Amazed by the Chinaman’s fluency in English, Bill said, “No, thank you. Wait, what does City Hall look like?”

“Like a big wedding cake. You can’t miss it.”

The waiter was right: even in the fading light, City Hall looked like an immense, domed cake. He was standing in front of it, on Polk Street, but while he had found the street, he didn’t know in which direction to go to find the queers, he thought. I’m looking for the queers because, but, before he could complete the sentence in his head, someone said, “I’m a queer.” The sound startled him. He looked around to see who had spoken but he was quite alone. And then he realized it was his own voice he had heard. His own voice saying aloud the words it had said in his head a thousand times but which, until that moment, had never passed his lips.

“I’m a queer,” he said, again. He waited for the ground to open up beneath him and tumble him into Hell, or a bolt of lightning to incinerate him, but all he heard was the traffic noises and the rustle of the wind.

Then, once more, softly but with utter conviction, he said, “I’m a queer.”

For a moment, it seemed to him, the world stopped. The cars and buses froze in place, the men in suits exiting city hall were suspended in mid-step. Even the wisps of pink and orange and lavender in the evening sky paused in their unfurling. All he heard was his heart beating in his ears, all he felt was the heft of his own flesh as the magnitude of the revelation—I’m a queer—settled into the very cells that composed him. Because he was a queer and that changed everything.

“I’m a—” He stopped himself. Queer was an epithet of contempt and loathing and it would no longer do. What had the hippie boy called him?

“I’m a gay,” Bill said. That sounded not quite right, so he tried again. “I’m gay.”

The world spun back into place.

It was nearly midnight. Bill had discovered the part of Polk Street where, among shoe repair shops and newsstands, were bars which seemed patronized entirely by men. Some of the men matched the descriptions he had read in the abnormal psychology textbooks of his hometown library; willowy, swishy figures in feminine clothes with elaborately styled bouffants giggling and mincing. They were as repulsive to him in the flesh as they had been in print but their presence, like neon lights, signaled to him that he was in the right place.