by Robin Talley
It was the check register, blown up twenty times its actual size. In the foreground, set against the photo, was a drawing of a woman with perfectly coiffed hair and immaculately straight red lipstick. Her head was tipped back with laughter, and she held a pitchfork in her hand. The drawing was outlined in thin, precise lines, leaving her image transparent, so the handwriting behind her came through.
The drawing was of Mrs. Amanda Dale. That would’ve been obvious even if she weren’t standing right next to it, but now the whole crowd was looking back and forth between the collage and Aunt Mandy, making the connection.
The line at the top of the blown-up check register read New Way Protect Our Children Fund, and below it were handwritten entries showing payment after payment. Posh Hair Lounge and Ocean Valley Golf Club were right at the top. Half a dozen lines down were five payments to K-ROY Los Angeles.
Cut-out words were pasted across the image, too, the same way Tammy had used them in the collage on my bedroom wall. Another poem, sort of. I picked out SINNER and LIAR and GREED, but the one that appeared most was HYPOCRITE. It popped up in at least three different places. Running sideways up a pitchfork tine was another set of pasted-on words: THOU SHALT NOT STEAL.
“Thanks, Alex.” Tammy took the collage from her and smiled at me. “And thank you, too.”
Then she turned around and lifted the collage, waving to the pro-Prop 6 protesters hovering on their end of the school lawn.
“Hey!” Tammy shouted. “If you ever donated to the New Way Protect Our Children Fund, come see what your pastor and his wife have been doing with your money!”
For a second, I thought Aunt Mandy was going to snatch the collage out of Tammy’s hand, but she didn’t move. Maybe she already knew she’d lost.
Carolyn’s mom was the first to approach us. At first I thought she was coming to yell at Tammy, but instead she peered forward, studying the collage.
“What’s that?” Tammy’s mother leaned forward, too.
“Your daughter’s a very lost child…” Aunt Mandy said, but now Mr. and Mrs. Murdoch from their church were stepping forward, too.
“Could you tell me what this is all about, miss?” the reporter asked, coming up to me.
“Tammy’s the one you need to talk to,” I told him. “Here, I’ll hold this.”
Peter stepped up, too, and he and I each held one end of the collage so the church members could read it for themselves while Tammy told the reporter all about the check register, promising to send him the original copies she’d kept back in San Francisco. While they talked, Mr. Murdoch went up to Aunt Mandy and said something I couldn’t understand. It was clear he was furious.
I couldn’t believe it. Tammy might have actually won.
The reporter went over to Aunt Mandy and Mr. Murdoch, which was sure to be an interesting conversation. Tammy’s mother and her sisters went over to join them, too. The other members of their church were studying the collage as Tammy came up beside me.
“Thank you.” She smiled, but her eyes were full of tears.
“You’re the one who made this happen.” I smiled back at her.
“Not true. If you hadn’t said what you did, I’d still be standing there like a rabbit in headlights.”
She reached out to take my hand again, even though the camera wasn’t on us anymore. I gazed down at our intertwined fingers.
Tammy must’ve seen the surprise on my face and pulled her hand away quickly. “Sorry. I shouldn’t assume, I—”
I reached out and grabbed her hand again.
“All right, Sharon,” Lisa said over my left shoulder, and laughter erupted behind us. I blushed redder than I’d ever blushed before.
“It’s time to go in,” Evelyn called. “Sit in the front row of the bleachers if you can. We can’t let the other side get all the good seats!”
Everyone moved fast. Lisa gave me the keys to the bus, and Tammy and I gingerly carried the collage over. It took us a few minutes to delicately wrap it back up so it would be ready for her exhibit tomorrow, and when we closed the trunk door and turned around, we were the only ones left outside.
“I’m still shaking,” I said, lowering myself onto the back bumper. “I can’t believe how intense that got.”
She held out her hand, showing me her goose bumps. “I can’t believe we did that. I was so scared when I saw my mom watching.”
“You were incredible. Now it’s going to be in the paper and everything. The whole world will know about your aunt and uncle.”
“I hope they print what you said, too.” She grinned and leaned back next to me. “Especially the part about sacrifice. And the part about love.”
“Right. Love.”
I turned and met Tammy’s eyes. She didn’t look away.
I bit my lip. “I, um. There’s something I want to give you, but it’s in my backpack. In the bus. It’s kind of crumpled up, but I hope you can still read it. Not right now, though. Maybe I can get it for you after the debate and you can read it on the ride home tomorrow.”
She glanced behind us at the bus. “You’ve got to know I want to skip the entire debate and go get it right this second.”
I laughed. “No, don’t. We should get inside.”
“Okay.” She hadn’t looked away from my face once. She hadn’t stopped smiling, either. “If you say so.”
“Yeah. I…” I kept looking back and forth, from her eyes to her lips.
It wasn’t that I wanted to know how it felt to kiss a girl. It was that I wanted to know how it felt to kiss her.
“I…” I blushed again. “I, um…”
Her lips parted. “You what?”
“I…love you.” Oh, God, I said it. I said it, and it felt better than anything else has ever felt. “I’m in love with you.”
The smile that spread across her face felt even better. “I’m in love with you, too.”
Then I kissed her. And I finally understand all those songs I didn’t get before.
This is what people mean when they write songs about love.
This feeling. This perfect, overwhelming knowledge that everything is finally exactly right.
Yours, Sharon
Election Night, 1978
Tuesday, November 7, 1978
Dear Harvey,
Can you believe it???
I can’t! It doesn’t feel real.
I’m back home now writing this, but I was at Sharon’s when we got the news. It was the perfect place to be. Usually I hate having to sneak around, but tonight it was worth it. Being with her when something like this happens is worth a little deception.
“Channel Five hasn’t said anything on Prop 6 yet.” Peter’s voice was hard to make out through the phone line, thanks to all the people talking in the room behind him. The fact that Sharon and I were both trying to listen from the same phone, huddled on the couch with the receiver jammed against our ears, didn’t help, either.
“Switch to Channel Seven,” Sharon told him. She’d refused to let us turn on the election coverage since I got there, partly because her mom was asleep upstairs and we had to be quiet, but probably also because she was nervous. It was easier to hear it secondhand from Peter than straight from the TV. “Don’t bother with Eleven. Mom had it on earlier and they were only talking about the stupid governor’s race.”
While we sat squashed together in Sharon’s living room, her brother, ironically, was at my house, with my roommates and some of his, too. When I’d left the Mission every house had a TV blaring. Every gay and bi person in the entire state of California was in front of a screen right now, collectively biting their nails to shreds.
Well, except Sharon and me. But being with her was better than being in front of a hundred screens.
“We only need to win San Francisco,” I said. It’s the same refrain Evelyn and Lisa keep repeating.
I don’t know if Sharon found it comforting—I didn’t—but it was all we had to hold on to. Winning San Francisco would definitely be good, but we’d need the rest of the state to stop Briggs’s initiative from becoming law.
Still, we’d done absolutely everything we could. The bookstore crew had gone on a dozen bus trips to knock on doors, and we’d folded so many pamphlets my paper cuts would probably never fully heal.
Sharon had managed to join us a few more times. Her mother had partially ungrounded her a month after we got back from the debate, but her new curfew was strict, so trips to our part of town were rare. Fortunately, we’ve gone back to writing each other letters every other day, and I’ve gotten good at sneaking in through a window off her kitchen.
But if things work out the way we hope, we might not have to do it much longer. Peter’s coming over to their house for Thanksgiving, and he and Sharon are planning to just start talking about Dean and me during dinner, as though there’s nothing strange about it. Even though she’s been keeping my letters hidden, Sharon has a feeling her mom knows about us, and Peter and Dean, too, but they never talk about it. Sharon and Peter both think it’s time to start. They don’t think she wants to keep fighting. The whole family’s had enough of that for three lifetimes.
Maybe someday it’ll seem normal for all of us to talk about our lives. To live our lives. Maybe next Thanksgiving I can come over and have dinner with them, without having to hide the truth.
But even if her mom does try to stop us, she can’t do it forever. We’ll both be eighteen next year.
“If we can beat Prop 6 here, the rest of the state will follow when it’s ready,” I said when things had been quiet too long, even though we all knew I was only parroting Evelyn again.
“I want to beat Prop 6 everywhere,” Sharon said.
“Don’t we all.” Peter paused through the phone. “Wait—wait, they’re getting ready to say something.”
“What?” Sharon said, way too loud.
“Shush!” I told her.
“Hey, everybody!” Peter called into the room behind him. “Shut up so we can hear!”
“Oh, my God.” I couldn’t handle the tension. “What are they saying? Tell us what they’re—”
“They—wait—They’re saying—” Peter choked on the words.
“WE WON!” someone shouted in the room behind him, loud enough for us to hear. I think it was Alex. “We fucking won!”
“What?” I couldn’t believe it. “Peter, what did it say? We won San Francisco?”
“We won L.A.—we won California!” There were tears in his voice. “Prop 6 is done!”
I started laughing, from shock and from happiness. “Really!?”
“Hell yeah!” Sharon cried. I could hear whoops and cheers coming from the room behind Peter.
Oh, my God, oh, my God, this was real!
“Three to two against!” Peter shouted. “It’s over!”
We did it, Harvey!!!
“Oh, my God!” I dropped the phone, leaped off the couch and started jumping up and down in the middle of the living room carpet. Sharon leaped up and started jumping, too.
“Oh, my gosh! Oh, my gosh!”
“We won, we won, we won!” I grabbed her and spun her in a circle, both of us being way too loud and neither of us caring. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it!”
“Me neither!” Her voice was giddily high. Shrieks were coming from the receiver where we’d dropped it on the couch, but we didn’t bother to pick it up.
“God, remember all those nights when they beat us?” I wrapped my arms tight around her waist, speaking into her ear, trying to keep my voice soft even though I wanted to scream in triumph. “How it always seemed like the end of the world?”
She nodded fervently. “Now here we are!”
“I’m so happy right now.”
I kissed her. I was smiling so big, my whole body filled with such joy. It was as if we were having our first kiss all over again, outside that high-school gym with Harvey waiting inside.
I pulled back just long enough to say, “I love you so much.” Then I leaned down to kiss her again.
“I need to write you a letter,” she said, the next time we broke apart. “As soon as you leave.”
I laughed. “What are you going to put in a letter that you haven’t already said tonight?”
“A million things. There’s so much going through my head right now, and for the first time, it’s all good.”
I smiled. “Me, too.”
“It’s going to be all right, isn’t it? Things are going to keep getting better.”
“Yeah.” I listened to the tinny cheers and whoops pouring from the phone. I shut my eyes and pictured our friends grinning and celebrating. All that love in one room.
When I opened them, I saw all the love in this room, right here, even though it was only Sharon and me.
“Yeah,” I said again. “Yeah. I think they are.”
Peace, love & hope, Tammy
Acknowledgments
“All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”
That’s a translation of a Victor Hugo quote. Harvey Milk copied it out by hand and hung it on his office wall.
After a series of groundbreaking protests in the 1950s and 60s, including at New York’s Stonewall Inn, as well as earlier demonstrations at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco, Cooper Do-nuts in Los Angeles, and other sites, the movement for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning equality was on the cusp of a breakthrough. The time had come. By the mid-70s, you could almost feel it in the air.
Or so I’ve heard. I was a teen of the 1990s, but the collective memory of the ’70s hung heavy in my high-school days, from the fashion to the music to the language. But I was well beyond my teen years when I truly learned about this era and the history of the movement to which I owe so much. Harvey Milk and legions of other activists, including Sally Gearhart, Marsha P. Johnson, Frank Kameny, and countless others put their own lives on the line because they had faith that their work would lead to a better future for the generations that came after them.
I ended Sharon and Tammy’s story on a high note, with the defeat of Proposition 6 in California—a major event in a time when ballot-box victories for the LGBT rights movement were virtually unheard of—but there were many, many ups and downs during this period, just like we’re seeing today. Only weeks after the Prop 6 win, Harvey Milk was assassinated, along with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone. The killer was Dan White, who’d served alongside Milk on the Board of Supervisors. Although White confessed to the crimes and there was plenty of evidence that they were premeditated, he was ultimately convicted of voluntary manslaughter rather than first-degree murder. Riots and violent police raids on the Castro followed the announcement of the verdict.
For all the movement’s successes, it was clear there remained a lot of work to do, and that’s still the case today. Reports of hate crimes against the LGBT community are rising, with transgender women of color at a particularly high risk. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has banned transgender people from serving in the military, and dozens of states continue to allow people to be fired or lose their housing based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. For all the positive changes we’ve seen in the decades since Harvey Milk’s death, we still have so much more to accomplish to ensure that LGBT people and other marginalized communities aren’t subject to violence and discrimination.
The idea for Music from Another World came about as I reflected on this history, particularly in light of the activism we’re seeing around us right now as a new and powerful generation fights back against a frighteningly emboldened conservative movement.
When I started this book, I turned first to researching the activists working during the 1970s against odds that must h
ave truly seemed impossible. I’m very grateful to the journalist Randy Shilts, whose biography of Harvey Milk, The Mayor of Castro Street, was one of my most helpful reference books as I was writing. Thanks also to activist Cleve Jones for his memoir, When We Rise, and to Lisa McGirr, the author of Suburban Warriors, a fascinating account of the conservative movement in Orange County, California.
Thanks, as well, to the readers of early drafts of Music from Another World, including Anna-Marie McLemore, Jennie Kendrick, and Nicole Overton. You helped to improve this book more than I can say. Thank you to my agent, Jim McCarthy, who’s stood by me through queer story after queer story and offered amazing insights every time. Thank you to my editors, T.S. Ferguson and Lauren Smulski, and to Kate Studer, for helping to make this book so much better than its first iteration, and to Kathleen Oudit for designing another truly spectacular cover. And thank you to the rest of the team at HarperCollins who helped to put this book out into the world, including Laura Gianino, Bess Braswell, Connolly Bottum, Brittany Mitchell, John Oberholtzer, and Allison Draper.
Thank you to Patti Smith, whose music went totally over my head when I was in high school but still impressed itself upon me so deeply that when I needed to call on it to create these characters, it was right there. Thank you, too, to the classic rock station in my hometown, which provided me with a musical education that I never imagined would come in handy until I sat down to write this book.
And most of all, thank you, as always, to Julia, and to Darcy. For everything there is to be thankful for.
1
Friday, September 15, 2017
It took all of Abby’s willpower not to kiss her.
She’d gotten pretty good lately at staring at Linh without making it obvious. Most of the time, at least. Some days were harder than others, though, and today might be the hardest yet.
They’d just gotten back from a Starbucks run, and Abby kept darting looks at Linh out of the corner of her eye. They were sitting only inches apart on the lumpy old couch in the senior lounge, and as Linh sipped her drink and scribbled in her notebook, Abby couldn’t shake the memory of precisely how the echo of iced coffee tasted on Linh’s lips.
