Personally, I think finding a whole copy ofGay Treasuresfor sale is almost impossible at this point. I’d never heard of it before Cam squirreled the book into my room. I haven’t heard of it from any other place since. Even Bolerium Books has never seen a copy. If we’re really going to find this thing, we’ll have to pick up clues wherever we can.
Obscure book from the 1980s, I type.
The screen pulls up page after page of completely mainstream books. Of course, the internet is the exact kind of place you wander into asking about a book no one’s heard of, and then everyone immediately shouts,How aboutThe Handmaid’s Taleby Margaret Atwood?
I try again.
Obscure “gay treasure hunt” book from the 1980s.
The cursor blinks a moment as the results load. My eyes scan through each listing, then stop on a Reddit thread near the bottom of the page. I click the link.
“Bingo,” I murmur.
A little over ten years ago, a user by the name ofu/DyslexicStoner240wrote into a subreddit forum calledr/tipofmytongue, a community where members can ask for help finding something they almost—but not quite—recall.
r/tipofmytongue• 10years ago
DyslexicStoner240
[TOMT] [BOOK] PLEASE HELP! NINETIES TREASURE BOOK I FOUND AT A GARAGE SALE AS A KID. IT HAS BEEN DRIVING ME CRAZY EVER SINCE.
Locked: OP Not Responding
Hey, guys, appreciate anyone reading this. When I was a kid in the 90s, my mom used to drag me to estate sales around the greater Minneapolis area every Saturday. We definitely went to other towns a lot, so I’m not sure where exactly this was. But I remember hanging out in the backyard of one estate sale where the family had put the cheaper things on foldout tables like a garage sale. There was a giant, beat-up beanbag chair in the corner of the yard, and I dragged a box of old comic books over to it while my mom looked at the jewelry inside the house.
In the box there were a bunch of issues of Gay Comix, which I hadn’t heard of before, but maybe it’s going to be important for figuring out whatever this book was. Anyway, I pull out a random comic book issue, and this tiny little book drops out from between the pages. I swear it was calledGay Treasure HuntingorHunting for Gay Goldor something about being gay and finding treasure, but I opened it up, and it was like I could tell that this was legit. All these words were crammed together, but you just knew that if you squinted real hard, you would find a treasure map in the words or something. Like in those Magic Eye books.
I wanted to buy it, or at least try to steal it (dumbass ten-year-old-boy brain), but I didn’t hear my mom come outside, telling me it was time to leave. She walked right up to me surrounded by all the Gay Comix and had this crazy meltdown and stormed us both out of there. Then we had to read a bunch of passages from the Bible that night and do, like, a bajillion Hail Marys. (Raised Catholic FTL.) So I never got to go back…and then I was sort of scared that it really was this Satanic cult pamphlet like she said. And since then I haven’t been able to find anything about it online.
PLEASE help me end this awful scratching at the back of my head. Like, WHAT WAS THAT BOOK, AND WAS I ALMOST A REAL-LIFE GOONIE?!
Locked post: New comments cannot be posted
I immediately notice a little gray bubble below the title.Locked: OP Not Responding.
“Uh-oh,” I murmur. I’m guessing it’s about to get real nasty in the replies.
Sure enough, most users popped in only to tellu/DyslexicStoner240that this so-called memory was more likely his way of dealing with coming out of the closet. He probably concocted the book because he was reading a bunch of gay comics and realized he was gay too.
The real treasure’s in owning your truth, bro, wroteu/Colonel_Panic, which, actually, is sort of nice, I guess. Buteveryone crashed on DyslexicStoner240 hard, saying he probably made the story up. I feel like I’m hitting another dead end just by reading this guy hit his.
I click on the username. He’s been inactive on Reddit for almost ten years, basically since he made the post. Probably had to get another username or something, poor dude. I scroll down his profile and click on his last recorded comment.
It looks like the comment is from a small thread about a totally different subject. Dyslexic Stoner replies and then gets a reply from another user directly to him. The other user has the screen name u/BusTRoss.
I pause and stare at the screen.
Bus T. Ross.
As in…Busty Ross?
I click into another window and type out Gilbert Baker’s info.Died 2017.One year after this exchange.It can’t be the same person, though, I tell myself. Just because Gilbert’s drag name was Busty Gay Ross doesn’t mean he made that user profile on Reddit.
But whoever did probably knew about BGR and the treasure hunt.
I open the conversation.
u/BusTRoss:scarecrow, lion, or tin man?
