Billy Budd
By Tim Mead
At 7:15 A.M. thirty-something Everett Sloane heaved himself out of the college pool after forty-five minutes of swimming laps. The three other men in the pool, all faculty members, didn’t even look up. Sloane was a fixture there three mornings a week, so they took his presence and his leaving for granted. If they had troubled to look, they might have said Sloan had kept his swimmer’s build. The less charitable could have pointed out the beginnings of a pair of love handles. He looked pretty good at 6’1” with no sign of losing his thick brown hair, which he kept cut to a medium length to show off the waves in it. Some of the women in his classes had been known to admire his brown eyes. But Sloan was lonely. It was no fun being a gay professor in a small town thirty
