Zach glances up. I set my jaw, waiting.
“Of course, this is a conversation that affects the whole band, so nothing will be settled on before we run it past Jon and Angel.”
Zach nods. “We get that.”
I blink. “Um, no, we don’t ‘get that.’ We’ll take them into account, but we don’t need their permission to say we’re queer.”
Zach considers this. “True. Fair point. But, I’m sure they wouldn’t have a problem with us doing it?”
“That’s not the point.”
“This sounds like a conversation the two of you might want to have in private,” Geoff suggests. God, anything to shut this talk down before he has to commit to anything.
“It’s a business conversation,” I say briskly. “There’s no need for privacy.”
Geoff, David, and I stare each other down. Zach’s looking at the screen, but the crease between his brows tells me he’s not a participant in the face-off, but an observer.
David shrugs first. “Okay. Well, on my end, the first obvious thing to consider is the promotion of The Town Red. We’re still snowed under managing the media’s coverage of Angel, here. We’re on top of it, but the last thing we need is another scandal.”
“Well, ‘scandal’ is the wrong word,” Geoff jumps in quickly.
“Right, of course. Sorry, haven’t had my second cup of coffee yet.” David laughs. No one else does. “We just need the narrative to be more focused on how Saturday is returning to business as usual. Not another significant change. People need time to adjust after a hiccup like Budapest. The best time for an announcement like this will be when things are steady and predictable, and Saturday’s regained its image.”
“But this could be good for the band’s image, right?” Zach asks uncertainly. “If we spin it, it could pull attention away from Angel’s accident and make the narrative about, like … love?”
I want to smack David’s patronizing smile—directed at Zach—right off his face. “As I said, not in a period of instability like this. There’s a ton of ways the media could spin a revelation like this, and if it suits them to tie the announcement in with Berlin and Budapest to theorize that Saturday is a bad influence on its vulnerable audience…”
“Why, because we’ll turn them all into gay drug addicts?” I snap.
“You know as well as I do how some groups will take this news, Ruben, don’t be obtuse. Just because the official narrative for Angel is exhaustion doesn’t mean journalists won’t revisit the substance abuse theories from a few weeks ago to boost their story. We need you to be realistic, here. Maybe a little less selfish?”
“He’s not being selfish,” Zach jumps in, uncharacteristically firm. “This is important to us.”
“We understand. How about we pencil in a group discussion about this, say … January?”
I think my heart stops. “January of next year?”
“Well, I don’t mean January five months ago.” David laughs again.
“But it won’t take seven months for the Angel story to become old news.”
“Yes, but we’re about to go into album promotion for The Town Red. We have a real shot at breaking some massive records with this one, guys. I don’t want you to get too preemptively excited, but we think this one will be career-changing. But for that to happen, we need all of our current audience, and then some. Your younger fans might be largely progressive, but it’s mommy and daddy who control the purse strings. When this happens, you will alienate a portion of your would-be sales, and an even bigger portion of their parents. We lose support in the red states, and we lose a lot. You do this now and who knows what’ll happen. The band might not recover.”
Zach’s nodding, and I feel a flicker of frustration toward him. “That makes sense,” he says. “So, January, then?”
“Yes! We can revisit in January,” David says.
“In January,” I say, “there will be another reason we can’t come out.”
“We can’t predict the future.”
“No? I can. Either the band collapses and you won’t have any opinion on what we do, or the band does well. And if the band does well, there will always be something. Another international tour. Another record. Another upcoming award voted on by homophobes.”
Geoff rolls his eyes. “Don’t you think you’re being dramatic here, Ruben?”