She recognized my voice. She knew we were calling from San Francisco. She knows about Peter from your letters. That fake name probably gave us away as much as his real one would’ve.
And this means… Well. She knows I’m here, with you. She might’ve already suspected, but now she knows for sure.
I don’t know what’ll happen. I don’t know what she’ll do. Whatever she thinks will get her what she wants, probably.
I’m so scared, Sharon. I hate that I’m still so scared of her. Maybe that’s the kind of thing that never goes away.
I’m so, so sorry. Things were going so well, and now I’ve ruined it all.
Yours, Tammy
Sunday, June 25, 1978
Dear Tammy,
No, you haven’t.
I don’t have time for a real letter—I’m just writing this one fast while you’re in the shower so I can leave it for you before I go downstairs—but I wanted you to know you haven’t ruined everything. You couldn’t, not ever.
We’ll figure out this thing with your aunt. For now, it’s Gay Freedom Day. It’s a day to be happy. So please, try to relax and enjoy it, all right?
Yours, Sharon
Sunday, June 25, 1978
Dear Diary,
So that was my first Gay Freedom Day.
The house is dead quiet tonight. I’ve been lying on my bed, staring up at the ceiling for the past two hours. Peter and Tammy are both who knows where and Mom is asleep, as usual.
The afternoon was amazing at first, being in the middle of all that energy in the air. It wasn’t exactly perfect—it was hard to shake all the fears that phone call with Aunt Mandy the night before had stirred up—but Tammy seemed to have taken my letter this morning to heart, because despite everything that had happened, she was so excited to be there for the parade, it was contagious. She must’ve said the word “wow” a hundred times before it was halfway over.
“Wow,” she said again, beaming, as a dozen motorcycles revved their engines up ahead of us. Her face kept lighting up, over and over again. “Did you see that, Sharon?”
I grinned. “The motorcycles? Yeah, they were tough to miss.”
“That woman had a shirt that said Dykes on Bikes.” Tammy’s usual sunny smile had been overtaken by an all-out Cheshire cat grin the moment we’d reached Castro Street and gotten our first glimpse of the huge flag hanging in the distance, with massive stripes in all different colors. “That’s what they call themselves. They don’t think it’s a bad word at all!”
“They don’t? Really?” I hadn’t noticed the woman’s shirt. How would a shirt like that even get made?
“Nope,” Peter said from Tammy’s other side, grinning just as wide as she was. “Words mean different things when different people say them.”
“Wow. Okay. Oh, my gosh.”
“Oh, my gosh!” He laughed again and flicked a braid off my shoulder. He’s done that every time I’ve worn my hair in braids since we were little kids, and it annoys me as much now as it did then. I elbowed him back just as a drag queen in a one-piece bathing suit blew us a kiss from atop a tinsel-covered truck.
“I’ve wasted so much time being scared,” Tammy said, reaching out to catch the imaginary kiss. “But my aunt isn’t more powerful than all of this. She can’t be. There are thousands of us here! This is the world now, whether she likes it or not.”
“Exactly.” Peter reached out, pretending to take the kiss from Tammy and slapping it onto his own cheek.
He’d somehow maneuvered us to the front row of spectators, but the crowd was impossibly tight all around us. I knew Gay Freedom Day was a big deal, but I’d never imagined this. There had to be tens of thousands of people around us, and fifty feet away a cluster of TV trucks with cameras on their roofs was taking in the scene.
Peter even heard a rumor that a gray-haired woman was walking around the