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Stonewall: Stories of Gay Liberation 109

have jumped overboard. One of the thin ones. A lad. A grown boy.”
He was as horrified to listen to her as she was insistent to prove what
she had said was true. Her trilling Strathclyde burr chilled her voice
opposite his Dublin-born mother’s warm brogue that still entertained
him during their late-night telephone conversations. “He’s nowhere
on board. The crew’s looked everywhere. Jumping is better, better
for me, better than finding them in the morning lying there cold
in their beds. I leave them till last. The dead ones. Clean the other
rooms first, I do.”
She was progressive enough, and Protestant to boot, a Calvinist,
not caring a fig for priests, but he could not bring Himself to ask her
about the cabin boy from Genoa who smiled knowing full well what
was wanted and what he was for. Remembering their first exchange
of looks, that first look, Brian could not deny the rush in Himself.
He had no poker face. He knew the boy recognized the look. The
boy knew what the man was for.
Brian could only hint to the stewardess about the looks men
exchange with the gay cast in the eye that identifies them to each
other. He was confused, unfamiliar with shipboard etiquette, un-
comfortable, yet turned on by the pinch of class distinction that
made the boy and him inaccessible to each other. Was the boy’s look
really beauty smiling back? Did the boy really know what he was
for? Was he an innocent at sea, a stammering naive Billy Budd, or
was his the come-on of a Mediterranean rent boy hustling trade in
the North Pacific?
On the fourth morning, the ship docked at Skagway. The other
passengers flocked to the curio shops that were the same as all the
other curio shops in all the other ports. Brian stood quietly in the
center of the village to listen for the sound of hammers, following
the sound, finding the local men, talking with them, telling lies,
pretending he was a teacher, saying his principal had made him
promise to bring back to his students some documentary truth about
the people of Alaska. The men, tuned to humor all the quirky cruise-
ship characters who brought money to town, kept nailing up fence

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