A tall, thin boy in a QUEER T-shirt jumped to his feet and shouted, “Who the fuck are you to be up there running things? Who put you in charge? We didn’t elect you.”
The old veteran replied calmly, “I’m not in charge of anything. No decisions are going to be made here this afternoon. This is purely an informational meeting. The people up here have been tracking Proposition 54 and they want to share what they’ve learned. How the community responds to 54 is up to everyone in this room.”
“But you set up the room like you’re the head honcho,” the boy shouted back. “Like you got authority.”
There was a hurried, hushed deliberation among the people at the head table, and then the older man said, “Point taken. Why don’t we get rid of the table and form a circle? That way, no one’s at the head of the room.”
I groaned. This was precisely the kind of bickering that wasted time and energy better spent in organizing against the quarantine. But like everyone else I helped rearrange the room, shuffling chairs and bodies until we had achieved a semblance of a circle.
The older man, who introduced himself as Madison Knight, again called us to order and introduced the first speaker, a young lawyer named Wendell Thorne. Thorne gave us the background of the initiative, its potential effect— quarantine camps to which people with HIV would be forcibly removed— and the worrying poll numbers and concluded: “We have seven months to put together a statewide coalition to defeat the proposition, and I got to tell you, right now it looks like an uphill fight.”
“That’s impossible!” some shouted in disbelief.
“We have to make it happen,” Thorne replied.
Another panelist, also a lawyer, a flame-haired woman who introduced herself as Kate Cassells from the Lesbian and Gay Legal Defense Fund, broke in. “We’re also taking the fight to the courts. The LGLDF is about to file a lawsuit in the state supreme court trying to knock 54 off the ballot because it violates the state constitutional right to privacy by forcing people to disclose their HIV status.”
It was a decent argument, but the state supreme court had an entrenched conservative majority. There was no way those ancient white men were going to side with people they doubtless considered deviants. Proposition 54 would have to be defeated at the ballot, or not at all.
Knight was saying, “. . . want to present some possible— and I emphasize possible— strategies to defeat 54. Like Wen said, the Christian right’s all over this, but we are not without our allies in the church. Reverend Hester Price from St. George Episcopal has some ideas for mobilizing the Christian left—”
“Fuck that!” The tall QUEER T-shirted man who had disrupted the proceedings earlier was on his feet again. “Who invited her? Christians are the enemy. They’re all bigots and homophobes.”
The man sitting in front of me stood up and shouted back, “I’m gay and I’m a Christian!”
The tall man strode toward us, got in the second man’s face, and screamed, “Then you’re an asshole and a traitor.”
He shoved the second man, who slammed into me with such force I went over in my flimsy folding chair, smacked the back of my head on the concrete floor, and saw stars. I rolled away from the chair, touched the back of my head, and came away with blood on my fingers. Meanwhile, the meeting had dissolved into screaming voices and flailing arms.
A young man’s face swam into my line of vision. A moment later he was kneeling on the floor beside me and saying, “Are you all right?”
“Help me up.”
He pulled me to my feet. “Are you bleeding?” he asked, the blood from my fingers now staining his.
“A little, from my head. I need some air.”
Still dazed, I staggered out of the room and slumped down on a bench outside the building. The young man reappeared, a wad of damp paper towels in his hand.
“Let me look at you.”
I rested my chin on my chest and felt his fingers gently part my hair, then dab my skull with the paper towels. “It’s not deep. There’s a first aid kit inside. Don’t move. I’ll be right back.”
He returned with a metal first aid kit, again parted my hair, applied a stinging antiseptic and then a Band-Aid to the cut.
“There,” he said. “Good as new.”
I smiled. “Are you a doctor?”
He smiled back. “Ex-Eagle scout. My name is Josh.”
“I’m Henry. Thanks for coming to my rescue.”
He glanced down at his feet, then up at me, and said shyly, “Um, it was my chance to meet you. Not,” he added quickly, “that I wanted you to get hurt.”
I guessed he was in his early twenties. His hair was a mass of black curls restrained by a shiny mousse. He had a delicate, bony face; a long nose; a wide, strong mouth; and a dimpled chin. Behind the lenses of his tortoise-shell framed glasses his eyes were the color of honey, the same tone as his skin.
“It was worth the blow to my head,” I replied. He was wearing a QUEER T-shirt. “You’re with that group.”
He smiled. “For today anyway. My roommate drafted me. He said—”
The tall man from QUEER stomped out of the center accompanied by a shorter but more muscular Latino, also in a QUEER T-shirt. He regarded me with cool, confiding eyes, as if to say, Can you believe these gringos?
The taller man said to Josh, “Come on, we’re leaving.” He glared at me. “These people are losers.”
Josh said, “He’s the roommate I was—”
“Come on, Josh,” he interrupted. “Let’s go.”
“I’m the one with the car,” he said to me, apologetically. He took a pen from his pants pocket, lifted my hand, and carefully wrote a phone number on the back of it. “Call me?”
“Yeah.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
He smiled, said, “Okay, talk to you later,” and went off with the QUEER cohort. At the edge of the parking lot, he turned back, smiled, and waved.
••••
“Queers United to End Erasure and Repression.”
Madison Knight— “a pseudonym, my dear, adopted back in the ’50s when you could get locked up for daring to suggest homosexuals were human”— pronounced each word with slightly disdainful precision.
We were sitting in the now nearly empty community room, the town hall having ended. A few people still milled around, plotting, planning, despairing.
“That’s quite a mouthful,” I said.
Madison laughed. “The whole point is the acronym. Queer. A hate word for people our age. These boys and girls fling it in our faces, reclaim it, they say, to show us what old fuddy-duddies we are. Sellouts. And worst of all, the ultimate curse word, assimilationists.”
“As opposed to what? Separatists?”
He shook his head. “No, my dear. Revolutionaries.” He laid a liver-spotted hand on my arm. “It’s part of an old, ongoing quarrel in the community between people willing to work in the system and people who want to bring it down. It started with Harry Hay and his Mattachine Society in the ’50s. Hay had been a Communist. When they tossed him out of the party for sucking cock, he transferred his ideals from overthrowing the capitalists to overthrowing the straights. But most of us,” he said, glancing around the room, “aren’t revolutionaries. We just want what other people have—”