u/DyslexicStoner240:…huh?
u/BusTRoss:friend of Dorothy, right?
u/BusTRoss:are you a scarecrow, a lion, or a tin man?
u/DyslexicStoner240:Oh.
u/DyslexicStoner240:Lion, I guess?
u/BusTRoss:right answer.
u/BusTRoss:lookover the rainbow.
And that’s it. But the last phrase, “over the rainbow,” is hyperlinked. I paste it over into a new tab and land in an absolutely ancient-looking web forum. Like, clearly this was one of the first websites to ever be designed for public use.
An incredibly garishGay4Treasureicon blinks at the center of the website heading. It’s in an old rainbow WordArt font that I’ve seen used in countless internet memes. There’s a subheading underneath that readsGay Treasure Icon: Judy Garland.
Of course, I think, palming my forehead.
Busty asked if Dyslexic Stoner was a friend of Dorothy. He meant “Dorothy” as in Judy Garland’s character Dorothy. It’s all making sense. But, wait a second…
Didn’t Julia say that’s how people used to ask if someone was gay?Are you a friend of Dorothy?I click back to the conversation on Reddit. Busty didn’t ask about the treasure hunt itself. They asked if Stoner was a friend of Dorothy. Why? Did Stoner have to say yes, to confirm that he was gay, before Busty could send over the link? Are only true insiders allowed to find this treasure?
I measure this conundrum against the only other treasure hunt story I really know. Ben Gates would never have been able to solve the hunt inNational Treasurewithout knowing a ton about American history. But also, at the end of the day, Benwas an American with a deep-cut American legacy. Whereas Ian—the bad guy—was British. He was an outsider.
Is there something to that?
What does Busty’s question really mean, I wonder, for the hunt in general? Does everyone who’s interested inGay Treasureshave to be gay? Are they not allowed to go looking for the treasure otherwise? And if they do have to be gay, do they have to be a specific type of gay? Busty gave Stoner three choices: the Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow…Why was only one of those choices correct?
I shove the questions crowding my head to one side and click open the top thread, which is titled “SOLVED: Grand Rapids.” It’s posted by none other than former RedditorDyslexicStoner240, same username and all.
Good for him, I think. Screw those haters on Reddit.
As the thread loads, my eyeballs nearly pop out of my head. Photocopied images directly from the book show up, pixel by pixel, on the screen.
“Hey! I found something!” I call out.
The three rolling chairs Sunny, Julia, and Gabriel were sitting in suddenly whoosh backward. Gabriel’s even clatters to the floor. They all slam into my sides and crowd around the screen.
“You got the book?” Julia asks.
“Some of it,” I say. “These are scanned pages from the original. Well…maybe not scanned. Maybe photocopied or…”
“Or photographed with the world’s first phone camera in dim lighting?” Sunny supplies. Still, I catch her failing totamp down a grin as she grabs my mouse and scrolls through the page. “Oh, we can totally handle this.”
“I don’t know if it’s worth cleaning up these specific pages, though,” I say. I point to the first image. “This is for the Judy Garland treasure. That’s in a different chapter of the book.”
“Not our chapter, then,” Gabriel says. “I’ll look through the website.” He copies the URL onto his phone and nearly sprints back to his own computer.
“There’s a thread here on Harvey Milk!” he calls out a few moments later. “Should I look through it?”
“Obviously!” Sunny says, nostrils flaring. She doesn’t let go of my mouse. She’s scrolling down the Judy Garland page messages, rolling further and further back in time until she reaches the earliest message, posted by a user named EggBert in June 1999.
“Found this weird book at Quatrefoil Library,” Sunny reads aloud. “It was being used to prop up a table. Apparently it’s a treasure map?”
She opens a side tab and GooglesQuatrefoil Library. “This is a queer library. I think Gilbert Baker planted copies ofGay Treasures. I don’t think the book was ever widely circulated at all. That’s why we can’t find it anywhere.”
Just in specific gay communities, I think to myself.
