Be faithful to that which exists within yourself. - André Gide

I.

What few knew about Emmett Honeycutt was the darkness he fought.

They knew his light, shining in a brilliant prism of color, bright as the tangerine pleather that hugged his long legs. They knew his gap-toothed smile and his quick bon mots. They knew his penchant for frothy drinks in pastel pink and his praise-Jesus sensuality. They knew his verve and his zeal for the latest chin-waggery and back-fence prattle.

And they dismissed his whole as the sum of those assorted parts.

But few knew who Emmett Honeycutt really was in the dimmed light of his cluttered apartment, milling alone among his copper-clad cookware, wrapped in an ancient afghan crocheted by the aunt most considered little more than a euphemistic vehicle for a morality tale.

And he preferred it that way.

Aunt Lulah had told him once a long time ago, as she yet again patched together the edges of a vermilion line broken through the impact of a judgmental fist, that the only truth worth living was one's own. That the only person one could be was the one they were. "The man you show the world can be anything, but the man you are inside is who the Good Lord made you." She kissed his broken lip, patted down the cowlick on his mussed head and pulled the crocheted afghan around his shoulders. "And he expects you to honor his creation."

Two weeks later Emmett Honeycutt boarded a Greyhound bus with two suitcases stowed underneath and a pork tenderloin sandwich tucked in his right pocket for his lunch. Aunt Lulah had carefully wrapped it in the waxed paper she kept on a shelf above her porcelain sink, ends creased and carefully folded to keep it fresh. In his left pocket, she had tucked a fifty dollar bill and a picture of the two of them taken at the last church homecoming supper. And a tube of her Golden Poppy lipstick.

Aunt Lulah was one of the few who knew who Emmett Honeycutt really was.

Pennsylvania was a far cry from Mississippi but when Emmett Honeycutt stepped onto the tarmac of the bus station in Pittsburgh he was just as broke and more alone than he'd been two days earlier. But he felt in his pocket for the picture and the $42.37 that was all the money he had in the world, and waited as the driver lowered the cargo door and unloaded the mismatched suitcases.

Nearly a decade later he still had those suitcases stored at the bottom of his small closet, buried beneath a box of feathers and wool felt. The picture sat on his bedside table and every night he held it and talked out his day to the first person who had ever really loved him, running his fingers over the fifty dollar bill taped to the underside of the dollar store frame. He never got to see his Aunt Lulah again, but they knew they loved each other and he'd promised himself to mention her at least once every day just so he'd remember that.

~~

"You need to turn up that pilot light, Sugar. The darkness in you is making it too hard to see your beautiful smile."

Those were the first words Godiva said to Emmett when she saw him hauling another load of clothes to the back of the small Chinese laundry where he'd found a part time job, and he thought the voice sounded like raw honey running down the side of a plump strawberry.

She was beautiful with her long, soft curls and dark chocolate skin and the most voluptuously painted lips Emmett had ever seen. He touched the tube of Golden Poppy in his pocket and watched the late afternoon sun glimmer off the crystal beads on her tight, strapless dress. He smiled his gap-toothed smile and his darkness lifted slightly.

"There ya go, Sugar" she said deeply, with a wink.

It was a week later when Emmett moved his few belongings from the homeless hospice to Godiva's small apartment. She taught him everything she knew about integrity and honesty and dressing in drag. About the important difference between cyan and turquoise, between salamander and tangerine, between being a man and needing to look like one. She reminded him of his inner light when his darkness became too heavy. She taught him about dignity in life.

And in death.

Godiva was one of the few who knew who Emmett Honeycutt really was.

All these years later he still took out that beaded dress and those long, soft curls and the mango pumps and lay them out on his faux-zebra duvet once in a while just to remember. He still tried on the pumps and still found them much too small yet much too large to ever fill. He could never see her again or hear her raw honey voice or kiss her voluptuously painted lips, but he promised himself to let his inner light shine every day to honor her.

And himself.

II.

"And don't call me Honeycutt," he called over his shoulder as the offender hit him in the side of the head with the balled up napkin he'd just used to wipe up a coffee ring left from the diner before him.

Emmett had come to this place in life, in this diner and bosomed in the arms of the dysfunctional family with which it came endowed, by happenstance as he danced alone at Babylon. Losing himself in the pulse of the men and music and memories, his eyes closed and arm raised in homage to his Godiva, he let his body move languidly with the beat. He could almost hear her voice - You shine, Sugar - as he gyrated his lean hips.

"You praising Jesus there, boy?"

The harsh snicker and the tight hand around his arm that accompanied the comment brought back other, darker memories for Emmett and he closed his eyes a moment to ward them off.

"He's just thanking god he's not with your sorry ass. Now, fuck off." The voice was a butter-soft tenor with snake fangs on the edge.

When Emmett opened his eyes the tight hand was gone and he looked into the brightest mix of gold and brown and green he'd ever seen. Godiva would sort those colors and properly name each one, he thought. Aztec, cordoba and kelly, perhaps. The man smirked off Emmett's thanks and kept dancing.

By the end of the night he'd met Michael and Theodore, and somehow had become part of a slightly feral pack of friends.

The unsettling dynamics of this new 'family' were oddly comforting to Emmett, in a post-apocalyptic kind of way, as he learned to maneuver through the minefield of diverse personalities. Debbie, the mother-confessor-of-all-lost-gay-boys-everywhere, adopted him as one of her own and poured out overly-effusive emotion on him in a deluge the likes of which hadn't been seen since Noah built an ark. Theodore, in his anguished, self-deprecating way drew Emmett into a close and reciprocal friendship that let them both feel superior and equal at the same time. Michael became Emmett's roommate and friend, although there was always some emotional distance between them. An emotional distance that Michael filled with his own issues.

All in all, they were a motley group - the self-effacing Eyore, the doe-eyed innocent Kinney shadow, the kaleidoscope clad faux-buffoon - struggling through their own lonely lives in search of 'the one'.

And then there was Brian Kinney. The aztec, cordoba and kelly eyed linchpin around which the motley group rotated, satellites ebbing and flowing in the magnetic thrall of a moon god. He was succinct, secretive, undeniably beautiful, uncannily astute. He was over-the-top in his promiscuity, sarcastically arrogant in his success, and as convinced of his singularity as they come.

They'd never become friends, not in the way Emmett had become friends with Theodore, or even Michael. They thrust and parried in some arcane game of cat and mouse, of poking the beast. A psychological slap and tickle which sometimes became the highlight of Emmett's day. He could never figure Brian Kinney out, which led Emmett to watch him more closely in the trying. But the layers, all beautiful and prickly and spurious, deflected whatever attempts anyone made, like bullets pinging off the chest of a superhero.

And then came azure and alabaster and honeyed-wheat doggedness into the mix and Emmett watched the heavens shift. Watched as Brian's layers cracked and threaten to fall. Watched as the moon god danced around in the Sunshine then pulled down the blackout shades when the light got too bright, too close, only to pull them up again when the darkness became too bleak. Watched as the superhero became a little less impervious to the bullets pinging off his chest.

Now, as Emmett Honeycutt paced in the dimmed light of his cluttered apartment, milling alone among his copper-clad cookware, wrapped in an ancient afghan crocheted by the aunt most considered little more than a euphemistic vehicle for a morality tale, he thought of a broken moon god and of the Sunshine laying faded in a hospital bed. As he talked out his day to the picture in the dollar store frame and brushed his hand across the crystals on a beautiful strapless dress, he wondered what talismans Brian Kinney would hold next to his heart for comfort. What memories he would lay out on his duvet to dispel the darkness of this night.

Over time Emmett often heard the voice of his Aunt Lulah - The man you show the world can be anything, but the man you are inside is who the Good Lord made you. And he expects you to honor his creation. - when he thought about himself. Or Brian Kinney.

Emmett Honeycutt was one of the few who knew who Brian Kinney really was.