I’d always thought being gay was wrong, when I thought about it at all. But if this Curtis boy could make my brother smile that way…well, I didn’t see how that could be a bad thing, whether or not it matched up with what my teachers said.
“Okay,” I’d said. He looked up with wide eyes to see me standing there. “I’ll keep your secret. You know, about the, um…that. And… I think I might be able to get used to the idea.”
His eyes crinkled at the corners. “Thanks, sister dear. I wasn’t exactly asking for your permission, but it’s nice of you to say so all the same.”
He got up from the table, crossed the kitchen, and gave me a hug. Even though we aren’t the kind of family that hugs much.
Tonight, though, I couldn’t make sense of what was happening. Having a homosexual brother was one thing, but being surrounded by homosexuals in the middle of the street was something else. I’d thought gay people usually didn’t want anyone to know they were gay, but the men around me didn’t look as if they were hiding anything. Weren’t they worried about who might see them carrying these signs? And why were so many of them even there?
“Why are they protesting something that happened in Miami?” I asked. “How many thousands of miles away is that?”
“Doesn’t matter.” Peter kept swiveling his head around, as though he was trying to see everything at once. The chants were getting louder, and he had to raise his voice so I could hear him. “It’s only a matter of time before it happens here.”
“Wait, you mean Anita Bryant’s coming to California?”
“Probably. She and her friends aren’t going to stop now that they’ve won.”
“You think so? Oh, my gosh.” When I turned to him, though, instead of looking worried, my brother was laughing. At me.
I groaned. “What’s so funny?”
“You always sound about nine years old when you say that. ‘Oh, my gosh.’” He did a high-pitched trill on the words.
“Shut up. That’s not what I sound like at all.”
“Hey, do you hear that?” Peter cocked his head.
The crowd was getting louder, the sounds of the protest drifting over the stores and houses in front of us. Whistles, and shouts, and a faint rhythmic sound that might’ve been drumming poured in from the next block.
“How many people are up there?” I asked.
“Hundreds?” Peter shrugged. “Thousands?”
Thousands? Of gay people?
He practically dragged me past the restaurants and bars that lined the block. People were spilling out onto the sidewalk, thickening the crowd around us even more. The street was full of honking horns. Drivers leaned out the windows, shouting for everyone to stop clogging the street.
We turned another corner, past an intersection jammed with traffic, and suddenly we were in the middle of a sea of people like nothing I’d ever seen. A wall of fast-moving bodies, all marching north, a fierce energy thrumming through the group.
Before I understood what was happening, Peter and I were swept up in it. We didn’t have a choice—it was march or be trampled.
My brother had already started shouting along with everybody else. “TWO, FOUR, SIX, EIGHT! SEPARATE THE CHURCH AND STATE!”
“FUCK YOU, ANITA!” a man shouted up ahead. Others shouted in agreement, a few of them banging on drums that hung around their necks. One of the men held up a sign with painted letters that read SAVE OUR HUMAN RIGHTS. Behind him, a cop on a motorcycle was trying to cut into the crowd, but the marchers kept going while the cop just watched, revving his engine. A few of the men glanced warily at the officer. As far as I know it’s still illegal to be gay, but he didn’t seem to be arresting anyone.
A lot of the men in the crowd had long hair, and some of them were wearing earrings or leather jackets. I didn’t see anyone who looked quite as young as Peter and me, but there were a few who didn’t look that much older. College students, maybe.