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epilogue why this story now? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The news of both deaths arrived via voicemail. The first message was left on May 20, 2004. My partner and I had just returned home from running errands when I noticed that there was a message waiting. ‘‘Rob,’’ one of the narrators in this book, had called to ask if I had heard from Curt, a mutual friend of ours, a former student of mine from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a future Ph.D. student in the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University , where I teach. I had indeed spoken with Curt just a week before. He was making plans for his move to Chicago from Durham, North Carolina, and wanted to know if he could stay with me on one of his apartment-hunting trips over the summer. But the message was odd. Why would Rob, who spoke with Curt almost daily, contact me in Chicago to ascertain if I had spoken to him? The message was cryptic and did not sit well with me. I immediately returned the call to inquire further. Curt was missing, and a body had been found in his apartment but had not yet been identified. Through the myriad of questions I began to ask—When was the last time someone saw him? Has he been to work? Have you called one of his brothers? Wasn’t he hosting an event at Duke this week?—the horror of the unspoken began to settle on the two friends on the phone—the one asking questions and the one with no answers. Two days passed before the official word came: the body found in the apartment was indeed Curt’s. Among the various rumors and hearsay was the story that he was found naked, bound and gagged, in the hallway outside his bedroom, and that he had been stabbed over twenty-two times—three of the stab wounds proving to be fatal. The suspect, an ‘‘acquaintance ’’ according to the newspapers,∞ stole a van that Curt had rented to transport items to an event at Duke University, where he worked as a minority graduate student recruiter. The authorities found the van not too far from town and eventually arrested the assailant after a co-worker tipped the police off 546 : epilogue that he had been holding several electronic items in his locker and was selling them at a local pawn shop. None of us wanted to believe that Curt had lost his life over a television set and a dvd player. What we all thought, but never voiced, was that it was a trick gone bad. That’s the only thing that could ever explain the how of it. The why was still lodged somewhere between our willful denial and silent tears, Curt’s final moments (Was he afraid? Did he feel any pain? How long was he alive?), and the closed-mouthed convicted murderer’s indignation. The second voicemail came almost two years later on March 16, 2006. This time, however, the voice on the other end was female, the daughter of a former colleague and friend. Her mother had told her to get in touch with me to share the news that Dean, a student at Southern Methodist University and one of the narrators in this book, had been brutally murdered in his Dallas apartment. The daughter was sorry to break the news to me in a voicemail message, but she thought I should know. The similarities of the murders were uncanny. Like Curt, Dean had been found bound and gagged, and there was no sign of forced entry. Instead of being stabbed, however, Dean was shot in the back of the head. Like Curt’s murderer, the assailant was thought to be an ‘‘acquaintance’’ of the victim, and it’s believed that he actually called 911 to report that the murder had taken place. Was this a moment of compassion? Regret? I imagined Dean’s body lying face down near the place where I had sat in his tiny, one-bedroom apartment in January 2005 to record his story, a story filled with ambivalence about his sexuality, which manifested in various networks of ‘‘virtual’’ meetings , encounters, and, yes, danger. As a flood of emotions consumed my by now immobile body, Curt’s face ghosted my reflection in the television on my kitchen counter. Then, an inaudible wail surfaced just beneath my slightly parted lips. Not again, I thought. Not again...

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