Chapter Sixteen
We merge into a single-file line up the stairs and to the sixth floor.
Gabriel checks us into the San Francisco History Center, and the librarian on duty brings us over to one of the rows of long, narrow tables that stretch across the room end to end.
Two cardboard boxes sit in the middle of our assigned table.
“This is it,” Gabriel says. He reaches for one of the lids.
“Ahem.” The librarian slides a much smaller open box toward us. Inside is a stack of white cloth gloves.
“To protect the documents,” they say. Julia starts writing this down. “Also, no pens.”
Julia looks up, startled. “No pens?”
The librarian points again at the box. I move the gloves to one side and find a set of stubby yellow pencils, the same kind the library puts out on reference desks for taking down call numbers.
“Here.” I hand Julia one of the stubs. She narrows her eyes at it as though I’ve handed her a used cigarette from a parking lot. Then she lets out a deep, unappreciative sigh and finishes the line in her notebook with the pencil.
“You can photograph whatever you’d like,” the librarian tells us, eyeing Gabriel’s camera. “And if you need any full-resolution scans, I can send you downstairs to collect them at the end of your appointment.”
“Thank you,” I say.
The librarian leaves, and Gabriel puts on the first pair of gloves. He places a hand on either box and takes off both lids with a flourish.
“Ta-da!” he says. We all lean over to peer inside.
Julia gasps.
Sunny shakes her head. “Holy hell.”
I don’t know what I was expecting—maybe a collection of labeled files we could sort through the way I’ve seen people do at law offices. We’d find everything written about the island, sorted out year by year. Maybe there would even be a file labeled Harvey Milk, and we’d start there.
In reality, the boxes are less like the inside of a filing cabinet and more like the box someone brings home from work right after they’ve been fired on the spot.
Piles of photos tip over in every direction, crushed alongside county fair ribbons, a tiny bowling trophy, and random wrinkled pages that probably haven’t seen the inside of a folder in their entire existence.
A few of the papers look way too much like empty hamburger wrappers for my liking.
“Welcome to city archives.” The four of us look over at the front desk. The librarian gives us a tight smile. “Good luck.”
Gabriel winces. “Glad I’m wearing gloves for this.”
I take a deep breath.
“Okay,” I say. “This is salvageable. Gabriel and Julia, you two take the first box. Sunny and I will take this one. Try to divvy up the contents as best you can.”
“What about those?” Sunny asks, tipping her chin at one of the suspiciously garbage-looking bundles.
I roll my eyes. “I’ll take those. Let’s just get started.”
Load by load, we slowly empty the contents of both boxes in front of us.
Things get easier as we sort. Photos from certain events and time periods start coinciding.
Most of the loose papers turn out to be government forms, and we stack the same types of forms together until our own filing system emerges.
“They should be paying us for this,” Sunny murmurs next to me.
The first hour flies by as we sort and organize, searching for clues.
Every time I check the clock over the librarian’s desk, my heart starts racing.
It’s entirely possible we’re going to reach our appointment time limit, and then what?
We book another appointment? I’m not waiting a full week to come back here.
Luckily, not long after hitting our halfway point, Sunny triumphantly holds up a sheet of paper.
“I found the architects of two buildings on Treasure Island,” she says. She reads off the page in front of her: “Court of Honor and Court of the East.”
I drop my pile of ceremonial-tree-planting photos. “Amazing! So, who are they?”
Sunny shrugs. “Just some random dudes,” she says, and hands me the page to look over.
Two black-and-white photos of buildings have been Xeroxed side by side, with a typewriter-style caption underneath listing the three names of the architects.
I frown. I had hoped that the right answer would jump out at us the moment we found it.
That I would naturally know just from looking what the next step should be.
I pass the sheet over to Julia so she can copy down the names.
“I’ve got the architect for the Court of Pacifica,” Gabriel adds a few minutes later.
We make a master list of all buildings on the island, with Julia taking notes on every name attached.
Three architects. Then four. Then seven.
My stomach starts to sink. The only strategy I can think of is to research the hell out of every individual name we find.
But what if, by the end of the day, we have twenty architects on the list?
What if we have fifty? Our breakthrough clue is starting to look more like broken glass, with the cracks in my plan spider-webbing out farther and farther.
Then, with only twenty minutes left in our appointment, Julia finds an article that changes everything.
“Um…guys?”
I look up from an ancient parking citation issued in the 1950s. “Another building architect?” I ask absently.
“No,” Julia says. She’s blinking over and over, her eyes scanning back and forth across a clipped newspaper article. She runs a gloved finger over the title. “Listen to this heading: ‘The Lost Boys of Treasure Island: How Discharged Naval Sailors Built a Homosexual Hub in San Francisco.’ ”
Immediately, we abandon our stacks and crowd in next to Julia.
“What does the article say?” I ask.
Julia adjusts her glasses. “Well, we knew that Treasure Island was a naval base for World War II, right? It turns out that, afterward, in the late 1940s and ’50s, sailors from all over the country—if they either came out or were discovered as gay—got sent here.”
Gabriel scoffs. “That was the navy’s genius plan to squash homosexuality? To round up all the gays together?”
“Why did they send them here?” Sunny asks.
Julia points farther down the page. “Treasure Island was a port,” she says.
“They didn’t make the sailors stick around or anything; this was just where they were told they were getting kicked out of the navy.
But tons of sailors stayed behind. They started living in the same neighborhoods in San Francisco, going to the same shops and stuff.
They went from a bunch of scattered individuals to a group, a community. ”
I catch one of the final lines of the article and read it out loud: “In many ways, Treasure Island laid the foundation for the beginning of gay culture in America.”
I pause. I’d never really thought about why San Francisco has such a rich history in the queer community.
It’s always kind of been a chicken-or-egg scenario in my head.
Did gay people come here because San Francisco was so accepting, or was San Francisco so accepting because so many gay people came here?
According to this article…the gay community made San Francisco accepting. They forged their own home here, together.
“Ooh!” Sunny stands and points a finger into the air. She holds up another article. “Harvey Milk used to be in the navy!”
“I thought you said he didn’t do anything on Treasure Island,” I say.
Sunny shrugs. “He didn’t. He served before he ever moved to San Francisco. But now naming a naval ship after him makes sense.”
I pull Julia’s notebook toward me. “Okay, we can put this all together. I still think we’re looking for an architect. But if Harvey is the key to this puzzle, then we should be looking for an architect of a naval building on Treasure Island, yeah? Any idea which one that could be?”
Gabriel raises his hand. “I think I have the answer to that.”
He reads a caption from a large eight-by-ten photograph in front of him. “Administration Building, also called Building 1, was the primary headquarters of the command naval base in San Francisco. In World War II, the building was known as Naval Station Treasure Island.”
“Any architects listed for that building?” I ask tentatively.
“Two names,” Gabriel says. He flips through a couple more photos, then stops, frozen in place. He turns to the Naval Station photo again, then back to a new mystery photo.
“No freaking way,” he whispers.
“What?” I say, leaning over now. “What is it?”
Gabriel blinks and looks at the rest of us. “I’m pretty sure the second architect on the naval building is our guy.” He holds up the photo, covering the front dramatically with his giant gloved hand. Underneath, we see a single name scrawled across in delicate script.
George W. Kelham.
“Okay…” I’m already confused. This is just another name, exactly like all the ones already on Julia’s list. “Why this architect? Was he gay or something?”
“I don’t know,” Gabriel says. “But I do know that he happened to design another really important building in San Francisco. One that fits our clue perfectly.”
“What building?” I ask.
Gabriel slowly lifts his hand from the mystery photo and shows us.