“All right,” Sunny announces. “I’ve had about enough of this Ivy-flavored nervous breakdown, or whatever it is that’s happening. Give us a reason to stay or I’m going back to bed.”
“You already drank an entire cup of coffee,” Julia says.
Sunny sniffs. “Bold of you to assume that was my first cup.”
I whip around to face the others. “You want a reason to stay?” I ask Sunny. I march up to the projector screen and smack my palm over the flyer. “How about digging up an actual buried treasure?”
Chapter Five
When Cam first broughtGay Treasuresto my house freshman year, we were, at that point, extremely amateur sleuths. The book itself is basically an introduction to gay rights told in the style of a fairy tale:
Once upon a time, not long after midnight, in a room crowded with smoke…four, two, one, and one knocked on the double doors of Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn.
“Open up! Police! We’re taking the place!”
In stormed the four officers in plainclothes suits.
In stormed the two in uniform.
In stormed the detective.
In stormed the deputy.
But they were not the only storm in the room that night. And despite the formal announcement of their intentions, in the early morning hours of the twenty-eighth of June, the Stonewall Inn would not be for their taking.
Each chapter is another tale from the gay rights movement, set in places across the country, filled with different protagonists who each become, by the story’s end, gay treasures in their own rights.
That’s the obvious part of the book, at least. The hidden part, the part Cam and I were so focused on, was about theothergay treasures. Not the people themselves, but the actual treasures hidden in the ground in honor of each story’s hero. Clues leading to those treasures were in the book too. But instead of being hidden in the stories, the clues were hidden in codes and ciphers peppered throughout the pages.
The night Cam first brought overGay Treasures, we watchedNational Treasuretogether and took notes on all the ciphers featured in the movie. Then we went back through the book and circled anything that seemed like a potential clue or cipher. After that, we spent almost every day that summer poking around San Francisco.
“Copyright says 1983,” Cam had said. “We shouldn’t need to use modern technology to solve a riddle that was written forty years ago.”
But if my yearbook crew has a specialty, it would be mixing modern technology with the past. Everything it took Cam and me months to figure out ends up taking Gabriel, Sunny, and Julia mere minutes to uncover, thanks to their internet-sleuthing skills.
“Okay,” Sunny says as the Wiki page loads. She nurses the second round of coffee I went out and bought everyoneimmediately after announcing our new angle. A caffeinated Sunny is a happy Sunny, evidenced by the fact that herfuzzy robe and sunglasses are now discarded in a pile by the stairwell.
Sunny uses the find-in-page function and skims through the highlighted sections.
“Gay Treasures. Written and published by an anonymous BGR. Later revealed to be Gilbert Baker, inventor of the Pride rainbow flag.”
“Why the BGR initials, then?” Julia asks, looking up from her notebook.
Sunny smirks. “Stands for ‘Busty Gay Ross,’ apparently.” She keeps reading. “That was Gilbert’s drag name, based on Betsy Ross, creator of the American flag.”
“Ahh.” Julia nods and scribbles more notes.
“Book’s been out of print since its initial publication,” Sunny reads off the bottom of the page. “No known copies in circulation. But two of the seven treasures have already been located.”
“The treasures are based on specific people,” I add.
Sunny nods and reads the next section out loud. “There were seven treasures buried for seven different gay icons. The Marsha P. Johnson treasure—an enamel vase painted with Marsha’s portrait—was found in New York City twenty-five years ago. Then the Judy Garland treasure—a tennis bracelet made up of rainbow-colored gemstones—was found by accident in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, around nine years ago.”
Gabriel looks over from his own computer and wrinkles his nose. “But Judy wasn’t even gay.”
“She was agay icon,” Julia counters. She reads from her own screen, “In the 1970s, you would check whether someonewas gay by asking them, ‘Are you a friend of Dorothy?’ The question refers to Judy Garland’s character Dorothy from the 1939The Wizard of Ozfilm.” Julia glances at Gabriel. “She’s basically the OG ally for the queer community.”
“Hmph,” Gabriel says, turning away from us.
