Cockeyed

I was not quite old enough to have been there, but I sometimes wondered where I would have stood on that June night that ignited the post ‘50s and ‘60s gay rights movement, had I been present. Would I have joined the drunken kick line that sang

“We are the Stonewall girls” and hurled bottles and debris at the rampaging cops? Fat chance. Or would I have been among the contemptuous better-heeled gay bystanders across the street muttering about how grossly impolite and impolitic the rebellion was? I’d like to think I would have been among the organizers who moved in, in the following days, to set up more focused and orderly protests, and who initiated the legal challenges that led to the police and other reforms of the seventies and eighties. But maybe I would not yet have been sufficiently clear-headed about myself and brave enough to do even that.

Hu

“Hourly,” Art said.

“You guys seem to have a really busy and varied sex life,” I said. “Or is a lot of that just talk? Or wishful thinking?”

“We try not to let it be,” Hu

I asked, “And this way of life has not been problematical?”

Art looked puzzled. “In what way?”

“Oh, the usual. Disease. Legal difficulties. Getting involved with people who turn out to be crazy or dangerous.”

“Oh, girl! All of the above. Why else would you be sitting here, Donald?”

74 Richard Stevenson

This reminded me that I still had to check out a few of the blackmailers and extortionists who had turned up late in the week. I had told Hu

The phone rang and Hu

He hung up and said, “That’s my cousin, Wesley Bump. He checked with Aunt Joycelyn, and Mom never called her. She doesn’t seem to have contacted anybody in the family about what she’s up to. Oh Lord, I just know that poor Mom has been having one of her days where she’s not all there, and she’s probably somewhere where people think she’s a local derelict. But what gets me is, why don’t people see this old lady going around in her bathrobe and call the police? Why can’t they see that she is in need of assistance?”

The phone rang several more times over the next half hour, and at one point Hu

Just after four-thirty, Antoine arrived and Hu

Hu

where she’s being held captive. But we already looked in all the rooms on the second floor and up in the attic, and we’re certain that Mom isn’t here in the house.”

“Oh, Hu

“I want to believe that. I want so badly to believe that.”

Art said, “Did you bring the letter?”

“I hope this is the right one. Hu

“Why would you ask that?” Hu

“I don’t know. You’ve got all sorts of shady stuff in your past.

Maybe your mom does, too. Like mother, like son.”

“Where would you get that idea?”

“Hu

Hu

Then suddenly they all burst out laughing, and this led to another group hug and some more cackling.

“Girl, just hand me that letter. As a matter of fact, it is blackmail. Mom embezzled some money many years ago. She paid it back, but these puke-heads from Cobleskill, this skanky bitch and her a

to do with all that long-ago crapola. But don’t tell anybody at Golden Gardens. Mom is over being a criminal — it was after Dad died and she was distraught — and nobody at the home has to worry about her filching anything.”

Antoine shook his head and gri

“No, the police don’t know. That’s how she got blackmailed.”

Antoine produced an envelope from his back pocket. “I sat on it, so it’s squished.”

Hu

Congratulations to your homosexual son for wi