The social order of tiny Stoney Falls, Colorado, is in upheaval this holiday season. To celebrate the arrival of a new lesbian pastor and the forced resignation of the conservative minister, high school English teacher Quinn and his fellow instructor (and lover) Josh are hosting a gala Christmas eve dinner.
Quinn’s mother is convinced the “boys” need her help to make the meal memorable. So, she’s compiling a guest list to celebrate brighter days ahead.
While Quinn’s mom plots to make her son’s and everyone else’s life better, so does the new minister who also has big plans for Quinn and Josh. As if that’s not enough, even Josh himself has ideas about what he and Quinn should be doing in the future.
Will all these plans add up to happiness or heartache for the hapless Quinn?
In the immortal words of Professor Harold Hill, we’ve got trouble with a capital T right here in River City. Okay, not River City, but in Stoney Falls, an equally small town in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. And our trouble has nothing to do with pool.
Instead of a pool-playing, band instrument-selling, fast-talking flim-flam man, our trouble stemmed from the stream of gay software and app developers moving into the area and, as some of the old-timers put it, taking over. As the Town Fathers saw it, a radical new element of liberals moving into town during the past year had been changing our peaceful, historic, God-fearing, family-values community into a hotbed of trouble and discord.
READ MOREFirst the newcomers rallied to vote and elected a gay sheriff to the county, and then this same group of radicals shunned any established local business whose owners made homophobic jokes or slurs, even if they were made in good fun. It had gotten so bad that merely making a few anti-gay remarks in public got businesses black-balled by the new money crowd.
Their latest crime came in ousting the hellfire and damnation regime of the First United Church pastor in favor of a lesbian.
My boyfriend Josh and I couldn’t have been more ecstatic to see the changes taking place. While some of the other changes impacted on our lives, when Reverend Cynthia Nighthorse, not only a woman but a Native American, was voted in, we didn’t think we’d be affected much. We’re both teachers at Stoney Falls High School, not church goers.
We didn’t count on my mother and her fondness for sticking her nose in our business. Mother loved both me and Josh. There was no question about that even though what she really wanted was for us to get married, not just buy a house together.
But when we took the jobs—me as English instructor and drama coach, him as math teacher and football coach—we hadn’t been prepared to come out as boyfriends. We liked the community and our jobs and didn’t want to push the envelope far enough to lose them. We’d both grown up in the town and wanted to stay put. With the purchase of the house, we had even more incentive not to rock the boat.
As we got closer to Christmas, I longed to talk to him about our relationship and find out what he was thinking. With finals on us as well as the winter play and the football championships, however, we had little time to see each other coming and going. Tonight we’d be hosting a special dinner. Then maybe after that we’d be able to take a breath, sit down, and decide who we are and where we want to go from here.
My mother loved our family’s Christmas Eve tradition of inviting those who would be spending the evening alone to eat dinner with us. The new reverend would be our guest this year.
COLLAPSEThis short story was written for the WROTE podcast on December 2015.