Flash forward back to 1954. Imagine you’re Hawk, and the man you love more than your own father is saying that a integral part of yourself disgusts him to his core, churns his stomach and for the first time in your life, you feel shame for what you are. Shame your own hateful father couldn’t make you feel, shame a polygraph from your employer couldn’t make you feel. You hide your true self out of safety, not out of homophobia, and you feel safe with those your trust. Your friends, the man that you love and your surrogate family, even if they cannot know the real you, you know that their life for your is unconditional, the way it never was with the one you were born into. But, it isn’t, really. Of course, it isn’t. You see the shame on the Senator’s face and hear him talk about how his son’s actions have ruined him and his family and you promise to fix it, because that is your job. So, you visit a facility that claims to cure homosexuality and you don’t know anything about it, besides whatever vague nonsense you have been told. You play dumb when they explain, you try to hide the panic in your voice when they talk about electroshock therapy and call it ‘a small price to pay’ and you understand you are abandoning your childhood companion/rival there to protect his family and to your surprise, he very unresistant. By that point, Sen Smith, the man who said you would never wear out your welcome is suddenly full of regret about taking you in and the damage that caused his own son and you realize you no longer hold the light and hope and pride for that man, that you once did. And so Hawk stands there, looking at Sen Smith retreat back into his house, like a puppy being returned to the pound and so, Hawk does the only thing he can do. The only thing he has ever done. Sacrifice himself to safeguard Senator Smith and his family. He looks at Leonard’s fate and realizes that the life he was making with Tim, however beautiful and happy it made him, was a fantasy and could never last and by this point, Hawk thinks Tim hates him, anyway, so he makes the choice. Plans to marry Lucy, do what Sen Smith has always wanted him to do, protecting their family image in the process and then Tim comes back, but Hawk can’t take him back, can’t even let Tim touch him, one last time, because he knows that if he does, he will never be able to let go of him. So, he breaks Tim’s heart and his own in the process and proposes, giving Lucy a respectable marriage and promising fi care for her and her family for the rest of his life. And then the Senator kills himself, to protect his family from shame, to take away any leverage anyone could hold over him from Leonard’s arrest and Hawk is heartbroken, but he can’t go back. He has pledged to marry the man’s daughter and protect her as her father would have wanted. Then he gets a letter of condolence from the man he loves and goes back to him, one final time, not wanting the last time they see each other to be a memory of pain. And now, his boy plans to enlist, and Hawk says something so strange; “The Army owns your body, now, I can’t steal you from them. Or, can I?” and it’s almost like a plea. A last-ditch effort to say; ‘run away with me’ without actually saying it. Stay with me, please. But, it’s just another fantasy and he has to go and Hawk knows they have to get over each other because they have no real future together, but he allows himself to be held, one last time by the man he loves before giving himself over to honour and duty and he tries. He does what Lucy wants, gives her a baby, becomes the model husband and father that Wesley wanted him to be and lives his life the way he believes would have made him proud, safeguarding his family, ensuring they are all happy and well-provided for, all the while Hawk smothering himself from the inside out.
romaincrisis
gamechangershow
origamiaround
yousharknotpass
ellievsbear
