Chapter Five
When Cam first brought Gay Treasures to my house freshman year, we were, at that point, extremely amateur sleuths. The book itself is basically an introduction to gay rights told in the style of a fairy tale:
Once upon a time, not long after midnight, in a room crowded with smoke…four, two, one, and one knocked on the double doors of Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn.
“Open up! Police! We’re taking the place!”
In stormed the four officers in plainclothes suits.
In stormed the two in uniform.
In stormed the detective.
In stormed the deputy.
But they were not the only storm in the room that night. And despite the formal announcement of their intentions, in the early morning hours of the twenty-eighth of June, the Stonewall Inn would not be for their taking.
Each chapter is another tale from the gay rights movement, set in places across the country, filled with different protagonists who each become, by the story’s end, gay treasures in their own rights.
That’s the obvious part of the book, at least. The hidden part, the part Cam and I were so focused on, was about the other gay treasures.
Not the people themselves, but the actual treasures hidden in the ground in honor of each story’s hero.
Clues leading to those treasures were in the book too.
But instead of being hidden in the stories, the clues were hidden in codes and ciphers peppered throughout the pages.
The night Cam first brought over Gay Treasures, we watched National Treasure together and took notes on all the ciphers featured in the movie.
Then we went back through the book and circled anything that seemed like a potential clue or cipher.
After that, we spent almost every day that summer poking around San Francisco.
“Copyright says 1983,” Cam had said. “We shouldn’t need to use modern technology to solve a riddle that was written forty years ago.”
But if my yearbook crew has a specialty, it would be mixing modern technology with the past. Everything it took Cam and me months to figure out ends up taking Gabriel, Sunny, and Julia mere minutes to uncover, thanks to their internet-sleuthing skills.
“Okay,” Sunny says as the Wiki page loads. She nurses the second round of coffee I went out and bought everyone immediately after announcing our new angle. A caffeinated Sunny is a happy Sunny, evidenced by the fact that her fuzzy robe and sunglasses are now discarded in a pile by the stairwell.
Sunny uses the find-in-page function and skims through the highlighted sections.
“Gay Treasures. Written and published by an anonymous BGR. Later revealed to be Gilbert Baker, inventor of the Pride rainbow flag.”
“Why the BGR initials, then?” Julia asks, looking up from her notebook.
Sunny smirks. “Stands for ‘Busty Gay Ross,’ apparently.” She keeps reading. “That was Gilbert’s drag name, based on Betsy Ross, creator of the American flag.”
“Ahh.” Julia nods and scribbles more notes.
“Book’s been out of print since its initial publication,” Sunny reads off the bottom of the page. “No known copies in circulation. But two of the seven treasures have already been located.”
“The treasures are based on specific people,” I add.
Sunny nods and reads the next section out loud.
“There were seven treasures buried for seven different gay icons. The Marsha P. Johnson treasure—an enamel vase painted with Marsha’s portrait—was found in New York City twenty-five years ago.
Then the Judy Garland treasure—a tennis bracelet made up of rainbow-colored gemstones—was found by accident in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, around nine years ago. ”
Gabriel looks over from his own computer and wrinkles his nose. “But Judy wasn’t even gay.”
“She was a gay icon,” Julia counters. She reads from her own screen, “In the 1970s, you would check whether someone was gay by asking them, ‘Are you a friend of Dorothy?’ The question refers to Judy Garland’s character Dorothy from the 1939 The Wizard of Oz film.
” Julia glances at Gabriel. “She’s basically the OG ally for the queer community. ”
“Hmph,” Gabriel says, turning away from us.
“So where are the other five treasures?” Sunny asks me.
I shrug. “I don’t know. There are a lot of theories about the other icons and cities. But we do know that San Francisco is a pretty good bet.”
Sunny swivels around in her chair. “Gilbert invented the rainbow flag when he lived here. You think he might’ve buried a treasure in honor of himself?”
“Nope!” Gabriel says before I have a chance to answer. He slides to one side and shows us his screen, where he’s been cleaning up the background flyer from the yearbook dedication page. The flyer that’s changed everything.
“Whoa,” Julia says.
The transformation is definitely impressive. Gabriel has dialed out the shadows and pumped up the contrast to get the words “brate,” “vey’s,” and “Birthday” sharp enough to read. But all my focus is on the last line, which has been surprisingly clear from the beginning.
btwn 17th & 18th Streets
In the end, despite hundreds of hours combing through the book, Cam and I managed to solve only one cipher in Gay Treasures.
The answer we came up with was A GIANT BTWN STREETS.
Which, of course, is nonsense without any context.
A giant could be anyone. “Between streets” could mean anything.
Without the next step, we were lost. We needed the right clue for everything else to unlock.
“Vey’s birthday,” Julia says, her voice lilting as she tips her head to one side. “Who do we think is Vey?”
“It’s cut off,” Gabriel says. He types something into the search bar and grins as the results load. “Harvey Milk was born on May 22, 1930. He was famously known as the Mayor of Castro Street. That’s pretty giant-like, if you ask me!”
I do a quick map search on my own computer.
“Oh my gosh,” I say under my breath.
Julia’s by my shoulder in an instant. “What is it?”
“Look at this,” I say as Gabriel and Sunny cram next to Julia on either side. I point to a satellite map of the Castro neighborhood. “There’s Seventeenth Street, and there’s Eighteenth Street. See where they each intersect with Castro? Now, look right in the middle.”
I draw my finger down the road, pausing at the exact midpoint between Seventeenth and Eighteenth. A tiny alley juts out from Castro Street and ends in a cluster of trees. If the Mayor of Castro Street is our giant…and there’s a perfect hideaway just off Castro between Seventeenth and Eighteenth…
“The treasure has to be there,” I say. The clues match up too well for this to be pure coincidence.
The verdict sets the team in motion, and in a moment everyone is scrambling madly around, grabbing their bags and shouting out directions for how we should get our asses over to Castro. But I linger on the map in front of me.
I don’t want to admit it out loud…but it feels wrong, somehow, to be doing this next step without Cam.
He’s the one who always said Harvey Milk had to be the gay treasure of San Francisco.
We even went to Harvey’s old storefront, Castro Camera, a few times, as well as the GLBT—Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender—Historical Society Museum on Castro and Eighteenth Street to look for clues.
I can’t believe we were so close.
But even more than that, even if Cam had never figured out the Harvey Milk thing…he was the one who squeezed in through my window with the book. This was his hunt first.
No, a voice in my head pipes up.
This was our hunt. I was the one dragging Cam to museums and libraries.
I was the one who wanted to talk about the gay rights movement.
It shouldn’t matter who found the book first. What matters now is that I’ve found the next clue.
And it’s not my responsibility to drag along someone who ghosted our friendship just to finish something we started so long ago.
In the end, Gabriel, Julia, Sunny, and I agree to grab the train over to Market Street and then ride it down to Castro.
When we get on at Irving and Sixth, we can barely contain our excitement.
Sunny keeps asking how much the treasure is worth and how we’re going to split it four ways.
Gabriel starts counting the trees in the satellite map so we’ll know which one to look under.
Julia wants to know what our cover should be if the cops show up.
Everyone has their own ideas and questions, but overall we’re collectively buzzing.
An hour ago we were mere yearbook staff editors.
And now we’re like Benjamin freaking Gates heading down the mine shaft in Trinity Church.
The intoxication of treasure hunting is real.
By the time we get off at Market and Castro, however, the vibe has shifted considerably.
“We didn’t bring a shovel,” Sunny says in a monotone as the train clangs on behind us. She looks around at the group. “We literally just hopped on the train to go dig up treasure, and we don’t even have a shovel.”
“We could buy a shovel,” Gabriel offers.
Sunny narrows her eyes. “Where?”
“I don’t know…” Gabriel gestures down Castro Street. “Maybe there’s a hardware store around here.”
“I have a clipboard,” Julia says, pulling her backpack to her front. “That could make a decent shovel.”
I hold up my hands. “Let’s go check things out first,” I suggest. “Make sure we’re on the right track.”
It’s hard for me not to get too carried away, though, as we walk farther down the street.
Every single light pole has a Pride flag waving underneath.
Nearly every storefront is sporting some kind of rainbow.
This has to be a sign. It’s hard to believe, even two years later, how much I desperately want this all to be a sign.
But if Castro Street seems like a yellow brick road…the so-called secret path between Seventeenth and Eighteenth is no Emerald City. It’s not even an Emerald Hamlet.
“It’s just a parking lot,” Julia says as we round the corner.
“Of course it is,” Sunny mutters.
My shoulders sag as we stare down the alleyway. My brain is spinning out like a car caught in mud. I can feel the ignition kicking, can feel the wheels trying to get to another point. But all that work just goes in circles. How could we have been wrong? The flyer was too spot-on for us to be wrong.
Gabriel points over the parked cars. “There are a couple trees back there,” he says.
We glance at each other and trade nods. We’ve come this far, after all.
We slip into the alley and hurry toward the parking lot. Julia clutches her backpack to her chest and runs. Gabriel hunches halfway over as he follows on her heels. Considering it’s midmorning on a Sunday, we all probably look ridiculous.
Once we reach the end of the alley, we see firsthand how closely packed all the cars are together.
Even the trees Gabriel pointed out are wedged between the asphalt and the vine-covered wall encircling the lot.
I shimmy past the noses of two cars to stand next to one of the trees.
There’s not really any “shovel prospect,” as Cam used to call it.
Everything is way too crammed together to dig in, let alone bury a treasure.
I lean in closer to check out the tree roots.
The second my hand touches the earth, a blaring alarm shatters the air to pieces.