She took a fresh linen handkerchief out of her purse and dabbed the corners of her eyes, bright with tears, before she answered, “He’s reading the names of the all the neighborhood boys who have died.”

The address Adam had given me led me to an old apartment building at the outskirts of the Tenderloin, not far from the restaurant. I rang the doorbell and he buzzed me into the building. The tiny lobby was clean but bleak and smelled of insecticide and musty wool carpet. I skipped the ancient, gated elevator and climbed the dimly lit stairs to the fourth floor where he was standing outside his apartment in a pair of black sweatpants and a gray SF State T-shirt.

“Hi, Adam. Sorry I’m a little late.”

He looked at me with uncertain eyes, and then, taking a deep breath, he pulled me against his chest, immobilizing me in a tight embrace and kissed me full on, tongue and all.

“What the hell? Is this what you wanted to tell me? That you’re gay?”

“I’m not gay,” he replied. “Uh, maybe you should come inside.”

9.

9.

Bill was drinking at the bar on Castro everyone called the Petrified Forest because all anyone ever did there was stand and stare, waiting for the blond who had been cruising him to work up his nerve and approach him. Once, Bill would have gone over and chatted up the guy but that was before he had learned The Rules. The Rules, unwritten and largely unspoken, were more about power than sex, and while he disliked them, it was impossible not to play by them when everyone else was. Rule One: wait for the other guy to make the first move.

He didn’t remember whether The Rules applied when he had first stumbled into The Hide ’n Seek almost a decade earlier. If they had, he hadn’t noticed, being too thrilled and too terrified to be aware of much more than that he was in a room full of other gay guys. After that first night he always went out with Waldo, who had no patience for rules and had been known to approach stuck-up, posing queens and ask, in his most honeyed voice, “Girl, you need some help taking the broomstick out of your ass?” He smiled to himself, thinking about his friend. Waldo was most likely curled up at home with Eddie watching Dynasty, his latest craze. Tomorrow morning, Bill could expect a call in which Waldo would describe in detail not only the plot but Joan Collins’s outfits. Not for the first time he thought how ironic it was that Waldo, a self-described slut, had settled into a monogamous relationship, while Bill, who had wanted just that, was still on the hunt for Mr. Right (“Or,” he could hear Waldo add snidely, “Mr. Right Now”). He was more likely to find the latter than the former at the Petrified Forest.