No Queens on Pickett Street 

Greg Young and Liberace died the same year, albeit of different causes.  Greg was murdered and Liberace died from AIDS.  To this day, neither perpetrator has been arrested.  I remember being struck by the timing, because in 1987 I put to rest something of my own.  I stopped trying to be a straight woman, stopped trying to live a life that I’d known for many years was all wrong.  Of course, queens had been murdered before in Springfield, and I knew as much about AIDS as the next person.  Rock Hudson was already gone.  A close friend was diagnosed with HIV—at the time we figured he had ten years—he had six.

Greg Young’s stage name was Natalie Nichols.  Opening the State Journal Register, I found a big write up about his murder.  The paper elaborated on the glamorous women’s clothes squeezed tight in his closet; his anxious poodle shut in the bathroom.  The implication was that because of his lifestyle he asked to be stabbed repeatedly; he couldn’t expect better.  Of course Liberace’s sexual preference, the worst kept secret in Hollywood, sold tabloids for several weeks.  Like Greg’s, his death was his own fault.  He charmed the socks off all those old women, but it wasn’t they who infected him.

I was living in the Laketown then.  The house was a small Cape Cod that my parents had sold to my husband and me when they retired to Florida.  We’d moved our little family into it in the late 1970s.

Laketown began after World War II when a contractor named Barker-Lubin bought some farmland and put up tract housing priced for returning servicemen.  The tiny houses were the same size and one of three or four floor plans.  When I was a child, in the 1950s, the neighborhood was full of kids.  The yards were huge and shady.  In the summer our mothers watched “Queen for a Day” on boxy black and white TV sets, then lay side by side on a blanket in the afternoon sun listening to a radio through an open window.  My sisters and I played jacks on cement porches that held the heat of the sun and played war with green plastic army men in the dust around the roots of the shade trees.

The basement had a huge coal-converted furnace that looked and sounded like a ticking octopus in its center.  In the winter, we put on roller skates and skated in circles around it, using up our youthful energy, often ducking damp laundry that my mother hung on plastic clotheslines.

I made my children a playroom down in that basement.  I coated the walls several times with white, and I painted a huge purple and gold butterfly near their toy box.  My sons slept upstairs under the eves where my sisters and I had slept.  The children were young; that house was probably the only one they remembered.

We lived there eight years before things came unraveled.  I was newly sober and looking at my life through a new set of lenses.  Ending the marriage turned out to be very expensive—the cost no doubt increased by the woman I chose for my lover.  After the divorce, my sons and I stayed in the house on Pickett Street, but it didn’t take long for my ex-husband to turn on me.

A “Queen for a Day” contestant, who is thinner than my mother, has one six-year-old son.  She has been married five years.  The moderator says to her, “Are you a widow then?” She says, “No, I had my son before I was married.”  The 1954 audience gasps.  I quickly ask my mother, “How did that woman get a baby without a husband?  Why is everyone so upset?”  My mother tells me that you can have babies without husbands, but only if you are bad.  The people now know the woman was bad.  Later I plan to rob a bank as soon as I am big enough to get a baby without a man.

The “bad woman” contestant does not win.  She will not be queen.  Her wishes will not come true.

I sit in a lawyer’s office, my butch lover at my side.  The attorney is a lesbian who could lose her job if that knowledge became public.  “My advice to you is to stay out of court, whatever it takes,” says the attorney.  “Try to talk to him.  See if there is some compromise.  You could lose everything in court.”

My oldest son goes to live with his father, the youngest stays with me.  We stay out of court, a place where even as a mother I no longer have rights. I pack my first-born’s clothes, toys, and books in plastic garbage bags.  I tell him I will pick him up on Sunday to spend the day with him.  I watch his father back slowly out of the drive, his eyes watching me watching our son.  Once I had children, it never occurred to me someone could take them away.  The rest of the evening at the house on Pickett Street is quiet.  We choke down our supper, trying to ignore the empty chair.

When I was a little girl my bedroom had been about six by eight feet, a hallway to another room, really, with a slanted ceiling and varnished hard wood floors.  I extended the room by putting a bookcase on the landing to the stairway.  There wasn’t any door to close between my sister’s room and mine.  When I was sixteen I started filling my bookcase with alcohol, behind copies of Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden, a pint at a time.  By then I had a high-fi and 45 RPM records or the latest hits.  I liked to dance.  I spent countless hours alone in the cool, gray basement.  I set up an easel down there and painted on stretched canvas with oils, dreaming about how I would leave Springfield and go to New York and live in Greenwich Village and be an artist.  I had a thousand dreams.  But the only painting I would do as an adult was a butterfly in my children’s playroom, ironically in the same basement, in the same house.

My butch lover and I walk through the state museum one rainy Sunday afternoon.  We are dressed in blue jeans and T-shirts.  My little boy runs ahead of us to see the Indian relics.  We do not touch, but see men and women hold hands as they stroll along.  I hear a child say the word, “homos.”  Later an older male in an audible whisper says, “All she needs is a good fuck.”

Limited war targets the military only.  That’s the difference between total war and limited war. Terrorists have no problem hitting non-military targets and civilians.  My neighbors, I’ll never know how many, waged a campaign against my family and me.  They aimed this calculated, collective meanness at us.  Collateral damage was incurred as the lives of innocent civilians, women and children, were shattered.  And the reason—the reason was something so small, so private.

One night I wake to the sound of the phone.  “You’re going to get AIDS,” says a voice that must be a child’s.  I hang up.  The call is only the first of many.  My sons learn the hard way that there are now things they cannot share with even their friends.  Of course my relationship with a woman isn’t a secret to the neighbors. Foolishly, we do not try to hide anything.

Another evening, after the supper dishes are done, we take a walk.  It is warm.  The sunset is red and orange.  A few blocks from home we pass Jack LaHart walking alone.  He is the aging father of a daughter I’d gone to school with, been friends with when we were children.  He lives five houses west of us.  I nod to him, but he looks right through me.  I turned and find him glaring at us, a grim look on his face.

We were poor, me living and paying bills on half the income I had during my marriage, my lover looking for work.  We went all through August without air conditioning because we couldn’t afford to fix it.  When things broke, there was no money for repairs.  But we could have held on if it weren’t for the neighbors who were openly hostile toward us.  A dog upset a trashcan, and we were turned in to the city before we could get it cleaned up.  Often we found trash in our yard that wasn’t ours.  The night I saw Jack LaHart, I realized that this was an organized effort.  He was the president of the Laketown Association.  I had visions of them discussing us at their meetings like something they had to “take care of,” like the sewer problems, potholes, or the X rated Movie Theater that opened in the area.  My ancestors came to this country from Germany in 1740.  I’m eligible to be a member of the DAR for Christ’s sake.

My lover and I go to Smokie’s Den to be with our own kind.  Smokie is taking up a collection for a small granite angel and a headstone for Greg Young’s grave.  His parents had nothing to do with him; we were his family.  A line snakes in and out and around the tables while the song “That’s What Friends are For” plays over and over.  The gay people of the Springfield community raised a lot of money for a dead drag queen that night.  I dance in the soft warm arms of my lover and feel sad, for Greg, for Liberace, for all of us.

It does not matter what my neighbors do to us; there is no law against wanting a queer out of your neighborhood.  I cannot count on the community to whom I paid taxes for help.  People who do not even know me hate me.  I realize with a new clarity that we are alone.

We sit in the park eating peanut butter sandwiches for supper because we can’t afford McDonalds.  Our table is under a tree.  Rain beats down around us.  My towheaded son is wearing a coat, eating a sandwich with one hand, holding the dog next to him with the other.  He is shivering.  When we finish eating, we sit in the car, with the heater going trying to dry off.  A realtor is taking a prospective buyer through the house.  This scene is repeated several times in the next three months.  I have to get at least what I owe on the house, and I cannot.  Repairs need to be made; interest rates make the house payments too high.  As the harassment escalates, I consider walking away and letting the bank take the house.

Later at home, my little boy tucked in bed, I make two cups of Earl Grey tea.

“We don’t have to do this,” my lover says.  “We can stay and fight.”

I think of my son, shivering in the rain, a brother he sees once a week, friends that tease him at school.  I shake my head.  “No, we will not fight.”

She waits until I sit across from her.  “I’m just saying that somebody has to fight.”

I say, “No,” once again, and the discussion is over.  I have decided to start looking for an apartment.  If I can’t sell the house, I will leave it to the bank.  I am not totally dispossessed; I have too much to lose in a fight, and it is impossible to battle hate while simultaneously suffering from its effects.

At the last moment, I found a woman interested in buying the house.  She called me, in fact, shortly after the realtor sign came down.  I think she may have been supplied by one of the neighbors (a friend or relative perhaps), but I’ll never know for sure.  I told her she could take over the payments and pay the closing costs and the house was hers.  Interest rates went down a few years later.  If I had been in a position to wait, I could have gotten the ten thousand dollars in equity I had in the house.  But I was in no position to wait.  Some things are more precious than equity.

The moving truck waited in the driveway.  I stood at the upstairs window through which the morning sun, always a little too bright, woke me, the same window I’d talked my eight-year-old sister into crawling out of (I’d told her I’d go next) so she could slide down a plastic clothes line rope to the ground, the same window from which I watched my son, his head down, get off the school bus and slowly walk toward home.  I’d turned to the attic, where my sisters and I had played during the day, making forts between old suitcases, and avoided at night, when it became a dark cold place behind the clothes rod.  In all my years, I’d never seen the attic empty.  Stripped of its contents, it looked small and innocuous.  It smelled dusty.  Only as I write this do I wonder about my own children.  Had they played there?  Had they been afraid at night too, or had the ghosts of my own childhood been exorcised?  My sons remember the good times in their home on Pickett Street, but though I did my best to protect them, they still carry scars from wounds inflicted at the end.  And they will probably never understand that it wasn’t me who did something bad.

I walked around the basement, remembered the easel when I was a teenager, the dreams of New York, my children’s playroom.  Those walls had contained my life for almost thirty years.  I can see the purple butterfly now; like other things in that place the image is sharp and painful and clear.

Today my children are grown.  Greg Young rests in peace, as do countless victims of AIDS.  Human lives were lost and justice never served.  A museum in Las Vegas, where you can’t take pictures, has a cold-mirrored Liberace collection.  But in my heart, a spotlight finds him, strikes his silver hair as he smiles, then turns and spreads his glittering rhinestone wings.  All these years later, the perpetrators never answered for their actions.  And I live in the same city, but I do not drive by the little house on Pickett Street, nor do my children.