by Robin Talley
Everyone moved fast. Lisa gave me the keys to the bus, and Tammy and I gingerly carried the collage over. It took us a few minutes to delicately wrap it back up so it would be ready for her exhibit tomorrow, and when we closed the trunk door and turned around, we were the only ones left outside.
“I’m still shaking,” I said, lowering myself onto the back bumper. “I can’t believe how intense that got.”
She held out her hand, showing me her goose bumps. “I can’t believe we did that. I was so scared when I saw my mom watching.”
“You were incredible. Now it’s going to be in the paper and everything. The whole world will know about your aunt and uncle.”
“I hope they print what you said, too.” She grinned and leaned back next to me. “Especially the part about sacrifice. And the part about love.”
“Right. Love.”
I turned and met Tammy’s eyes. She didn’t look away.
I bit my lip. “I, um. There’s something I want to give you, but it’s in my backpack. In the bus. It’s kind of crumpled up, but I hope you can still read it. Not right now, though. Maybe I can get it for you after the debate and you can read it on the ride home tomorrow.”
She glanced behind us at the bus. “You’ve got to know I want to skip the entire debate and go get it right this second.”
I laughed. “No, don’t. We should get inside.”
“Okay.” She hadn’t looked away from my face once. She hadn’t stopped smiling, either. “If you say so.”
“Yeah. I...” I kept looking back and forth, from her eyes to her lips.
It wasn’t that I wanted to know how it felt to kiss a girl. It was that I wanted to know how it felt to kiss her.
“I...” I blushed again. “I, um...”
Her lips parted. “You what?”
“I...love you.” Oh, God, I said it. I said it, and it felt better than anything else has ever felt. “I’m in love with you.”
The smile that spread across her face felt even better. “I’m in love with you, too.”
Then I kissed her. And I finally understand all those songs I didn’t get before.
This is what people mean when they write songs about love.
This feeling. This perfect, overwhelming knowledge that everything is finally exactly right.
Yours, Sharon
Election Night, 1978
Tuesday, November 7, 1978
Dear Harvey,
Can you believe it???
I can’t! It doesn’t feel real.
I’m back home now writing this, but I was at Sharon’s when we got the news. It was the perfect place to be. Usually I hate having to sneak around, but tonight it was worth it. Being with her when something like this happens is worth a little deception.
“Channel Five hasn’t said anything on Prop 6 yet.” Peter’s voice was hard to make out through the phone line, thanks to all the people talking in the room behind him. The fact that Sharon and I were both trying to listen from the same phone, huddled on the couch with the receiver jammed against our ears, didn’t help, either.
“Switch to Channel Seven,” Sharon told him. She’d refused to let us turn on the election coverage since I got there, partly because her mom was asleep upstairs and we had to be quiet, but probably also because she was nervous. It was easier to hear it secondhand from Peter than straight from the TV. “Don’t bother with Eleven. Mom had it on earlier and they were only talking about the stupid governor’s race.”
While we sat squashed together in Sharon’s living room, her brother, ironically, was at my house, with my roommates and some of his, too. When I’d left the Mission every house had a TV blaring. Every gay and bi person in the entire state of California was in front of a screen right now, collectively biting their nails to shreds.
Well, except Sharon and me. But being with her was better than being in front of a hundred screens.
“We only need to win San Francisco,” I said. It’s the same refrain Evelyn and Lisa keep repeating. I don’t know if Sharon found it comforting—I didn’t—but it was all we had to hold on to. Winning San Francisco would definitely be good, but we’d need the rest of the state to stop Briggs’s initiative from becoming law.
Still, we’d done absolutely everything we could. The bookstore crew had gone on a dozen bus trips to knock on doors, and we’d folded so many pamphlets my paper cuts would probably never fully heal.
Sharon had managed to join us a few more times. Her mother had partially ungrounded her a month after we got back from the debate, but her new curfew was strict, so trips to our part of town were rare. Fortunately, we’ve gone back to writing each other letters every other day, and I’ve gotten good at sneaking in through a window off her kitchen.
But if things work out the way we hope, we might not have to do it much longer. Peter’s coming over to their house for Thanksgiving, and he and Sharon are planning to just start talking about Dean and me during dinner, as though there’s nothing strange about it. Even though she’s been keeping my letters hidden, Sharon has a feeling her mom knows about us, and Peter and Dean, too, but they never talk about it. Sharon and Peter both think it’s time to start. They don’t think she wants to keep fighting. The whole family’s had enough of that for three lifetimes.
Maybe someday it’ll seem normal for all of us to talk about our lives. To live our lives. Maybe next Thanksgiving I can come over and have dinner with them, without having to hide the truth.
But even if her mom does try to stop us, she can’t do it forever. We’ll both be eighteen next year.
“If we can beat Prop 6 here, the rest of the state will follow when it’s ready,” I said when things had been quiet too long, even though we all knew I was only parroting Evelyn again.
“I want to beat Prop 6 everywhere,” Sharon said.
“Don’t we all.” Peter paused through the phone. “Wait—wait, they’re getting ready to say something.”
“What?” Sharon said, way too loud.
“Shush!” I told her.
“Hey, everybody!” Peter called into the room behind him. “Shut up so we can hear!”
“Oh, my God.” I couldn’t handle the tension. “What are they saying? Tell us what they’re—”
“They—wait—They’re saying—” Peter choked on the words.
“WE WON!” someone shouted in the room behind him, loud enough for us to hear. I think it was Alex. “We fucking won!”
“What?” I couldn’t believe it. “Peter, what did it say? We won San Francisco?”
“We won L.A.—we won California!” There were tears in his voice. “Prop 6 is done!”
I started laughing, from shock and from happiness. “Really!?”
“Hell yeah!” Sharon cried. I could hear whoops and cheers coming from the room behind Peter.
Oh, my God, oh, my God, this was real!
“Three to two against!” Peter shouted. “It’s over!”
We did it, Harvey!!!
“Oh, my God!” I dropped the phone, leaped off the couch and started jumping up and down in the middle of the living room carpet. Sharon leaped up and started jumping, too.
“Oh, my gosh! Oh, my gosh!”
“We won, we won, we won!” I grabbed her and spun her in a circle, both of us being way too loud and neither of us caring. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it!”
“Me neither!” Her voice was giddily high. Shrieks were coming from the receiver where we’d dropped it on the couch, but we didn’t bother to pick it up.
“God, remember all those nights when they beat us?” I wrapped my arms tight around her waist, speaking into her ear, trying to keep my voice soft even though I wanted to scream in triumph. “How it always seemed like the end of the world?”
She nodded fervently. “Now here we are!”
“I’m so
happy right now.”
I kissed her. I was smiling so big, my whole body filled with such joy. It was as if we were having our first kiss all over again, outside that high-school gym with Harvey waiting inside.
I pulled back just long enough to say, “I love you so much.” Then I leaned down to kiss her again.
“I need to write you a letter,” she said, the next time we broke apart. “As soon as you leave.”
I laughed. “What are you going to put in a letter that you haven’t already said tonight?”
“A million things. There’s so much going through my head right now, and for the first time, it’s all good.”
I smiled. “Me, too.”
“It’s going to be all right, isn’t it? Things are going to keep getting better.”
“Yeah.” I listened to the tinny cheers and whoops pouring from the phone. I shut my eyes and pictured our friends grinning and celebrating. All that love in one room.
When I opened them, I saw all the love in this room, right here, even though it was only Sharon and me.
“Yeah,” I said again. “Yeah. I think they are.”
Peace, love & hope, Tammy
* * *
Keep reading for an excerpt from Pulp by Robin Talley.
Acknowledgments
“All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”
That’s a translation of a Victor Hugo quote. Harvey Milk copied it out by hand and hung it on his office wall.
After a series of groundbreaking protests in the 1950s and 60s, including at New York’s Stonewall Inn, as well as earlier demonstrations at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco, Cooper Do-nuts in Los Angeles, and other sites, the movement for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning equality was on the cusp of a breakthrough. The time had come. By the mid-70s, you could almost feel it in the air.
Or so I’ve heard. I was a teen of the 1990s, but the collective memory of the ’70s hung heavy in my high-school days, from the fashion to the music to the language. But I was well beyond my teen years when I truly learned about this era and the history of the movement to which I owe so much. Harvey Milk and legions of other activists, including Sally Gearhart, Marsha P. Johnson, Frank Kameny, and countless others put their own lives on the line because they had faith that their work would lead to a better future for the generations that came after them.
I ended Sharon and Tammy’s story on a high note, with the defeat of Proposition 6 in California—a major event in a time when ballot-box victories for the LGBT rights movement were virtually unheard of—but there were many, many ups and downs during this period, just like we’re seeing today. Only weeks after the Prop 6 win, Harvey Milk was assassinated, along with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone. The killer was Dan White, who’d served alongside Milk on the Board of Supervisors. Although White confessed to the crimes and there was plenty of evidence that they were premeditated, he was ultimately convicted of voluntary manslaughter rather than first-degree murder. Riots and violent police raids on the Castro followed the announcement of the verdict.
For all the movement’s successes, it was clear there remained a lot of work to do, and that’s still the case today. Reports of hate crimes against the LGBT community are rising, with transgender women of color at a particularly high risk. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has banned transgender people from serving in the military, and dozens of states continue to allow people to be fired or lose their housing based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. For all the positive changes we’ve seen in the decades since Harvey Milk’s death, we still have so much more to accomplish to ensure that LGBT people and other marginalized communities aren’t subject to violence and discrimination.
The idea for Music from Another World came about as I reflected on this history, particularly in light of the activism we’re seeing around us right now as a new and powerful generation fights back against a frighteningly emboldened conservative movement.
When I started this book, I turned first to researching the activists working during the 1970s against odds that must have truly seemed impossible. I’m very grateful to the journalist Randy Shilts, whose biography of Harvey Milk, The Mayor of Castro Street, was one of my most helpful reference books as I was writing. Thanks also to activist Cleve Jones for his memoir, When We Rise, and to Lisa McGirr, the author of Suburban Warriors, a fascinating account of the conservative movement in Orange County, California.
Thanks, as well, to the readers of early drafts of Music from Another World, including Anna-Marie McLemore, Jennie Kendrick, and Nicole Overton. You helped to improve this book more than I can say. Thank you to my agent, Jim McCarthy, who’s stood by me through queer story after queer story and offered amazing insights every time. Thank you to my editors, T.S. Ferguson and Lauren Smulski, and to Kate Studer, for helping to make this book so much better than its first iteration, and to Kathleen Oudit for designing another truly spectacular cover. And thank you to the rest of the team at HarperCollins who helped to put this book out into the world, including Laura Gianino, Bess Braswell, Connolly Bottum, Brittany Mitchell, John Oberholtzer, and Allison Draper.
Thank you to Patti Smith, whose music went totally over my head when I was in high school but still impressed itself upon me so deeply that when I needed to call on it to create these characters, it was right there. Thank you, too, to the classic rock station in my hometown, which provided me with a musical education that I never imagined would come in handy until I sat down to write this book.
And most of all, thank you, as always, to Julia, and to Darcy. For everything there is to be thankful for.
More books from New York Times bestselling author
Robin Talley
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Pulp
by Robin Talley
1
Friday, September 15, 2017
It took all of Abby’s willpower not to kiss her.
She’d gotten pretty good lately at staring at Linh without making it obvious. Most of the time, at least. Some days were harder than others, though, and today might be the hardest yet.
They’d just gotten back from a Starbucks run, and Abby kept darting looks at Linh out of the corner of her eye. They were sitting only inches apart on the lumpy old couch in the senior lounge, and as Linh sipped her drink and scribbled in her notebook, Abby couldn’t shake the memory of precisely how the echo of iced coffee tasted on Linh’s lips.
She knew she should stop thinking about this. Or at the very least, she should pretend to stop. She and Linh were officially “just friends” now, for reasons Abby was still trying to forget, and she was supposed to be doing her very best to act like that arrangement was perfectly fine with her.
So as she sat next to Linh, her feet tucked under her, Abby really did try to focus on the laptop screen balanced on her knees. Even though it was basically impossible to tear her eyes away from the spot where Linh’s soft brown hair curled into the nape of her perfectly sloped neck.
The senior lounge was nothing special—just a tiny room in a far-off corner of the fourth floor, with a few couches and a dusty TV that had probably last worked in the nineties—and everyone at school except Abby and Linh seemed to have forgotten it existed. Which made it the perfect place for Abby to secretly pine after her ex-girlfriend, since no one else was around to notice and make fun of her for it.
“I can’t believe Mr. Knight already wants my first lab done by Monday.” Linh wrinkled her nose down at her notes. Abby didn’t know if it was good or bad that Linh was so oblivious to her silent yearning. “Don’t the teachers know fall of senior year is supposed t
o be about college applications? We shouldn’t have to start our projects until next semester.”
Abby didn’t want to talk about college applications or senior projects, but she did like it when Linh made that cute wrinkly-nose face. “Yeah, you’re totally right.”
“Do you have something due next week, too? What did you pick for your topic anyway?”
Abby scooted over to peer down at what Linh was writing. It was a blatant and probably pathetic attempt to get close to her, but Linh didn’t seem to mind. She glanced up at Abby with a smile and went back to jotting notes about molecular techniques.
When they were this close, it was so easy to remember how it used to feel. Kissing her. Being encircled in a pair of arms that had no intention of letting her go.
Kissing was Abby’s favorite activity in the entire world. It was pure sensation. When you were kissing someone, all you had to do was follow your instincts. There was no point stopping to worry about what came next.
That was the best part of being in love. The way it set the rest of the world on mute.
“So for real, what are you going to write? Poetry?” Linh finally met her eyes, and Abby blushed. Ugh, as if she wasn’t transparent enough already.
Not that Linh seemed to mind that, either.
“Nah, I’ve decided my poetry sucks.” Abby tried to arrange her face into a casual smile. They were halfway through their free period, and she was determined to get through the rest without giving herself away. “In eighth grade I had to write a love poem for French, and the best I could do was Je t’aime, ma puce, je t’aime tellement.”
Linh took Chinese, not French, so she asked, “What does puce mean?”
“Flea.” They both laughed.
It would be so easy to close the space between them. Last year, that was exactly what Abby would’ve done. Linh would’ve leaned in, too, and they would’ve kissed, and everything would’ve been perfect. No need for pining or pretending.