Edwin falls asleep only after midnight. When he came home from the walk, he made dinner while his head buzzed on with everything that was said, everything he learned, Vincent and his plans. He watched several hours of TV to drown out the thoughts, but they came back with a vengeance once he went to bed. He doesn't know what to think, about anything. Vincent promised a challenge, but he wouldn't say what it was.

"It's not a real challenge if you can prepare yourself," he'd laughed. "It's going to be a real test of what you've learned."

Edwin doesn't think Vincent would humiliate him, but there's already a sense of embarrassment, of anxiousness, crawling up his body. It feels like Vincent is daring him to make a mistake, to prove Vincent right. He doesn't want Vincent to be right. He wants to be better, to not be an outsider, to be in on Vincent's mischievous, infuriating smile.

But when he's surrounded by Vincent's friends, he feels ignorant. He knows so little about the history of gay people. All these places, and shared memories, and banding together for safety and their rights, ...

He didn't know the Aids crisis was so bad for the gay community. Something opens up inside him and a sort of pain or sorrow diffuses through his chest that he doesn't know how to interpret. He feels so alone in his not-knowing. Was he so blind for suffering? Was it like that for everyone or just for Vincent's friends?

When he thinks of the eighties and nineties, he doesn't think about Aids. They talked about Aids in his med classes, sure, in gossip among friends and fearmongering on TV, but nobody knew much about the gay cancer. It seemed so far removed from reality, so minor, among everything else that was happening. When he thinks about that period, the rise of the far right contrasts with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the birth of his daughters with the wars in Yugoslavia. So much good and bad, but not half of his friends dying. It must have felt —

He can't imagine. He should have known. Empathised, even if he was safe in his heterosexual marriage. It wouldn't have made a difference, but it seems disrespectful, to not remember these people who died in such large numbers.

The not-knowing burns in him.

He needs to know.

***

After the basketball match, the usual group goes to the bar. Everyone's in a good mood. Edwin sits between Leo and Arthur, and other than Patrick, Robert and Willem, there's two older guys named Guido and Marc. Both of them sport a full beard, but Guido wears only leather, while Marc dresses more ... normal. He definitely has the bigger personality, though, chattering about a seemingly endless supply of mundane topics and jumping between unrelated ideas.

Edwin wishes he didn't sit between the two youngest men of the group, but he was trailing the team while they headed here, his head full, and by the time he went in, this was the only seat left at the table.

They chatter about the match, their week, and during a lull in the conversation, Edwin says: "I did an LGBT history walk on Sunday."

It stays silent for a second, and then Marc says: "A what?" and Willem exclaims: "Why?"

"I, uh -" Edwin looks down at the table. Maybe he shouldn't have started like that. Or brought up that part. He doesn't want to talk about Vincent. "Someone invited me. To learn more. About, you know ... gay history."

Willem guffaws. "I didn't peg you for that kind of person! You don't need to pass your history exam to be gay!"

"No, I know, but—"

"Edwin out here one-upping all of us to be the gayest!" Patrick raises his glass. "I'll drink to that."

"Cheers!" Robert says and downs the rest of his beer.

Leo puts his hand on Edwin's arm. "Don't mind those animals." He shoots them a look, but they're still laughing. It scrapes Edwin raw. He should have shut up. Or not gone to the walk at all. It is embarrassing, but he'd let Vincent goad and guilt him into it. He should remember that Vincent is the weird one, the outlier. Never mind how he felt on Sunday. Why is he even learning things? To impress Vincent?

"Let Edwin talk, you morons," Leo says. He turns to Edwin. "Did you like it?"

"It was ..." And now the attention is on him and he can't not say something. He doesn't want them to think he just wanted to talk about his little 'history walk'. "... interesting. I didn't know how bad the Aids crisis was."

"They talked about Aids?" Patrick asks.

"Yeah. Not the guide, but the ... people I spoke to. Who had invited me. They said they lost a lot of friends."

It stays strangely silent for a few moments, despite the noise of the bar, and then Marc says: "Sad times. I try not to think about it too much."

Leo leans back with his arms over the back of his chair. "Was it that bad? I thought that was mostly an American thing."
Robert snorts. "If there's one piece of gay history you should know, it's that. It was awful everywhere. Everyone was dying and everyone was scared and right when things had been getting better for us, people had something they could call God's punishment for us." Edwin's ignorance until last Sunday burns again. He didn't know.

"I remember the first time I saw pictures of people with Aids," Guido murmurs. "We did think then it was just a thing in the US, that we were safe. Those people ... And nobody really knew what it was, just that a lot of young gay men were dying. And they'd have these gaunt faces, and spots on their skin ..."

"Right," Robert says. "Some people who knew I was gay stopped shaking my hand, even though I didn't have it. And everyone became paranoid." Oh god, that's so extreme.

"That's the least of it." Guido smacks his lips a few times. "My brother got it in the early years and when he passed away, we had trouble finding an undertaker because nobody wanted to do it. We'd visit him in the Institute of Tropical Medicine and it was just rows of young men dying alone because their families refused to see them or their partners left them or they just had nobody. I think my mum became substitute mum for all of them after a while because we made some effort to talk to all of them, even after my brother had passed." Edwin feels like he's watching a tsunami descend on him in slow motion. Every sentence hurts more than the one before.

Patrick is nodding along. "I remember one month I went to three funerals for friends of mine. I started putting the memoriam cards in a box because I didn't have space to put more of them up. And there was this one funeral where nobody came except his gay friends. I'm still the only one taking care of his grave."

"I had some friends like that too," Robert says. Guido nods.

"Fucking hell," Arthur says. That's about the extent of Edwin's reaction too. He feels frozen with disbelieving horror. That's so much worse than he pictured. 'A whole generation' dying feels very real now.

"When my partner died," Marc says, and Edwin realises that Marc has been silent since his first solemn remark, "I wasn't allowed to go to his funeral. His parents said I had given him Aids. And maybe I did, but none of us knew we had it and we didn't like using condoms, fools that we were." He smiles wryly. "Or maybe he gave it to me, or either of us got it from a hookup. I didn't even know I had Aids until 3 years later, when I stopped chickening out and got tested, and I was just lucky to survive until the first medication existed."

"Real sorry to hear that, man." Robert clasps Marc's shoulder. Everyone echoes that sentiment, including Edwin. He's glad other people are more equipped to handle this. Some family members and friends have lost parents or partners, but Ellen was always the one to talk to them while he made food or cleaned their house or crammed all his empathy into a single nod.

Marc waves them off. "It's been three decades. I've learned to live with it. But I will kill you if you don't use a condom and don't think you should get tested either. Almost got into a fight back in '92 when we were handing out free condoms in the sauna and some young guys were mocking us." He chortles. "I get that barely anyone used them before people started dying, but you had to be stupid to not use them when literally everyone was telling you to fucking use them. I used to be stupid and I paid for it."

"But that was then, right?" Arthur interjects. "I don't think it's that important now."

"Dude!" Leo reaches around Edwin to smack Arthur's shoulder. "Even I know you should either use a condom or everyone gets tested. Didn't you pay attention in biology when they talked about STDs? Or you know, common sense? Some of that stuff is nasty." He makes a face. Edwin is pretty sure they didn't talk about STDs in his biology classes until he started studying medicine in university.

Arthur grimaces. "I'm not gonna have unprotected sex if someone has Aids."

"That's if he tells you he has it. Or if he even knows it," Marc points out. "You know most infections happen because people aren't aware they have it, right? That's what happened with me."

"Just don't be a fool," Patrick says. "Even if there's pills now, you don't want to be taking pills for the rest of your life every single day. You gotta take enough pills when you're old." Arthur looks chastised and doesn't reply.

"And if not for your health," Marc adds after a second, "you're gonna have a much harder time with hook-ups if you're infected and it only takes one mistake. People still blame you for being reckless, or they think they can get it from a little kiss or when you're on medication. They just about stopped thinking it's dangerous to breathe the same air." He makes a face. "Even the doctors used to think that, you know? They would wear masks and sometimes even refuse to treat us. At least there were some good people in the Institute in Antwerp. Made it their life's work to research and treat Aids."

"I had a friend who got fired," Willem says quietly. He has been uncharacteristically silent since the conversation about Aids started. "They said it was 'reorganisation'. He wasn't even sick yet. And he was seeing a guy, but he never saw him again because the parents forbade it. They'd have thrown stones if they could. Real fanatics. He ended up in one of the action groups and they all hooked up with each other. Can't die more than I already am, he said." Edwin almost wants to laugh, but it hurts. That's one way to look at it.

"It wasn't all bad, though," Robert says. "We didn't have Reagan."

Patrick scoffs. "Yeah, but we had Wivina Demeester. She wasn't homophobic, but that's about the only thing she's got going for her. Do you remember her being all 'we don't want to stigmatise gay people, so we won't target them to help'?" Oh. Edwin had always thought she was pretty okay, as politicians go. He hadn't even realised she must have been responsible for tackling the Aids crisis.

"I thought that was great. We weren't the only ones affected. It's good they tried to inform the whole population."

"Yeah, and then they made an ad trying not to spread panic, but their whole slogan was 'open your eyes before Aids closes them'. Yeah, right." Patrick scoffs and Edwin agrees. Hearing it now, he can vaguely recall that slogan, but he dismissed it because it wasn't about him, for him.

"I was literally afraid to have sex when I saw that," Guido says and he smacks his lips. "Even before my brother told us he had it. Then I got really afraid. Demeester was not Reagan, but I'm not a fan either."

"I think we did all the important things on our own," Marc says. "The organising, the campaigns, the protests, the information, the condoms, ... The Pink Action Front in those days, they really made a difference."

"You're a radical?" Willem laughs.

"If it's about our rights, sure. You aren't?" Marc pulls up an eyebrow.

"If it's radical to want them to treat us like everyone else maybe. Even I went to some protests when I was young."

"I think we all did," Robert says. Except me, Edwin thinks. "Aids at least made us band together and fight."

Patrick nods. "I don't think we'd have gotten marriage equality so fast if not for the activism of those years."

"Those years were awful, but also some of the best of my life," Marc says. "You had those people who judged us for having Aids and you thought you were gonna die, but we also lived life with abandon and we stuck together. Felt like the best family you could wish for, even if you had to wash their asses because they were too weak and go to their funerals. But we would comfort each other, and fight."

"Feels like the younger generation doesn't understand how important it is that we have each other," Guido adds. "They can take our rights away, but they can't take our fight away, as long as we stick together."

"Not all young people," Arthur protests. "We're here." He gestures at Leo, who shakes his head.

"No, I agree. People act like gay marriage wasn't literally just made legal across the US in 2015. That's only two years ago! And we don't have all those gay bars and saunas and action groups like you used to. And we're not the only LGBT+ people who need rights."

Arthur rolls his eyes. "There he goes again."

"Good point," Guido says. "Let's not forget transgender people."

"Or anyone else, really," Leo asserts. "Or even just bi people. People always forget there's more than gay or lesbian." Everyone nods. Edwin had forgotten that a little. He knew some people were bisexual, but he'd never really thought about it, where they might be.

"Do you know bisexual people?" he asks.

Guido lifts his hand. "I am." Edwin smiles at him.

"There are some bi people on the team," Leo says. "And I've questioned if I am."

Patrick pulls a surprised face. "That's news. Since when even?"

"Several years." Leo shoots them all a challenging look.

"Did you sleep with a woman or something?" Willem asks. Edwin's attention sharpens. Could it be he's not the only one who has slept with a woman? He's gay, though, not bi. "You only ever talk about the men you've slept with."

"Because I've only ever slept with men. Doesn't make me less bi. If I am. Like I said, I don't know. I just think women are nice and pretty, but I don't know if I want to be with them." That sounds a little like how Edwin felt. Ellen was nice and pretty and amazing. And he wanted to be with her because there was no other woman for him.

"You're gonna have to test it out to know." Arthur smirks.

"That's not how it works and you know it." Leo's face is disapproving and Edwin almost feels like the frown is for him, sitting between Leo and Arthur. What Arthur said sounded sensible for a second, but now he realises that it's really not. He knew he was gay without having sex with a man. And he didn't know he wasn't attracted to women after having sex with one. "This is exactly why I never told you guys, because you can be dense as fuck. By which I mean you have the sensitivity of animals."

Patrick chuckles. "Harsh but true."

"I've slept with a woman and I'm not less gay," Robert says. The statement draws Edwin forward. Is Robert like him? Did he not know he was gay either? Did he have a girlfriend, a wife, before he knew?

"Was that the girl in university?" Guido asks.

"Yeah. It was awful. And I don't mean her, but she was this nice experienced girl and I was a fumbling virgin and I thought I'd want women once I had sex with one." He chuckles. "It just made me very sure I didn't want to have sex with women." Edwin deflates. He really should have known. Why was he so stupidly oblivious? How did everyone just know? They are his age. Their parents and friends can't have been much more supportive than his.

"I used to think Ellen — my ex, I mean — was nice and pretty and that's why I was in love with her." Edwin avoids the gazes of the other men. "I didn't know there was supposed to be more."

"Yeah," Leo replies, "that's why I'm not sure, because that's not how I feel about men. I've always known I was attracted to men. Men are hot and they make me hot and sometimes there's a rare specimen I actually like." He laughs at his own joke. Even Leo, who is not sure if he's attracted to women, was always sure he was attracted to men.

"Same for me," Guido says. "And then I fell in love with my friend in university and it was pretty clear."

"I wish. But I don't care too much. If it happens, it happens. It's not gonna change my life."

"You have never ... wanted to sleep with a woman?" Edwin wonders.

Leo shrugs with one shoulder. "Never really thought about it before I started questioning. And now I don't know. The women that make me question are always masculine women, and the few times I've hit on someone, she was a lesbian. And the way I like women feels very different from the way I like men. Maybe I just like feminine men, who knows. There's a certain overlap between butch lesbian and gay twink." Leo chuckles. Edwin doesn't know what 'butch' means. Masculine? At least he knows what a twink is now. If Leo is attracted to feminine men, does that mean he would be attracted to people like Vincent? The obvious ones?

"If you like feminine men, is that not a sign? That you ... like women?"

"What? No! Of course not. They're still just men. It's not 'less gay' or 'bi' or whatever the biphobes think, if you're attracted to a man in make-up. Or even just a twink." Edwin's face heats up and he looks at the condensation on his beer glass. His fingers are twitching. That is ... totally different from whoever said before that gay men were attracted to masculine men.

"You think it's normal for men to wear make-up?"

Leo shrugs. "I wouldn't call it 'normal' because most men don't do it, but it's not weirder than anyone else doing what makes them happy. It's not like men automatically have an allergic reaction to make-up." He chuckles. "I've done it. It's fun, but a little too much effort for every day."

"I don't get why any men would wear make-up," Willem grumbles. "Or be attracted to men who wear make-up."

"I don't get it either," Robert agrees, "but good for them."

The mild reactions unsettle Edwin. He was sure that last time, they were all talking about how gay men are attracted to muscles and leather and not make-up and now ... Was that just in his head? No, Willem and Robert still don't get it. They're like him. He's like them.

"I was pretty feminine in my youth," Guido says. "Before I -" He makes an expanding gesture at his belly. "And then I discovered kink and I became a leather daddy." He laughs. Leo leans around Marc to high-five him and Edwin narrowly shoves his glass away. Leo's T-shirt has hitched up and there's a patch of skin right in front of his face, before Leo sits back down.

"Look at that," Leo laughs, "the ultimate leather daddy used to be fem."

"I had a fem boyfriend too in those days. He even wore skirts at home and in the scene. Leather skirts." Guido chuckles.

"I'm almost gonna feel boring now," Patrick jokes.

"That's because you are," Robert deadpans. Everyone laughs. Edwin wonders if he's boring. He's not into leather or make-up.

"You're all boring," Leo says. "All of you are insensitive animals. Except Guido. And Edwin." Edwin is taken aback by the arm Leo suddenly puts around him. "At least they can appreciate a woman. And I can introduce Edwin to some feminine men." Edwin stiffens. I already know a feminine man, he doesn't say. I am not attracted to feminine men. They make me uncomfortable. He makes me uncomfortable.

"I'm not boring either!" Marc proclaims.

"Yeah? Come on, prove it! Tell us, what makes you more interesting than them?" Leo gestures at Patrick, Robert, Willem and Arthur all sitting next to each other.

"I'm non-binary." Marc leans back in his chair with a self-satisfied smile.

Arthur, Willem and Patrick all erupt, shouting through each other: "What? Since when?"

"Since always. But I realised a few years ago, with the Internet, you know."

"But you look ..." Patrick gestures at Marc's beard and ... everything. Edwin agrees. Kim is non-binary, but Marc looks totally different. Kim makes you doubt if they are a man or a woman; Marc looks ... very male.

Marc is shaking his head and emphasises his point with his hands. "How I look has nothing to do with my gender. It's what Leo said. Men can wear make-up and be feminine and be no less of a man. Non-binary people can look like anything and still be non-binary. I'm the type who doesn't have a gender anyway, so it's not like I care. I like having a beard. People can assume."

"What's the use then?" Willem asks. "If you're just gonna look like a man."

Marc shrugs. "Knowing? And other people care about what they're called and stuff."

"Are you still ... gay then?" Edwin asks. "If you're not a man?"

"Why not? I've called myself gay my whole life. I don't need another word."

That makes ... a little sense. Edwin doesn't really get it. He thought that's why there were so many labels. But Marc is older, like him. Maybe that's why he prefers to use older labels and not all those new ones that nobody knows, except the people online coming up with them. And Vincent, and people like him. This whole conversation has been so much information that he doesn't really know what to do with it. He might have to look some things up on the Internet. About Aids, and bisexuality, and 'gender'. Clearly Vincent is less weird than he thought, if people here are agreeing with him, but he also understands a little better now.