newspaper (which regularly editorialized against us), the police department (which failed to protect us from the violent criminals who frequently came out to attack and threaten us), the city government (which worked to draft anti-picketing ordinances), many local churches (which joined the counterprotests against us), and any location related to any person who made any public statement against us or for gays.
Even our language had intensified. The word gay had disappeared entirely from our signs and vocabulary—a misnomer, Gramps said—and it was replaced by fag, a word that literally signified a bundle of sticks used for kindling. “Fag is an elegant metaphor!” Gramps insisted. “In the same way a literal fag is used to kindle the fires of nature, these metaphorical fags fuel the flames of Hell and the fires of God’s wrath!” Of course, fag also had the added benefit of being scandalous and offensive, which only garnered more attention for our message.
One of the verses that Gramps quoted often included a command from God to shew my people their transgression—and as with the rest of the Bible, my grandfather took this literally. For my cousins and me, this resulted in a precocious knowledge of gay sex practices, at least insofar as they were presented by our pastor. Revulsion filled his voice as he spoke of gay people “anally copulating their brains out,” and “suckin’ around on each other, lickin’ around on each other.” He started adding stick figure depictions of anal sex to our picket signs, one man bent over in front of another. I could articulate the meanings of “scat,” “rimming,” and “golden showers” all before my eighth birthday, though I was loath to do so. To publicly accuse gays of these filthy behaviors would leave a girl open to challenge—“How do you know?”—and thus put her in the unenviable position of having to explain that it’s in a book called The Joys of Gay Sex … which, no, she had not read … but her grandfather had told her about it … during church … from the pulpit.
“Golden showers” was a term featured in our parody of The Twelve Days of Christmas. On December evenings, I’d don my colorful winter coat, pick up a sign, and belt out the lyrics with gusto alongside my uncles and cousins, illuminated by streetlights or the glow of the marquee announcing The Nutcracker at the Topeka Performing Arts Center: “Five golden showers! Preparation H, three bloody rectums, two shaven gerbils, and a vat of K-Y Jelly!” I knew even then that this was transgressive, but there was something so delightful about it, so appealing: this sense that my family had some secret knowledge about the world, that we were not subject to its rules or its judgments. There might be an overabundance of regulations governing life within our own community, but the social niceties of the broader world held no sway over us in the context of the protests. In that respect, we were a law unto ourselves, and all bets were off as long as our words were justified by the Bible. Truth was an absolute defense against any and all claims made against us.
Unfortunately for us, it was not always an adequate defense.
One evening when I was seven, as my siblings and I cleaned up after dinner, there was the wail of a police siren, growing loud as it passed near our house and then fading. And then there was another. And another. My mother frowned. Our house sat just a block east of Gage Boulevard, one of the city’s main thoroughfares, so sirens weren’t especially unusual. For some reason, these ones were making her uneasy.
“Maybe it’s our guys at the Vintage…”
The Vintage was a little restaurant advertising “Cocktails” and “Fine Foods” at the east end of a run-down shopping center just a few blocks from our house—targeted by Westboro because one of the managers was a lesbian serving on the Mayor’s Gay and Lesbian Task Force. I had desperately wanted to picket the Vintage that Friday night, because my cousin Jael had told me she would be there. She was one of my best friends, but since we now attended different elementary schools and lived on different blocks, the most regular time I had with her was when we were protesting. Jael and I had this great routine whereby we’d grab a sign from the truck—her favorite was FAG GOD = RECTUM while I preferred FAG = AIDS with the skull and crossbones underneath—and then we’d plant