Waldo dragged him to political meetings where people talked about changing laws and rewriting the medical books that classed gays as mentally ill. Not just talk, as it turned out. Within three years of his arrival in San Francisco, the psychiatrists had declassified homosexuality as a mental illness and the legislature had abolished California’s sodomy law. Waldo was gleeful. “See, hon, the shrinks say we’re not sick and the government says we’re not criminals!” When Bill brought up the Church’s strictures against homosexuality, Waldo rolled his eyes and said, “Honey, if you’re going to take sex advice from a bunch of men in dresses, I’d choose drag queens over priests. At least drag queens have had sex.”

Bill went to the meetings and the marches and the gay pride parades, a gay face in the gay crowd, but he never felt entirely included in the celebrations. While these advances in law and society allowed gay men to live as they wanted, none of them, Bill observed, seemed to want what he wanted; what Waldo teasingly called, “A cunning little cottage and your lover in an apron making you dinner when you get home from work.”

“What’s wrong with wanting something like that?”

“Guys aren’t made that way, Billy.”

“I am,” Bill said.

Waldo shook his head. “That’s what they want you to think you want. Your family, society, the schools, the fucking billboards and TV ads. That’s their world, Bill, not ours. We’re making our own world here.”

“What world is that?” Bill asked bitterly. “Bathhouses and fist fucking and guys pissing on each other.”

Waldo compressed his lips into a tight, angry line. “You sound just like them. First off, yeah that’s part of our world, but it’s part of their world too. You don’t think women let their husbands fuck them in the ass or guys don’t ask their girlfriends to piss on them? Sure they do. The difference is we’re not goddammned hypocrites about sex. Second, who cares if some guy gets off by having other guys pee on him or getting a fist up his butt. It’s none of your business. No one said you had to do it. Third, is that what you see when you walk down Castro Street? Sex? That’s not what I see, hon. I see freedom. I see courage. You’re the one with sex on his brain.”

Bill walked away from the argument because Waldo’s words about hypocrites hit too close to home. He came close to telling Waldo about Bad Bill, but the shame and guilt were too deep, so he pushed them down where they festered and drove him back to the dark places where Bad Bill emerged.