Chapter Twenty-Eight
Sunny’s right. My mind is officially cloudy.
It feels like the San Francisco sky, with every thought thick and crowded and constantly racing.
Sunny likes me, I think as I get on the train the next morning, heading not west toward school but east. I stare out the window at the crest of Strawberry Hill, then the final eastern swath of Golden Gate Park. I stare into the deep black of the Sunset Tunnel.
Sunny likes me.
On paper, this is very good news. Sunny is smart and funny, not to mention extremely hot.
I have personally felt my knees get weak whenever I’ve seen her whip out her round reading glasses during yearbook meetings to take a close look at photo layouts.
I should have followed her back down the stairs yesterday.
I should be texting her something cute and flirtatious right now.
Instead, I get off the Judah train and walk the several blocks to the main library.
I slink into the reference section. And the whole time I’m paging through reference books, looking for entries about Harvey Milk and the gay rights movement in the 1970s, I’m not thinking about what to text Sunny or when I should see her.
I’m thinking about Cam walking around the corner.
I don’t understand it. My mind is totally overcrowded.
There are too many good ideas I should be following and even more bad ideas I want to follow instead.
Cam brushes through the front doors of the library just before noon. He strides across the foyer and looms over my notebook.
“Now who’s the early bird?” Cam says, smiling.
The corners of his mouth make two tiny dimples—one in either cheek.
“Found some stuff,” I say, not quite looking up.
Cam sits down next to me at one of the reading tables between the shelves. He leans over far enough that his Old Spice deodorant floods my senses. I want to hate it, I want to hate it, I want to hate it.
My lungs breathe in deep, traitors that they are.
“What did you find?” Cam asks.
“Well…” I flip back to my first page of notes. I’m not nearly as neat and organized as Julia, but as long as I’m translating my own chicken scratch, it’s fine. “Remember what the octopus monument said? About the unity of the empire?”
“Uhhh, no,” Cam admits. He grins and looks up at me from the notebook. “But I have a feeling you’re about to remind me.”
“It was a monument made to memorialize the state of California officially joining the Union.”
“Union,” Cam says. “Got it.”
“Turns out, there are a lot of reference entries for Harvey Milk and unions. Did you know one of Harvey Milk’s biggest movements as an activist was to lead a boycott over a beer company whose union workers were on strike?”
“Hmm. Union…union.” Cam taps his chin in thought. He pulls a face. “That’s a little bit of a stretch, V. It might be something, though.”
I turn to the next page in my notes. “Okay, well, how about this? Do you know where the Stonewall riots took place?”
“New York City?”
“At the Stonewall Inn,” I tell him. “In Greenwich Village.”
I let Cam work out the next connection.
“And you found the clock fountain along the Greenwich Steps,” he says slowly.
“We found it there, yeah.”
Cam motions to the open books around me. “So…what does this mean? What do we do?”
I check my phone. “First we keep our twelve p.m. appointment upstairs. But maybe these facts, these little gay history footnotes, can be a sort of confirmation system for each drawing. I’m not sure yet.”
Cam helps me pack up the books and place them on the return cart.
When we arrive at the sixth floor, I’m almost relieved to see a different librarian working at the check-in desk.
Like as long as no one here officially recognizes me from before, I’m in the clear.
The man seats us at a different row of tables, this time packed not with two but ten boxes of city archives.
“What is all this?” Cam asks.
“Every city park archive from 1970 through 1985,” I say. “At least, whatever they kept around at that time. Oh, and be careful—we found a used tissue the last time we were here.”
I hand Cam a pair of white gloves and a pencil stub.
He immediately tucks the pencil stub behind his ear, which looks simultaneously stupid and strangely hot.
He then makes a show of putting on the gloves like a doctor heading into surgery, except the gloves at the library don’t snap the way medical gloves do, and, thank God, this time he just looks stupid.
“Okay, which images are we looking for again?”
I pull up Gilbert Baker’s drawing on my phone, zooming in and scrolling to the four remaining images we haven’t yet figured out.
There’s the eagle with the shield. The head in the sink.
The three women in the middle of what must be debilitating menstrual cramps.
And, of course, the woman with the necklace, wearing that long floral dress.
“She’s holding something,” Cam points out. “Right there. In the hand closer to the screaming ladies. Is it…glasses?”
“I think it’s one of those fancy masks, like the ones people wear at a masquerade party.”
“Maybe,” Cam says. He squints. “It looks more like binoculars to me.”
“But it has that long handle!” I say. “See, it goes all the way from her hand to her hip almost.”
“Hmm. Let’s put a pin in that for now.” Cam pulls off a lid from one of the boxes. “So. We set aside anything that could be a match?”
“Yes. Anything that could be a match.”
The two of us get started.
As the minutes collect into the first hour, it becomes clear that working with Cam is undeniably different than working with the yearbook crew.
Cam has always struck me as the type of group partner who would want to goof off and talk the whole time.
But here he’s quiet and methodical. He doesn’t even mind going through the occasional disgusting unidentified object.
“The Three Shades,” Cam says an hour and a half into our appointment. He taps the bottom right corner of the scroll between us.
“Oh.” I put down my stack of photographs and look closer at the drawing of the women. All three figures are rendered in slightly different styles—one in basic line work, one with some shading, and one almost entirely in shadow.
“I guess they are in three shades,” I say. “I hadn’t noticed that part before.”
“No.” Cam turns and shows me a photograph of three men sculpted in bronze, slumping over. They’re in the exact same pose as the female figures from the drawing.
I shake my head. “Those are all the same shade, though.”
He sighs and points to the caption underneath. “They’re called The Three Shades, Ivy. It’s a sculpture in the Legion of Honor museum. It stands over a larger piece titled The Gates of Hell.”
“Sounds cheerful,” I say, scrunching my nose. “What’s the connection to gay history?”
“I don’t know yet,” Cam answers. “Plus, the sculpture’s inside a building. And I’m pretty sure Gilbert Baker buried the final treasure outside. But maybe nearby…”
“The installation series.”
Both Cam and I nearly jump from the table. We swivel toward each other in unison, then turn and scan the room. The entire place is empty except for—
The librarian at the head of the room coughs and sets the newspaper down in front of him.
“There was a series of temporary art installations just outside the Legion of Honor museum,” he says gruffly. “Those have been over for a long time now, though.”
“How long?” Cam asks.
The old man shrugs and ponders, curling his fingers around his unruly beard.
“They lasted through the 1970s, maybe? Used to occur around the same time as the annual gay pride parades down Polk Street. June of each year—that was it. But they stopped around ’82 or ’83. So perhaps not what you’re looking for.”
I stand so quickly that the empty chair next to me tumbles sideways onto the floor. “That’s actually kind of exactly what we’re looking for,” I say, throwing a quick glance to Cam. “Do you happen to have any photos of those installations by chance?”
The librarian shakes his head. “You won’t find photos in the official archives.
They were unauthorized installations—technically vandalism.
” He offers us a devious little smile, then picks up his newspaper and rattles it like a breeze is wafting through the room.
“But I’ll bet something comes up in the San Francisco Chronicle archives.
You’ll find all the reels for the issues printed before 2003 in the basement. ”
It only takes five minutes for us to pack up all ten boxes and book it all the way down to the basement.
We check out every reel of the San Francisco Chronicle printed between 1975 and 1983.
Luckily, the library has two microfilm readers, and Cam and I sit side by side as we divide up years—he takes all the even ones, and I take the odds—and begin searching through.
“Are we sticking to June issues only?” Cam asks. He slides a reel into the reader.
“June and July,” I say. “Sometimes newspapers pick stories up late.”
We scroll through, trying not to get snagged in every article about the Pride marches or protests or Harvey’s trajectory to office. There’s so much that happened in such a short period of time. It really is like going back and seeing an entire revolution unfold.
“Listen to this,” Cam says after a while. “ ‘Gay people, we will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets…We are coming out! We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions. We are coming out to tell the truth about gays. For I am tired of the conspiracy of silence.’ ”
The last word manifests itself, stretching between us.
“It’s from Harvey’s speech at the 1978 parade,” Cam says softly. He shifts away from the microfilm reader. “Is that how you felt? When you came out to me?”
My entire body goes numb. Neither of us has mentioned that specific day since it happened. Secretly, I guess I sort of hoped that in his weird, new surfer-guy phase, Cam had forgotten about it. That he might’ve looked back and figured we had simply grown apart as friends.
I go over Harvey’s speech in my head, mining it for an answer that sidesteps my and Cam’s personal history.
“I think it’s important to come out on a community level,” I say steadily.
“I think Harvey’s talking about the fact that a lot of people are scared to come out because they think coming out will get them stereotyped or”—I spin my hand around, trying to remember Harvey’s exact wording—“distorted, in society. They stay in the closet because they’re not a specific kind of gay person, you know?
But being gay is a spectrum. It always has been. ”
I realize I haven’t answered Cam’s question at all.
“If you’re asking if I came out for gay people’s rights,” I say finally, “then, I mean, yes! Obviously!”
“No, I’m not asking you that.”
Cam pushes even farther from the microfilm reader, shifting closer to me.
He clears his throat. “Harvey said, ‘For I am tired of the conspiracy of silence.’ But what does that mean, the conspiracy of silence? It’s the idea that silence is telling a lie, right?
Or, at the very least, that silence is covering up the truth. ”
I make a face. “I’m not sure I’m following.”
“Forget the gay rights movement for one second,” Cam says. “I’m talking about us right now. You and me. I want to know: When you came out that day…was that your way of trying to tell me the truth?”