Chapter 5 #3
Amy laughed. “God’s not real. And even if He is, why would He give a shit about me having a girlfriend?
It doesn’t make any sense! The Bible isn’t His thoughts, His words.
Every single line in the Good Book is man-made.
Interpretations passed down through generations like the world’s worst game of telephone.
And,” she added, “queer people existed long before the Bible ever did. I mean, come on. There are queer whales! Queer lions! Surely, they’re part of God’s Plan, so why do they bone each other and we’re not allowed? ”
“Succinct as usual,” Becca said.
“What happened with your father?” Don asked.
Amy looked away, jaw tense. “He found us again. A few months later, right after my fifteenth birthday. He threatened to send me away to a camp. Not the kind with crafts and swimming in a lake. The conversion kind. The worst kind. They still exist in Texas. Other places, too. You know what they do in places like those?”
Rodney nodded. “We’ve heard stories.”
“We ran,” Becca said. “Right then and there. Got on a bus and headed north. They tried to look for us, but we stayed one step ahead of them. Rough few years. Slept in the car a lot. Stayed in shelters. Found ourselves in Maryland. Got a shitty room to sublet. Got jobs. Our GEDs.”
“A good life,” Amy said. “The best life. God, do you remember that room? No hot water. No air-conditioning. A tiny window that only opened a crack. But it was ours. I loved it so much. I put up decorations. Plants. Rainbow flags. Little pillows I got from Goodwill to put on the bed to make it look fancy.”
“You did a great job,” Becca told her, kissing the side of her head. “I loved that home.”
“Did you ever see your parents again?” Don asked.
“Once,” Amy said. “Right after my twenty-first birthday. I was working as a waitress at a nice restaurant. Good tips. I liked it. One night, the hostess told me people had requested to be seated in my section. It was my dad, and other people from the church.”
“She didn’t tell me about it until she got home,” Becca said, glaring at the fire. “I wasn’t very happy about that, but I got over it because Amy can handle herself.”
“I can,” she said with a sniff. “And I did. I went over to them, and it felt like I was floating through a dream. As soon as my dad saw me, he grabbed my arm and said he was going to take me home. So I did the best thing I could.”
“Which was?” Rodney asked.
“I screamed that a man was touching me without my permission,” Amy said.
“I screamed at him to let me go, that a stranger was trying to hurt me. I’d been there for almost a year.
I’d made friends, especially with the guys in the kitchen.
They loved me. I loved them. They treated me like I was one of the boys.
So when they heard me screaming, they all came running out.
He tried to say that he was my dad, that he was entitled to do with me whatever he wanted.
So I lied. I said I’d never seen this man before in my life.
It wasn’t the first lie I’d told, or the last. But it was the one that made me feel the most powerful.
There was nothing he could do to prove anything.
They forced him out and I never saw him again.
He did send a letter to the restaurant, a few months later.
I didn’t read it. Instead, I took a lighter from one of the cooks and burned it in the parking lot.
Maybe it was him apologizing. Maybe it was him telling me that he’d been wrong all my life, and that he wanted nothing more than to love me like a father should.
” She shook her head. “I didn’t need to read it to know it’d be filled with scripture and quotes about ungrateful children and returning to the light.
But even if it had been conciliatory, fuck him.
Fuck him and his God that teaches hate and bigotry, all in the name of Christ.”
“Do you have any regrets?” Don asked.
She stared at him hard. “What would I regret? I escaped a prison and found all the color in the world. I’ve seen meteor showers.
I’ve touched buffalo and bison. A few years ago, I read something about buried treasure hidden in the Appalachians and spent months dragging Becca around to look for it.
We never found anything, but that didn’t matter.
What matters is that I’m able to make my own choices.
What matters is I survived. What matters is I flourished.
Not because of my parents or where I came from, but despite them.
To spite them. The best revenge any queer person can get is to be happy.
It took me a while to realize that, but when I did, I’d never felt so free. ”
“And we found others like us,” Becca said.
“So many others. Queer people. People like us, people not like us but loving all the same. So much is discussed around the idea of found family. But what most people don’t realize is that queer people made that.
A lot of us aren’t born to people who will love their children like they should, so we have to go out and make families of our own.
We did that. We found people who loved us for who we are.
And no matter what happens next, no one can take that away from us. ”
“And now you want to talk to the old gays,” Rodney said.
“Elders,” Amy corrected gently. “In this house, we show respect.”
Rodney groaned as Don laughed. “That’s … kind of you. I think?”
Amy ducked her head as she smiled. “I like people. Some of them. I don’t know.
It’s weird, right? We all have mostly the same innards, but some people act like their family tree is a circle.
I don’t get it.” Then, with barely a pause to suck in a quick breath, she asked, “Do you like being old? I’ll never get to be.
Isn’t that crazy? Just wow. Wow. That’s a weird thought. I want to know what it’s like.”
“Amy,” Becca said, obviously embarrassed. “You can’t just—”
Surprisingly, it was Rodney who spoke. “It’s fine. I don’t … I’m sorry for that.”
Amy blinked. “For what?”
“That you’ll never know what it’s like to grow old. While it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be, I guess it’s not all bad.”
“Not bad at all,” Don said. He looked at Rodney, and Rodney looked at him.
“I think of it this way: Every wrinkle on Rodney’s face is a memory.
We’ve been together so long I know those lines as well as I know my own.
I remember how it was when we first met.
Smooth skin, sometimes rough with stubble.
Good jawline. Eyes crinkling when he smiled.
And it just got better and better as the years went on.
Lines around the mouth, the eyes, lines across the forehead.
A map to our lives. You can see everything we’ve been through, all the highs and lows. It’s etched into his face and mine.”
Rodney smiled. A small thing, a quick upward tug of the lips, only for Don. He was like that. Not with everyone, but it could take time for him to warm up to people. And yet, here, so far from home and among strangers, that little smile. Their secret language.
Rodney looked at the young women and seemed to see a genuine willingness to listen. They didn’t find that a lot these days, at least before the black hole came. How like the youth, Don thought to himself. We were the exact same way.
Rodney spoke about history. Not just his and Don’s, but their community history.
How many people thought the Stonewall riots were the start of the gay rights movement.
Not so, he said. That was earlier in Silver Lake, California.
A bar called the Black Cat. Still there, he said.
Still has the same sign. Police raided the bar, as they did others.
Queer people of all stripes were pissed, not wanting to take it anymore.
They fought back. They were the first. He talked about how they went to Tucson, once.
Just happened to be there for Pride. Did Becca and Amy know why Pride started in Tucson?
No, they’d said, tell us. It was because a gay man named Richard Heakin—visiting from out of state—was murdered after he left a local gay bar.
The culprits? Teenagers. Their punishment?
Probation. Gays and lesbians said no, no, no.
He told them of Matthew Shepherd, the young queer man left to die by people who hated his light.
Amy had seen a play about him. He was the one they tied to a fence, she told Becca in a hushed voice.
Did they know the harm Reagan caused? Did they have any idea of the effects that trickle-down economics had?
Or how the Great Actor’s war on drugs decimated Black communities without a care for the destruction left in the wake?
Surely, Rodney said, they had to know about HIV, about AIDS, how Ol’ Ronny ignored the cries, ignored people begging for help.
Oh, and don’t forget about Ms. Nancy. Two poisoned people, he said.
There’s a reason Amy and Becca didn’t see many people of old age in the queer community.
So many were left to die, to be confined to a hospital, not allowed to be touched by anyone, lesions forming, skin stretching, stretching until they were pale skeletons.
And still the Man in Charge did nothing.
He did nothing. He refused to even acknowledge it.
Rodney said, “If there’s a Hell, I know Ron and Nance are there. They are burning. They are suffering. They’ll do so for eternity, and it still won’t be enough. I don’t care if everything goes with the eventual heat death of the entire universe, I hope they will still burn.”