Image credits: Private Kyle Lawson,
a discharged gay soldier, and a victim of U.S. Military homophobia.

Image credits: Oliver's Army, Chap. 10

The boys in the glass case at the library are hot
The girls know it
The boys like me know it
The kids know it
Even the old men and women know it
Though for them it's the heat of stove and radiator
A comfort
For them, the boys in the glass case are money in the bank
 
For the children, the boys in the glass case, in their uniforms,
  are superheroes
Their stern willful eyes intent to do what's right
To the girls, these bulletproof glass boys are a man to guard the house
A man worthy to woo their maidenhead
But to boys like me, these fragile glass boys are raw and packed
  as tightly as explosives
No safer in my army than the enemy's
They are a conundrum
Shards that cut and shimmer in the light
A weapon
And I want their war, like we all want their war
But not a killing war, an offensive or a defensive war,
  not a war aimed outward at all
I alone, and those like me, care about who they encounter
I alone, the invert
desire their enemy as much as I desire them
desire not their return with a belt of scalps
But the grin of a contest won
A competition resolved, bloodless, but the ground wet all the same
With sweat and semen, saliva
The boys in the glass case are an aquarium of beautiful, poison fish
 
The boys in the glass case at the library are hot as electric eels
It's only the boys their age won't say so
To themselves or others
The boys their age are either less stupid, less driven,
  less egotistical, less fucked-up
Or less patriotic (which doesn't mean what people think)
Patriotism is as blind as Pilate's justice
And Jesus did it for us
Real men who love Jesus don't have to die,
  the other boys tell themselves
The boys in the glass case challenge them all the same
Threaten them with a blunt weapon of manhood
Far clearer than the convoluted abstract power of these other boys'
  blades of knowledge and money
Jesus, sure, but for a boy to be a man he has to do it himself,
  the boys in the case answer
 
The boys in the glass case at the library are hot
And sometimes they change
Like weather
Some are removed
Others spawn displays of dozens more photos
A storm of reminisce
These are the dead, preserved in amber
Those whose photos disappear
have served and returned home
To be forgotten with their scars
The dead are the real stars here
At the library, in the glass case
On display
Their sacrifice dressed up in celebrity and religion
To drown out their last whimper
Their doubt
Even their courage
Which every dying man knows is a humble thing
He would not want to see enshrined
 
The boys in the glass case at the library are hot
And I didn't want to think so at first
Hector, John, Scott, Jared, Victor, Eduardo, Alonzo, Enrique, Tyrone
Their faces transfix me
Like Edward Curtis Indians
Warriors
What then is this glory in war?
I thought war might end in my lifetime
A land of milk and honey, the Middle East
A prosperous Africa too
Religion fading, freeing the Irish, the subcontinent, Sri Lanka, Israel,
The homosexuals of Mississippi and Brazil
That we could outgrow violence
I know now we never will
I learned it at the library
So long as sperm churns
There will be aim and there will be invasion
Surrender, gunplay, mayhem, the earth soaked with
Human fluids
They'll keep making up reasons
But it's just the way of men
 
And the boys in the glass case at the library are hot
As fire
It is their lot
And we are cool and unburned
We do not know them
We flirt with their warmth
The child who can get them to smile and pat their head
The old folks who receive their bow, their submission to the common myth
 (A little payback makes them feel warm as brandy)
For the women, the boys encased
Are a promise of mammalian bliss, enveloping them from behind
For the other young men, their unscorched rivals:
Bad luck, sucker, bummer, glad it's not me;
One less threat on the street, in a bar, on a field where they
  bang their fragile manhood against one another
To shatter
For all these others, the boys in the glass case are but warriors
  tempered and tamed
 
But for boys like me
We alone dream the dream of fuel
To be burned clean into Buddhist nothingness
By the boys in the glass case
By the fire of their tongues, their lips, their bristled, scruffed
  chins crackling; the rough fabric of their buzz cuts burning;
  their time-bomb-ticking flacid cocks -- the hot iron
  of their erections
The molten release -- saliva, sweat, semen
The burning of their penetration
The shock and the awe
 
We long for them to melt the glass and spend all their war in us