#danlou

It's a cheap ad.

The rented set is mostly taken up by wooden shelves, fake books, and a few urns. The rug is a threadbare imitation, but there are little notes taped to a whiteboard, a glass of water neatly tucked out of the way. Daniel isn't a boy tripping over himself to make an impression, not any longer. He's a man in a nice suit--not expensive, but not cheap. It's dark gray, to go with the shirt that's the same color. It's an optical illusion that naturally draws the eye to his face, to silver curls and green eyes that look impossibly bright in the sunlight. Their eyes might be the same color, and there's some comfort in that. In the idea that this boy he confided in, who wanted to be his everything, who asked for it at the most painful moment possible--that he and this boy have carried something together, all these years. That they might have something in common, even something that small.

Daniel is still broad in the shoulders, but he's grown into them. He's older than Louis expected him to be, somehow--approaching seventy, probably, and...arresting. He was handsome in the seventies, in a boyish, charmingly bumbling sort of way. Giggly. He was understanding, and nothing could have been more endearing than that. As an older man, there's something sharp about Daniel--he's sitting in a beige easy chair, in a non-descript room, but he leans forward and smiles at the camera. It's lopsided, easy in a practiced way. There's nothing giggly about this Daniel Molloy--he rests his elbows on his knees, and the camera zooms in.

"Hi. I'm Daniel Molloy, and I'd like to be your professor."

Daniel winks at the camera--it cuts away, to footage of an ACT-UP rally.

"Stories are the backbone of society--who did what where, when, how and why? And somebody has to tell those stories."

A black banner that reads 'Silence = Death.'

"Even when the going gets hard, even when the powers that be say 'no, let this one stay buried,' it's somebody's job to get the word out. Could be your job, if you want it badly enough."

A still shot of an office from the...late seventies, perhaps. There are about a hundred men, all of them white, milling about shoved together desks like an upset hive of bees, crisp white shirts blending in with the papers tacked onto the wall. There are four or five white women hovering around the edges of the room, holding papers or skirting the fray. Daniel tells the audience:

"The News used to be a bunch of guys who look like me, huddled around a desk at a page one meeting, deciding what people were going to read about that day. Things were easier to bury, then--it was harder to get the word out.'

The camera cuts back to Daniel, now holding a cellphone.

"But that's not your world--you've got a trump card. Journalism school? You're kidding. You don't need a mountain of debt, you need a good data plan and somebody to teach you how to conduct an interview--otherwise, the world is your oyster."