by Robin Talley
“Yeah. Sometimes I wish I weren’t quite so smart.”
I elbowed him. “They wouldn’t really do it here, would they?”
“They will if they can.”
“It would never pass. There must have been thousands of people out marching that night.”
“Sure, but there are millions of people in California, and gay people only make up a tiny fraction. If there were a statewide campaign, even if we all voted no, Orange County alone would probably have enough fundamentalist assholes to pass it. That whole place is basically one gigantic fundamentalist asshole.”
“Right.” I didn’t mention that Orange County was also where my new pen pal was from. Tammy Larson of Ocean Valley, located smack in the middle of the land of sunshine and hatred. It’s kind of strange, since Tammy seems nice from her letters—the last one was fun to read, all about her big family—but if she knew I had a gay brother, she’d probably report it straight to one of her teachers. Then her school would call my school, and Peter’s secret would be out for the whole world to know.
It’s too bad. I could see us being friends if things were different.
“Look.” Peter nudged me, angling his chin up ahead. We had a few blocks to go, but there were already two men in front of us, walking with their arms slung around each other’s shoulders.
“Come on, Shar.” Peter sped up.
“I’m coming. I’m coming.”
By the time we’d made it two more blocks, we’d seen at least a dozen other men, and when we reached Castro Street itself, the crowd swelled. Tall men, short men, white men, Black men, Latino men, young men, slightly less young men—the sidewalks were teeming with them, and the one thing they all seemed to have in common was the way they touched each other. Right out in the open, where anyone could see.
Some of these men must’ve been the same ones who’d marched with us, but the mood on the street tonight was the opposite of what it had been then. Tonight felt relaxed, simple, fun. Not at all angry.
Plus, it really did seem to be all men. Almost. I did spot one girl hovering in a doorway, talking to a man in a flannel shirt. She looked like she was in her twenties, and she was wearing a leather jacket and dark glasses, even though the sun had already set. She had shoulder-length, jagged blond hair, and she was much, much cooler than I could ever hope to be.
I shrank a little in my boring gray T-shirt and tugged my two thick braids back over my shoulders. Maybe I didn’t fit on Castro Street after all.
“Hey, that’s the place we saw on the news.” Peter pointed to a liquor store across the street. “Remember? On Gay Freedom Day?”
“Right.” Last week Mom, Peter, and I had all sat together and watched silently as the local news started its Gay Freedom Day report. Apparently, this year’s parade had been the biggest one yet. Mom made us change the channel before the report was over, since Gay Freedom Day reports always show pictures of naked men running around.
“It would be cool to go to that someday, but...” Peter shook his head. “It’s always on the news.”
“That’s true.” I tried to hide my relief. I don’t want my brother anywhere near Gay Freedom Day. If someone saw him on TV, they might try to hurt him for real. Someone worse than Gary Knopp.
“Hey, are you two registered to vote?”
I jumped, startled to hear how close the new voice was, but Peter turned and grinned. Behind us was a guy holding a clipboard and a folder. He looked a little older than us, and he was dark-skinned, with a puffy Afro. He was wearing a red flannel shirt unbuttoned over a tight white T-shirt, Levi’s, and hiking boots.
“I’m afraid we’re underage,” Peter told the guy in a stage whisper.
He laughed. “That’s all right. Want to sign up for our volunteer list? We need all the help we can get. There are ways kids can help, too.” He smiled at me, and I blushed again. I’m shorter than Peter, but did I look that much younger? I knew I shouldn’t have worn my hair in braids. “Have you heard about Harvey’s campaign?”
Peter nodded. “He’s running for supervisor again?”
“He is, and he could win it this time, but only if we can turn out enough voters.”
“What do you need volunteers to do, exactly?” I asked. “Are you having more marches? We came to the one after the Miami vote.”
The guy tilted his head and smiled me. “Yeah, and we need people to canvass, too. Do you two live in the city?”
Peter grimaced. “Yeah. With our mom, in the Excelsior.”
The guy grimaced, too, then laughed. “District Eight? My condolences. Is it really all conservative Irish-Catholic down there?”
“Just about.”
“And I mean, we are Irish-Catholic,” I added, “but we aren’t—”
“Conservative. I get it.” The guy smiled knowingly. “That just means we need to get you registered as soon as you’re legal so you can change your district from the inside out.”
Peter nodded vigorously. “My name’s Peter, by the way. This is my sister, Sharon.” At least he didn’t call me his kid sister, the way he used to in junior high.
“Leonard. Nice to meet you both.” From the way he shook our hands, I was starting to wonder if Leonard was a politician himself.
He showed Peter a flyer, and I scanned the sidewalks around us. The girl in the leather jacket was gone. All I could see in any direction were men. I shifted, conscious of exactly how much I stuck out on Castro Street.
“Can I get you to sign up?” Leonard held out his folder with a volunteer form on top. I took it from him, but when I glanced down, I hesitated.
The very first line asked for a phone number. What if someone called our house, and Mom answered?
Peter was peering down at the form, too. He met my gaze and frowned slightly.
“Oh, and by the way, Sharon...” Leonard didn’t seem to notice our uncertainty. He took back the folder and flipped through a few pages, pulling out a mimeographed sheet of paper. “I promised a friend of mine I’d hang this up in the Elephant Walk, but you can check it out first if you want. I know they’re always looking for more women to join them.”
The mimeographed text was hard to read, but I made out the words “Women’s Bookstore” and an address on the opposite side of the park. The logo at the top read VALENCIA STREET BOOKS.
A whole bookstore, just for women? Did they have a rule about not letting men inside or something?
Maybe that was where all the girls I saw the other night were. Maybe Castro Street was just for gay men when they weren’t having marches, and the lesbians hung out in this bookstore.
But if that were true, I wouldn’t fit there, either.
A man in a cowboy hat strode toward us, waving to Leonard. I tucked the flyer inside the folder and gave it back. The man asked Leonard for a light, and while they were talking, I told Peter I was ready to go home.
“We just got here.” He furrowed his eyebrows. “Why don’t you go check out that bookstore? It’s only a few blocks away, and there’d be other girls. I could meet you there later and drive you home.”
“That’s okay. You stay, though. I’ll get the bus.”
“Are you sure?”
He was trying to argue with me, but he wasn’t trying very hard. I’m sure he’d rather have been on his own, anyway. He and Curtis stopped writing to each other last year, and he probably wanted to make new gay friends.
“Yeah. I’m sure.”
“Okay, well, don’t get home too late. You know how Mom gets.”
“All right.”
I dragged my feet as I walked away. I was annoyed with myself for not doing what I came out to do, and I wasn’t in any hurry to get home and have to lie to Mom about where I’d been.
I gazed into the windows of stores and bars as I headed south. Everywhere I looked, there were more men. Most of them were smiling.
I could see why. Here, they had a place where they could all be together, without worrying about what anyone else thought.
There was a phone booth outside a drugstore, and I slowed down. I thought about calling Kevin and having him come pick me up, but he was working tonight.
That’s when a poster taped to the glass booth wall caught my eye. It was handwritten on top of being mimeographed, so the words were barely legible, but the photo in the middle was clear. A girl was wearing a leather miniskirt with a man’s shirt and tie. Her hair was slicked back and she was leering at the camera, half-smiling, as though she had a secret she couldn’t wait to tell everyone. Dotted around the edges of the poster were more photos, showing men with long hair, sunglasses, and zippered jackets, smoking cigarettes and flipping off the camera.
It took me a minute to decipher the text below the photo:
THE PRUDES! With CREEPS IN TOYLAND and DAMNED REVERENDS. Saturday, July 2. $3. No age limit, kiddies!
The address was on Valencia Street.
I glanced back over my shoulder. Peter was nowhere in sight, but the crowd of men on Castro Street had only gotten deeper. Everyone was milling around, going in and out of restaurants and bars, talking and laughing.
I turned back to the poster. That girl, in the center. There was something about the way she sneered at the camera. I could’ve stood there staring at her for the rest of the night.
Or... I could go to the show. It was only a few blocks over.
It was a ridiculous idea. Except, the longer I stood there, the less ridiculous it seemed.
I could just walk over and check it out. I didn’t have to go inside.
I pulled the rubber bands off the bottoms of my braids and combed out my long hair with my fingers as I walked. When I’d made it two blocks east, I realized I hadn’t seen any obviously gay guys in a while. There were more girls on the street now, too, and soon I spotted a straight couple coming out of a corner store, laughing as they tried to hold hands and juggle an armful of brown paper bags at the same time. I guess I’d left the gay area of the city behind.
Before long, I found the address from the poster. There was a line outside the door of the club—if club is the right word for an old industrial building with blacked-out windows and run-down bars on either side.
Before I could lose my nerve, I slid in the back of the line. A pair of girls in purple lipstick, short skirts, and stiletto boots were waiting in front of me. I felt underdressed in my T-shirt and jeans, but at least I didn’t have my little-girl hair anymore.
No one seemed to notice how I looked, though. In fact, no one glanced at me twice, not even the bouncer who took my three dollars and silently jammed his thumb toward the loud music spilling out from the dark, humid hallway behind him.
“I can’t believe this city finally has a punk scene!” a guy shouted as I followed the short-skirted girls inside.
So that’s what this was. A punk show. All I knew about this kind of music was that there was a punk band named the Sex Pistols. A guy at St. John’s got suspended for two weeks because he wore a T-shirt with their name on it under his uniform, and the gym teacher saw him changing out of it in the locker room. Peter said they were a band in England, and that people liked them because they cursed a lot.
I doubted the Sex Pistols were in this grimy club tonight, but maybe there’d be other bands who cursed a lot. That idea was surprisingly appealing.
By the time I’d made it halfway down the narrow hall, music was already pumping out from the main room up ahead. I couldn’t make out any of the words well enough to tell if the band was cursing, but I did know it was completely different from any music I’d ever heard. The radio stations I listened to played Donna Summer or the Bee Gees or KC and the Sunshine Band—disco love songs, mostly. But the music tonight wasn’t anything like disco. It might as well have been piped in from outer space.
There were no smooth, Donna Summer-style voices. In fact, no one was singing at all—just yelling. And whatever they were yelling about, it wasn’t love.
It didn’t flow, either, the way I always thought music was supposed to. Instead, as I stepped out of the hall and into the big, dark room, the music shrieked and banged and pounded. There was no way to dance to it—not in the way I knew how to dance, at least. The most you could do was shake in tune to all the pounding.
But best of all, this music was angry.
There was a tall, skinny guy in leather pants and spiky black hair bent over the microphone on the little stage at the end of the room, his words incomprehensible under the feedback and squealing guitars and nonstop drumming. Still, the anger came through loud and clear.
It was there in the crowd, too. Everyone I saw—girls in tight jeans and boots, men in wrinkled T-shirts with safety pins stuck through their sleeves, all of them jumping up and down and waving their hands over their heads as the music thumped—they all had that same ferocity on their faces.
It was the same energy I’d felt the night of the march. The sounds and smells and sensations of the club crawled inside my veins, exactly the way the chants had from the crowd that night.
I stepped into the thickest part of the crowd, until I was out of the path of people still pouring in through the door. I shut my eyes, my body thrumming as the fury in the music filled me up.
It felt good to let myself get mad. My shoulders started moving first, and before I’d realized I was doing it, I was shaking along to the music along with everyone else.
“He-e-y-y-y,” a winking voice drawled from the stage. At the sound of decipherable words, I opened my eyes. The guys in front of me were bent over a joint, and through the momentary gap in the crowd, I got a good look at the band.
The guy with the spiky hair had picked up a guitar, and a girl had stepped to the front. She had dark hair and wore a trench coat over a short, tight black dress, with bright red lipstick and platform heels, and she was squeezing the microphone so tightly I was afraid she’d crush it.
“SHIT!” the guy in front of me bellowed to his friend, straightening up and waving the joint over his head. “It’s that chick you like! It’s Midge fucking Spelling!”
The drummer started pounding out a new, sharp rhythm, and a moment later the girl onstage—Midge fucking Spelling, I guess—shut her eyes and growled into the microphone. I couldn’t make out her words, but I knew exactly who she was. The girl from the poster.
She stepped backward, tilting her head up so her hair fell loose behind her, her eyes still shut tight. Her dress stretched and shifted and clung to her skin as she lifted the microphone to her lips and shouted at the ceiling. “WOOOO!”
A hundred voices shouted “WOOOO!” back.
“That’s right, Midge!” the guy in front of me called, sloshing his drink all over his T-shirt. “Shake it, baby!”
Midge ignored him. I could only make out a few syllables from all her growling—the most frequently used one seemed to be “fuck”—but the lyrics clearly didn’t matter as much as the volume and the noise and the life in this room.
The unquestioned rebellion. The complete lack of giving a shit.
Midge didn’t look as if she was “shaking it” to me. What she was doing was bigger than that. As long as she was up on that stage, growling into the mic, the rest of us were at her mercy. No one had the option of standing still.
I shut my eyes again and lost track of how long my body rocked to the music. It was easy, almost too easy, to shut off my brain while Midge Spelling was on the stage.
At some point her growls faded out, and when I opened my eyes again, there was a blond girl in a leather jacket in front of me. Her eyes were locked on my face.
I blinked and dropped my head, startled, but when I looked up again, she hadn’t moved. She looked familiar, and after another minute I realized she was the girl I’d seen on Castro Street earlier that night. Her lo
ok was understated compared to Midge’s—she wasn’t wearing any makeup at all, and she had on ancient Converse sneakers instead of platform heels—but she fit in perfectly, with her Ramones T-shirt and a leather collar tied below the knee of her ripped jeans. I didn’t remember her wearing that on Castro Street.
The girl leaned forward to shout in my ear. I couldn’t understand her at first, and I shook my head, so she shouted it again. “DID I SEE YOU ON CASTRO WITH LEONARD TONIGHT?”
I nodded and waved, since shouting over the music seemed impossible.
“I’M EVELYN,” the girl shouted. “WANT TO GET A DRINK?”
Half of me wanted to stay where I was, thrumming to the music, but the bar was on the far side of the room, and it looked slightly less jammed with people. Plus, I didn’t mind the idea of getting away from the guy in front of me, since his grip on his joint was so loose I was surprised it hadn’t already fallen onto my shoe. I nodded again.
The noise near the bar was slightly less deafening than the rest of the club. Evelyn left me standing against a wall and came back a minute later with two glasses.
“I don’t usually see women from the Castro at these shows.” She still had to lean in and raise her voice so I could understand her, but at least we didn’t have to shout.
“I’ve never been to one of these shows before,” I told her, “but I saw the poster and thought I’d check it out.”
“Cool. What do you think so far?”
I glanced back toward the stage. Midge was dancing wildly while the band behind her banged on their instruments. The spiky-haired guy had stepped forward to join her at the edge of the stage, jangling his guitar and pounding his head wildly in time with Midge’s movements. As if they were dancing together, but in the most inharmonious way possible. “I like the band.”
“Yeah, Midge is great.” Evelyn pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket and held it out to me. I shook my head, and she popped one into her mouth. “We were supposed to hang out after their set, but it looks like she’s already gone the way of Johnny. Once those two are sharing space, the rest of the world turns invisible.”
