so many choices.

Which meant that television carried an enormous cultural weight.

And in my case, it meant Nickelodeon became one of the places where I first saw boys who felt emotionally recognizable in ways the rest of the culture didn’t quite allow yet.

But when I look at my kids now, I realize how much that world has changed.

They’ll put on a movie, sit on the couch, and then spend half the time looking at their phones.

The screen is still there, but it isn’t the center of gravity anymore.

Television used to pull our attention together. Now it’s just one thing competing for it.

Which makes it a little strange to think about how powerful it once was.

For my generation, a cable channel could shape how we saw friendship, masculinity, humor—even ourselves.

Kids telling ghost stories around a camp fire could leave a memory that lasted thirty years.

Apparently longer.

That kind of cultural influence feels harder to imagine now.

But for those of us who grew up during that window—between the black-and-white reruns of Nick at Nite and the explosion of cable in the ’90s—it was very real.

We didn’t know it at the time.

We thought we were just watching television.

It turns out television was quietly watching us grow up.

Further Reading

II keep a running collection of books that shaped this project on Bookshop.org.

Purchases there support independent bookstores—and help sustain this work.

Stay Connected

• 📖 Subscribe to Caleb Reed for weekly chapters and essays.

• 📸 Follow along on Instagram: @caleb_writes

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When Eric Dane died yesterday, most people remembered him as “McSteamy” from Grey’s Anatomy. Or they remembered the prosthetic from Euphoria — the grotesque foyer scene that turned into a meme.

I never watched Grey’s Anatomy. Nothing against it, but when you work in a hospital every day, you don’[t really watch shows about them. Plus, they irritate me, if I’m being honest.

And the prosthetic isn’t what stayed with me.

I remember the basement.

I started watching Euphoria during a suspended stretch of my life. I had taken a leave of absence from work. For the first time in decades, I wasn’t running anything. No meetings. No performance metrics. No decisions that affected hundreds of people.

Just quiet.

Too much quiet.

So I clicked on Euphoria because HBO prestige drama felt like a safe distraction. I wasn’t looking for insight. I wasn’t looking for a mirror.

Then the flashbacks began.

Cal and Derek in high school. The basement. The beer. The music. Two boys orbiting each other with that electric closeness that feels ordinary when you’re inside it and seismic when you look back.

And then the kiss.

Watching Cal remember Derek — watching him revisit the life he didn’t choose — did something to me that no book had managed to do.

Because I had a Derek.

His name was Billy.

I’ve written about him before. At the time, I softened the language. Intensity. Friendship. Brotherhood. I told the story in a way that kept it respectable.

But sitting there, middle of the day, house quiet, watching Eric Dane play a man flashing back to the boy he once loved, I understood something I had been editing out of my own history.

Billy wasn’t just a friend.

I loved him.

Not theatrically. Not dramatically. Quietly. In the way you rearrange yourself around someone. In the way your body recognizes something before your vocabulary does.

I don’t defend Cal Jacobs. He cheated. He lied. He became cruel. He hurt his family. That isn’t noble. That isn’t romantic.

But in those flashbacks, before the bitterness, I saw the fork in the road.

Most viewers saw the spectacle.

I saw the fork.

I was already unraveling when I watched those episodes. Twenty years married. Three children. A career that required clarity and command. From the outside, everything worked. From the inside, something was splitting.

The leave of absence created space for the truth to get loud.

Cal’s story is what happens when you bury one version of yourself long enough that it ferments. When you marry the girl. When you convince yourself the boy was confusion. When you build a life that functions but doesn’t quite fit.

I remember pausing the episode and feeling something close to dread. Not because I was living Cal’s double life. I wasn’t cheating. I wasn’t sneaking into hotel rooms.

But I recognized the architecture of suppression.

And I could see how it ends.

Coming out later in life wasn’t cinematic. It wasn’t a drunken confession in a foyer. It was paperwork. Divorce. Therapy. A custody schedule. Grief that felt like a death. It was telling my children something that would reshape their understanding of our family.

It was choosing rupture over rot.

Eric Dane didn’t inspire me in the way a motivational speaker inspires someone. He portrayed a man who waited too long. Watching that portrayal forced me to admit that I had loved Billy, and that minimizing that truth had shaped my entire adult life.

I never watched him on Grey’s Anatomy. I didn’t follow his career. I didn’t know him.

But for a few episodes of a television show, he held up a mirror at exactly the moment I was finally still enough to look.

Most people will remember the prosthetic.

I’ll remember the basement.

And the boy I stopped pretending was just a friend.

Further Reading

II keep a running collection of books that shaped this project on Bookshop.org.

Purchases there support independent bookstores—and help sustain this work.

Stay Connected

• 📖 Subscribe to Caleb Reed for weekly chapters and essays.

• 📸 Follow along on Instagram: @caleb_writes

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When I was a kid, that coincidence felt like a small moral assignment. Teachers and relatives leaned into it with cheerful sincerity: Be like Honest Abe. Read the books. Admire the speeches. Learn the story. Absorb the lesson.

So I did.

What no one ever explained was what kind of man Lincoln actually was — not the statue, not the mythology, but the human being who carried the Civil War on his back. And certainly no one ever suggested that whatever made Lincoln great might sit uneasily with our modern ideas of masculinity.

That’s why I loved the documentary Lincoln: Lover of Men.

Not because it was provocative.
Not because it was trying to shock.
Because it treated Lincoln as something we rarely allow great men to be anymore: complex.

Masculinity Before Labels

The documentary does something both modest and radical. It refuses to flatten Lincoln into a set of modern labels, but it also refuses to pretend that his intimate relationships with men were incidental or meaningless.

Lincoln’s long, emotionally intense relationship with Joshua Speed is not speculation. The letters exist. The shared bed is historical fact. The depth of attachment is undeniable.

I’m comfortable saying this plainly: Lincoln was most likely gay as we would understand the term today.

That doesn’t mean he lived with a modern sexual identity. It doesn’t mean he understood himself through our categories. Desire doesn’t require vocabulary, and intimacy doesn’t wait for permission from history.

What matters more than labels is this:
Lincoln lived in a world where masculinity was broad enough to absorb intimacy without breaking.

That world is gone.

The Sandburg Decision

It’s worth remembering that Carl Sandburg is largely responsible for the Lincoln most Americans carry in their heads. The prairie mystic. The moral conscience. The melancholy genius. That portrait is Sandburg’s.

In the first printing of his Lincoln biography in the 1920s, Sandburg referenced Lincoln’s relationship with Speed in language that clearly marked its emotional and intimate character. It wasn’t scandalous. It wasn’t accusatory. It was observational.

And then, quietly, that language disappeared in later editions — a shift scholars still debate but rarely ignore.

Not corrected.
Not disproven.
Simply omitted.

That wasn’t about historical accuracy. It was about cultural comfort.

By mid-century, America had decided something important:
its greatest president could not also be queer.

Not openly. Not even suggestively. Not even poetically.

So the complexity was smoothed away. And with it, something larger disappeared.

The Kind of Men I Grew Up Around

I grew up surrounded by men who would never have panicked over this — uncles, neighbors, church deacons, men who spoke rarely but watched everything.

The Greatest Generation fought in World War II. They worked with their hands. They kept their private lives private. They did not explain themselves, and no one expected them to. Masculinity wasn’t something they performed. It was something they inhabited.

They assumed men could have inner lives without those lives becoming public performance.
They assumed intimacy didn’t cancel authority.
They assumed responsibility mattered more than explanation.

No one asked what they did at night. No one cared. They slept in separate bedrooms from their wives. They came and went as they pleased. Affairs were understood, not discussed. Whether those affairs involved men or women was largely beside the point.

What mattered was whether you showed up.

That world had plenty of flaws, and I don’t romanticize it. But it understood something we’ve since lost: masculinity did not need to be defended.

It was sturdy enough to hold contradiction.

What Lincoln Gave Me

Here’s the part I didn’t understand as a kid when people told me to “be like Abe.”

I already was.

was observant, inward, verbal. I watched more than I talked. I felt deeply but learned early that those feelings needed to be managed, not displayed. I knew I was different long before I knew what that difference meant.

And like a lot of boys, I absorbed the lesson that masculinity was something you could lose if you weren’t careful.

Lincoln disrupted that.

Because when you look closely at who he actually was, not the monument, you see a man whose inner life was not incidental to his leadership but central to it. His melancholy sharpened his judgment. His attachments deepened his empathy. His capacity for intimacy made him better able to hold a nation together when it was tearing itself apart.

For someone like me, that mattered.

It meant that the parts of myself I had been quietly managing weren’t weaknesses to be outgrown. They were tools I hadn’t been taught how to use yet.

Strength Without Performance

Lincoln was not a swaggering man. He was melancholic, self-doubting, awkward, and deeply introspective. He loved language. He loved stories. He loved men.

He was also one of the strongest leaders this country has ever produced.

He visited battlefields.
He sat with dying soldiers.
He absorbed criticism from every direction without lashing out.
He held together a fractured cabinet through persuasion rather than domination.
He delayed moral certainty until he believed the country could bear it.

No one questioned his masculinity.
No one doubted his authority.

Masculinity, then, was not performance.
It was capacity.

Capacity for endurance.
Capacity for responsibility.
Capacity for restraint.
Capacity for moral seriousness.

Lincoln had all of that — in abundance.

The Diagnosis Everyone Is Getting Wrong

We hear a lot right now about a “crisis of boys.”

Falling academic performance.
Isolation.
Anger.
Disengagement.
A sense that young men don’t know what they’re for anymore.

The people most eager to talk about this tend to land on the same explanations: schools are too soft, culture is too hostile to masculinity, boys need tougher discipline, clearer rules, stronger role models.

Some of that isn’t wrong. It’s just incomplete.

Because it mistakes symptoms for causes.

The real problem isn’t that boys are being told too much about feelings.
It’s that they’re being told the wrong story about what feelings mean.

They’re taught that inner life is either a liability to suppress or a product to monetize. That masculinity must be constantly defended. That intimacy weakens authority. That ambiguity disqualifies leadership.

When boys sense that they are complex before anyone gives them permission to be, they assume something is wrong with them.

That’s the fracture.

What Lincoln Would Have Made Possible

Lincoln lived before we demanded that men explain themselves in slogans.

He did not have to announce who he was.
He did not have to defend the seriousness of his inner life.
He did not have to simplify himself to be legible.

That gave him something boys today rarely receive: permission to mature slowly.

Lincoln didn’t resolve his contradictions early. He carried them. He lived with them. He let experience shape judgment over time. His leadership came not from certainty, but from an unusual tolerance for tension.

When we stripped masculinity of interior life, we didn’t make men stronger. We made them brittle.

Be Like Abe

Growing up, “be like Abe” meant honesty, perseverance, humility. All good things. But it left out the most important lesson.

Be like Abe means you don’t amputate parts of yourself to be taken seriously.
You don’t perform toughness to earn authority.
You don’t confuse certainty with courage.

You carry what you feel.
You do the work anyway.
You don’t ask to be applauded for it.

Sandburg didn’t remove that language because it was wrong.
He removed it because America decided it couldn’t hold both greatness and queerness at the same time.

Lincoln could.

It took me decades to understand that the instruction to “be like Abe” was never about perfection. It was about wholeness.

He didn’t need to defend his masculinity.
He didn’t need to clarify his desires.
He didn’t need to simplify himself to lead.

He was strong enough to be complicated.

And that, it turns out, is exactly the kind of man we need again.

Further Reading

II keep a running collection of books that shaped this project on Bookshop.org.

Purchases there support independent bookstores—and help sustain this work.

Stay Connected

• 📖 Subscribe to Caleb Reed for weekly chapters and essays.

• 📸 Follow along on Instagram: @caleb_writes

• 📘 Facebook: Caleb Reed

• 🦋 Bluesky: @thecalebreed.bsky.social

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Author’s note: This is the second essay in a series about firsts, what it feels like to come out later in life. If you are just catching up, start here:

That sounds backward, but it’s the only honest way to describe it. I hadn’t been there as a kid. I hadn’t visited on school trips or work conferences. I didn’t have an origin story with the city. This was my first time, period. And instead of feeling dazzled or overwhelmed, I felt something quieter and more disorienting.

I felt caught up.

I came during Pride weekend, though that detail matters less than you might expect. Pride wasn’t something I traveled to New York for so much as something I walked into. The city was already in motion when I arrived. Louder, fuller, unconcerned with whether I was ready. Rainbow flags in windows. Groups forming and dissolving on sidewalks. Couples holding hands without checking who might be watching.

It felt like stepping into a conversation that had been going on for a long time without me.

For most of my life, I had worked very hard to appear straight, or at least masculine enough that no one would bother looking too closely. I grew up in a small town and spent most of my adult life in small towns. In those places, being gay didn’t just mean being different. It meant being other. Marked. Explained. I didn’t want to feel that way, so I learned how not to.

The editing started early and became subconscious. I didn’t think of it as hiding so much as calibrating. Adjusting posture. Monitoring tone. Being careful with gestures. Filing away interests or curiosities that felt like they might give me away. By the time I was grown, it wasn’t something I actively decided anymore. It was just how I moved through the world.

If you’d passed me on the street, you would have clocked me instantly, just not in the way that mattered. Middle-aged, preppy, former frat guy. Probably married. Probably with a stay-at-home wife and three adorable kids. A man who knew how to belong anywhere by asking very little of the space around him.

I had spent decades mastering that version of normal.

So when I arrived in New York and realized the city wasn’t paying attention to me at all, it took a minute to register.

New York did not notice me.

No one looked twice. No one tried to place me. No one seemed to care where I was from or what I was still figuring out. I moved through the city the way everyone else did, instinctively adjusting my pace, learning the choreography by osmosis. Crossing streets without thinking. Standing on corners without scanning faces.

You don’t audition for New York. You participate.

My first walk through the Village happened almost immediately. I headed south with intention I pretended not to examine too closely. What struck me wasn’t excitement or adrenaline, but relief.

A gay man walking down the street there was about as unusual as the sun coming up.

That was the revelation. Not joy. Not celebration. Normalcy. The kind that doesn’t congratulate you or ask how you got there. The kind that assumes your presence makes sense and moves on.

It was freeing in a very specific way.

Not the loud, performative freedom people like to talk about. Not self-expression as spectacle. But the freedom of not having to monitor yourself. Of not constantly scanning rooms. Of not worrying about who might be watching for you to make a mistake.

For the first time in a long time, I could breathe easier.

I noticed it in my body before I noticed it emotionally. My shoulders dropped. My pace changed. I stopped doing that constant background scan I’d always done without realizing it. I let myself look at other people, at men, and when our eyes met, I smiled or nodded in a way that said, I see you. And sometimes they nodded back, as if to say, Yes. I see you too.

It felt safe. It felt normal. And then, almost immediately, I wanted to move there.

Intellectually, I had always known that most people don’t give a second thought to the strangers around them. Ninety-nine percent of us are invisible to one another most of the time. But growing up closeted does something strange to your sense of scale. You feel as though all eyes are on you, waiting for you to slip. Waiting for you to reveal yourself accidentally.

In the Village, that illusion collapsed.

There were queer people of every age, shape, and size. Couples. Singles. Groups of friends. People who looked nothing like me and people who looked exactly like they could have been. And it was all fine. All unremarkable. All already accounted for.

I wandered in and out of a few bars that night. Nothing dramatic. A drink here. A pause there. Doors open to the street. Music spilling out and dissolving into the evening air. No one asked why I was there. No one asked who I was with. No one asked what this meant.

In smaller places, bars feel like auditions. You’re aware of being evaluated, even when nothing is explicitly at stake. In the Village, they felt like infrastructure. Places built to hold people who had already decided they belonged somewhere.

Earlier that day, I had gone into The Leatherman, a leather shop I’d carried around in my imagination for years as something faintly intimidating. Growing up, leather had been framed as the outer edge of gay life. Deviant. Aggressive. A caricature. The Blue Oyster Bar (from the Police Academy franchise) version of a world you weren’t meant to enter unless you were ready to be laughed at or feared.

That image had done its work on me. I had spent years assuming that curiosity itself was a kind of admission. That wanting to know more meant something dangerous or embarrassing about me.

Going in, I was afraid to admit that I was curious at all. I assumed I would still be the same person I had always been, just gay now. Instead, I found that I had a genuine interest and wanted to learn more. That realization came with its own fear.

I worried I was too old for any of this. That my body wasn’t something people wanted to see. That I would be humored politely and joked about after I left. I hadn’t planned to try anything on. I certainly hadn’t planned to expose myself in any meaningful way.

As soon as I stepped downstairs into the shop, all of that melted.

The space was bright. Clean. Orderly. Leather folded and hung with the precision of a place that takes materials and people seriously. No pulsing music. No performative edge. Just mirrors, racks, and staff doing their jobs.

I told the guy helping me what I was looking for. He didn’t blink. Asked my size. Asked how I wanted it to sit. Practical questions. Measurement questions. The kind you ask when the goal is fit, not fantasy.

The changing area was makeshift, the way New York interiors often are. A partition, a mirror, enough privacy to do the job. I stepped out of my clothes and stood there in nothing but a full-body harness while he adjusted straps, checked tension, and made small, efficient corrections.

At one point I mentioned that one piece didn’t feel quite right, that I might need a larger size. He nodded and checked himself, the way a tailor does when something pulls unexpectedly. Matter-of-fact. No hesitation.

The curtain was pulled back just enough to let in light, and I became dimly aware of other customers passing by. No gawking. No shock. One or two nodded almost imperceptibly, the way people do when something simply makes sense.

Then they kept moving.

What stayed with me wasn’t exposure. It was calm.

We talked through other options. I bought a leather jockstrap with a snap-off pouch. We discussed color choices briefly, referencing the old hankey code the way you might reference tailoring conventions. Not instruction. Context. A shared language that once helped people find one another when there were fewer safe ways to ask directly.

At one point, he asked what I was into. Not as a test. Not as a provocation. Just a practical question.

I answered honestly.

He nodded, showed me what they had that aligned with it, and mentioned, almost as an aside, that he was into the same. He was about my age, which helped more than I expected. In my prior life, this was something I would have been mortified for anyone to know. Here, we were simply commiserating.

It was the most normal thing in the world.

That small moment shut up an old voice I’d been carrying for years. The one that insisted my interests were strange or isolating or worthy of ridicule. It dismantled the belief that curiosity had to be defended or explained.

This wasn’t transgression. It was logistics.

The whole experience felt closer to buying a well-made suit than anything I’d been warned about. The staff were proud of their store, their work. They talked about leather the way a tailor talks about wool. Small things I hadn’t noticed were adjusted without comment. A leather smith took the piece and added an extra snap here or there.

That was the shock of it. Something I’d internalized as a fetish had a storefront in New York City, and it was the most ordinary thing imaginable.

When I left the store, fully dressed again with the bag in my hand, I didn’t hide it. I carried it without thinking. I’d chosen the jockstrap in a color that aligned with my kink, and I felt oddly anchored by that fact.

Honestly, I wanted to go straight to the Eagle. My traveling companions gently convinced me I wasn’t quite ready for that yet. They were probably right.

I stepped back into the Village. Pride continued around me, already softening into evening. People leaned into one another on stoops. Laughter drifted. No one was watching.

The city kept going.

That was the point.

I do feel sadness that it took me so long to come out in general. I missed some things. I know that. There are experiences I’ll never have, versions of myself that only exist hypothetically. At the same time, I wouldn’t have my three wonderful children if my life had unfolded differently.

Things happen for a reason. Or at least they happen, and you learn how to live with the shape they make.

What I learned that weekend is that there are places you can go and not feel different. Places where you can walk into a gay bar and the music doesn’t stop while everyone turns to stare. Places where it doesn’t matter if you don’t look like the people you’re conventionally attracted to. Places where you can take your shirt off to dance and not worry who’s watching.

You learn quickly that they aren’t.

And you learn that it doesn’t matter what you look like with your shirt off. It’s the uninhibited part that counts. The letting go. The refusal to keep managing yourself for other people’s comfort.

New York didn’t give me permission. It revealed I’d been holding it unnecessarily.

The Village didn’t celebrate me. It absorbed me.

Sometimes the most meaningful first trips aren’t about discovering something new. They’re about realizing how much energy you’ve spent trying not to be noticed.

That weekend, on my first visit to New York, I learned what it felt like to be ordinary in the best possible way.

And once you experience that kind of normal, it’s very hard to accept anything less again.

Further Reading

II keep a running collection of books that shaped this project on Bookshop.org.

Purchases there support independent bookstores—and help sustain this work.

Stay Connected

• 📖 Subscribe to Caleb Reed for weekly chapters and essays.

• 📸 Follow along on Instagram: @caleb_writes

• 📘 Facebook: Caleb Reed

• 🦋 Bluesky: @thecalebreed.bsky.social

• Visit my Bookshop.org Store

Author’s Note

This essay begins a series about firsts.

I came out in my forties with a platinum Amex, hotel points, miles, and access to the Delta Sky Club. Which is to say, I didn’t skip gay adolescence. I just arrived late, with the time, privacy, and resources that adulthood quietly provides.

What follows across this series are honest accounts of those delayed firsts: first hookups, first trips to New York, Provincetown, and Key West, first gay bars, first dark rooms, first time checking my clothes at the door. Experiences many gay men encounter in their teens and twenties, I experienced at forty-five, while holding a professional life, a family, and responsibilities that don’t pause for self-discovery.

This isn’t nostalgia or regret. It isn’t instruction or ideology. It’s curiosity, indulgence, miscalculation, joy, embarrassment, and relief. It’s what happens when desire finally gets room to move.

Think of it as gay adolescence, experienced out of sequence.

The First Time

I didn’t have much original material to work from.

Like most people, my expectations were shaped by television, movies, and porn. I knew, broadly, what men did with each other. I knew what I wanted. Bottoming had always been the fantasy. That part felt settled long before anything else did, as if my body had been quietly filing paperwork my mind hadn’t yet reviewed.

What I didn’t know was how to prepare in a way that felt compatible with the person I already was. At forty-five, I wasn’t reckless or naïve. I was competent. I had spent decades being good at things, making decisions, managing consequences. So I did what I always do when facing uncertainty. I researched.

I moved between wildly different sources: How to Bottom Like a Pornstar, The Joy of Gay Sex, and eventually books written by surgeons, including Dr. Evan Goldstein’s Butt Seriously. My healthcare background refused to stay quiet. Pleasure was fine. Precision mattered more. There was something both absurd and comforting about approaching desire with the same seriousness I brought to any unfamiliar procedure.

I assumed my first time would be awkward. I imagined it would be with someone from an app because I didn’t personally know any other candidates. I knew, mostly from a very awkward scene in the HBO series It’s a Sin, that douching was involved. That detail had never occurred to me organically, which feels revealing now. So much of what we think of as “sexual knowledge” is really just cultural shorthand passed down without explanation.

What I didn’t imagine was that my first time would be with a married couple.

It was a long New Year’s weekend. I was at a gated resort with my family. My ex-wife and I were already separated, but the trip had been planned long before, and we’d met my parents there. I was still inhabiting multiple lives at once: a husband in the process of becoming something else, a son on vacation, a professional who never really clocked out. I made a judgment call that in an expensive, insular vacation community, hooking up with other guests felt relatively low risk. Adulthood has a way of lending confidence to decisions that are still, at heart, impulsive.

I met one of them on Grindr, the other on Scruff. After a few exchanges, it became clear they were a couple. They were open. They came here often. Hooking up while on vacation was part of the rhythm of the place. What many straight people keep safely in the realm of fantasy was, for them, simply how weekends worked.

It moved quickly. A few messages. Some photos. A plan for that afternoon. Drinks and “fun” at the house they’d rented. Once the plan existed, I felt no ambivalence. I couldn’t wait. Desire, when it’s been deferred long enough, doesn’t negotiate much once it’s finally given a window.

If anything unsettled me, it was the scale of it. This would be my first time bottoming, and I had decided to do it with two people. Somewhere in the conversation I learned they lived less than an hour from my home in Virginia. That detail registered, then drifted away. It would return later, the way certain facts always do, after the moment has passed.

What I was afraid of wasn’t moral collapse or regret. It was practical. I was afraid I would have an accident. That, and that I wouldn’t be able to take it. These were not abstract fears. They were bodily, humiliating, specific. The kinds of fears people don’t tend to write essays about, but absolutely carry with them.

I had prepared. I had read. I had practiced with toys. I knew, in theory, what was required. It turns out How to Bottom Like a Pornstar was the most practically useful guide I encountered. I appreciated the specificity and reassurances of the medical books (particularly the parts where physicians confirmed this would not, in fact, kill me), but Pornstar aligned more closely with where my fantasy lived. At some point, preparation gives way to decision. I knew I was ready. I decided to let go and stop thinking.

Their house looked like it belonged to two men. Groceries for the weekend were laid out on the counter. A candle was lit. There was an ease to the space that surprised me. I had brought wine, the way you do when you’re meeting someone for the first time and want to appear normal. I felt comfortable almost immediately. I noticed, with quiet relief, a giant can of Metamucil on the counter. Domesticity has a way of disarming fear.

We talked. The kind of talking people do when they’re just getting to know one another. We were all surprised to realize how close we lived to each other in real life. That familiarity settled me. There was something grounding about discovering that these weren’t avatars or fantasies but people with grocery lists and neighborhoods and routines. When one of them moved closer and started kissing me, whatever tension remained disappeared. I knew I would be okay.

I wasn’t naïve about what was going to happen. I didn’t load the moment with the kind of meaning I probably would have at twenty. I never told them it was my first time. That felt unnecessary. At forty-five, inexperience didn’t feel like deficiency. It felt like timing. When we moved to the bedroom, something shifted. Not identity. Attention. I stopped narrating the experience to myself. I was inside it.

There’s something particular about experiencing a first while already fully formed elsewhere in your life. I wasn’t discovering who I was. I already knew that. I was discovering what my body had been waiting for. Adolescence, compressed and accelerated, hits differently when you’re not worried about reputation, or being found out, or what this means for the rest of your life. The stakes are lower and higher at the same time.

Afterward, my first thought was simple and almost incredulous: I had just been fucked by two men.

I felt proud. Not in a triumphant way. In a grounded one. I had tested the hypothesis. I had arranged this myself. The world hadn’t ended. It had felt amazing. Nothing catastrophic had happened. I felt the same quiet satisfaction I’d felt at sixteen after losing my virginity. A threshold crossed. A box checked.

The ending, though, was anticlimactic. They showed me the bathroom. Offered the shower. Asked if I needed anything. It was kind, but efficient. This was fun for them. A release. They had been together since college. They loved each other. They had navigated coming out together, built a life, accumulated history. This was something they shared easily. When it was done, it was thanks, we had fun, let’s do this again sometime.

That transactionality lingered with me more than I expected. Not as disappointment, exactly. More as awareness. I was the guest in someone else’s intimacy, temporary by design. At forty-five, you’re capable of holding pleasure and distance at the same time. You don’t need everything to be permanent for it to be meaningful.

Driving back to the house my family had rented, I felt both secretive and strangely ordinary. I told everyone I’d run an errand. I felt like anyone who looked at me could tell, which was almost certainly untrue. I literally and figuratively carried the experience with me quietly, like a private confirmation.

What stayed with me wasn’t shame. It was confidence. I felt real in a way I hadn’t before. Not more masculine. Not transformed. Just steadier. It showed me that even though I didn’t look like the men I was usually attracted to, that didn’t mean they wouldn’t be attracted to me. I would be okay. I could meet people. I could have connection on whatever terms we agreed to.

I told the one gay friend I had met so far that I’d finally checked the box. It turned out he had been invited into their home before too. That shared recognition felt grounding, almost tender. Proof that this world had patterns and pathways I was only just beginning to see.

This feels like the right place to begin because the fear underneath it is universal. The first hookup. The risks. The questions no one says out loud. Will anyone want me? Will I be good at this? What if something goes wrong?

So much of coming out can remain theoretical for years. Conversations. Labels. Self-acceptance. This couldn’t. This required a body. This meant I was fully gay in the most unabstract way possible. I had been fucked by two men and loved it. I finally understood why people are so obsessed with sex.

For a long time, I genuinely wondered what the big deal was.

Then I knew.

I’m sure they’ve likely forgotten me by now, but I will always remember the two of them and my first time.

Further Reading

II keep a running collection of books that shaped this project on Bookshop.org.

Purchases there support independent bookstores—and help sustain this work.

Stay Connected

• 📖 Subscribe to Caleb Reed for weekly chapters and essays.

• 📸 Follow along on Instagram: @caleb_writes

• 📘 Facebook: Caleb Reed

• 🦋 Bluesky: @thecalebreed.bsky.social

• Visit my Bookshop.org Store

I’m sitting on the sofa early in the morning, coffee in hand, before the sun comes up. It’s the same Christmas blend I buy every year, nothing remarkable except that it’s familiar. I’ve been buying it long enough that I don’t even really notice the label anymore. I know where it sits on the shelf. I know how it smells when I open the bag, how it will taste before I even pour the first cup.

The tree is glowing softly in the corner, lights still on from the night before. I never turn them off on Christmas Eve. That feels like interrupting something mid-sentence. The room is quiet in that way it only ever is on Christmas morning, before the day begins to announce itself. No one else is awake yet. There’s no soundtrack, no television murmuring in the background, no list waiting to be checked off. Just the low hum of heat kicking on and off, and the faint awareness that this moment won’t last.

This is the first year I’ve felt that old magic again. There were no kids, no family visiting. Just me and my partner—and the feeling was there again.

For a while, I wasn’t sure it would come back. Not because I stopped liking Christmas, or because I had grown cynical about it, but because the holidays changed in ways I didn’t yet have language for. They stopped fitting neatly into the shape they had held for most of my adult life. The rituals were still there, but the scaffolding around them had shifted.

For years, I was the host. Christmas lived inside my house in a very literal way. I built the calendar around it. I orchestrated the movement of people and food and traditions with the quiet confidence of someone who believed this was simply how things were done. It wasn’t performative. It was instinctive. Christmas happened because I made space for it to happen.

Then suddenly, I wasn’t the host anymore.

I became an invited guest in what used to be my home. That phrase sounds heavier than I mean it to, but it’s the most accurate way I know how to describe the shift. I still showed up. I was still welcomed. But the center of gravity had moved. Christmas was no longer something I held in my hands. It was something I stepped into.

That alone takes time to understand.

The last three years have been hard. I don’t say that to dramatize them, and I don’t feel the need to inventory every bruise. But the truth is that a lot happened in a relatively short span of time. Coming out. Divorce. Job loss. The ending of my first real relationship with a man. Each of those experiences rearranges your sense of self in quiet but lasting ways. Taken together, they left very little room for a holiday built almost entirely on memory and expectation.

Those Christmases didn’t disappear. They still arrived on schedule. I did what was required of me. I showed up. I smiled in the right places. I put up a tree because not doing so felt like an admission I wasn’t ready to make. But the spark that used to arrive without effort didn’t.

Those holidays passed politely. They did not linger.

I noticed it most in the small moments. The ones that used to catch me off guard. A song coming on in a store. The first cold night that felt like winter rather than inconvenience. The ritual of pulling ornaments out of their boxes. None of it landed the way it once had. Not because it hurt, exactly, but because it felt distant. Like watching something through glass. I don’t think I watched a single Christmas movie last year. I just wasn’t feeling it. I know they are sappy and sentimental - that’s why I like them - but they didn’t fit my mood anymore.

This year was different.

Not because everything has been resolved. Not because the past has been folded into something neat and painless. But because I stopped trying to recreate what Christmas used to be and allowed it to show me what it could be now.

That realization didn’t arrive all at once. It didn’t announce itself. It started quietly, the way most things worth keeping do.

This January, I took my kids to New York while the city was still dressed for Christmas. It was their first time seeing it that way. It was mine, too. That surprised me when I realized it. I had carried this idea of New York at Christmas for years, built entirely from movies and photographs and secondhand descriptions. Somehow, despite all the places I’d been, I had never actually seen it for myself.

We experienced it together, without hierarchy or nostalgia dictating the terms. None of us were revisiting something. We were discovering it.

Walking down Fifth Avenue felt unreal in the way only carefully constructed beauty ever does. Nest Fragrances had placed live greenery along the sidewalks, wrapped in lights, quietly emitting their Holiday fragrance. The kind that usually comes from a candle that costs more than it should. There were two or three of them per block, stretching on for blocks at a time. Music was piped softly into the air, just loud enough to notice, just subtle enough not to intrude.

It felt staged. And I didn’t mind at all.

It felt like walking through a Christmas movie. One of those scenes where everything is a little too perfect, where you expect the illusion to break if you look too closely. Except it didn’t. We were inside it. Together.

We went to Rockefeller Center and stood beneath the tree, the scale of it impossible to understand until you’re actually there. It’s one thing to see it on television every year, quite another to feel how small it makes you. We saw the Rockettes, precision and spectacle delivered without apology or irony. The kind of performance that knows exactly what it is and doesn’t pretend otherwise.

We wandered through the Bryant Park holiday market, steam rising from cups of something warm, lights strung everywhere without concern for minimalism. The kids laced up skates and stepped onto the ice, gripping the rail at first, bodies stiff with concentration. I watched them wobble, laugh, steady themselves. And then, without ceremony, they let go.

That moment stayed with me. The way they didn’t announce it. The way they didn’t look back. The way readiness sometimes arrives quietly, without permission or applause.

We passed through the Plaza and into Central Park, the city giving way to quiet in small, unexpected pockets. It amazed me how quickly the noise softened, how trees and snow and space changed the feel of everything. Everywhere we went felt familiar and impossible at the same time, like stepping into a memory that hadn’t existed yet.

At some point, I realized what was happening. This wasn’t just my children having a holiday experience. This was a childhood fantasy of mine being fulfilled alongside theirs. Not instead of it. Not after it. With it.

That mattered more than I expected.

On the way home, I started thinking about how to mark it. Not in a performative way. Not with a caption or a framed photograph destined to gather dust. I wanted something tactile. Something slow. Something that required time rather than money.

I thought about my mother.

Growing up, she made needlepoint ornaments for my sister and me. One each year. They weren’t flashy. They weren’t meant to impress anyone outside our family. Usually they were meant to mark an event or memory from the year. When my sister and I had our own children, she started doing the same for them. They were patient. Each one represented time spent, attention given, care repeated annually without commentary. Over time, they accumulated into a quiet archive of childhood. You could trace years with your hands.

I hadn’t thought about that tradition in a long time. Not because it stopped mattering, but because some things sit so deep in you that they don’t surface until they’re needed again.

I want to carry that forward.

I understood the basics of needlepoint, the terminology, the time, energy, and money that goes into creating one. My mother is a master, and has been stitching all of her life. So, this year, on Black Friday, I ordered 3 needlepoint ornament canvases, each representing parts of our trip to New York - Rockafellar Christmas Tree, Radio City and the Rockettes, and the Brooklyn Bridge, all dressed for Christmas.

They’re a little rough. I can see every errant stitch as soon as I look at them, though I doubt my kids will. By the third ornament, I was using more complex stitches and threads to get the look I wanted. These kinds of gifts take time and planning most people never see—finishing deadlines are usually months earlier—so I finished them myself. Still a little rough. Still worth it. I hope that years from now they’ll recognize the time and love in them, and maybe notice how my work improved along the way.

This year, decorating looked different, too.

There was a time when I treated Christmas like a full-scale production. Magical worlds built room by room. Garland wired into submission. Ornaments curated and themed, rotated like exhibits. I loved it. I don’t regret it. It was an expression of devotion, even if it wasn’t always recognized as such.

Now, I’m more restrained. Not because I love the season less, but because I share it differently. My partner doesn’t celebrate Christmas, and that matters. A department-store-scale transformation would feel less like joy and more like insistence. So I’ve adapted. One room. One tree. More intention. Decorations that invite rather than overwhelm.

It turns out that magic doesn’t require excess. Sometimes it requires respect.

And still, sitting here this morning, I can feel it again. That quiet hum. That sense that something meaningful is happening even when nothing dramatic is occurring. The tree lights glow a little less brightly now that the sun is up. The coffee has cooled. The day will unfold in its own time.

This year feels settled in a way it hasn’t in a long time. I’m starting a new job in January. My divorce is final. I’m happy in my relationship.

It’s good.

Not triumphant. Not resolved. Just good.

If there’s anything this series has taught me, it’s that Christmas isn’t something you preserve intact. It’s something you revise, often without noticing. Traditions fall away. New ones appear quietly. The season keeps offering itself, even when we’re distracted or unsure how to receive it.

This year, I’m receiving it again.

And that feels like enough.

Further Reading

I keep a running collection of books that shaped this project on Bookshop.org.

Purchases there support independent bookstores—and help sustain this work.

Stay Connected

• 📖 Subscribe to Caleb Reed for weekly chapters and essays.

• 📸 Follow along on Instagram: @caleb_writes

• 📘 Facebook: Caleb Reed

• 🦋 Bluesky: @thecalebreed.bsky.social

• Visit my Bookshop.org Store

These posts are intentionally presented in reverse order. Parts I and II of the three-part series are live, along with companion essays that dig a little deeper—into the music, movies, and moments that tie it all together.

I hope you enjoy reading them. If you’re inclined, I’d love to hear your own favorite memories and holiday traditions in the comments.

Merry Christmas!

Caleb

Further Reading

I keep a running collection of books that shaped this project on Bookshop.org.

Purchases there support independent bookstores—and help sustain this work.

Stay Connected

• 📖 Subscribe to Caleb Reed for weekly chapters and essays.

• 📸 Follow along on Instagram: @caleb_writes

• 📘 Facebook: Caleb Reed

• 🦋 Bluesky: @thecalebreed.bsky.social

• Visit my Bookshop.org Store

The moment I knew Christmas couldn’t keep happening the way it had was on Christmas Eve Eve, somewhere on the highway between South Florida and New Jersey.

It was a long, punishing drive—the kind that reduces days to rest stops and gas stations and the constant sense that you’re either behind schedule or about to be. Our first child was still small then—about eight months old—and everything about the trip revolved around him. Feeding schedules. Nap windows. The careful choreography of stopping and starting so he wouldn’t completely unravel. Our corgi, still a puppy himself, was a champ.

Christmas, meanwhile, existed somewhere else. Waiting. Already underway in someone else’s house.

I remember watching the miles tick by and feeling a quiet grief I didn’t yet know how to articulate. Christmas, the season that had once felt like a world you stepped into, had been reduced to logistics. Arrival times. Expectations. Exhaustion. It wasn’t that anything was wrong. It was that something essential was being thinned out by motion.

Christmas is for kids.

That thought arrived without drama, but it lodged itself firmly. And kids shouldn’t spend Christmas in transit. They shouldn’t associate the season with car seats and rest stops and adults who are too tired to be fully present.

That was the year I decided that from now on, Christmas would come to us.

There was no announcement. No family meeting. Just a private vow made somewhere between lanes of traffic. If Christmas was going to matter, it needed roots. It needed to live where the children lived. It didn’t matter that our son wouldn’t remember it. That wasn’t the point. Traditions don’t wait for memory. They begin when someone decides to build them anyway.

So began the era of hosting.

Each year after that, my family or my in-laws would join us, depending on whose turn it was. We agreed to rotate Thanksgiving and Christmas, and to travel for Thanksgiving. The house became the destination instead of a waypoint. We stopped being the ones arriving late and started being the ones who had already lit the lights.

Once that shift happened, something inside me clicked into place. I wasn’t recreating my childhood out of nostalgia. I was protecting it from erosion, and paying forward what my parents had done for my sister and me.

I wanted to recreate the warmth I grew up with—down to the smallest, most trivial details. Not because I was chasing an image, but because I knew how fragile the feeling was. Warmth doesn’t survive abstraction. It survives specificity.

The Smell of Christmas potpourri had to be there—and potpourri is no longer the fad it was when I was growing up. I had to search for it. I could pick up a bag in a shop and immediately tell if it was from last year. Not something similar. Not a candle, a spray, dusty reeds, or a Wi-Fi–enabled device emitting scent on a timer. They aren’t the same. Scent is the fastest way back to a memory, and I wanted the house to announce itself the moment someone stepped inside.

I tracked down a set of drunken reindeer glasses on eBay identical to the ones my aunt had owned, because it mattered that they were right, even if no one else noticed.

I built lighted villages piece by piece—well after their 1990s heyday. It’s a Wonderful Life came first, from Walgreens, driving town to town to track down the last few buildings as supply thinned out. Then A Christmas Story. Then Christmas Vacation. Each one assembled slowly, deliberately, as if proximity mattered. The Advent House came later, after years of wanting it, because some things refuse to be rushed.

There was a tree in every room. Five in total.

The formal living room tree.

The kids’ tree.

The “vintage” tree in the family room - indulging my childhood desire for a flocked tree.

The needlepoint ornament tree.

The Radko Little Gems feather tree—the one sold only to Radko dealers for display (stolen from my mother’s store, along with most of the gems themselves).

Each had its own logic. None were accidental.

The train came back out and performed handsomely for decades—the engine replaced only recently with New Old Stock tracked down on eBay so it would be identical. The movies returned in rotation. Outside lighting was planned months in advance, not because anyone demanded it, but because I needed the season to feel intentional. Also because my father would NOT put up any Christmas lights.

I wasn’t decorating.

I was constructing a container.

The table was laid with special Christmas china and the real silver. Crystal sparkled. Everything was washed by hand. Placemats and napkins were ironed. Live greenery and their associated smell filled the house—four fireplaces dressed with lighted garlands and fresh branches.

The house didn’t just look like Christmas.

It participated in it.

My mother once told my Aunt that her house looked like a department store. She meant it was tacky, I took it as the highest compliment.

I always made the beef tenderloin, which was my family’s tradition. It was the centerpiece of Christmas dinner, and I cooked it slowly every year until the price crossed into the astronomical range. If anyone doubts how much beef prices have risen, I watched it happen in real time, year by year, because it was almost the only grocery shopping I did myself. Traditions don’t just ask for effort. They ask for sacrifice, and sometimes they quietly price themselves out of reach.

Decorating was mostly my domain. I handled the scale, the structure, the timing—the trees, the lights, the rooms transforming one by one. But my ex-wife, also a florist, stepped in and took over the live greenery and bows, the flower arrangements that softened everything I’d built. We complemented each other that way. I wanted impact. Big bang for the buck. I don’t have the patience for fine adjustments. She did. Where I built the world, she gave it breath.

When people entered our house for the first time at Christmas, there was often a pause. A visible one. Even if they didn’t recognize the brands or know the lineage of what they were seeing, they sensed immediately that something was different. The ornaments sparkled more. The light felt warmer. The house smelled like Christmas in a way that couldn’t be faked.

Tasteful, but excessive.

Deliberate.

The bows were elaborate. The greenery was real. The lights were everywhere, but never harsh. Even the wet bar packed itself up for the month and reappeared transformed—Christmas glasses, ice buckets, tools, towels. Long after I let go of the It’s a Wonderful Life village, I kept the Martini’s bar from it displayed on our own bar every December, the way my aunt once had. Some objects stop being decorations and become anchors. They tell the room what season it is without explanation.

The living room tree—the formal one—took the better part of a day to decorate. I started by filling the interior with simple round ornaments to give it depth, then moved outward, wiring each blown-glass ornament in place one by one. It wasn’t that I forbade help. It was that no one else wanted to do it that way. I recognize now that it probably took all the fun out of it.

One year my mother individually boxed and wrapped all twelve of the Christopher Radko Twelve Days of Christmas ornaments. She knew I loved them and at first I thought she had given me hers—but she hadn’t. She had been buying them for me one by one over the years, lacking only the first and hardest to find. That Christmas I was stunned to see it, still in its original box. She later told me it had been my aunt’s, who had passed away a couple of years earlier. She had asked my cousins to track it down, happy to do it because they knew how much I loved Christmas.

Each year, I unboxed and reboxed every ornament as if it were new. I never counted them. I just knew how many hooks I needed. I bought roughly a thousand ornament hooks every year and usually had only a handful left over. When we eventually divided the ornaments as part of the divorce, we did it the way other couples divide precious assets—deliberately, carefully, acknowledging their value without quite knowing how to explain it.

Even when we switched to artificial, pre-lit trees, I couldn’t leave them alone. I added colored lights anyway. Sometimes vintage C7s. Sometimes bubble lights. Eventually I settled on a particular incandescent GE bulb that mimicked the look of modern LEDs before LEDs existed. I held onto incandescent lights long past the point of reason, long past the point of safety. I never met a strand of lights I couldn’t get working again. I still don’t like LEDs. They work, but they don’t feel right.

Eventually, I learned to slow it down. I started decorating on November 1st, a little each day—not because I was in a rush, but because I wasn’t. The villages came out first, then the bar, then the trees one by one. By Thanksgiving, the house was transformed. The outdoor lights went up the weekend after.

I didn’t want to spend December running around like a nut trying to get everything ready. I wanted to enjoy it. That was the point. Starting early meant the work was done before the season arrived. My wife handled it the same way—Christmas shopping finished well in advance. By the time December began, the house was ready, the gifts were wrapped, and the calendar was open.

Christmas wasn’t something we were chasing.

It was something we lived inside.

We moved for my job every few years, which meant the house itself changed constantly—new layouts, new light, new proportions. But the decorations stayed the same. No matter where we landed, Christmas looked like us. The rooms shifted. The rituals held.

In house hunting, I imagined what each place would look like at Christmas. Where the tree would go. Where the villages could be placed. If a house had more than a 200-amp electrical panel, I immediately imagined the exterior illumination possibilities. One house had two 200-amp panels and outlets pre-installed in all the flower beds. I had my checkbook out as soon as I saw it. My ex-wife thought I was crazy. I would send my mother the Zillow link, and her first response was usually, Oh, that will look good at Christmas.

On December 1st, the Advent House came out. The kids took turns opening the doors each night, carefully, seriously, as if the house itself were watching. I didn’t explain it. I didn’t direct it. I just watched. I think I installed the magic in them. I hope they do the same one day for their own families. My parents and my in-laws loved it. We had the first grandchildren, and when that happens, you understand how quickly wonder becomes a shared resource.

There is a scene in Christmas Vacation that most people laugh through and forget. Clark Griswold, trapped in the attic, falls through the floor and ends up watching old home movies—grainy footage of himself as a child, sledding, laughing, Christmas lights glowing in a simpler time. The scene is meant to be comedic, but the joke almost hides the truth.

That’s what Clark is trying to do.

He’s not trying to build the perfect Christmas.

He’s not trying to impress anyone.

He’s trying to get back to the feeling he had when he was small enough to believe it would always feel that way.

I understood that scene differently once I had children of my own. I wasn’t trying to recreate my childhood for myself. I was trying to make sure my children had something they could someday try to get back to—something solid enough to remember, and forgiving enough to survive disappointment.

The best Christmas we ever hosted came out of preparation—and then failure.

My wife belonged to a women’s group that met all year, and once a year the husbands were invited to participate. It was our turn to host, and we went all out. I scoured every HomeGoods and Marshalls in driving distance to find nearly fifty matching Christmas cocktail glasses. I would die before serving someone a drink in a plastic cup. Fires were lit everywhere. All the lights were on. The house was ready.

About thirty minutes in, the power went out. I remember thinking, Of course. The house was seventy-five years old with original wiring, and I was sure I’d finally pushed it too far. When I looked outside, the houses around us were still glowing. A car accident nearby had knocked out a transformer that served only a handful of homes on our street.

I was certain everyone would leave. Instead, we lit more candles. We kept the fires going. People talked, laughed, lingered late into the night. Years later, people still said it was the best Christmas party the group had ever thrown.

Most people never really saw the decorations.

But they felt the house immediately. The warmth was already there—the smell of Christmas in the air, candles glinting off china and crystal, firelight moving across the walls. The room crackled. Drinks flowed too freely. No one asked what had happened. No one checked their phones. People stayed where they were.

That was the night I finally understood what all those years of preparation had been for. Christmas doesn’t collapse when the lights go out. If it’s been built carefully enough, the warmth holds. The spectacle can disappear and the feeling remains.

I didn’t lose Christmas when I grew up.

I learned what Clark was trying to do all along.

Further Reading

I keep a running collection of books that shaped this project on Bookshop.org.

Purchases there support independent bookstores—and help sustain this work.

Stay Connected

• 📖 Subscribe to Caleb Reed for weekly chapters and essays.

• 📸 Follow along on Instagram: @caleb_writes

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• 🦋 Bluesky: @thecalebreed.bsky.social

• Visit my Bookshop.org Store

Yesterday, on the eastern edge of Sydney, Australia, at one of the country’s most famous beaches — Bondi Beach, a place known for sun, surf, families, and summer evenings by the sea — a Hanukkah celebration turned into a scene of terror. Hundreds of people had gathered for a “Chanukah by the Sea” event on the first night of Hanukkah, an annual festival that celebrates resilience and light in the darkest part of the year. Two gunmen opened fire on the crowd, killing at least 16 people, including a child, and injuring more than 40 others, according to authorities, in what has been widely described as an antisemitic terrorist attack targeting Jewish people simply for attending a holiday celebration. The shooters, believed to be a father and son, were confronted by police; one was killed and the other taken into custody. Officials have said this was a deliberate attack on Jewish worshipers and families gathered in one of Sydney’s most open, public places.

For many people reading this, that may feel distant. Another headline. Another place far away. But it is worth naming plainly: people were killed not because of where they were, but because of who they were and what they believed.

That reality reframed something for me. I had planned to expand on this later, but it seems more important to do it now.

Earlier this fall, I attended Yom Kippur services with my partner. It was my first time. The atmosphere was quiet, solemn, deeply inward. A day built around reflection, accountability, and humility.

Outside the synagogue, there was a police car parked near the entrance. Two officers standing watch.

I remember commenting on it at the time, almost offhandedly. I asked if it was because Yom Kippur is a High Holy Day. Maybe they expected a crowd. We were in a busy urban area. Maybe it was just precaution.

No, my partner said. They’re always there.

That was the moment it clicked.

I understood my privilege then, not abstractly, but viscerally. I grew up Catholic. We didn’t attend church every Sunday, but we kept the traditions and beliefs. Christmas Eve. Easter. The familiar rhythm of it all. Later, we raised our children Catholic and, for stretches of time, attended Mass consistently. I’m no longer a practicing Catholic, but I do consider myself Christian in the older sense of the word, before it became an identity rather than a personal belief system.

It would have shocked me to see police stationed outside a church on Christmas or Easter. That absence of fear felt normal. Invisible. Assumed.

Only later did I realize how unevenly that assumption is distributed.

For some communities, worship is not something you enter casually. It is not protected by default. It requires vigilance. Planning. Security. Not because of crowd size or logistics, but because history and experience say otherwise.

Anyone who practices their faith as part of a visible minority knows this feeling. Anyone whose beliefs mark them as different understands that gathering itself can be an act of courage.

I’ve spent the past several days sharing warm memories. Christmases layered in light, excess, and nostalgia. I don’t regret that. Those memories matter. But they exist alongside something else that deserves to be named.

Not everyone gets to indulge freely this time of year.

Not everyone gets to assume safety as part of the ritual.

Not everyone gets to worship without protection.

This isn’t about guilt. It’s about awareness.

Before the lights come back on, it’s worth pausing to recognize that comfort and safety are privileges, not guarantees — and that something as simple, personal, and pure as going to worship is not experienced equally by everyone.

Further Reading

I keep a running collection of books that shaped this project on Bookshop.org.

Purchases there support independent bookstores—and help sustain this work.

Stay Connected

• 📖 Subscribe to Caleb Reed for weekly chapters and essays.

• 📸 Follow along on Instagram: @caleb_writes

• 📘 Facebook: Caleb Reed

• 🦋 Bluesky: @thecalebreed.bsky.social

• Visit my Bookshop.org Store

I sometimes think my childhood was measured not in years, but in Christmases. Other kids grew an inch or two each summer; I grew in rings of memory, bright as the lights that filled our house each December. There are people who say memory softens the past, rounding off the edges, smoothing over the real shape of things. Maybe that’s true for me. But the Christmases of my childhood remain vivid, shimmering in my mind with a clarity I’ve never been able to explain away. They were more than holidays. They were whole worlds we stepped into—built, arranged, and animated by the people who raised me.

The smell was always the first sign the world was changing. Not cinnamon or pine in any vague sense, but Aromatique’s The Smell of Christmas, which my mother deployed each year like an incantation. It arrived before the lights, before the garlands, before the boxes of ornaments came down from the attic. She’d place the potpourri in a glass bowl on the coffee table, and suddenly the house shifted. You could taste the scent on the air—a warm, resinous blend of clove and orange that meant the calendar didn’t matter anymore. Christmas had begun.

My aunt lived next door, which made the holiday feel less like a single celebration and more like a compound-wide transformation. She decorated on a scale that would’ve embarrassed a department store. Fake fruit dipped in glitter, garlands that sagged under the weight of ornaments, wreaths so large they looked stolen from the gates of a civic building. And it all began early. October-early. The Time-Life Treasury of Christmas playing through the house before the leaves even finished turning. The Alabama Christmas Album and Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers snuck in by Halloween. By Thanksgiving, her house was fully awake. To this day I know every word to every song on those first two albums.

If my aunt built maximalist magic, my grandmother provided the quiet scaffolding beneath it. She didn’t perform Christmas in the obvious ways—no loud decorations, no glittering garlands—but she made space and provided for it all to flourish. Christmas wouldn’t have happened without her, and in a way, she remains the person I think of when the season settles into its softer, more tender places.

But the heart of it all—the architect of our most spellbinding Christmases—was my mother. She was a florist, which meant she knew how to work with native greenery the way other people work with words. She would come home in early December with armfuls of pine garlands, cedar branches, magnolia leaves, and smilax that seemed to stretch on forever. She tied bows with a precision and beauty that looked easy until you tried to copy it. The house would fill with the scent of sap and cold greenery, with ribbon, floral wire (I promise you it has its own smell), pinecones, and the hush of focus that fell over her when she was making something beautiful.

If she needed materials that couldn’t be purchased, my father and I would go out searching for them. These weren’t simple errands. These were expeditions. We’d drive into the national forest or around our neighborhood - which was mostly untouched woods at the time. The cedar had to have the little blue berries on it, the “right” magnolia without the waxy leaves. Unfortunately, my yard today has the cedar, but the “wrong” kind of Magnolia. My father would haul the cut branches over his shoulder, and I’d carry the lighter pieces, proud to be part of the effort. These outings held a quiet magic of their own—a father teaching his son what devotion looks like, not in words, but in the simple willingness to gather what someone you love needs in order to create something beautiful.

My mother had an artist’s eye but also a merchant’s instinct. For a time, she sold Christopher Radko ornaments in her shop—the proper, hand-blown kind whose sparkle is unmistakable. Radko ornaments didn’t just hang on trees; they transformed them into jeweled mosaics. She discovered them in New York in the early 80s and began collecting them. We had a lot of his first ornaments on our tree—the whole Twelve Days of Christmas set, eventually—and they came out each year with the kind of reverence some families reserve for heirloom silver. She never scolded me for touching them. She handed them to me freely, trusting the care I had even as a child. And when my sister and I begged for our own small trees in our bedrooms, she decorated those, too, with miniature glass ornaments bought on our annual trips to Calabash.

Calabash, North Carolina, was not known to us for its shrimp boats or seaside tchotchke shops. For us, it was known for one particular Christmas store - Callahan’s Nautical Gifts. At first glance you would assume it to be like every other Myrtle Beach gift emporium. Of course they had saltwater taffy and that stuff, but the bulk of the store was devoted to Christmas decorations. A Department 56 “Snow Village” laid out in the largest display I had ever seen. Blown glass ornaments, Byer’s choice Carolers, you name it and they had it.

We’d also go to Charlotte, NC mostly to visit Southpark Mall and the specialty shops that my mother and aunt had discovered visiting my great-grandmother. Even after a “new” way to Charlotte was possible via 4 lane highways, we still went the old way - passing through dozens of little SC towns I can still rattle off today. On the way my mother would stop for dollhouse miniatures for my sister, who owned a beautiful wooden dollhouse that grew more elaborate with each passing year. They bought tiny lamps, porcelain dishes, wreaths the size of quarters. I, too, benefited from these excursions. My mother found plastic garlands and dollhouse-sized wreaths to decorate my LGB train set. One year, she even made the wreaths herself, twisting the green material with wire and trimming them with red bows so small they looked like they belonged on a fairy’s front door.

The train was my pride. Still is. An LGB set from West Germany, purchased before the Berlin Wall fell, engineered with a level of craftsmanship that has kept it running strong for decades. The station, a kit she bought somewhere near my grandparents mountain home, came with instructions entirely in German, which I assembled through sheer willpower and intuition. I still have the train today, circling my own Christmas tree 40 years later.

Summers in the mountains were spent haunting every Christmas shop in the High Country—Boone, Banner Elk, Linville—searching for additions to our winter worlds. These stores weren’t the tourist attractions they are now. They were small, warm, undiscovered places tucked into mountain towns, smelling faintly of wood and wool and dusty shelves. Run by locals or retirees to the area, open only in the summer. One of them is where she found my train. Today the shop is a rafting place.

The magic of those High Country summers carried straight into December. My sister and I would set up our tiny trees with our tiny glass ornaments; my mother would shape the house with greenery and garlands; my aunt’s windows would glow next door. The world around us felt transformed, as if our small town had been chosen for something extraordinary.

Sometimes, I was so overwhelmed by excitement on Christmas Eve that I threw up. Not from sweets or nerves or too much motion, but from anticipation that became too large to hold inside my small body. Other kids counted presents. I counted worlds—tiny ones under the tree, bigger ones outside the window, worlds made of lights and music and needlepoint stockings. I wasn’t greedy. I was overwhelmed by wonder.

And the wonder was not abstract. It was embodied in the people around me. One year, my father and his uncle built a playhouse for us. Not a pre-fabricated thing bought from Lowe’s, not a hand-me-down play set assembled with an Allen wrench. They stick-built it on Christmas Eve, hammering and sawing through the night in the cold while my sister and I slept. My mother told us Santa’s elves had borrowed my father’s tools. I believed her. Part of me still does.

Christmas magic in our house wasn’t something purchased—it was something constructed, conspired, and lovingly engineered by the people who raised me. When I look back now, the most extraordinary part isn’t the objects themselves, but the lengths to which my family went to make December feel like stepping into another world. With Amazon Prime, eBay, Facebook Marketplace, you can find and have shipped to you nearly anything. Not so then. We circled what we wanted in the Sears “Wishbook.” My mother, grandmother, aunt, all made phone calls to find that year’s latest toy. Friends haunting their own local stores trying to find the things on her list. I’m certain she brawled with other moms to get Cabbage Patch dolls, or the GI Joe men. My great-grandmother, oblivious to all the hype, would dutifully wait in line to pick up things for her well into her 90s.

One of the most legendary examples was the year of the GI Joe aircraft carrier. Not the later versions kids could find on eBay, but the original—seven feet long when assembled, the holy grail of 1980s toys. You couldn’t walk into the Kmart in my small hometown and buy something like that. There was nothing on the shelves that could hold that kind of wonder. My mother found found it in Charlotte, and my great-grandmother and my grandfather loaded the unassembled box into the trunk of her Cadillac Seville, the one with the two-tone paint and carpeting so plush it felt like stepping into a coat of fur. It even had a CB radio.

The box fit perfectly into that long, square-backed trunk—almost as if the Cadillac had been designed for it. That absurdity still delights me. You could never fit something like that into a modern sedan. Christmas Eve, after we’d been sent to bed, my older cousin and his best friend stayed up into the small hours assembling it—hundreds of pieces, tiny struts and platforms, stickers, compartments, ladders. They worked in secret under dim garage lights so that I would wake to a fully realized world.

And I did. Every year.

That carrier was the closest thing to waking up inside FAO Schwarz without ever having stepped foot in one. People ask why I threw up every Christmas Eve. This is why. Reality never stood a chance against the world my family built.

The aircraft carrier year is also bound up in another memory: the house full to bursting. Every December, my great-grandmother and her sister came to stay for a week or two. Our house rearranged itself to make space. My great-grandmother slept in my sister’s room; my sister slept in my room, taking the top bunk; and I, in the bottom bunk, tried—and failed—to fall asleep on Christmas Eve. I’d climb quietly down the ladder every so often to throw up from sheer, overwhelming anticipation, trying not to wake anyone. My sister pretended not to hear. My great-grandmother was deaf as a post. She also woke every morning at 5:00 am, except Christmas morning. We’d all be up waiting for her to open presents muttering to ourselves, wondering why of all days, she chooses this one to sleep in.

But it wasn’t just the big gifts or the full house that made Christmas what it was. It was the way the season called forth talent from every corner of the family.

My father was in charge of the tree, getting it home, storing it and taking care of it until it was time to bring it inside. We had an old, steel Christmas tree stand that my great grandfather had made. It weighed a ton and had 8 “L” bolts that had to be hand cranked into the trunk of the tree. Though it could hold a 12 ft tree easily, the opening circumference was comically small. My father would start by sawing a ring around the trunk to match the depth of the stand, then slowly chip away at the bottom with a hatchet. Finally, my uncle, a machinist, copied the original with a much wider opening. Once he got it in the house, his part was done.

When I was in high school, it was determined that I was old enough to be trusted with choosing the tree myself. The nursery owner and I didn’t discuss price—he knew my mother was good for it, which was its own kind of unspoken Southern code. I remember standing beneath the towering branches, unable to see the top from where I stood, feeling the same thrill I’d felt the first time I saw the aircraft carrier. When they delivered it, it required a full rearrangement of the living room to make space for the tip to brush the cathedral ceiling.

My mother was furious.

The cost, the scale, the logistics—and perhaps most of all, the fact that with the tree pulled into the center of the room, we could no longer hide the “ugly ornaments” in the back.

For all her elegance—her florist’s instinct, her Radko displays, her love of fresh cedar and magnolia—she adored colored lights. Tiny, glowing bulbs in every shade. She liked them cheerfully messy and unapologetically bright, a detail that would have horrified some of the women she knew, but she held to her preference with the kind of genteel stubbornness that suggests a lineage of women who knew their minds and saw no need to apologize for them. That year I think I made 3 trips to Wal-Mart to buy more lights to finish it.

As I grew older, she began entrusting me with more of the decorating. First the tree, then the Snow Village and other decorations she had collected over the years. I didn’t realize then what a gift this was. In some families, children are told not to touch the tree. In ours, I was permitted to shape it. To arrange it. To build it into something like the worlds in my imagination. I eventually convinced her to let me add white lights to the tree, to “brighten it up.” It was one of the few times in my childhood when no one questioned why I cared so much about beauty or where I placed each detail. It was December. Everyone was allowed to care.

All these details—my aunt’s maximalism, my grandmother’s quiet stewardship, my mother’s artistry, my father’s greenery expeditions, my great-grandmother’s presence, the ingenuity of my uncle’s tree stand—wove together into a childhood where Christmas felt less like a holiday and more like a place we lived in. A season built by many hands, with a kind of devotion that today feels almost impossible. It was a world where beauty was allowed, where wonder wasn’t mocked, where the effort to create something magical was simply part of who we were.

And in that world, I learned something quietly, without realizing it:

Christmas was the first place where I felt the inside of myself match the outside.

A place where caring wasn’t suspect, where arranging wasn’t unusual, where light and color and music felt like the most natural language in the world.

A place where I belonged without apology.

As I got older, the magic changed shape, as all magic eventually does. Childhood wonder gives way to adolescent self-consciousness, and yet Christmas—somehow—remained the one place untouched by that shift. It stayed bright. It stayed whole. It stayed mine.

Not because the world outside softened, but because the world inside those December walls had already been built so solidly, so lovingly, so convincingly that I could walk back into it each year like stepping into a memory that still breathed.

The older I grew, the more Christmas began to feel less like something done for me and more like something I was being invited to participate in. My mother didn’t script that transition; she simply allowed it. She’d stand beside me at the tree and hand me an ornament—one of the Radko pieces, usually—and say, “Find the right spot.” And she meant it. She trusted me to know.

I don’t think she ever understood what that trust meant, or how rare it was. In the world we lived in—Southern, traditional, quietly prescriptive—boys weren’t often encouraged to express feeling through arrangement, or beauty, or attention to detail. Boys were allowed to hang lights, perhaps, but not to care about how they hung. Not to feel something meaningful come alive in the placement of a wreath or the drape of garland or the soft, glowing symmetry of a well-balanced tree.

But I cared.

And in December, no one questioned that impulse.

Beauty wasn’t coded. It wasn’t policed. It was simply allowed.

I didn’t yet understand that this was a kind of early self-expression.

I didn’t understand that in other months, the same instincts could be misread or judged or tucked away.

All I knew was that for a few weeks each year, I felt entirely at home inside myself.

My mother would decorate with abandon—magnolia leaves and cedar branches and smilax gathered by my father. The house would glow. My aunt’s house next door would glow too, though in a different register—maximal, glittering, unapologetic. “More is better” being her motto. My great-grandmother would move quietly through our house, observing, assisting, adding that subtle layer of presence only elders can offer.

And I, entirely unaware of the deeper currents shaping me, absorbed it all.

I learned how a space could feel festive or warm or reverent.

I learned that beauty is a form of care, and that care is a form of love.

I learned that the world could be transformed—not in grand, sweeping gestures, but through small, intentional acts done again and again with devotion.

But the thing that stayed with me most was the world of Christmas morning.

By the time I reached the age where I began to notice the limitations of the real world—the rules and expectations, the unspoken boundaries of what boys could do or love or say—Christmas morning remained untouched. In that room, surrounded by the glow of colored lights, with the tree towering toward the ceiling and my LGB train circling below, I felt a kind of alignment I didn’t experience anywhere else.

It was the feeling of being allowed to feel.

The feeling of being allowed to show delight without restraint.

The feeling of being understood without needing to explain myself.

My great-grandmother and her sister, sitting in robes at the table with coffee.

My mother moving through the living room, fixing a ribbon here, straightening an ornament there.

My sister squealing over a new doll or toy.

My father, quiet and steady in the background, garbage bag in hand, proud without needing to say so.

My aunt next door, blasting Time-Life Christmas before noon.

My train running its soft, steady loop, as if reminding us that wonder has its own rhythm, circular and eternal.

If you’d asked me then why I loved Christmas so much, I would’ve had no answer except to say, “It’s Christmas.”

But now, with the distance of years, I know the truth:

Christmas was the one place in my childhood where I never felt the need to hide anything.

Not my joy.

Not my care.

Not my sensitivity.

Not my imagination.

It was the season that taught me beauty wasn’t frivolous—it was meaningful.

It was the ritual that taught me expression wasn’t weakness—it was connection.

It was the room where I first learned how to breathe.

Sometimes I think the reason I was sick with excitement every Christmas Eve wasn’t because of presents or anticipation, but because my body knew what my mind didn’t yet have words for:

This was the world where I felt most fully myself.

And the possibility of stepping into that world again was almost too much to hold.

In the years that followed, life would grow more complicated. Identity would become something I learned to manage, then suppress, then carefully excavate again as an adult. But Christmas—those childhood worlds—remained untouched by that process. They remained the blueprint of something true.

When I look back now, what stays with me isn’t the GI Joe aircraft carrier or the twelve-foot tree or the train looping under the branches. It isn’t the Radko ornaments or the Snow Village or the greenery that perfumed the air.

What stays with me is the feeling.

The hush before the lights were plugged in.

The soft, slow wonder of a house transformed.

The sense that magic wasn’t something found—it was something made.

And even now, decades later, whenever that first December chill arrives and the light shifts across the floor in that particular winter way, I feel the faintest echo of the child I once was—wide-eyed, sleepless, trembling with anticipation—not because of gifts or spectacle or surprises…

…but because Christmas was the first time I ever saw a world that matched the one inside me.

And that kind of magic never really leaves you.

There’s a song on the Alabama Christmas album called “Santa Claus (I Still Believe in You).” It’s pure mid-80s country Christmas — sentimental, earnest, a little syrupy — but the heart of it has always stayed with me. The chorus talks about how even grownups carry a child inside them who still wants to believe, still sees magic in the glow under the tree. And that’s exactly what Christmas is for me: the one season where the kid I was could meet the adult I became, with wonder still intact.

Further Reading

I keep a running collection of books that shaped this project on Bookshop.org.

Purchases there support independent bookstores—and help sustain this work.

Stay Connected

• 📖 Subscribe to Caleb Reed for weekly chapters and essays.

• 📸 Follow along on Instagram: @caleb_writes

• 📘 Facebook: Caleb Reed

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November is Transgender Awareness Month — a time set aside to recognize the lives, voices, and resilience of transgender and gender-diverse people. It’s a month for learning and unlearning, for listening, for honoring truths that too many still dismiss or misunderstand.

Within it is Transgender Awareness Week, running from November 13–19, when the focus shifts toward education and visibility. And today, November 20, is the Transgender Day of Remembrance — a day specifically dedicated to memorializing transgender people who have been killed through acts of violence and hate.

It is the most solemn day in the month. A day that should never have had to exist.

But it does.

And because of that, we tell the truth.

Biology Is Messy, Not Political

People like tidy boxes: male or female, gay or straight, this or that. But biology doesn’t care about those categories. Human development isn’t a single switch; it’s a long choreography of chromosomes, hormones, receptors, and timing. External genitalia form in the first trimester. The brain develops under hormonal influence later, in the second trimester. When those systems fall out of sync, you get a person whose anatomy and inner identity don’t align.

That isn’t a mistake. It isn’t “rebellion.” It isn’t ideology. It’s how nature works.

Intersex people exist — proof that chromosomes don’t always match anatomy. Transgender people exist — proof that the brain’s map of self can differ from the body’s assignment. And brain-structure research reflects what many trans people have always known: identity is not imagined. It’s wired into them from the start.

None of this is a “choice,” any more than being gay is a choice. Biology is not binary. It’s diverse, layered, and sometimes wonderfully complicated.

The Pain Doesn’t Come From the Identity — It Comes From the World

Gender dysphoria doesn’t arise because someone is trans. It arises because they’re forced to live in bodies or environments that don’t allow them to be themselves without fear. And too often, that fear is justified.

Transgender people — especially trans women of color — live with a level of vulnerability that others never have to think about. The violence they face isn’t theoretical. It’s not political talking points. It is real, and it is deadly.

That is why the Transgender Day of Remembrance matters. It names the truth about the world we live in and the price people pay simply for existing.

We Share More Than We Admit

Everyone under the LGBTQ+ umbrella knows something about being outside the lines. Different stories, different paths — yes. But the underlying experience is familiar:

Being told that something innate is wrong.

Having to explain yourself to survive.

Being asked to justify your own existence.

We are far more connected than the world wants us to be. And part of honoring this day is recognizing that solidarity isn’t optional — it’s necessary. The forces that target trans people aren’t stopping with them. The fault lines may look different, but they run through the same ground.

Today is a memorial. A day of names, of stories cut short, of lives lost to a violence that should never have existed. Nothing about this should feel normal. Nothing about it should be inevitable. But the least we can do is look it in the eye.

We remember those we lost.

We refuse to forget why.

And we choose — every day, not just today — to fight for a world where transgender people can live long enough to be known for their lives, not their deaths.

Author’s Note

Today holds weight. Transgender Day of Remembrance is not about discourse or debate; it’s about honoring lives lost to violence that should never have existed in the first place. My intention with this piece is simple: to stand with the transgender community, especially on a day shaped by grief, and to help widen the circle of understanding for anyone who reads my work.

If you are transgender, gender-diverse, or grieving someone you’ve lost, I hope today brings gentleness and space. If you’re new to learning, I hope something here helps you see the fullness and humanity of people whose lives deserve protection, dignity, and joy.

This month — Transgender Awareness Month — is a chance to deepen our understanding. Today is a moment to pause, remember, and recommit ourselves to a world where this day is no longer necessary.

Further Reading

I keep a running collection of books that shaped this project on Bookshop.org.

Purchases there support independent bookstores—and help sustain this work.

Stay Connected

• 📖 Subscribe to Caleb Reed for weekly chapters and essays.

• 📸 Follow along on Instagram: @caleb_writes

• 📘 Facebook: Caleb Reed

• 🦋 Bluesky: @thecalebreed.bsky.social

• Visit my Bookshop.org Store

It’s the most personal thing I’ve written—about friendship, loss, coming out, and what it means to grow up twice.

Read it here →

The Queer Love Project

Billy and the Kid

Email us at queerloveprojectsub@gmail.com to take “The QLP Questionnaire…

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7 months ago · 10 likes · 1 comment · Caleb Reed

Originally published in The Queer Love Project (October 2025).

By every rational measure, Republicans could have walked away from Donald Trump years ago. His legal baggage grows heavier, his approval ratings lighter, and his hold on the party thinner by the day. Yet they stay. The reason isn’t loyalty. It’s cowardice—the organizing principle of modern politics.

Cowardice is what happens when self-preservation replaces conviction. It’s the quiet deal with fear: keep your head down, keep the base calm, keep your donors happy. The price is always the same—dignity first, democracy later. The shutdown is just the latest proof that the price has come due.

The Numbers No Longer Justify Loyalty

By every public measure, the case for clinging to Trump has collapsed. His favorability among independents now hovers in the low thirties. Among suburban and college-educated voters—the groups that decide general elections—his negatives are above sixty percent. National fundraising has slowed; the small-dollar engine that once powered his rallies is sputtering. Meanwhile, Republican-aligned super PACs are hoarding cash instead of spending it, a sure sign donors are hedging their bets. The political math that once made loyalty seem pragmatic now reads like a suicide note.

Polls on the shutdown tell the same story. When asked who’s to blame, nearly half of Americans point to Republicans in Congress; only about a third fault Democrats. Among independents the gap is even wider. That means the GOP isn’t just losing moderates—it’s actively teaching them to associate the word Republican with chaos. Dragging out the stalemate does nothing but confirm the caricature: a party unable to govern the system it claims to revere.

And yet, the leadership stays frozen. The fear that abandoning Trump will alienate “the base” outweighs every numerical warning flashing red on the dashboard. It’s the same logic that kept Nixon’s allies loyal until the tapes dropped—only this time, the evidence has been public for years. They’re not misreading the polls; they’re refusing to read them at all, because to do so would mean admitting that cowardice, not calculation, is what’s guiding them.

Fear as Strategy (and as Addiction)

For years, the party has mistaken fear for discipline. It began as a tactic—a way to keep restless voters engaged and a fractured coalition obedient. Fear of immigrants, of moral decline, of cities, of “them.” It worked. Then it metastasized. The leadership that once wielded fear as a political tool now lives inside it.

The math no longer matters because fear isn’t data-driven; it’s Pavlovian. The constant polling, the performative outrage, the made-for-cable soundbites—everything is designed to feed a base that mistakes adrenaline for conviction. When those voters threaten rebellion, party leaders don’t confront them; they beg them to stay. Each capitulation trains the next one. Fear has become not just the message but the metabolism.

The irony is brutal. The party that once branded itself as the champion of “tough choices” and “personal responsibility” can’t even face its own voters. The supposed alpha-male movement has become a hostage negotiation conducted in public. They call it pragmatism. It’s really dependency.

And the more they indulge it, the smaller they get. A movement built on grievance requires constant enemies, so compromise—the oxygen of governance—feels like betrayal. Every dealmaker becomes a traitor; every moderate a threat. The result is paralysis disguised as purity. Fear isn’t keeping them in power. It’s keeping them from admitting they’ve already lost it.

The Shutdown and the Death of Accountability

The shutdown isn’t just a policy failure; it’s the perfect exhibit of what fear-driven politics produces. Nine hundred thousand federal workers furloughed, millions more working without pay, airports short-staffed, benefits delayed. Congress knows exactly how to end it—two phone calls, one vote—but paralysis has become the brand. Speaker Mike Johnson stands at the microphone, insisting Democrats “caused” the shutdown, even as every poll shows that nearly half the country blames Republicans. The lie isn’t meant to convince anyone; it’s meant to postpone responsibility.

In the Nixon era, when the evidence became undeniable, his party elders walked to the White House and told him it was over. That instinct—to protect the institution before the man—no longer exists. Today’s Republicans protect the man to avoid admitting the institution is already broken. Johnson could reopen the government tomorrow and be hailed for it, yet he won’t, because leadership now means managing blame rather than solving problems. To act would expose the truth that the chaos is elective.

Meanwhile, voters have stopped distinguishing between parties; they just see failure. The longer the shutdown drags on, the more every incumbent, red or blue, becomes part of the same farce. When government ceases to function, ideology doesn’t matter—only competence does. And competence, at this point, would look like courage. That’s the commodity Washington has run out of.

“The shutdown didn’t kill accountability; it revealed the corpse.”

The Cowardice is Bipartisan

Democrats aren’t blameless. Their version of fear is quieter but no less corrosive. It’s the fear of losing control of the narrative—the instinct to issue polished statements about “governing responsibly” while counting which phrase polls best in the suburbs. They watched the GOP dismantle norms for a decade and responded mostly with hand-wringing about “tone.” It’s a milder form of the same disease: the terror of losing the next news cycle outweighs the duty to act in this one. They still believe that managing perception is governing. It isn’t.

The disease is universal; only the symptoms differ. One side rages, the other rationalizes, and the country waits for someone to remember what courage looks like.

The Generational Cliff

Every data point says the same thing: the future has already left them. Voters under 30 break roughly 60-to-35 for Democrats. Even among self-identified independents, barely one in five call themselves conservative anymore. Gallup’s trendlines show fewer than 23 percent of Gen Z identify with the GOP at all. That’s not a slump; it’s an extinction event on a time delay.

The reasons aren’t mysterious. Young voters don’t see politics as a battlefield of identities; they see it as triage for a collapsing planet and economy. They want housing they can afford, wages that keep pace, a planet that doesn’t boil, and the freedom to be left alone about who they are. What they get from Republicans is a lecture about bathrooms, a ban list, and another sermon on “woke.” It’s not policy—it’s nostalgia cosplaying as courage.

Identity politics was supposed to protect the base, but it’s turned into an iron lung. The oxygen of new voters is running out. Each culture-war victory—another book banned, another performative outrage—buys them fifteen minutes of cable airtime and costs them a decade of relevance. A generation raised online has learned to spot manipulation in 4K. They know when fear is being sold as morality.

This is cowardice in its purest form: fear of irrelevance masquerading as conviction. They’re not fighting the left; they’re fighting time, and time is undefeated. The party that once sold itself as the future of free markets and moral clarity now looks like a retirement community yelling at the clouds. Unless something changes, their movement ends the way all reactionary movements do—not with defeat, but with silence.

“A party that won’t face tomorrow doesn’t lose it—it hands it away.”

What Cowardice Costs

Cowardice used to be a moment; now it’s a business model. It buys silence from donors, airtime from friendly networks, and a few more months of pretending power is the same thing as purpose. But the invoice is arriving in real time. Each act of avoidance—each shutdown, each conspiracy nod, each moral contortion to keep a base appeased—shaves away what’s left of credibility. You can’t govern a country you no longer respect, and you can’t respect a country you spend every day convincing is broken beyond repair.

The first cost is moral. When fear replaces judgment, integrity becomes a liability. The party of “character” has produced leaders who treat cowardice as craft, whose only consistent principle is survival. They’ve turned virtue into performance art, courage into a costume that fits only when the cameras are on.

The second cost is institutional. Every retreat from responsibility erodes the idea that the system can correct itself. The refusal to tell their own voters the truth—that tax cuts don’t pay for themselves, that culture wars don’t fix wages, that the country isn’t falling apart—has hollowed out the conservative project until nothing’s left but branding. A government that can’t pass a budget or manage its own tantrums isn’t conservative; it’s negligent.

And the final cost is existential. By refusing to evolve, they’re creating the vacuum that will replace them. Demographics aren’t destiny, but apathy is. When young voters see only paralysis, they tune out, and what’s left is a party shouting into an echo chamber of its own making. History doesn’t remember the timid kindly; it forgets them altogether.

“Cowardice doesn’t just lose elections—it empties meaning from power itself.”

After the Fear

At some point, the math, the polls, the donor spreadsheets, and the generational curves all stop mattering. What’s left is a question no algorithm can answer: do they have the nerve to face the country they built? Every era gets the reckoning it deserves, and this one’s has arrived wearing its own reflection.

The lesson of Watergate was simple—power survives confession; it dies from denial. Nixon’s fall hurt, but it proved the system could still tell the truth about itself. Half a century later, that instinct is gone. The reflex to protect the institution has been replaced by the reflex to protect the brand. There’s no virtue in a house that keeps rebuilding its walls around the same fire.

Everyone inside that chamber already knows the character file. They know the accusations, the Access Hollywood tape, the dozens of women who’ve gone on record, and the civil suits that were quietly settled. They know the names that surface whenever Epstein’s records are mentioned. So when members of Congress stand before cameras demanding that the files be released, it isn’t curiosity they’re selling—it’s theater. They’ve read enough to know what’s in them. Pretending otherwise is just one more insult to the public’s memory and intelligence. They aren’t protecting transparency; they’re inoculating themselves against accountability.

Cowardice has a half-life. Eventually, it decays into irrelevance. The voters already sense it—the exhaustion in every speech, the stale choreography of grievance. When a party spends long enough fearing its own base, it stops leading and starts hiding. The real loss isn’t political; it’s human. Fear shrinks people. It makes small men of loud ones.

They could still choose differently. They could still call the bluff, end the shutdown, reject the cult, and govern like adults. But history doesn’t wait for courage to find its footing. If they can’t locate it now, the electorate will do what it always does: move on without them.

“They’re not afraid of losing the country; they’re afraid of facing it. And soon, the country won’t wait for them to look up.”

Further Reading

If you like this series and are curious about books that have inspired me, I’ve curated a collection on Bookshop.org. Buying through that link supports independent bookstores—and it helps sustain this project.

Stay Connected

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• 📸 Follow along on Instagram: @caleb_writes

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I first read W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South at twenty, in an American South history course. I read it again the following year in a Civil War seminar, and once more in a 20th-century American history class. All three times, the same professor stood at the front: Ron Heinemann, a Yankee who had made Hampden-Sydney College his home for more than fifty years.

Heinemann was a force. He had strong politics, no question, but what mattered wasn’t where he stood. It was the way he taught. He used books like Cash’s — messy, flawed, unsettling — to force students to confront their assumptions. He didn’t hand out beliefs. He made you build your own, with evidence and reason. For a roomful of privileged Southern boys, that was destabilizing.

Cash wasn’t a historian, and he wasn’t a psychologist. He was a newspaperman with a sharp pen, writing in a fever. His book is flawed in countless ways — unsourced, sweeping, impressionistic. Cash himself was likely unaware of what was happening in the South’s major cities. Critics pounced on all of that, and yet they couldn’t dismiss his central claim: that the South was less a geography than a psychology, a cultural temperament defined by myth, honor, and romance stronger than fact.

Yet, importantly, the South is not a monolith. There have always been dissenters and skeptics who push against these dominant narratives. Cash himself exemplifies the complexity within the region he critiqued, illustrating that resistance to myth is as Southern as the myths themselves.

And strangely enough, the book endures. Nearly eighty years after its publication, it’s still in print, still assigned in college courses, still for sale on Amazon and stacked in campus bookstores. Messy as it is, Cash’s fevered diagnosis has outlived the times it was written to explain — and thanks to professors like Heinemann, it still gets pushed across desks to students who’d rather cling to myth.

Rhett Butler’s Math

Around the same time, I was reintroduced to Gone With the Wind. Not the romance — the movie played on cable often enough that I had already seen Scarlett in her green dress — but Rhett Butler.

Rhett was the skeptic, the one man in the story who refused to buy the illusion. When the fire-eaters were thundering about Southern honor, Rhett cut them down with a single line:

“I mean, gentlemen, there’s not a cannon factory in the whole South. What are you going to fight with? Gentlemen’s dueling pistols and bowie knives?”

It was the most brutal moment in the film. Not because of its cruelty, but because of its clarity. The South had cotton, slaves, and arrogance. The North had factories, fleets, railroads, and coal. The outcome was obvious to anyone who could do the math. Rhett did the math. The rest of the room preferred romance.

When I first read Cash and heard Rhett, I thought they were both describing a world long gone. The mind of the South, the one that believed myth was stronger than fact, belonged to the 1860s or, at the latest, 1941.

Now I’m not so sure.

The Eternal Pause

Faulkner understood it too. In Intruder in the Dust he wrote what may be the single most haunting sentence about the Southern imagination:

“For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863... and it’s all in the balance… it hasn’t happened yet…”

I first encountered that passage in Heinemann’s classroom. He used it often, pushing generations of Hampden-Sydney students to see how deeply the Lost Cause lodged itself in the Southern imagination. July 3, 1863: the last afternoon of Gettysburg, just before Pickett’s Charge. Confederate troops massed on the ridge, flags ready, about to march across an open field into slaughter.

Heinemann’s point, Faulkner’s point, was that the dream isn’t about victory. It’s about living forever in that suspended instant, when it still felt possible. In the fantasy, maybe if you had been there—carrying the flag, urging the line forward—the outcome might have been different. That’s the most dangerous myth of all: not triumph, but the permanent postponement of loss.

Cash gave us the diagnosis; Faulkner gave us the fantasy. Together they reveal a mind forever trapped in the “not yet lost.” What followed is history: the Confederates were mowed down by Union artillery and rifle fire, their ranks shredded, survivors forced into retreat. From that moment forward, the South fought a defensive war it could never win — one that dragged on, bloody and hopeless, for almost two more years.

The Illusion of Change

We like to tell ourselves that we’ve changed. That the Civil Rights movement ended the old order. That electing a Black president proved the South’s ghosts had been laid to rest. For a brief window — say from the mid-1960s to 2008 — it was possible to believe that Cash’s diagnosis had expired. At the time I was sitting in that classroom, Virginia had recently elected the nations’s first Black governor. Heinemann himself helped to lead the faculty’s ultimately unsuccessful charge to make Hampden-Sydney coed. At the same time I was choosing colleges, Nancy Mace (yes, that Nancy Mace) was making history as the woman who would go on to become the Citadel Military College of South Carolina’s first female graduate of the Corps of Cadets.

But if those were decisive breaks, they didn’t last long. The Voting Rights Act was gutted by the Supreme Court. Confederate nostalgia has grown louder, not quieter. Book bans, anti-intellectualism, suspicion of reform — all of them sound like echoes of the world Cash described in 1941. Nancy Mace had the opportunity to use her fame and platform to engage in work that would meaningfully change the lives of the people she would go on to represent. Instead she represents one of the most controversial gerrymandered congressional districts in history.

The election of Barack Obama now feels less like a turning point than a blip. A brief, hopeful moment before the old psychology reasserted itself. The backlash came swift and furious, proof that the “mind of the South” was never really dismantled, only driven underground for a generation.

The MTG Fantasy

That’s why the rhetoric of secession still finds an audience. Just this week, Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene openly called for a “national divorce,” in the wake of Charlie’ Kirk’s assassination, calling the country “too divided to continue as one.” The specifics of her appeal — honor, God, grievance, destiny — sound suspiciously like the fire-eaters of 1860.

What it ignores — now, as then — is math.

Rhett Butler could see that the South had no cannon factories. Today the equivalent is tax revenue. Red states rail against federal overreach, but they depend on it more than anyone. Federal data show that most red states are net recipients of federal spending. For every dollar they send to Washington, they get back about $1.31. Blue states — California, New York, Illinois — get back only 92 cents.

And yet the rhetoric continues. Just as in 1860, the poorest regions shout loudest about independence, blind to their own dependence.

Too Poor to Win, Too Proud to Quit

Cash would not have been surprised. He called it the South’s preference for myth over math. Faulkner showed the fantasy of the eternal pause. Rhett Butler put it plainer: too poor to win, too proud to quit.

What makes the comparison eerie is how little has changed in the underlying psychology. The specifics are different — cotton and slaves then, federal transfers now — but the logic is the same. The South convinces itself that honor, God, and pride will triumph over industry, infrastructure, and capital.

That “mind,” Cash argued, was more durable than any political order. And he was right. The Confederacy fell. Jim Crow fell. But the psychology persisted, ready to be repackaged for each new era.

The South Goes National

What Cash couldn’t have predicted is how thoroughly the rest of the country would absorb that psychology. The Vox article I read recently put it bluntly: American culture has been quietly Southernized.

Reality TV is Exhibit A: Duck Dynasty, Swamp People, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, Tiger King. Each one packages Southern caricature as entertainment, feeding a national appetite for spectacle and myth. SEC football isn’t just regional anymore — it’s a national brand, televised every Saturday as if it were a civic religion. Town and Country magazine just published a piece today about the popularity of southern universities.

Evangelical Christianity, too, began as a distinctly Southern phenomenon, deeply rooted in the revivals of the Second Great Awakening. With its emphasis on emotional conversion, Biblical literalism, and intertwining of faith and cultural identity, evangelicalism took hold in the South, gradually transforming from a regional force into a powerful national movement.

Leaders like Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson helped export Southern evangelicalism to the rest of America, embedding its conservative politics and cultural worldview into the fabric of national discourse.But it isn’t just spectacle.

National politics now runs on Southern fuel: suspicion of experts, disdain for reform, and the weaponization of grievance. Entire parties orient their platforms not around numbers or policy but around identity, honor, and imagined betrayal. The South’s psychology has become the country’s operating system.

A Personal Reckoning

When I was in college, reading Cash under Heinemann’s watchful eye, I thought I was learning about a region my grandparents had grown up in but that I had already outgrown. Now, living through the past decade, I realize Cash wasn’t just describing the South. He was describing an American tendency that the South incubated, exaggerated, and eventually exported.

I see it in politics. I see it in culture. I see it in the way whole states vote against their economic interests because the myth of honor or grievance feels more real than the numbers.

And I can’t help but think of Rhett Butler, standing in that room, pointing out the absence of cannon factories. He was ignored then. He would be ignored now.

Why It Still Matters

So why dwell on this? Why reread Cash, why quote Rhett Butler, why linger on Faulkner’s Southern boy dreaming of Gettysburg?

Because myth unchecked is dangerous. The Civil War proved that. The backlash to civil rights proved it again. The allure of secession talk today proves it once more. The “mind of the South” is not quaint nostalgia. It’s a reminder of what happens when pride and grievance are allowed to drown out reason.

We are still living with the same choice: myth or math, honor or honesty. Cash saw it. Rhett Butler said it out loud. Faulkner gave it poetry. Heinemann made sure I couldn’t look away.

Closing

I used to think The Mind of the South was a period piece, a snapshot of a region at a moment in time. Now I read it differently. It’s not just about the South. It’s about us. About America’s persistent temptation to believe we are chosen, destined, exempt from consequence.

The “mind” hasn’t vanished. It has metastasized. It lives in our politics, our entertainment, our distrust of institutions. And unless we’re willing to admit it, we’ll keep replaying the same old drama: too poor to win, too proud to quit.

Note on W.J. Cash

Cash died in 1941, the same year his book was published, and never saw its legacy. He was no academic, and his work was often dismissed by them. But what he lacked in rigor he made up for in force. The book remains on syllabi not because it is tidy, but because it isn’t — because it insists the South can only be understood as a psychology, not a chronology.

For generations of Hampden-Sydney students, that psychology came alive under Ron Heinemann. He kept assigning Cash, knowing we’d resist it, argue with it, even resent it — and that was the point. He wasn’t trying to make us think like him. He was trying to make us think. Nearly eighty years later, you can still buy Cash’s book on Amazon, still find it in college bookstores, still be handed it by a professor intent on breaking through the myths you carried into the classroom.

References & Links

• Intruder in the Dust — William Faulkner (Amazon) or (Bookshop.org)

• Intruder in the Dust (1941 film) (Amazon)

• The Mind of the South — W.J. Cash (Amazon)

• Gone with the Wind (1939 film) — Based on the novel by Margaret Mitchell (Amazon) or (Bookshop.org)

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Welcome — I’m Caleb Reed. I’m writing Line & Verse, a serialized novel set at a Southern liberal arts college in the late 1990s, where fraternity rituals, tailgates, and first love collide.

I also write essays on queer literature and memory — most recently on E.M. Forster’s Maurice, with Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story up next.

I’ve completed the QLP questionnaire with Queer LoveProject, If you’re curious, or want to know more about me, take a look:

The Queer Love Project

The QLP Questionnaire: Caleb Reed

Email us at queerloveprojectsub@gmail.com to take “The QLP Questionnaire…

Read more

9 months ago · 12 likes · Caleb Reed and Jerry Portwood

I’m working on my first submission now, so hopefully, you will see it here soon!

Thanks for reading and sharing — glad you’re here.

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Following helps spread the word — thanks for being part of this project.Line & Verse is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

When I started Line & Verse a few weeks ago, I thought it might just sit quietly in some forgotten corner of the internet. A private experiment. Maybe a handful of readers.

Instead, we’ve crossed two milestones: 100 subscribers and over 7,000 views on the story so far.

For a project this personal, that’s hard to wrap my head around. These chapters are fiction, but they’re stitched together with threads of memory — the places, the feelings, the confusion of coming of age in the late 1990s. To know that people are not only reading but connecting — commenting, restacking, even writing back with their own stories — makes this feel less like shouting into the void and more like community.

I’m grateful.

What’s Next

The story is only just beginning. First Line-up is live now, marking Ethan’s first real night as a pledge. This Friday, The Grind drops, pulling him deeper into the day-to-day reality of fraternity life: errands, humiliations, absurd rituals — and the quiet moments of connection that complicate it all.

Alongside the chapters, I’ve been writing reflections and essays. The Nifty piece surprised me with how many of you remembered that same secret archive. I’ll keep weaving those midweek essays in — nostalgia that connects directly to the world of Line & Verse, and maybe stirs some of your own memories too.

Beyond the Chapters

A few readers have asked about the images that accompany the story. They’re not stock photos — they’re AI generated, painterly illustrations created to evoke the 1990s collegiate world of Westmore. I uploaded the handful of snapshots I have from college just to get an idea of clothes, hairstyles, and the look of the campus and used them as the backdrop. I wanted them to feel like the vintage illustrations you might find in a pulp fiction novel, an old alumni magazine, or an illustrated story, but reimagined to capture Ethan and Eli’s story.

I’ve also started a “Reading & Watching” series — reflections on the books and films that shaped me and, in some ways, helped shape Line & Verse. Next up is E.M. Forster’s Maurice, which I think belongs on Caleb’s shelf. Though set almost 100 years apart, the world Maurice Hall inhabits is very similar to Ethan’s world.

Thank You

100 might not sound like much in the grand scheme of the internet, but it feels monumental to me. It means people are choosing to come back, week after week, to see what happens next.

So thank you. For showing up, for sharing, for making this story feel alive. Here’s to the next hundred.

👉 Share Line & Verse with a friend if you think they’d enjoy it.

— Caleb

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The Hidden Library

After I finished Chapter 5, I came downstairs, ready to share the memory with my partner. To my astonishment, he had never heard of the Nifty Erotic Stories Archive.

He’s only a few years younger than me, but by the time he was figuring himself out, the internet had already shifted. He came out in a world where broadband connections were becoming common—hookup sites, decent .jpegs, and, if you were patient, even video. Desire was visible early, sharp, and available.

For me, it was Nifty.

Nifty.org was clunky—gray background, Courier font, links stacked like an old phone directory. But behind those links was the first place I saw people like me, not as a punchline but as the center of a story.

The college/fraternity folder was my refuge. I’d sneak into the library, pretending to research, heart pounding as I scrolled nervously through page after page of text on a “green-screen” terminal. Sometimes I’d save my favorites onto a floppy disk—1.44 MB of contraband—and slip it into my backpack like it was radioactive. Back in my dorm, late at night, I’d open those files in secret, letting my imagination fill in the laughter, the touch, the heat of a room I couldn’t yet enter.

That was how I learned to want. Quietly. Secretly. In text.

The Power of Timing

The difference between my experience and his wasn’t just age—it was infrastructure.

By the late ’90s, campuses were racing to wire every dorm room. Mine still ran on AppleTalk, piggybacking on plain old telephone wire. It felt like magic: I could plug my Apple PowerBook into the phone jack and suddenly, I was “on the internet.”

Except it wasn’t the internet the way we know it now. Really, my little laptop was connecting to a session on the campus mainframe, which then grudgingly handed me off to the wider web. It was clunky, but at the time it felt like a superpower.

And because it wasn’t video yet—no YouTube, no streaming porn, barely even images—words were everything.

Nifty worked because you had to participate. Visualize the locker room, the hallway, the hesitated glance. You brought the texture. And because it looked like homework, no one blinked.

For me, it was more than smut. It was proof I wasn’t alone.

Still There

Nifty is still online, unchanged for thirty years. Same ugly layout, still updating with new stories. A dinosaur that outlived the comet—one of the last pieces of the old, lawless internet, stubbornly free and unpolished.

It seems quaint thinking back to those days, but at least in my state (and bordering states) laws designed to “protect children” now require proof of age to access adult websites—essentially a credit card, or worse, uploading your photo ID.

I don’t advocate children having access to pornography. But the real issue is how adult gets defined, and who gets to make that decision. For many of us, anything gay was considered adult at best, pornography at worst. Not having access to media that reflected who we were felt very isolating.

A New Archive

When I told my partner about it, he laughed. To him, it sounded like folklore: floppy disks and dial-up, a secret library tucked into the shadows of the web. But that’s exactly what it was.

And in a way, that’s what I’m doing now—writing Line & Verse on Substack, adding my own chapters to a new kind of archive. A serialized story, read week by week, carrying the same charge Nifty once held for me: recognition, desire, proof.

The technology changed. The fonts are prettier. But the impulse is the same.

Because stories like these don’t just entertain. They raise us.

For a certain slice of us—queer kids coming of age in the 90s and early 2000s—Nifty wasn’t just a website. It was a lifeline. A secret handshake.

If you were there, you know exactly what I mean.

And if you weren’t? Consider this your glimpse into how a whole generation of us learned to want—in floppy disks, dim dorm rooms, and lines of text that carried us long before the world was ready to.

If Nifty was your secret too—or if this is your first time hearing about it—I’d love for you to keep following along. New chapters of Line & Verse and the reflections they stir arrive weekly.

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To say that I have been overwhelmed by the response to these stories would be an understatement. I have always wanted to write, but couldn’t find the time or my voice. I sent the first chapter out expecting no one else to read it. I felt better for having written it, regardless of whether or not anyone else read it.

When I arrived at a small Southern liberal arts college (not unlike Westmore) in the mid-1990s, I stepped into a world with clearly drawn lines—what to wear, how to act, who to be. It was easy to blend in, so easy that the masks became comfortable. Fraternity life promised belonging, something that I desperately craved, so I followed along. I laughed at jokes that weren’t funny, stood silently through rituals I didn’t quite believe in, and carefully hid away feelings I didn’t fully understand.

I did everything expected of me. I took the path of least resistance, chasing approval and connection, believing that safety and acceptance were enough. My life unfolded along lines drawn by someone else’s hand—friendships built on partial truths, romances that felt safe, a carefully constructed identity designed not to stand out too much, not to cause questions, never to invite scrutiny.

And then in 2020, in the midst of COVID, I lost someone I cared deeply about, and everything changed.

Losing him clarified things I’d spent decades obscuring. It was a sharp, painful reminder that life is brief, fragile, and uncompromising. He had been brave in ways I never was, authentic in ways I hadn’t dared imagine. I owed it to him—and to myself—to stop hiding.

Coming out wasn’t just about sexuality; it was about reclaiming my story. For the first time, I was honest about who I was and what mattered to me. It was terrifying. It was liberating. It felt like stepping out from behind a curtain after a lifetime in shadow, blinking at how bright the world could be when you finally stood in your own truth.

I started writing Line & Verse not because I wanted to relive those years, but because I needed to rewrite them. The story is fiction, but the feelings are real—the anxiety of acceptance, the raw ache of unspoken desire, the pull of something deeper that feels impossible to name.

I write this story for the nineteen-year-old version of me who didn’t have the language or courage to ask the questions he needed to. I write it for anyone who has ever felt trapped by expectations, anyone who has ever believed that love had to be hidden, anyone still wondering if it’s safe to step into their own truth.

Mostly, I write this story in memory of a friend who reminded me—painfully, beautifully—that happiness isn’t something we earn or apologize for; it’s something we deserve simply because we’re alive.

Line & Verse is my way of saying all the things I wish I’d known then, to anyone who might need to hear them now.

I hope you enjoy it.

If you’ve been reading Line & Verse consider to subscribing to my sister Substack - Caleb’s Reading List, think of this as its nonfiction sibling. This project imagines what it felt like to be closeted in the 90s; that one looks back at the bookshelf that wasn’t available to me then, and what it means to read it now.

👉 Subscribe to Caleb’s Reading List to follow along as I build the queer syllabus I never got — one book at a time.

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