The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016

by Karen Joy Fowler

  I used to think that faggots were poor creatures who couldn’t help their perversion. I’ve changed my mind about that. Now I know for a fact they’re born of hellfire and bent on burning us all up. And that we ought to put them all on a big boat, put it out to sea, and torpedo the son of a bitch.

  Shelly Bronsky, bookstore owner

  I was a waitress then, at the Stonewall, although “waitress” is a stretch. We picked up glasses and gave them to the bartenders, and we kept the cigar boxes full of money—no cash register, ever, or the cops would take it away during a raid as evidence that we were selling liquor without a license, as opposed to holding a private party, which is what the mob lawyers would argue to get the case against the building owner thrown out. We mopped up the toilets when they overflowed, which was always. At the end of every night, we’d go through the garbage of the neighboring bars and steal empty bottles of top-shelf liquor, so the next night when the mob guys came through, they could fill them up with their own shitty diluted bootleg stuff.

  Sergeant Abraham Asher, NYPD 6th Precinct police chief

  I hated the raids. We had to do them, because you can’t just let filth and sickness fester in your city, but going into those places made my officers really lose their shit.

  By midnight we were in position around the corner, thirty cops, waiting for the signal from the undercovers we’d sent inside. That was standard for a raid—undercovers went in early, always women, to finger the people who worked there, because those were more serious charges. The Stonewall had a big heavy door with wooden reinforcements, so every time we raided the place, it would take us six or seven minutes to break it down and get inside, and in that time the workers would drop everything and blend in with the crowd. Once we were in, it’d be like no one worked there.

  But that night, it was weird. We kept waiting and our girls inside did not come out, and I tried to radio headquarters and couldn’t get through. So we got pretty antsy pretty fast.

  Tricksie Barron, unemployed

  You got to talk to somebody else for that. I was there, but I was so drunk that night that we might have called up a bunch of flying monkeys to burn it down. All I remember is, I met the man of my dreams that night. I meet him most nights, but this one was extra special. Complimented my dress and everything. While we were dancing, he grabbed me by the ass, pulled me close, and said, “I like a girl who’s packing more heat than me.”

  Craig Perry, university administration employee

  It was a rough night for the older queens. Men wept like babies for Judy. I stood in their midst, baffled. What was wrong with them, these fools, these people, my people, dancing like all was well in the world? I wanted to grab them, shake them, fill them up with the rage that choked me.

  A lot of them were men I’d been seeing there for the longest. Many had lost everything over the years, for being who they were, for living in the world they lived in. But they were too beaten down to ever fight back. Less than a month before, when I tried to organize a campaign against the New York Times for its policy of publishing the names of men arrested in vice raids—lists that invariably got everyone on them fired or divorced or sometimes institutionalized and lobotomized against their will—not a one of them wanted to do a damn thing.

  Judy Garland got played again and again, sparking fresh tears and howls each time a song started. A bunch of women I had never seen before, who looked like they wandered into the wrong bar by mistake, joined in on a sing-along to the fifth straight time someone played “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Now I know they must have been the undercovers, but then I just thought they were confused tourists.

  I watched them dance, the poorest of our poor, the kids who got beaten and thrown out and sometimes way worse. Smokey Robinson said, Take a gooood look at my face, and they all sang along, even the boy with the scar across his face shaped like the iron his mother burned him with.

  Again I thought about the twins at the gym, men of steel or stone, their bodies as perfect as the bond between them. I had never known any bond remotely like that. I was forty that summer, and I had come to believe that loneliness was an essential and ineluctable aspect of gay identity, or at least my own.

  Diana Ross came on the radio. We danced, and we sang, I hear a symphony, and we were the symphony, for as long as the song lasted.

  Annabelle Kowalski, stenographer

  Judy who? Child, please. Don’t you let the gay boys hoodwink you. Sure, some old queens were crying in their beer to “Over the Rainbow” that night, but divas die every day and nobody bursts into flames. That shit happened because we made it happen.

  The raid itself came at one in the morning. I was in bed already. I lived a block and a half away. I heard the screams and shouts. I went to the window and saw two young black men, laughing, running. I hollered down, asked what was happening.

  “Riot at the Stonewall!” they shouted. “Us faggots is fighting back!”

  And I don’t know how, but I knew this was my story. My chance. I pulled a jacket on over my bedclothes and ran.

  —Jenny Trent, Editor (formerly of the New York Times)

  Ben Lazzarra, NYPD beat cop

  What you need to know is that I was always scared when I did stuff like that. Meeting men in darkness under the West Side Highway, accepting hurried blowjobs on late-night subway platforms, entering the Stonewall, I always expected the worst. It’s ridiculous, but I wished Quentin could have been there. I never felt whole or safe without him. But of course he couldn’t be.

  We were dancing, all of us, packed together in that shitty room, hot and sweaty and happy. And for once, I wasn’t scared. For once, I felt good and happy about who and where I was. We were safe there, from the cops and the mob and all the other bad men, safe in the heat our bodies made together.

  I don’t know what was different. I never liked dancing before. For me, like for a lot of the Stonewall boys, dancing was what you did to figure out who you were going home with. But what I felt that night was a lot like what I had always felt at the gym, the same sense of power and energy, except without the constant shame and terror that I always felt around Quentin. The fear that he’d see me staring at some boy’s backside, or spot some infinitesimal fraction of an erection, and Know Everything.

  What I felt that night was joy. There is no other word for it.

  This, I kept thinking. This is sacred. This is joy.

  My twin brother and I added up to something, together. Quentin made me feel love, power, and safety, but never joy. We were locked into each other, a closed loop that gave us much but took away more.

  People have told me that maybe if I had been honest with him, things would have gone down differently. I’d still have him. They’re right, of course, every time. And every time, I want to punch them in the face until my fist comes out the other side.

  Craig Perry, university administration employee

  The frenzy was on me by then, and I was dancing like I might die when I stopped.

  I danced up on a short built sparkplug of a man with his back to me. The shape of his ass assured me he’d be a prime catch.

  That’s when the house lights came up, blindingly bright and white, flickering like a theater warning us intermission was ending. I’d been caught up in a raid before. Taken to the precinct along with twenty other guys, and one of them got so scared because his name would be in the paper and his parents would find out and disown him, he jumped out the second-story window—and got impaled on the points of a wrought-iron fence. Took them six hours to get him off of there, with blowtorches and everything, and when they brought him to St. Vincent’s, he still had spikes of iron in him. He survived, but he wished he hadn’t.

  So a lot of us knew what to expect when the Stonewall gave the signal. A lot of us screamed, high theatrical exaggerated wails, and laughed, and faked swooning, and to be honest I heard myself laugh. Kind of a crazy laugh, though, because I could finally feel the sadness start to ebb out of my rage. I didn’t want to r
un. I wanted to fucking kill somebody.

  The sparkplug, on the other hand, wasn’t laughing.

  “Fuck,” he said, looking around in a panic, looking for another way out. Of course there wasn’t one, because the fucking Stonewall was a death trap with no fire exit. He turned around. I saw his face.

  “Hi,” I said, absurdly, cheerfully, finding room in my rage for more laughter, because it was the bearded one of the twins from the gym.

  Ben Lazzarra, NYPD beat cop

  Nobody told me that the flashing white lights meant a raid. I thought there was a fire, or somebody won a raffle I didn’t know about. It took me a while to pick up what was happening from what people were saying around me.

  “What do we do?” I said, to Craig, except he wasn’t Craig then, he was just the weirdly friendly black dude standing behind me.

  “We wait, and keep our fingers crossed they don’t take anybody in.”

  But I knew they’d be taking us in. An unscheduled raid, less than a week after the last one, meant this was more than just the shake-up each precinct was obliged to give from time to time. And for a minute I was fine. Relieved, even. When the worst thing you can possibly imagine happens, you’re free from the fear of it for the rest of your life.

  But sometimes the worst thing you can imagine isn’t the worst thing that can happen.

  “Everybody up against the walls,” said a loud scary cop voice, and then repeated it, and the second time I knew who was speaking.

  Quentin led the brigade into the back room, two rows of cops, each with a dozen sets of handcuffs at the ready. The dance floor emptied out, but I couldn’t move. He stopped, five feet from me, snarling with rage at having to repeat himself, because someone had not immediately obeyed. And then he saw who it was.

  “Benjy?” he said. His face, that perfect cop blank slate, cracked under the weight of what he was seeing. His twin brother, the man whose side he’d hardly ever left, the man with whom he’d joined the police force and struggled valiantly to fight the forces of evil, who now stood before him in a sweaty tight T-shirt in a den of iniquity, had been keeping from him a secret so terrifying that it threatened to strip the flesh from both our bones. The man who he knew better than anyone, he had not known at all.

  Some lady with a gruff voice beside me hissed, “Oh, hell no.”

  Quentin said my name again, no question mark now, and that was the last word he ever said.

  Shelly Bronsky, bookstore owner

  Those gay boys parted like the Red Sea for the boys in blue. The cops marched in and men fell over themselves, running for the walls. One guy didn’t, and that’s what gave me the courage to pry myself free from the crowd and step forward. The scary-mustache cop who led the brigade stopped short, not five feet from me, and I saw something like fear come over his face.

  “Oh, hell no,” I hissed.

  Someone behind me yelled, “Yeah!”

  Some black gay protest queen, who I’d been seeing around since forever, stepped forward to join the two of us. “Hell no!”

  The shouts spread. Oh no, honey, no, you won’t, and Ain’t you got no real criminals to arrest. I thought of the beautiful boy I knew from school, whose father pressed his face to the burner on the stove to make the men leave him alone, and the cigarette burns on my own upper arm where my mother tried to burn the lez out of me. We’d been swallowing fire for so long, fire and violence and hate, and in that moment of panic and fear and anger everything fell into place to feed the fire back.

  And that’s what we did.

  Sergeant Abraham Asher, NYPD 6th Precinct police chief

  I was born and bred in the Bronx, but I went to fight in Europe during World War Two. As a Jew, I felt I had to play my part in ridding the world of the fascist menace. Later on I’d join the police force for the same reason, because I felt it was my duty to make my city safe.

  In the war I saw some rough things, went on some scary missions. And I’ve never in my life been more frightened than I was in that fag bar.

  I’ll tell you what I’ve told everyone else: It was too dark and too full of screaming and the smell of cooked flesh for me to say one way or another whether a wave of devil fire really shot out of nowhere to murder my men. If some of our boys who survived said that’s what happened, I’m not going to call them liars.

  Accounts of the uprising have been unsurprisingly whitewashed. All the major news outlets have blocked any mention of multipsionics—or whatever you want to call it. My own articles have been rejected by dozens of papers and magazines because I’ve refused to take out what they call “supernatural elements.” Time, for example, is the least biased of the bunch, and their most enlightened pronouncement on the subject of sexual difference is that “homosexuality is a serious and sometimes crippling maladjustment.”

  Responsible parties have conducted exhaustive experiments. They won’t talk about them publicly, but through my connections to the Stonewall veterans, I know that almost everyone who has gone on record about that night has subsequently been approached to participate in studies by the U.S. government, foreign governments, defense contractors, pharmaceutical companies, and leading organized crime families.

  While the phenomenon has since been observed in hundreds of minor and major incidents, it simply refuses to submit to science. Studying individuals or groups, with or without duress, in labs or on the street or in the still-smoldering remains of the Stonewall itself, no one has been able to replicate those events, not so much as the lighting of a lone candle on a birthday cake.

  —Jenny Trent, Editor (formerly of the New York Times)

  Ben Lazzarra, NYPD beat cop

  Fire sparked in the air all around us. It hung there like the burning of invisible torches, and then it spread, like fire does. It moved, writhed, twisted into a ring, surrounded the three cops that had led the battalion into the back room. Three that included my brother Quentin. The flames rushed in, fast as floodwater when a levee breaks, and incinerated them.

  The rest of those cops ran. Fifteen of them, but the door from the back to the front rooms only let them out one at a time, and the anger of my fellow queers was quicker and smarter. Somehow, so swiftly, they had learned to control the flames. Without saying a word, the crowd turned its full rage on them—and the fire lashed out with such white-hot hunger that ten men simply vanished from this planet. Flame broke them down into the atoms they were made from, and carved a huge hole in the stone wall between the front and back rooms, too.

  Everyone was screaming and yelling by then, rushing out into the street after the rest of the cops. Streaks of fire zinged and whooshed through the air around them. They left me alone with the charred heap of my brother.

  Tyrell James, security specialist

  I was there. I felt it. I know what we did. And I’ve been going all over the world, training people who’ve been pushed too far for too long, telling them how to fight back when the moment comes when their backs are up against the wall. And one day very soon, the people who like to push other people around are going to wake up and find out everything’s changed.

  Sergeant Abraham Asher, NYPD 6th Precinct police chief

  I find it offensive, what those people are saying. They expect you to believe all you’ve got to do is get a bunch of people together who are mad and scared and then fire will rain down on the evildoers? So, the Jews who went to the gas chambers weren’t scared enough? The slaves weren’t mad? It’s a bunch of manure, if you ask me.

  I’ll tell you this much. Cops are a pretty cynical bunch, and we don’t buy ghost stories. But there isn’t a man or woman of the 20,000 on the force that doesn’t know in our guts that something really real and really scary happened that night. Finding a couple fairies in a park and ticketing them for disorderly conduct used to be an easy count toward your quota, but to this day most officers will think twice before they do it. And we don’t ever raid gay bars.

  Craig Perry, university administration employee

  I
t’s not that no one in the whole history of human oppression was as pissed off and fucked over as we were that night—I think it’s happened lots of times, except we’re reading history the wrong way. We read it the way The Man wrote it, and when he was writing it, I bet he didn’t know what to do with multipsionics. But I’ve studied this shit. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising happened on Passover, after all, and the Haitian Revolution began with a spontaneous uprising at a vodoun religious ceremony. When people come together to celebrate, that’s when they’re unstoppable.

  Ben Lazzarra, NYPD beat cop

  People say the world changed for us that night, but I’m not sure I buy it. The world is the same, only more so. People still hate and fear us, they just hate and fear us more. People still bash and kill and lobotomize us, they just do it more. And we still know in our hearts, under the shame and self-loathing and all the other shit society has heaped on us, that we were born blessed by God with an incredible gift.

  I’ve steered clear of all the scientists and scholars and reporters trying to turn that night into a research paper, but there’s one thing I do know. It was us. The heat of us, of all those bodies full of joy and sadness and anger and lust, and the combination of the three of us: Me and Craig and that dyke. I can’t explain it, that’s just what I felt in that moment. We were the match and the sandpaper, coming together. All I know is it was us.

  Craig Perry, university administration employee

  We all went a little mad that night. Nobody knew what the hell had happened, but we knew nothing would be the same again. People danced and whooped and hollered and laughed. Three men skipped into the distance with their arms locked, singing, We’re off to see the wizard.