Bret Ellis—Ryan Vaughn

Bret Ellis—Ryan Vaughn is a secret relationship between two Buckley classmates whose brief intimacy gives Bret a glimpse of a life beyond concealment, then becomes another history of distance and unresolved longing. Ryan’s guardedness is not simply personal hesitation: both boys imagine leaving Los Angeles and beginning again elsewhere, while the school’s social world gives them little room to be open about their desire.

Recognition and Secrecy

Bret and Ryan had known each other since seventh grade, but became close only near the end of junior year, when they began eating lunch together in the Buckley courtyard. Bret had long noticed Ryan’s appearance and reserve; he came to recognize in Ryan a version of himself, a closeted athlete whose outward ease concealed a private difference. Their classmates saw Ryan as a cool, self-contained “bro,” not as someone marginalized, and his athletic masculinity helped keep that private reality unread.

The relationship’s possibility emerged through small, indirect signals rather than an open declaration. Bret recalls a charged glance at a school event and, later, a moment in a car when Ryan showed him a soccer bruise by lowering his shorts. Earlier, when Ryan came to Bret’s house on Mulholland and Bret moved too quickly, Ryan stopped him and said, “I want to … but not just yet … not now.” The refusal was a delay, not a rejection: it made explicit that Ryan shared Bret’s attraction while also setting a boundary around its timing.

Ryan described the discretion their relationship would require as “subterfuge,” treating secrecy almost as a practical game. His family lived in Northridge, in a more conservative and religious environment than many Buckley families. He planned to leave Los Angeles for college, start over, and reinvent himself; Bret understood that plan as his own as well. Their imagined future therefore depended on distance from the present, while their actual closeness had to remain hidden within it.

The September Weekend

In September 1981, Ryan announced that he would spend a weekend at Bret’s house. The plan required little negotiation, and Bret’s remembered excitement marks it as a turning point: after an earlier, brief encounter, they were at last able to be together without rushing. Ryan arrived on Friday evening in his Trans Am with a duffel bag. They spent most of the weekend at the house, with only a trip to the Beverly Glen Centre for beer and steaks, and organized their time around being together.

The weekend’s intimacy felt different to Bret from his past experience with Matt Kellner. He describes the connection with Ryan as mutual and unhurried, with neither boy confined to a fixed role and both attentive to giving the other pleasure. For Bret, its importance lay not in a promise of romance or a settled future but in the absence of the anxiety and role-playing that had shaped other encounters. He later remembers the weekend as a rare, uncomplicated interval, a last stretch of intimacy he could imagine as untainted by what followed.

Their time together also contained ordinary, specific details that made it feel like a shared life, however briefly: football on television, music by Bob Seger and Bruce Springsteen, and a viewing of Flash Gordon on the Z Channel. Bret ignored calls from Susan Reynolds and his mother; Debbie Schaffer briefly worried when he said he was not feeling well. These interruptions underline how deliberately private the weekend was, set apart from the classmates and obligations who otherwise filled their days.

Unequal Aftermath

The weekend ended without a conversation about what it meant. After their final encounter, Ryan went to sleep beside Bret, then left early the next morning before the housekeeper arrived. Bret woke at seven-thirty to find the other side of the bed empty. Ryan had not woken him or said goodbye, and Bret took that departure as the first indication that the relationship did not carry equal emotional weight. He later recognized that he might not have affected Ryan as deeply as Ryan had affected him.

At school, the contrast between private intimacy and public distance grew sharper. Bret suspected Ryan was wary of being watched, interpreting his fixed smiles and blankness around the lockers as anxiety that someone might read their interactions as evidence. Yet Ryan continued to come to Bret’s house after school, where they could be alone. Their private meetings continued even as Ryan stopped joining Bret at lunch and instead sat with other classmates. Secrecy allowed the relationship to persist physically, but it also divided their shared life into a hidden space and a public one.

Their conversations remained oblique, even when they acknowledged their desire. When Bret asked Ryan about the Trawler and the discovery of Julie Selwyn, Ryan said he did not know what Bret meant; their exchanged glance returned them to their private connection, and Ryan said he wanted to come over again. Their intimacy occupied the same school days in which other students treated the killings as distant news. The parallel reveals the narrowness of the world the boys were trying to protect: their urgent private concerns coexisted with a broader crisis they struggled to address together.

Distance and Memory

Ryan’s reserve also included resentment about Buckley’s class hierarchy. During the weekend, he called Thom Wright a rich, clueless “wuss,” and Bret understood that Ryan’s lower-middle-class background and summer jobs set him apart from the wealthy families around them. Bret had tended to see Ryan chiefly through his beauty and desirability; Ryan’s remarks forced him to glimpse a more complicated person, whose distance from his classmates carried its own grievances. This did not resolve the divide between them, but made clear that Bret’s attraction had not given him complete knowledge of Ryan.

The relationship receded during their senior year. Bret later recalled that Ryan barely spoke to him for the rest of the school year. At graduation in June 1982, they unexpectedly encountered each other in the boys’ bathroom at the Pavilion, both still wearing red robes and mortarboards. Bret began to address him, but Ryan cut the moment short with “See ya!” and their familiar What’s up? face. The shared gesture preserved a trace of their old complicity while avoiding any attempt to recover it.

Decades later, Bret still wondered whether they might have made a life together after Buckley, in New York, Vermont, or San Francisco. In 2018, Tracy Goldman told him she had heard Ryan was an architect living with a partner in San Francisco. The news wounded Bret despite the nearly forty years since their brief relationship. Its force lay in the future it implied: Ryan had eventually built a life far from the school and city where he had once needed secrecy, while Bret was left with an unanswered question about what they might have become. In Bret’s later recollection, the relationship’s defining pattern is the mismatch between a brief period of intense closeness and the long, unfinished life of its memory.

Narrative Significance

The relationship places queer desire against the expected timetable of high-school life: Buckley’s social order, senior-year plans, and the approach of graduation all point toward public, conventional futures, while Bret and Ryan can imagine freedom only after leaving. Their shared plan to escape and reinvent themselves gives the relationship a horizon, but not a durable promise. The weekend offers a temporary present in place of that distant future; Ryan’s departure and later withdrawal expose how little such a present can guarantee.

Bret’s later account also complicates the idea that intimacy necessarily produces mutual understanding. He first reads Ryan’s beauty and guardedness as signs of an erotic possibility; only gradually does he register Ryan’s class resentment, caution, and independent plans. Their encounter matters intensely to Bret without becoming an enduring partnership, and Ryan’s eventual life remains known to him only through another person’s report. The relation thus survives most fully as an asymmetry: a shared secret for a short time, a separation through the rest of senior year, and a memory Bret continues to measure against the life they did not share.