Chapter Text
Coming out as gay changed surprisingly little about Billy’s life.
For all that he’d built the moment up in his mind as some grand gesture, some momentous cataclysm that would cause a shift in the foundation of his very universe, it had actually turned out to be something of a non-event. His friends were open minded people and after everything they’d been through together it was unlikely that this would be the thing that would break them up... but still, it was nice to have his fears laid to rest.
He wasn’t out to the world yet, but he was out to his team, and that was its own kind of world in a way. He hadn’t felt this free and open since, well, since was a kid playing pretend; uninhibited and seeing limitless possibilities in the world. And the best part is he didn’t even really need to change anything really! He still fought monsters every week, still walked to school with Trini, still stayed up too late tinkering in the Command Center– he was still the same old lovable nerd he had been before, and everyone treated him as such.
Well… almost everyone.
Jason’s behavior towards him remained unchanged by the news; Billy sometimes gets the sense that the other boy had known about him all along but had politely waited for Billy to be the one to broach the subject (a theory that was perfectly in line with both Jason’s caring nature and his well documented tendency to hold on to secrets).
Zack was delighted that the repertoire of jokes he could make had expanded and he kept threatening to set Billy up with a date (because of course Zack had a closet full of gay friends that Billy had never heard of) but otherwise he never treated Billy any differently than he had before.
Kimberly had changed a little bit, but in a good way! Since he’d come out her “big sister” energy had grown stronger than ever: she’d started complimenting him more and he sometimes caught her staring at him when she thought he wasn’t looking, hovering over him as if she was worried he would break if she wasn’t there to smother him in her aura. Conversely she had also started to lean on him more, turning to him more often for advice or a sympathetic ear. Billy suspected that these changes had less to do with him being gay and more to do with her need for someone to be a rock to hold onto in the crashing tides of change that were battering her life as of late, and he was only too glad to oblige. Really, the two were closer than ever and it felt… nice, to move Kim deeper into his inner circle.
No, the one who was starting to bother him was Trini. The weeks since he'd cracked open the door of the closet had been the gayest of his life not just because he had come out as gay, but because Trini had taken it upon herself to act as Billy’s personal guide to the wonderful world of homosexuality. She began dragging him to queer youth groups, forwarding him LGBT+ articles, and Billy’s movie nights had been forcibly repurposed away from his standard sci-fi fare towards the (unsurprisingly fractional) world of gay cinema.
It was as if he had signed up for a queer studies course, albeit one more enthusiastic than academic.
His main hypothesis was that she felt some sort of guilt that despite being his closest friend she hadn’t ever picked up on his secret and had been unable to help him through it, and thus she was attempting to be there for him retroactively via her somewhat overbearing crusade in the present. He’d tried to articulate to her on numerous occasions that really, he held no resentment towards her for it and rather appreciated that she’d both respected his privacy and avoided stereotyping him, but each time he did she’d just give him this look that he couldn’t quite read (melancholy? guilty? emotional intelligence wasn’t his forte) and then would press play on whatever queer classic she’d found that he just had to see to complete his gay education. He half-worried that there was some sort of LGBT+ certification test he didn’t know about she was covertly prepping him for.
On one level he appreciated having someone finally listen to him when he complained about the historical inaccuracies of of The Imitation Game, but on the other hand if she didn’t stop trying to force him to watch Schitt’s Creek he was going to get Alpha to teleport one of them to the far side of the galaxy. He hadn’t made up his mind which of them it would be yet, but after she texted him a video about proper rectal hygiene he had an inkling of which direction he was leaning. (Whether or not he watched the video is inconsequential, and his interest was purely scientific anyways, okay?) After a few weeks she began to slow down and Billy was hopeful that she’d gotten her fill and things could return back to normal.
He should have known his friend better. This was Trini, who never did things halfway, which meant exactly a month after Billy came out Angel Grove held its first ever Pride festival.