Chapter Ten
Gabriel nods like Sunny’s given him an order. He pushes over to his own computer.
“AbeBooks and ThriftBooks,” Sunny mutters.
“Etsy and eBay,” Gabriel replies.
This is Yearbook Club convention. If there’s a big task that needs to be done, a school activity to write up, or an event from the archives to research, we all call out what we’re doing so we won’t overlap.
Julia sets her laptop aside and parks herself at her usual desktop computer.
“Title and author search on Google?” she asks me, eyebrows tilting.
“Go into ‘Images’ for results,” I suggest. “We don’t have to find the whole book if we can find digital scans. Do a deep dive; go in twenty or so pages.”
Julia nods. I sit down at my own computer and pull open the browser.
“Reddit and Quora,” I call out. Gabriel looks at me questioningly for a moment but quickly disappears back into his own monitor’s results.
Personally, I think finding a whole copy of Gay Treasures for sale is almost impossible at this point.
I’d never heard of it before Cam squirreled the book into my room.
I haven’t heard of it from any other place since.
Even Bolerium Books has never seen a copy.
If we’re really going to find this thing, we’ll have to pick up clues wherever we can.
Obscure book from the 1980s, I type.
The screen pulls up page after page of completely mainstream books. Of course, the internet is the exact kind of place you wander into asking about a book no one’s heard of, and then everyone immediately shouts, How about The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood?
I try again.
Obscure “gay treasure hunt” book from the 1980s.
The cursor blinks a moment as the results load. My eyes scan through each listing, then stop on a Reddit thread near the bottom of the page. I click the link.
“Bingo,” I murmur.
A little over ten years ago, a user by the name of u/DyslexicStoner240 wrote into a subreddit forum called r/tipofmytongue, a community where members can ask for help finding something they almost—but not quite—recall.
r/tipofmytongue · 10 years ago
DyslexicStoner240
[TOMT] [BOOK] PLEASE HELP! NINETIES TREASURE BOOK I FOUND AT A GARAGE SALE AS A KID. IT HAS BEEN DRIVING ME CRAZY EVER SINCE.
Locked: OP Not Responding
Hey, guys, appreciate anyone reading this.
When I was a kid in the 90s, my mom used to drag me to estate sales around the greater Minneapolis area every Saturday.
We definitely went to other towns a lot, so I’m not sure where exactly this was.
But I remember hanging out in the backyard of one estate sale where the family had put the cheaper things on foldout tables like a garage sale.
There was a giant, beat-up beanbag chair in the corner of the yard, and I dragged a box of old comic books over to it while my mom looked at the jewelry inside the house.
In the box there were a bunch of issues of Gay Comix, which I hadn’t heard of before, but maybe it’s going to be important for figuring out whatever this book was.
Anyway, I pull out a random comic book issue, and this tiny little book drops out from between the pages.
I swear it was called Gay Treasure Hunting or Hunting for Gay Gold or something about being gay and finding treasure, but I opened it up, and it was like I could tell that this was legit.
All these words were crammed together, but you just knew that if you squinted real hard, you would find a treasure map in the words or something. Like in those Magic Eye books.
I wanted to buy it, or at least try to steal it (dumbass ten-year-old-boy brain), but I didn’t hear my mom come outside, telling me it was time to leave.
She walked right up to me surrounded by all the Gay Comix and had this crazy meltdown and stormed us both out of there.
Then we had to read a bunch of passages from the Bible that night and do, like, a bajillion Hail Marys.
(Raised Catholic FTL.) So I never got to go back…
and then I was sort of scared that it really was this Satanic cult pamphlet like she said.
And since then I haven’t been able to find anything about it online.
PLEASE help me end this awful scratching at the back of my head. Like, WHAT WAS THAT BOOK, AND WAS I ALMOST A REAL-LIFE GOONIE?!
Locked post: New comments cannot be posted
I immediately notice a little gray bubble below the title. Locked: OP Not Responding.
“Uh-oh,” I murmur. I’m guessing it’s about to get real nasty in the replies.
Sure enough, most users popped in only to tell u/DyslexicStoner240 that this so-called memory was more likely his way of dealing with coming out of the closet. He probably concocted the book because he was reading a bunch of gay comics and realized he was gay too.
The real treasure’s in owning your truth, bro, wrote u/Colonel_Panic, which, actually, is sort of nice, I guess. But everyone crashed on DyslexicStoner240 hard, saying he probably made the story up. I feel like I’m hitting another dead end just by reading this guy hit his.
I click on the username. He’s been inactive on Reddit for almost ten years, basically since he made the post. Probably had to get another username or something, poor dude. I scroll down his profile and click on his last recorded comment.
It looks like the comment is from a small thread about a totally different subject. Dyslexic Stoner replies and then gets a reply from another user directly to him. The other user has the screen name u/BusTRoss.
I pause and stare at the screen.
Bus T. Ross.
As in…Busty Ross?
I click into another window and type out Gilbert Baker’s info. Died 2017. One year after this exchange. It can’t be the same person, though, I tell myself. Just because Gilbert’s drag name was Busty Gay Ross doesn’t mean he made that user profile on Reddit.
But whoever did probably knew about BGR and the treasure hunt.
I open the conversation.
u/BusTRoss: scarecrow, lion, or tin man?
u/DyslexicStoner240: …huh?
u/BusTRoss: friend of Dorothy, right?
u/BusTRoss: are you a scarecrow, a lion, or a tin man?
u/DyslexicStoner240: Oh.
u/DyslexicStoner240: Lion, I guess?
u/BusTRoss: right answer.
u/BusTRoss: look over the rainbow.
And that’s it. But the last phrase, “over the rainbow,” is hyperlinked. I paste it over into a new tab and land in an absolutely ancient-looking web forum. Like, clearly this was one of the first websites to ever be designed for public use.
An incredibly garish Gay4Treasure icon blinks at the center of the website heading. It’s in an old rainbow WordArt font that I’ve seen used in countless internet memes. There’s a subheading underneath that reads Gay Treasure Icon: Judy Garland.
Of course, I think, palming my forehead.
Busty asked if Dyslexic Stoner was a friend of Dorothy. He meant “Dorothy” as in Judy Garland’s character Dorothy. It’s all making sense. But, wait a second…
Didn’t Julia say that’s how people used to ask if someone was gay?
Are you a friend of Dorothy? I click back to the conversation on Reddit.
Busty didn’t ask about the treasure hunt itself.
They asked if Stoner was a friend of Dorothy.
Why? Did Stoner have to say yes, to confirm that he was gay, before Busty could send over the link?
Are only true insiders allowed to find this treasure?
I measure this conundrum against the only other treasure hunt story I really know.
Ben Gates would never have been able to solve the hunt in National Treasure without knowing a ton about American history.
But also, at the end of the day, Ben was an American with a deep-cut American legacy.
Whereas Ian—the bad guy—was British. He was an outsider.
Is there something to that?
What does Busty’s question really mean, I wonder, for the hunt in general?
Does everyone who’s interested in Gay Treasures have to be gay?
Are they not allowed to go looking for the treasure otherwise?
And if they do have to be gay, do they have to be a specific type of gay?
Busty gave Stoner three choices: the Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow…
Why was only one of those choices correct?
I shove the questions crowding my head to one side and click open the top thread, which is titled “SOLVED: Grand Rapids.” It’s posted by none other than former Redditor DyslexicStoner240, same username and all.
Good for him, I think. Screw those haters on Reddit.
As the thread loads, my eyeballs nearly pop out of my head. Photocopied images directly from the book show up, pixel by pixel, on the screen.
“Hey! I found something!” I call out.
The three rolling chairs Sunny, Julia, and Gabriel were sitting in suddenly whoosh backward. Gabriel’s even clatters to the floor. They all slam into my sides and crowd around the screen.
“You got the book?” Julia asks.
“Some of it,” I say. “These are scanned pages from the original. Well…maybe not scanned. Maybe photocopied or…”
“Or photographed with the world’s first phone camera in dim lighting?” Sunny supplies. Still, I catch her failing to tamp down a grin as she grabs my mouse and scrolls through the page. “Oh, we can totally handle this.”
“I don’t know if it’s worth cleaning up these specific pages, though,” I say. I point to the first image. “This is for the Judy Garland treasure. That’s in a different chapter of the book.”
“Not our chapter, then,” Gabriel says. “I’ll look through the website.” He copies the URL onto his phone and nearly sprints back to his own computer.
“There’s a thread here on Harvey Milk!” he calls out a few moments later. “Should I look through it?”
“Obviously!” Sunny says, nostrils flaring. She doesn’t let go of my mouse. She’s scrolling down the Judy Garland page messages, rolling further and further back in time until she reaches the earliest message, posted by a user named EggBert in June 1999.
“Found this weird book at Quatrefoil Library,” Sunny reads aloud. “It was being used to prop up a table. Apparently it’s a treasure map?”
She opens a side tab and Googles Quatrefoil Library. “This is a queer library. I think Gilbert Baker planted copies of Gay Treasures. I don’t think the book was ever widely circulated at all. That’s why we can’t find it anywhere.”
Just in specific gay communities, I think to myself.
I remember sitting next to Cam in my room, how uncomfortable he seemed when I asked if his uncle Brian was gay.
I wonder what Cam would think of the whole “friend of Dorothy” question.
I wonder if he would feel included in this particular lens of the old-school queer community.
Then again, I think about what it must have been like in the 1960s and ’70s and ’80s, when the old-school queer community was everything.
It was all queer people had. And even then, so many people weren’t able to be a part of that community at all.
I motion for Sunny to scroll to the top of the page.
“The Wiki said the Grand Rapids treasure was found by accident, but clearly it wasn’t,” I say. “These people have done all the work, step by step.”
“But they wanted to stay anonymous for some reason,” Sunny adds.
“Yeah. For some reason.”
I picture Dyslexic Stoner as a little boy, repeating Hail Marys over and over as his mother loomed next to him. The thought makes me unbearably sad.