We are your children. Of all the things to write on a sign, he picked that.
The year before last, down by the St. Francis Hotel, a man knocked a gun out of a woman’s hand when she was trying to shoot the president. When the newspapers printed that the big hero who’d stopped the assassination attempt was gay, his parents disowned him. He sued the papers for ruining his life.
Did the people here seriously think someone like Anita Bryant would do anything differently from that man’s parents if one of her kids turned out to be gay?
“Come on, Shar.” Peter tugged my sleeve again. He was actually smiling. I hadn’t thought there was any chance I’d see my brother smile tonight. “We don’t want to miss it.”
“Miss what?”
“Whatever it is!”
He started moving faster, into the crowd of men. A bunch of them were carrying signs now.
I followed, my heart pounding. I’d thought we were only coming to look around. I didn’t know something would be happening here, much less something involving signs and running and chanting.
It reminded me of the peace protests, when the hippies were on TV every night singing about the war. Our teachers always warned us to stay away from demonstrations, because you never knew when rocks or bullets would start flying. I’ve never heard of gay people protesting, though.
I only found out about Peter the summer before last. He’d gone away to some wilderness camp in Nevada, a present from our dad’s parents, who have this tendency to go radio-silent for months at a time, then pop up to insist on paying for things we weren’t planning on buying in the first place. Peter came back from that camp smiling bigger than I’d ever seen him smile, but he wouldn’t say why. I pestered him about it for weeks, until one night when Mom was at a church meeting and he finally said he’d tell me. We hid in my room under a blanket fort the way we used to in kindergarten, and he quietly said that over the summer, he’d fallen in love.
I didn’t see how that was possible. As far as I knew, “falling in love” wasn’t any different from the made-up stories we learned in nursery school about Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty.
Our mom and dad certainly never fell in love. Or if they did, it didn’t do them any good.
Besides, Kevin’s camp was all boys. Had he gotten a crush on a counselor’s sister or something?
Finally, his smile wavering a little, Peter told me he was in love with a boy named Curtis. He said he hoped I could accept that.
Well, to be honest, I couldn’t.
I’d known homosexuals existed. You can’t live in San Francisco without knowing that. But it had never occurred to me my own brother could be one of them.
The brother I’d shared a room with for nine years. The brother who’d taught me how to roller-skate and cheat at Candyland. Who made fart noises at the dinner table and hugged me when Dad forgot to send a birthday card.
I didn’t speak to Peter for a week. He’d begged me not to say anything to Mom, but I kept thinking I ought to tell someone. At school, they’d told us homosexuality was a curse, so I thought maybe Mom or Father Murphy could help him be normal again.
In the end, I didn’t say anything. I wanted to help Peter, but I was scared of hurting him, too. The longer I thought about it, the more confused I got about how to tell the difference.
Then one day, I came home from school and found him at the kitchen table, still in his St. John’s blazer. He was bent over a sheet of paper, so intent on what he was writing that he hadn’t heard me come in. He had a smile on his face, a wide, open grin that made his eyes light up as his pen flew across the page. I couldn’t remember ever seeing my brother look that happy.
Then I noticed the envelope on the table next to him. It was addressed to Curtis. Peter was