Not-you was eight fingers kinged with rings gold and stoned, a mouth I can only describe as a gay mouth (you know, corners curled Grinch-like, butter soft lips the pink of a young rose, a natural gloss boys see themselves in and drown), eyes like muddy water. Not-you wasn’t you, but felt almost like you, the right-on-time soft-uncle/butch-auntie I’m always looking for.

Not-you’s name was Richard and Richard was family the second we began to chat. I signed his book and admired his years-blessed face while he looked at me like I was a thing he made possible. And he was right. Richard made me, us. Richard looked me up and down (I was wearing a cute denim dress with some skinny jeans underneath, a femme Canadian tuxedo stunt) with a look that approved what he and his friends’ living had cleared space for, lives spent acting up and showing out, moving America’s needle across the record to a song fit for me to sissy myself into the glass majesty of the Poetry Foundation, and truly into the world of letters themselves, and not foreign, odd or alternative.

Richard and so many others, and you Essex, moved us into the center. Richard told me about Stonewall, not about being there, but about the zigzag of phone lines across the country, gay bar to pay phone to gay bar ring, ring, ringing off the hook with the news of the cops, the fist, the hell no, the fighting, the bricks in the brick-colored hands of the women who changed everything, everything, for us.

Richard was down the street, gay mouth probably sweet with whiskey, when he got the news of what went down in New York in that bar with our people, terror and pride coming out the receiver and pride sent right back in solidarity, in celebration of our bite.