"I'll pick you up when June's zeroed out, probably ballpark of six o'clock. Okay?"

Haru can hear the sort of shuffling sound of Lucien nodding rapidly.

"-yes Yes it is okay that works."

"See you tonight!"

"Yes thank you you will!" 

Haru giggles and hangs up.

Lucien is going to lie down for a bit.

Okay. He has a date. With a guy. When he has not even had a normal date before. This is acceptable and a thing he can handle, especially given that he lives in a better world where the written work of all of humanity is at his fingertips. In the past he'd have gone to the library and found only vague references to the subject but here he can find more.

Lucien first googles "How to be a homosexual". Helpfully the top result is an article from The Guardian (a newspaper that was old even when Lucien was born) entitled "How to be gay in 10 easy steps", which sounds like exactly what Lucien needs. 

...Why is the first thing a picture of men dancing in their underclothes in front of a rainbow flag. Is that what being gay is about? His father was gay and-oh that is not a mental image Lucien wanted... Haru is gay and... that mental image is distracting in an entirely different manner. 

Lucien reads the article and learns that... he should have a diva, dress in drag, and cruise, and know about poppers and... perhaps there are better articles on this subject.

He next searches for "how to go on a homosexual date"  and finds an advice article which mentions early on the queer theory section of a library which, while it may not be applied, might be at least more... scholastic in nature. 

Queer theory does in fact turn out to have a Wikipedia page which Lucien fruitlessly attempts to understand until it is time for dinner. 

Haru shows up right on time! Knock knock!

"Hi yes I am here!"

Lucien opens the door. There are various printed out web pages visible on the table behind him.

"...researching something?"

"I was trying to search for information on how to be a homosexual."

"...it's not that complicated. Did you have more specific questions?"

"Well I used to have some very general questions but now I have more specific ones like uh, what are 'poppers'?"

"...I don't know, so clearly it's not very important."

"Ah. Well, the article also said that if you are gay you should dress in drag and I think I sort of understand what that is but not why homosexuals do it?"

"For reasons that are not well understood a lot of gay people wind up low-key weird in the gender. Some people are even sufficiently weird in the gender to ask that people refer to them as a new one and present themselves to match and avail themselves of modern medicine about it, and may or may not also be gay. I'm not one of those people even to the 'drag' level and it sounds like you aren't either."

"I guess this is not surprising to me but yes, I don't particularly feel inclined in that direction."

"A lot of - stuff, about being gay, is just correlates and not actually required or even useful. More like, uh, a book recommendation. Like the articles are just going, men who like men also liked the following not fundamentally related things."

"I suppose this makes sense though I'd really have given my article a different title if that were the case. Possibly the Guardian has declined in quality since my time."

"It wouldn't surprise me."

Oh no Haru has a smile where have Lucien's words gone.

Oh he's cute. Why is this allowed.

"I. Um."

Lucien can find a thing to say, he has to be capable of at least that.

"You have a face?"

"...yes. I have a face. So do you. We could go put Italian food in our faces but it's not obligatory if you have something else in mind."