Unlike so many younger people, I didn’t grow up knowing I was queer. It was less common to be aware of things like that in the 1950s. Also, although I knew I was different from other kids, our family was one of those with the wrong kind of secrets. That was enough reason to feel different.  

      I was a literate child—awkward, silent and always with my face in a book. I read indiscriminately, from my parents’ crammed bookshelves, the children’s section of the library and the regular fiction section.  

      After school, my sister and I would walk down the hill to the library. I would pick a book off the shelf, pretty much at random. We would take our books and sit in the heavy wooden chairs at the heavy wooden tables polished to a whisper, with the faint smell of bubblegum and paper like dried grass on a hillside, and the golden sunlight that streamed in the windows at a slant, crowded with dancing dust motes. A safe place, full of books. 

      I knew about sex. My awkward, literate mother had left a book where I would find it, one with pictures, for children. It had stylized color-block images of a man and a woman, naked, lying together. “If they love each other very much,” it said. That was very progressive for the 1950s. No mention, of course, of what two men, or two women, do if they love each other very much. 

      There were love and romance and sex in most of the books from the adult fiction shelves, and very occasionally there would be homosexuals. All of that made me squirm, but it was just part of the price of having books to read. Did I notice that it was much more shameful, in the books, to be queer? I don’t think I was especially interested. 

      Once I hit puberty, I noticed.  

      When I was 13, books with queer characters and situations seemed to jump off the shelves into my hands. They told me that was a life to be avoided at all costs. A life of despair, degradation, shunning, society’s disgust, shame, murder and suicide. I was chilled and sickened, and I knew that these characters could have, must have, nothing to do with me. 

      For some reason I especially remember a story in which a woman, frustrated in her pursuit of a man who doesn’t love her back, grabs her best friend and grinds their crotches together. The other woman pushes her away. “What now? Do we put on tight skirts and red lipstick and go down to the Black Cat? Get drunk and pick up other sad women? Or do you go out there and get the man you really want?” 

      It may seem like an insignificant moment, blink and you’ll miss it, but each story that showed how hopeless it was to be queer pushed me a little farther down under the ice.  

      In junior high school I had a chemistry teacher who everybody knew was a faggot. In retrospect, I don’t know if he was actually gay. It didn’t matter. He was a frightened, humorless man and the children mocked and harassed him every day. It was so painful to watch, the cruelty, his vulnerability, that I stopped going to his class.  

      That same year, my mother sat me down and talked to me about homosexuals. She wasn’t talking about me. It might have been that teacher she was thinking of, or maybe it was the closeted father of a friend. She meant well. “You must not hate them,” she said. “You must feel sorry for them. They lead such sad, ugly, lonely lives.” 

      One bitter day, in the hall between classes, my friend Franklin asked me, “What do you think about homosexuals?”  

      I froze. He stood there and waited, a skinny pale boy with long dark lashes. Shouts and chatter mingled around us and bounced off the walls and ceiling. Why would he ask me that? What could he be thinking, to ask me that?  

      “Disgusting,” I mumbled. Lockers slammed. The smell of hotdogs curled up from the cafeteria. Franklin looked thoughtful and nodded, and changed the subject.  

      Only years later did I realize that he wasn’t asking because he suspected me. He didn’t. He was asking because he was gay himself, and wanted to know if he could tell the person he trusted most or if I would abandon him. That brave boy. He got his answer. I didn’t know, I didn’t understand.  

      Later, Franklin was my boyfriend. We never talked about homosexuals. I never knew that we both were making the same sad bargain. I loved him, for his courage, for his brightness and kindness. I wanted to be close to him, wanted my arms around him. We needed each other to survive the cold. It would have to be enough. 

      We needed different stories.  

      I wish someone had told us that there would be other stories. That what was in there, under the ice, waiting to grow, could not be stopped from growing. That all the way across the country, young people were changing the story. Spring would come.