(from Nanowrimo 2001)

Evan thought about the craziness of his recent gay social life. If anybody, anybody at all, had told him it was going to be like this, he never would have done it. It wasn’t worth it, not even the free toaster.

Threes. He hated the number three. The number three could go to hell.

He always did the worst in groups of three guys. One May — during Beach Week at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, during the week after final exams and before graduation — he and two of his friends, Tom Carter and Jonathan Press, had been driving home from a movie. It had been a big summer action movie, complete with tsunamis of water, Hollywood-style, and intense speechifying from actors playing military officers. Complete cotton candy, ripe with summer, and worth every delicious bite.

Evan, Tom, and Jonathan were in the same singing group at the University of Virginia. It was a sixteen-man a cappella group, something popular at colleges at that time. Guys would get together (and sometimes girls would, too, and sometimes guys and girls would get together) and sing pop tunes, a cappella, no instruments — voices performing the words, the harmony, the percussion, anything extra. A bunch of guys could pour themselves out of a van in the middle of nowhere, say the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and assemble themselves into a sixteen-member orchestra, fully complete.

Evan had wanted to be in one of these groups for the longest time. He’d done lots of singing in high school, in the chorus — the usual route, staid, 400-year-old music, even if it was beautiful — but when he got to college, he saw the Virginia Gentlemen perform.

It changed him.

He was mesmerized by them. Not only were they attractive — though that was in fact the first thing he noticed, a fresh arrival at UVa, still bowled over by the just plain old gorgeousness he saw everywhere on Grounds (the campus was not called a campus but the Grounds, because Thomas Jefferson, the school’s founder, had wanted it that way) in both men and women — confounding his already confounding sexual orientational conundrum — but besides being attractive, they were well-dressed, in button-down Oxfords of beautiful bold shades of color and/or pinstripes, and khakis too — and charismatic, with bright shiny smiles on their well-complexioned tan faces (tanned, he didn’t realize, from a recent one-week late-August rehearsal vacation at the beach) — the charisma evident because of the throngs of undergraduate women (and even some men) standing and even sitting in front of the group, captivated.

Evan wanted to be one of the Virginia Gentlemen. He wanted to be a VG.

Except he didn’t know it.

Part of him knew it. But this part, the part of him that knew it, lacked something that the more conscious part of him had. The conscious part of him was cuddled up in that other part of him: a nice warm cozy blanket of doubt, which had nurtured him his whole life. Like Linus’s security blanket, he couldn’t live without the doubt. He wrapped himself up in it as soon as he rolled out of bed in the morning, throwing off the cotton quilt and wrapping himself up in something even more necessary and protecting. Doubt was his mother and father and guardian. Doubt was a treacherous parent. Treacherous doubt withheld certain pieces of information from him. It was all out of a desire to protect him from the scary things, the shoes two sizes too big, the painful things that would yank him limb from limb if he got too enmeshed or enamored or enthralled.

Mother Doubt withheld from Evan the news that he wanted to be a VG.

Instead, Evan told himself that these guys were amazing, that they were so talented and attractive and cocksure. They were miles and miles above him.

He tripped over his shoelaces and fell into a mesmerized girl.

“Sorry,” he said to her, getting up. She and two of her friends glared. He hoped to God that the VG imitating Sting’s voice hadn’t noticed. But of course he hadn’t noticed. Nobody ever noticed Evan.

The glaring girls turned back to watch the Sting-impersonating Virginia Gentleman continue his magic.

Evan didn’t even clear his throat as he swiftly walked away. He stifled the impulse.

He never thought about the VGs again. Instead, he tried out for the men’s Glee Club, 50 men strong, and continued to sing 400-year-old choral music. It wasn’t staid, though — the Glee Club was a brotherhood. A fraternity of song. In fact, the group had a house, and keg parties, and the guys talked about girls and had mixers with sororities. Except for the fact that they sang beautiful music and sometimes got tears in their eyes — and the fact that they had rehearsal two nights a week, for two hours each — and the fact that there were no Greek letters in their names (though they sometimes sang in Latin) — they could have been a fraternity. Also, there were no hazing rituals, and there was no pledge status. It was fraternity lite.

A year and a half went by, and the a cappella urge resurfaced. He wasn’t sure how it happened. But one day in the warm delirious spring, at the end of his second year of college, he wanted to be in an a cappella group again. Spring always did weird things to Evan. It made him feel romantic inside, it made him want to turn into a bird and float among the clouds and sing a birdy whistling song. Springtime, like no other time, told Evan that he was a prisoner to biology. He could almost feel the hormones coursing through him.

This was a vague desire, unfocused. He didn’t fixate on any particular person — or even any particular gender — so much as have a strong desire to “suck the marrow out of life.” To throw on a pair of mesh athletic shorts and play soccer (he hated soccer) and roll around in the mud and neglect his studies. Get dirty. Be bad.

On the first warm day of the year Evan was walking back to his dorm from his Psych 101 class when he saw a student running past. The guy wore a white t-shirt and a red pair of mesh shorts. As he ran, his legs kicked up dust behind them, or they would have had there been any; the legs went so high in the air behind him. Legs dotted with hair, from the thighs all the way down to the ankles, where short white socks were covered with dirty sneakers that had formerly been white.

The guy ran past and Evan felt woozy and alive. Suddenly his bookbag was weighing him down unbearably, sweat forming between the bag’s strap and his back and chest, across which the strap was slung, sweat getting trapped in the warm pockets of his jacket. He tore off his jacket and tied it around his waist, and continued walking. He felt the breeze blowing against the shirt — the first direct outdoor breeze blowing against his shirt in months.

And as he walked, he smiled. This was life. It was April and he was in college and he was truly alive.

That evening there was an a cappella performance at his dorm. It was the VGs. This time — a year and a half after his first experience watching them — he actually knew some of them. Several of them were in the Glee Club: there was tall Harris Breaux, and short, cute Steven Sims, and hunky blond Dexter Avalon. He was proud to say that he sang with these guys, even if it wasn’t in the VGs that they sang together.

“Evan, how ya doing?”

Evan turned around. It was Randy, Randy Cohen, another Glee Club guy. They lived in the same dorm. Randy was coming down stairs with his own bookbag. He didn’t have a jacket.

“Oh, not bad.”

“The VGs are singing here tonight, eh?”

There was something in Randy’s voice that Evan couldn’t quite place. Something that wouldn’t even have registered on a seismograph. But Evan noticed these things.

“Yeah, hey, aren’t they?” Evan said.

“Will I see you there?”

“Probably… I think so.”

“Cool.” Randy smiled. “See you later.”

Randy had very white teeth.

That night the VGs came to Evan’s dorm during a 10:00 study break and performed a few songs. There was pizza and Coke. A crowd had gathered — mostly females, but also a few guys. Evan wondered about the guys; Evan always wondered about the guys. Evan noticed these things, because he was looking for them.

The VGs came, they sang, they conquered. They sang Simon and Garfunkel’s “Cecilia,” something by Pearl Jam that Evan didn’t know, and in the middle there was a ballad, sung by hunky Dexter Avalon. All the women swooned. Evan wished he could swoon as well. Dexter’s blue eyes focused on a few women in the front row.

Why couldn’t Dexter look at the guys, too? There were tons of closeted VG fans. But that would have hurt their image. And anyway, they probably didn’t know. They lived in a fantasy world where all the biggest fans were women. They didn’t know about the closeted gay guys who lay in bed at night, sweating and naked underneath their bedsheets, stroking themselves as they thought about Dexter Avalon or Harris Breaux or even Steven Sims.

It was that night that Evan realized, finally, that he wanted to be a VG. And if not a VG, then he wanted to be a member of another a cappella group. He was fascinated by the combination of musical components, all created unbelievably by the human voice, as he was with the idea of being part of another brotherhood and possibly being admired by legions of fans. He wanted the admiration, needed it.

Eventually he got into a group, after a total of eight auditions for four different groups (two each). After not evening making callbacks once, finally, at the beginning of his last year of college, he made it into a group.

And there he met Tom Carter and Jonathan Press.

So now here they were, Evan and Tom and Jonathan, cruising along Ocean Boulevard in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, coming back from the summer blockbuster of a film. Film was too strong a word — it was just a movie. A confection.

Evan was sitting in the back seat. He wasn’t sure how that had happened. It had just seemed to be his natural place. Tom was driving, and as they walked back, Evan deferred to Jonathan and let him take the front seat.

The truth is, Evan sometimes preferred the back seat. If you sat in the front passenger seat, you always had to be conscious of including the back-seated person in the conversation. Words wound up getting away from that rear person, as the driver and passenger faced forward, spouting their words into the front windshield. And Evan was the type of guy that always wanted to make sure he included the back-seat guy in the conversation. He was hyperconscious of leaving other people out. Once he had been so hyperconscious of this that he’d strained his neck muscles, whipping his head front and back, his brain churning overtime to think up questions he could ask the back-seat guy, then switching back to the driver and making sure the driver wasn’t left out, either.

It sure was lots of work, being nice.

But this case was almost as bad. In this case, he was the one stuck in the back seat. At least he wasn’t in the position of responsibility — and the front passenger guy really was in that responsible position, because the driver had to concentrate on driving, leaving the front passenger guy to act as social director.

And in this case, the social director was Jonathan.

Jonathan was very tall, 6 foot 3, with wavy blond hair and horn-rimmed glasses. He was sort of an artistic type, although straight, and Evan was in love with him in a platonic way. In fact, they’d driven down to Myrtle Beach together this year. They’d left Charlottesville at 6:00 in the evening, driving down I-95 and then along South Carolina’s mysterious bayou-like Highway 9 in the darkness, before arriving at 2 in the morning. They’d thrown their bags in one of the unclaimed rooms and had run down to the beach, tracing Latin phrases into the sand with their bare feet as the waves crashed in from the dark horizon. Standing there, in their shorts and bare feet, the wind rushing through Jonathan’s wavy blond hair, Evan knew he was in love. He wanted it to be 2 a.m. forever; he wanted to be at Myrtle Beach forever. He wanted Beach Week to last forever. He didn’t want to graduate.

But now, three nights later, they were driving back from the movies. It was 10:00 at night, and therefore the night at Myrtle Beach had not yet begun. Beach Week existed in another time zone; everything was several hours off. The day didn’t really begin until about 4 in the afternoon, when the shadows began to lengthen on the crowded beach, the shadows of the volleyball net and the volleyball and the frisbees and the guys and the girls, and people began to think about dinner and the upcoming night’s events. The revellers at Beach Week were like vampires, waiting for the sun to go down. Except that they were also happy in the sun. They were happy in the sun, happy underneath the moon and stars, happy underneath the flashing strobe lights of the Spanish Galleon, happy underneath the fluorescent lights of a kitchen mixing drinks, happy. There was only happy at Myrtle Beach.

Unless you were Evan, riding in the back of a car while Tom and Jonathan traded jokes up front. He couldn’t hear anything. It didn’t help that the windows were rolled down, the rushing air pulling the words out of Tom and Jonathan’s mouths and scattering the letters along Route 17. They drove past neon-lit seafood restaurants and amusement parks and miniature golf parks.

They were talking and laughing.

“What do you think, Evan?” Jonathan finally said, turning around, smiling.

“I can’t hear you guys at all,” Evan said.

Jonathan turned back and exchanged a glance with Tom. They were both smiling. Jonathan said something to Tom that Evan couldn’t hear, and they both laughed.

Evan felt his face turn red and his teeth start to grit. Jonathan was being a traitor. They were laughing at him.

Evan seethed the entire rest of the ride back to the condos. He was angry, he was sad, he was upset. Everything from his childhood was coming back to haunt him: the humiliations, the people making fun of his glasses and his brains and his greasy hair (before he’d learned to use a particular shampoo and conditioner that would make the greasiness go away, somewhere around ninth grade, when everyone began desperately trying to improve themselves). He’d thought that he’d made so much progress since middle school. He’d gained independence, he’d picked a major (finally), he’d gained confidence, he’d even made it into an a cappella group. And now it was all crumbling to dust like a hollow house, a house of cards. The bricks were strong but the foundation was still pretty weak. He was the foundation and he was crumbling. All because Jonathan and Tom were laughing.

There were times when Evan could see around his thoughts. He could live outside of them, step outside of himself and see things objectively. He was a guy who thought about things too much, and this was sometimes a blessing and sometimes a big screaming albatross around his neck, strangling him. You know how a really bad form of torture is to make sure that someone is wide awake but can’t move? Then you stick needles into them. They can feel everything, every little pinprick, but they’re completely paralyzed. Fully aware of something but unable to change it.

That’s how Evan felt. He knew there was no need to feel this way. But he couldn’t do anything to change it. That’s just the way he was feeling. He knew that Tom and Jonathan were just joking around. He knew that they liked him. He pretty much knew. After all, he’d known Tom for three years and Jonathan for two and they’d always been close. They’d always gotten along very well. Just the other night, when he and Jonathan were driving down to Myrtle Beach in the darkness, Evan suggested going out to Colorado to visit Jonathan during the upcoming summer. Jonathan had thought this was a great idea. So Evan thought they were close.

Hadn’t they stood on the beach barefoot at 2 in the morning and written words in the sand with their toes?

And now he was a traitor. How could people do that? What did they have in them that they could become a completely different person in a matter of minutes?

The other side of the coin, as Evan’s overthinking mind well knew, was that Jonathan wasn’t changing. Evan was just being a dork. Jonathan and Tom and Evan were all guys, after all, and guys joked around. It was their way of being emotionally intimate with each other. A way of expressing affection. Well, if that was affection, Evan didn’t need it or want it.

They pulled into the parking lot of the Tilghman, the condos where the Glee Club was staying. They all got out of the car. Evan was still grimacing. Jonathan said:

“What are you up to tonight, Evan?”

Evan grimaced and mumbled, “Not sure.”

Hearing his tone, Jonathan looked at him. Yet another change came over him. A hint of tenderness came into his eyes. A hint of warmth. It was like his eyelids were relaxing. He smiled.

“Are you okay?” he said to Evan.

“Yeah,” Evan said, turning away like an ashamed puppy.

He felt a hand on his shoulder. He heard Jonathan laugh.

“Come on, Evan, we were kidding around with you,” he said.

“Yeah, whatever.”

“No, really. Come on, Evan, you know we like ya.”

His back was still to Jonathan, but now Evan smiled. He felt like the kid in the commercial after he gives the football star a Coke and Mean Joe Greene gets down to him on one knee.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” he said.

“So come on, let’s go up and see what’s going on upstairs.”

It was 10:00 at night. Upstairs there would probably be the usual debauchery, a crowd gathered watching the season finale of some sitcom on TV, drinking beer and liquor, or playing drinking games, assorted open bottles of liquor on the Formica countertop, big red plastic cups stacked up inside clear plastic wrappers, assorted glassware from the cabinets, which had actually belonged to the condo’s owners, owners who had never suspected that their glassware would be used by a bunch of college students to mix exotic and experimental alcoholic concoctions. The people who weren’t around were off visiting other people in other condos or beach houses, where they were doing the same thing. Perhaps some people were off playing mini golf, and others were probably off at the movies like the three of them had been.

But others’ others were waiting on line right now to get into the Spanish Galleon.

The three of them, Evan, Jonathan and Tom, walked up the stairs. When the got to the condo, they saw what they expected. Randy Cohen and a couple of other guys were sitting on the couch, laughing and/or flirting with four women. They were not bimbos, but they were drunk — which meant the same thing, functionally. If Evan’s eyes had been hidden deep inside his body, undetectable by those around him, he would have rolled them.

So now they walked in and there was the crew, just as he knew they’d be, sitting there, drinking, playing spades (oh yeah, there was that too), watching TV.

Evan, it should be noted, felt nothing wrong with any of this. He fully enjoyed it, in fact. It was all part of why he loved Beach Week so much. Who wouldn’t enjoy something like this?

On TV was a sitcom. A haute-couture man was talking with a low-couture more relaxed man. He said something that was apparently funny, because the laugh track exploded.

“Hey!” Randy said to them. The others said hi as well, really enthusiastically, enthusiasm soaked in rum and vodka.

“Hey, y’all!” Tom said. Even though Tom was from Cleveland, he’d appropriated the “y’all” during his four years in Virginia. It was a cool word. The north had no plural for “you,” unless you were in the mafia, in which case you were permitted to say “youse,” which nobody in the mafia really said unless they were basing their interpretations on deeply inaccurate mafia movies or stereoptypes on TV.

Tom was a cheery guy. He had glasses and a big smile with white teeth. He was so friendly. Sometimes it seemed forced, but it wasn’t. It was just the way Tom was. He’d long ago incorporated such hyper-friendliness into his personality, so long ago and so deeply that it had come to seem fully natural in him. It hadn’t always been, Evan assumed; it seemed instead like a defense mechanism Tom had long ago acquired in order to fight off some deep-seated insecurity or insecurities. It was too creepy and unchanging to be natural.

Evan noted Randy. He’d been coming to notice Randy a bit more often during the last few days. Perhaps it was the different setting. He’d never seen Randy shirtless until this week, and a couple of days ago, while lying on a towel, reading some deeply uninteresting thick paperback novel, he’d finally seen it. Was it Randy in particular, or had Randy just become the vessel, the easily accessible focal point for all the shirtless guys on the beach? Randy was a friend. He was low-key and laid-back and slightly nerdish, but not in a geeky way. That is to say, he was intellectual, and he was into science fiction and so forth, but he wasn’t socially awkward. He was either nerdy but not in a geeky way, or geeky but not in a nerdy way. It was hard to say, really.

They’d always gotten along well, but now Evan found himself wanting Randy in a way he hadn’t before.

It had begun to happen that particular day on the beach, two days ago, the first full day at Myrtle. He’d noticed Randy. Randy wasn’t into volleyball, like most of the other Glee Club and music-type people, and so he was lying on dark green towel, bathing suit on, t-shirt on as well, reading a book with a black cover containing a picture of either a nova or a nebula, Evan wasn’t sure which. He’d arrived on the beach twenty minutes earlier and had seen Evan and had put his towel down next to his. He’d taken off his sandals but had left his shirt on, leaving his arms and legs exposed.

His legs were slim, not muscled, with a smattering of light hairs on them. Not many, but enough to show that he wasn’t a kid. His arms, too, were thin. His skin was pale. He wore a pair of aqua-colored shorts, not swim trunks or even mesh athletic shorts but plain old shorts that one might wear while hiking in the woods.

In other words, he was totally unprepared for the beach.

Evan found this appealing. He wasn’t really prepared for the beach, either.

“What have you guys been up to this evening?” Randy said.

Tom explained that they’d just come back from the movies, leaving out the part about the front seat/back seat dichotomy, probably because it hadn’t made much of an impression on him. It’s the ones who get hurt who remember a situation. There’s nothing like negative feelings to engrave a situation into your memory.

“Cool. What are you gonna do tonight?” he said.

That was the great thing about Beach Week — heck, the great thing about being in college. Or being young. But definitely about Beach Week, vacation, no timetable to follow: it could be 10:00 at night and someone could ask, “What are you gonna do tonight?” and be totally serious about it. Nobody went to bed until 5 in the morning. There was almost a whole workday full of hours ahead of them to fill with play.

Evan was pretty sure he knew what he wanted to do. Evan wanted to go to the Spanish Galleon –“Spanish G,” as one of his friends (a guy in the a cappella group who liked to break out into rap on random occasions) called it.

It wasn’t a gay dance club, which was fine, because at this point, Evan wasn’t calling himself gay anymore. It was just a club — and therefore, a straight club. Like most things in the world, if it wasn’t labelled as such, it was assumed to be normal. And, like most things in the world, that wasn’t totally true. Like most things in the world, the subversive element still existed — just underground.

Evan didn’t even know if gay people went there. As far as he knew, it was a straight club. In Evan’s interior world, gay didn’t exist unless it was labelled as such. There was no murkiness. Ironically, Evan didn’t recognize the murkiness of sexuality in the outside world even though he was filled with sexual murkiness himself.

At any rate, because the Spanish Galleon was not a gay club, it was okay to say he wanted to go there.

“I was thinking of going to the Spanish Galleon,” he said.

In fact, they all were. These a cappella people — well, not all of them, but the guys in their group — liked to go to clubs and dance. And presumably pick up women, maybe, although having fun was really the point.

“Wanna come?” Evan asked Randy.

This was the moment of truth. Would Randy come to the club? What did it matter, really? It wasn’t a gay club. Evan wasn’t even gay. He just sort of wanted Randy to say yes.

“Yeah, I think I will,” Randy said.

Hey, why not? Why not be happy that Randy was coming? Randy was a nice guy, a really nice guy. Evan liked him. They seemed kindred spirits in some ways. Neither of them seemed at home on the beach. And Evan could seem himself reading Randy’s astronomy book. Long ago, back when he’d been unafraid to be himself, back before he dad had made him feel bad about pursuing solitary interests, Evan had read books like that. He used to love math and computers and technology.

And now he noticed that Randy liked these things, Randy was a guy who could drink and hang out with both girls and guys and still be a nerd, but be socially smooth enough as well. Not completely lubricated, but socially smooth enough.

Half an hour later they’d changed their clothes and they were ready to go. Tom wasn’t going; he was supposed to meet a girl somewhere. Instead, Evan, Jonathan and Randy went together.

They walked along Ocean Boulevard in the cool air, Evan with two people who gave him great vibes: Jonathan, on whom he had a non-sexual yet incredibly deep crush (if only Jonathan had been shorter), and Randy, who — well, who just gave him great vibes, especially lately.

They saw small groups of people walking past. Some were yelling and shouting. Drunk. Yelling stupid things. Fraternity guys, probably. Or maybe they came from other schools. Wake Forest students were supposedly down here this week, too. It was hard to tell where they came from, because alcohol removed all formerly telltale traces of intelligence from any UVA students, and the Wake Forest students — well, for them, the alcohol couldn’t take away what wasn’t there to begin with.

Then Evan noticed a UVA cap on a guy, yes, one of those ubiquitous white UVA caps. Okay. Wahoowa.

They got to the Spanish Galleon. They’d hoped they wouldn’t have to pay to get in, because it was free before 10:00. But the closer it got to 11:00, the slower the line began to move. It was all a ploy: the bouncer and the stamper and the ID checker and the cashier would begin to slow to a crawl, so that you’d waited so long to get in free that by the time you got up to the entrance and it was 10:03, you weren’t willing to turn back. It was a trap. You figured you may as well pay your five bucks and go on in since you’d waited so long. Great business sense, these club owners had, catering to the young stupid college crowd. Great bucks, too. What a business.

But of course by the time they actually got to the Galleon, it was 10:45. So much for that idea. Still, it was worth the five bucks. They’d known it wasn’t going to be free, but they didn’t care. Five bucks is nothing when it’s the first club you’ve been to in months. There weren’t any clubs back in Charlottesville; there were fraternity parties and house parties and parties in dorms and people sitting around drinking. To go to a club, a real live club with flashing lights and loud good DJs, you had to go to D.C. Nobody ever did that, though. Who wants to drive two hours away?

So five bucks was worth it. They paid, they got fluorescent ink stamped on their hands that glowed under ultraviolet light, they went in. They walked right into a wall of sound.

The Spanish Galleon had a dance floor in the shape of a square. At each corner was an elevated cage that brave people (or drunk people, not that there was any difference) would stand in and shake their groove thing in, or whatever it was that Evan had heard people call it. The dance floor was recessed into the ground, so that to walk onto the floor you had to walk down two steps. From their vantage point, Evan and Randy and Jonathan could see the crowd bumping and grinding and jumping and dancing away.

Along one wall there was a bar where you could buy cheap beer in little plastic cups for a buck. You could also buy mixed drinks, but they were a little more expensive. It all depended on your tastes.

Jonathan didn’t drink, and a group of women came up to him. He was a girl magnet even though he didn’t think he was. He was soon absorbed into their circle and they carried him off like Amazons with a fur pelt, leaving Evan and Randy by themselves, together amidst the crowd.

“Beer?” Randy said.

“Sure,” Evan said. He gave Randy a dollar. And Randy went off to get beer.

While Randy was gone, Evan looked around the room. Attractive UVA guys everywhere. There were women, too, of course, but he didn’t really notice them; he fixated on the guys. He continually did this, throughout his life at UVA, all the while telling himself that he wasn’t gay — or at least reserving judgment until some deus ex machina, some cosmic event would occur. He wasn’t sure what that might be. In fact, he wasn’t wholly convinced that he hadn’t made the entire idea up in order to avoid the question.

He saw one guy in particular. Black hair, sideburns, short-sleeve t-shirt and jeans. Not your typical college fare, because the t-shirt was tight. Hmmm. He certainly didn’t fit the UVA mold, but he was with a few guys whom Evan recognized from around Grounds, so he had to be a UVA student. Well, as much as everyone looked alike at UVA, not everyone looked alike. There were exceptions. Obviously this guy was one of them.

The guys were dancing together in a group, with a few girls. The guy-to-girl ratio seemed a bit too high. In other words, there were too many guys.

And one of the guys was a gay friend of Evan’s. Interesting. That would explain the good-looking sideburn guy. Gay.