Three months in, I caught myself saying “partner” on a work call with a client I had known for over a year. He had said “my wife” earlier in the conversation. I had said “husband” to him many times before. This time I said “partner.” I noticed it only after I hung up.
The client made nothing of it. No one had asked. There was no incident I could point to. At some point, without deciding to, I had started making myself smaller.
I started asking other gay men whether they had noticed anything similar. The answers came back faster than I expected.
One stopped wearing a particular ring at work. Another moved a framed photo off his desk before meeting with a US-based team on Zoom. Someone said that for the past six months he’d been removing apps from his phone before international travel. A man in his fifties told me he had begun checking the news the way he used to check his bank balance in his twenties. Compulsively. Looking for bad numbers he was already expecting.
A few of them said this w…