Cal held me closer, as if I were a boy rather than a man, so vulnerable in his arms, “I love you enough for both of us,” he promised, the sadness of the statement not lost on me. Was I too callous to find forgiveness for a child who should have never been blamed? Too terrorized by the beginning of my life to see beyond my pain? Perhaps through Cal, I would finally be able to exonerate myself from the crimes I had never intended to commit.

As the world spun above us, all mayhem and motion, we stood at its base, solid and still. Two entities who had been divided by space, pulled toward each other by a force stronger than both of us—love.

24

February 1936

I never considered myself to be a scholar of world history. Though I had always found the study interesting, I wasn’t as well-versed in the challenges nations faced during their inceptions, and the actions which led them to their present dispositions, as I would have liked to have been. In school, we were given a survey education at best, and though I craved a greater knowledge, I much preferred to read fiction in my spare time rather than non. Still, there were patterns I recognized, even with my cursory knowledge, like how often governments used the press to control their people. There was a thin line between news and propaganda, and once a regime ran the press that line dissipated entirely.

Though America had flaws, I never considered she would subscribe to the fear tactics that authoritarian governments were so fluent in, but as I read another horrible headline proclaiming the improprieties of the queer community on the front page of the Chicago Tribune, I was convinced otherwise.

It had been a year since Towertown had shut down, and it seemed the news stories painting homosexuals as predators increased by the month. There were depraved people of all proclivities, but I found it difficult to buy into the sudden spike in pansy crime the papers were selling. Unfortunately, I was in the minority. The general public was gobbling the reports up, relieved to have a place to channel their frustration and unrest. The boom in coverage had naturally led to a rash of arrests that would not have occurred years before. Pansies were getting popped left and right for living the lives they had been leading for nearly a decade. Queens who wore dresses were arrested for lewd conduct, and working boys were tossed in the big house for solicitation. The unluckiest of the bunch bypassed prison completely and ended up in the nut house, an increasingly popular sentence for those who varied from the Victorian values America had recently readopted.