by Robin Talley
It’s all so ridiculous, Harvey. I’m not sure I even believe in Hell. I don’t believe in God, so I guess there’s no point buying in to the rest of it.
Wow—I just wrote those words. Here, in a church. With my whole family and everyone else I know sitting a few feet away. I’m covering the paper with my arm, of course, but I’m still shaking so hard.
I’m terrified, Harvey. It’s not that I’m scared about someone finding these letters to you...although if that happened, it would be the end of my life as I know it. More than that, though, I’m afraid they’ll see what’s inside my head.
I think Aunt Mandy already has. You probably think I’m joking, but I’m not. She can see right through people.
But I bet she couldn’t see through you. How could she? You don’t hide anything. You are who you are, and you don’t care if other people don’t like it.
I don’t know how you do that, Harvey.
I’ve read every article I could get my hands on about you. Well, I read anything I can find about homosexuals, but I love it when they quote you most of all. You’re always talking about how everyone deserves to have hope. I’ve never heard anyone say that before.
Do you have a volunteer campaign office full of people working against Anita Bryant? Do you and your friends put together mailings, too?
Maybe I can pretend that’s what I’m doing next time I’m folding up the letters from my aunt. Maybe that way I can keep going without feeling like I’m about to puke.
Sometimes I can’t believe you’re real, Harvey. You’re like something out of a fairy tale. A gay man, reviled by most of society, managing to rise above. When everyone I know hates your guts.
I despise living in Orange County, Harvey. So much. If Aunt Mandy knew I was writing to you, she’d probably tie me to a chair and bring in my whole family to pray the gay out of me.
Fuck, I’m about to cry. Maybe if I hide this notebook and go blow up some balloons that’ll keep my tear ducts occupied.
More later.
Peace, Tammy
Wednesday, June 8, 1977
Dear Diary,
Well, it’s still Tuesday night—technically Wednesday morning, I guess—but I can’t sleep, so here I am, writing again. As long as I’m awake, I might as well tell you what happened tonight after my brother and I left our neighborhood.
We parked on Liberty Street, a few blocks from Castro. It was dark out, but the streets up there were far from deserted. Our neighborhood might as well have been a million miles away instead of a twenty-minute drive.
“Is something going on?” I tugged my sleeves down over my hands as Peter and I climbed out of the car. The sidewalk was crowded with people, most of them youngish men, talking and moving fast. Everyone was heading north, and as we got closer to Castro, we could hear shouting ahead. Car horns kept honking, too. In the din, I couldn’t understand what all the voices were saying. “I mean, besides this Miami vote?”
“Nah, I bet this is all Anita.” Peter stretched up onto his toes, the leather in his boots flexing as he tried to see up to the next block. The area around Castro Street used to be just another Irish-Catholic neighborhood, but according to the news, it’s been completely taken over by gay people. The nuns at school are always saying the city’s on the brink of moral ruin, and it all starts with Castro Street.
“How do you know?” I asked, but I got my answer before my brother could say any more.
“GAY RIGHTS NOW!” A guy in a flannel shirt jogged past us, pumping his fist and shouting. Another guy next to him joined in.
Neither of the guys looked much older than Peter and me, and one of them had kind of long hair. I wondered if they were both gay, or if one of them was only there to support his friend, the way I was there to support Peter.
Then I saw the cardboard sign the shorter-haired guy was holding. The thick black letters were crooked and haphazard, as though he’d just made the sign minutes before with a marker he’d found lying in a drawer. It said WE ARE YOUR CHILDREN.
Peter tugged my sleeve, silently motioning for us to follow them. I sped up to a trot, turning the words over in my head.
We are your children. Of all the things to write on a sign, he picked that.
The year before last, down by the St. Francis Hotel, a man knocked a gun out of a woman’s hand when she was trying to shoot the president. When the newspapers printed that the big hero who’d stopped the assassination attempt was gay, his parents disowned him. He sued the papers for ruining his life.
Did the people here seriously think someone like Anita Bryant would do anything differently from that man’s parents if one of her kids turned out to be gay?
“Come on, Shar.” Peter tugged my sleeve again. He was actually smiling. I hadn’t thought there was any chance I’d see my brother smile tonight. “We don’t want to miss it.”
“Miss what?”
“Whatever it is!”
He started moving faster, into the crowd of men. A bunch of them were carrying signs now.
I followed, my heart pounding. I’d thought we were only coming to look around. I didn’t know something would be happening here, much less something involving signs and running and chanting.
It reminded me of the peace protests, when the hippies were on TV every night singing about the war. Our teachers always warned us to stay away from demonstrations, because you never knew when rocks or bullets would start flying. I’ve never heard of gay people protesting, though.
I only found out about Peter the summer before last. He’d gone away to some wilderness camp in Nevada, a present from our dad’s parents, who have this tendency to go radio-silent for months at a time, then pop up to insist on paying for things we weren’t planning on buying in the first place. Peter came back from that camp smiling bigger than I’d ever seen him smile, but he wouldn’t say why. I pestered him about it for weeks, until one night when Mom was at a church meeting and he finally said he’d tell me. We hid in my room under a blanket fort the way we used to in kindergarten, and he quietly said that over the summer, he’d fallen in love.
I didn’t see how that was possible. As far as I knew, “falling in love” wasn’t any different from the made-up stories we learned in nursery school about Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty.
Our mom and dad certainly never fell in love. Or if they did, it didn’t do them any good.
Besides, Kevin’s camp was all boys. Had he gotten a crush on a counselor’s sister or something?
Finally, his smile wavering a little, Peter told me he was in love with a boy named Curtis. He said he hoped I could accept that.
Well, to be honest, I couldn’t.
I’d known homosexuals existed. You can’t live in San Francisco without knowing that. But it had never occurred to me my own brother could be one of them.
The brother I’d shared a room with for nine years. The brother who’d taught me how to roller-skate and cheat at Candyland. Who made fart noises at the dinner table and hugged me when Dad forgot to send a birthday card.
I didn’t speak to Peter for a week. He’d begged me not to say anything to Mom, but I kept thinking I ought to tell someone. At school, they’d told us homosexuality was a curse, so I thought maybe Mom or Father Murphy could help him be normal again.
In the end, I didn’t say anything. I wanted to help Peter, but I was scared of hurting him, too. The longer I thought about it, the more confused I got about how to tell the difference.
Then one day, I came home from school and found him at the kitchen table, still in his St. John’s blazer. He was bent over a sheet of paper, so intent on what he was writing that he hadn’t heard me come in. He had a smile on his face, a wide, open grin that made his eyes light up as his pen flew across the page. I couldn’t remember ever seeing my brother look that happy.
Then I noticed the envelope on the table next to him. It was
addressed to Curtis. Peter was writing to the boy from camp.
I’d always thought being gay was wrong, when I thought about it at all. But if this Curtis boy could make my brother smile that way...well, I didn’t see how that could be a bad thing, whether or not it matched up with what my teachers said.
“Okay,” I’d said. He looked up with wide eyes to see me standing there. “I’ll keep your secret. You know, about the, um...that. And... I think I might be able to get used to the idea.”
His eyes crinkled at the corners. “Thanks, sister dear. I wasn’t exactly asking for your permission, but it’s nice of you to say so all the same.”
He got up from the table, crossed the kitchen, and gave me a hug. Even though we aren’t the kind of family that hugs much.
Tonight, though, I couldn’t make sense of what was happening. Having a homosexual brother was one thing, but being surrounded by homosexuals in the middle of the street was something else. I’d thought gay people usually didn’t want anyone to know they were gay, but the men around me didn’t look as if they were hiding anything. Weren’t they worried about who might see them carrying these signs? And why were so many of them even there?
“Why are they protesting something that happened in Miami?” I asked. “How many thousands of miles away is that?”
“Doesn’t matter.” Peter kept swiveling his head around, as though he was trying to see everything at once. The chants were getting louder, and he had to raise his voice so I could hear him. “It’s only a matter of time before it happens here.”
“Wait, you mean Anita Bryant’s coming to California?”
“Probably. She and her friends aren’t going to stop now that they’ve won.”
“You think so? Oh, my gosh.” When I turned to him, though, instead of looking worried, my brother was laughing. At me.
I groaned. “What’s so funny?”
“You always sound about nine years old when you say that. ‘Oh, my gosh.’” He did a high-pitched trill on the words.
“Shut up. That’s not what I sound like at all.”
“Hey, do you hear that?” Peter cocked his head.
The crowd was getting louder, the sounds of the protest drifting over the stores and houses in front of us. Whistles, and shouts, and a faint rhythmic sound that might’ve been drumming poured in from the next block.
“How many people are up there?” I asked.
“Hundreds?” Peter shrugged. “Thousands?”
Thousands? Of gay people?
He practically dragged me past the restaurants and bars that lined the block. People were spilling out onto the sidewalk, thickening the crowd around us even more. The street was full of honking horns. Drivers leaned out the windows, shouting for everyone to stop clogging the street.
We turned another corner, past an intersection jammed with traffic, and suddenly we were in the middle of a sea of people like nothing I’d ever seen. A wall of fast-moving bodies, all marching north, a fierce energy thrumming through the group.
Before I understood what was happening, Peter and I were swept up in it. We didn’t have a choice—it was march or be trampled.
My brother had already started shouting along with everybody else. “TWO, FOUR, SIX, EIGHT! SEPARATE THE CHURCH AND STATE!”
“FUCK YOU, ANITA!” a man shouted up ahead. Others shouted in agreement, a few of them banging on drums that hung around their necks. One of the men held up a sign with painted letters that read SAVE OUR HUMAN RIGHTS. Behind him, a cop on a motorcycle was trying to cut into the crowd, but the marchers kept going while the cop just watched, revving his engine. A few of the men glanced warily at the officer. As far as I know it’s still illegal to be gay, but he didn’t seem to be arresting anyone.
A lot of the men in the crowd had long hair, and some of them were wearing earrings or leather jackets. I didn’t see anyone who looked quite as young as Peter and me, but there were a few who didn’t look that much older. College students, maybe.
It was dizzying. Everywhere I turned, there were more men, and when I twisted around to look behind us, I even saw a couple of girls. Lesbians, maybe, but I didn’t know how to tell. The news reporters only ever talk about gay men, but the girls I saw in the crowd tonight were chanting along with everyone else. Most of them had short hair, and two of them were riding along the edges of the crowd on motorcycles, gunning their engines even louder than the cops. I would’ve thought the sight of a girl on a motorcycle would be strange, but it was actually kind of cool.
“GAY RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS!” the girls chanted along with the rest of the crowd. “GAY RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS!”
When I glanced back at my brother, his eyes were alight, his smile wide. I wondered how it felt to be surrounded by people like him. Even for me, it was exhilarating. There were so many of us gathered, it felt like we could do anything. And the chanting crowd, the anger in the air... It was cool to be so surrounded by all that energy. All that ferocity and strength.
“It’s him!” Peter was grinning, jumping up on his toes to look over the crowd. “It’s Harvey!”
I strained to see until the guy in front of me stepped aside and I could glimpse the cluster of men at the front of the march. One man, taller than the others, was carrying a bullhorn, and as the crowd parted, he turned around.
Peter was right—I recognized him right away. Harvey Milk. His picture’s always in the newspaper about something or other.
“CIVIL RIGHTS OR CIVIL WAR!” Mr. Milk called into his bullhorn.
The crowd picked up the chant immediately. “GAY RIGHTS NOW!”
When I glanced at my brother again, he was absolutely beaming.
An hour earlier, he’d been sitting alone in the shadows outside a darkened grocery store. Now he was surrounded by people, grinning wider than he ever had.
I’ve never fit. Not at school. Not at church. Not anywhere, really.
But my brother fit here. Maybe I did, too.
The charge in the air, the power in all these voices... Maybe I’d finally found my place.
Up ahead, Mr. Milk changed the chant and this time, I joined in.
“WE’VE GOT THE POWER TO...FIGHT BACK!” I shouted, my voice ringing out into the crowd. “WE’VE GOT THE POWER TO...FIGHT BACK!”
An engine revved behind me, and I twisted around. A motorcycle zoomed past us with two girls sharing the seat. The girl in back had her arms wrapped around the other one’s waist. I couldn’t tell if it was because she was afraid of falling off or because they were lesbians. I guess it could’ve been both.
The chant changed again. “ANITA! YOU LIAR! WE’LL SET YOUR HAIR ON FIRE!”
Anita Bryant’s been on TV since I was a kid, selling orange juice and tissues and macaroni and cheese, singing and smiling and filling up the otherwise-silent living room while Mom and Peter and I sat on the couch waiting for M*A*S*H to come back on.
But now, her followers want to hurt my brother. They want to hurt those girls on the motorcycle, too, and Mr. Milk with his bullhorn, and all the people here chanting with us.
And I want to hurt them back.
“CIVIL RIGHTS OR CIVIL WAR! GAY RIGHTS NOW!”
I pumped my fist with Peter and the others, shutting my eyes and relishing the motion.
We marched for hours, past City Hall and up to Nob Hill. We wound up at Union Square, miles north of where we’d left Peter’s car, surrounded by thousands of people, all of us chanting on long after our voices had started to give out. Mr. Milk gave a speech about seizing our power and standing up to Anita and all the people like her, and even though it was the middle of the night, I felt more awake than I could ever remember feeling.
We had to make it home before Mom noticed we were gone, so with the chants echoing in our ears, Peter and I walked down to Market and hitched a ride back to the car. Mom was asleep when we slunk in—there w
as no movement from behind her door, anyway—and Peter and I crept straight to our rooms, our clothes smelling of smoke and exhaust and all the other smells you bring home from downtown in the middle of the night.
It’s strange. I never noticed how quiet it is here. There’s the occasional siren from a faraway street, some birds chirping, the sound of that tree scraping against Peter’s window through the wall.
Still, I can almost hear my heart beating. And I can hear the shouts ringing in my ears, too.
I don’t want to fall asleep. I’m scared I’ll forget this feeling, and I want to remember it forever.
Yours, Sharon
Wednesday, June 8, 1977
Dear Harvey,
Have you ever tried blowing up a dozen balloons in a row?
It’s terrible. I don’t think there’s any breath left in my body.
Either way, I’m home now. It’s the middle of the night, but I can’t sleep. Whenever I close my eyes I’m back in that fucking basement, blowing up balloons with the rest of the youth group while our parents sit on the couches behind us drinking Dixie cups full of grape juice from the communion stash. My cousin Eddie and the other little kids kept trying to grab the balloons out of our hands so they’d fly around the room making fart noises.
Through it all, Uncle Russell was praying at the top of his lungs while Aunt Mandy called more reporters. She sounded so happy, I’m surprised she wasn’t fucking floating.
There are few things that terrify me more than my aunt being happy, Harvey.