Sam’s realization that something had shifted started to dawn during a phone call one Friday night in early spring. Sarah had been telling a story about how one of Ruby’s friends had gone viral for writing Drarry stories.
“Drarry?” Sam repeated.
“Ah, you and Connor haven’t dipped your toes into the wonderful world of Harry Potter yet, I presume?” Sarah asked.
Sam admitted that they hadn’t, and Sarah explained that the hero and one of the villains in the story were named Harry and Draco, and that people—young women, mostly—wrote stories where the two of them were actually in love. “So Drarry is their ship name.”
“Ship name?” Sam was lost.
“Ship like relationship,” said Sarah. “Draco plus Harry is Drarry. Hang in there,” she’d said cheerfully. “I’m sure by the time Connor’s a teenager there’s going to be completely new slang to figure out.”
Later that night, moved by a whim he didn’t consider too deeply, Sam typed “Drarry” into his browser and went tumbling down a rabbit hole of smut. There were thousands of stories; maybe tens of thousands. Some of the stories were silly, or poorly written, or anatomically improbable, even if the lovers were both wizards （which, of course, meant they contained any number of terrible “magic wand” puns）， but some were well-written and funny and sexy. Sam poked around the website, impressed and a little shocked by the multitude and creativity of pairings, and the worlds from which they came. Harry Potter was just the beginning （Sam would have called it the tip of the iceberg if the phrase “just the tip” hadn’t already started to sound perverted）。 If you wanted to read about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson getting it on, you could. If you wanted a fifty-thousand-word novella about Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock making sweet, same-sex love in a villa in New Orleans, it was there. Sam worked his way deeper and deeper into the archives, until he looked up from a story about Frodo and Sam sixty-nining beside the Cracks of Doom and realized two things, both of them shocking. The first was that it was two o’clock in the morning. The second was that he had an erection.
Tentatively, Sam palmed his crotch, rocking his hips forward, pressing into the warmth of his hand, thinking, What on earth? His sex drive had dwindled to practically nil in the months since Julie’s death, a phenomenon Sam ascribed to a combination of grief, antidepressants, and parenting a little boy who’d frequently start the night in his own bed and finish it in Sam’s. Maybe it wasn’t weird that he’d find himself turned on by any kind of X-rated fiction, whether it involved men and women, or men and men, or a pair of male teenage wizards.
Or maybe, suggested a voice in his head, this is what’s been missing, all those years. This is the thing you never knew about yourself, the blank space you could never fill in. This is what will make the rest of your life make sense.
Sam closed his computer. He changed into his pajamas, brushed his teeth, and lay in bed, staring up into the darkness, wondering. Was he gay? Was he bi? Was he—oh, God—into hobbits? A hobbitsexual? Was that a thing? And if he was gay, how could he have missed it? Unless he was the stupidest person in the world. Which, at almost three in the morning, seemed like a real possibility.
He wasn’t worried about being judged or shunned. His parents were admirably open-minded; his best friend wouldn’t care. His sister would just be happy for him… and certainly few people in Los Angeles would be shocked by a gay man, even one as late-blooming as Sam.
I’ll keep an open mind, he decided. That week, he found himself noticing men in a way he hadn’t before. The swell of a mailman’s calf as he pushed his cart down the sidewalk; the solid span of a neighbor’s chest beneath his golf shirt while he watered his lawn; that one of the other dads in the park had very nice eyes. A month after the night of the hobbits, Sam downloaded the app that every gay man in America seemed to use. He set up an account, first hesitating over a screen name （he settled on SamIAm37）， then agonizing over how to identify himself. Gay? Bi? Questioning? Thirty-eight years old and just realizing that maybe I’m into dudes because I read some Harry Potter fan fic? What was the shorthand for that?
He finally clicked questioning, then moved on to his next hurdle: the profile picture. Plenty of men used their faces. Others displayed body parts, abs or chests or asses. And when you started perusing the profiles themselves—oh, yep, there they were. The dick pics. After lengthy consideration and a few experimental selfies, Sam posted a full-body shot of himself on a hike with Connor （he made sure viewers wouldn’t be able to see Connor, and that they would be able to see all of his body, in the interest of not misleading anyone, or sending anyone home disappointed）。