Picturesque

Chapter 5: Café Lafitte

Throughout my youth, I always believed that while I had mentally developed sooner than my peers, thanks to the emptiness that being an only child reserved in my life which I filled with books and knowledge, that my physical development progressed at a slower pace. I imagined that my mental leverage took up so much space in my body that there wasn't enough room left to thirst for the things that other girls my age thirsted for. This wasn't to say that I was conceited about my intelligence. I was much humbler about my intellect than my nonintellectual peers.

I had watched from the outside as girls in middle school started talking about boys. Since most people thought Greg and I were going together, the pressure to find a boy just for the sake of seeming eligible enough to date by the popular crowd was lifted from my focus. I had no interest in boys, and honestly, I had no interest in romance at all.

My awareness of sexual orientation was limited to the boy-girl couples in high school up until I found out about Greg and Roger. To be honest, I didn't really think gay people even existed. I thought the words were just insults that straight people created themselves. I had never known a gay person before—until I realized I had known one my entire life.

There was not enough time for me to truly ponder on this aspect of human life before Greg was murdered because of it. In an instant, my view on the matter changed. I started paying more attention to what people said about gay people. I started looking more closely at people on the street of New Orleans and wondering if they were gay or straight, and if they were ashamed or proud. I heard that in the bigger cities, there were some areas where people could live more freely, like in New York or California. They operated like an underground organization. There were symbols and codes. There were bars made for them that operated under a guise to deflect suspicion and protect them from the people who were not so willing to just let a gay person live freely in their own space.

And then some other things started to dawn on me. I never had female friends, and I always felt a little scared and nervous around other girls in my class. I thought it was because Greg was my only friend, and he was a boy, and because of that I had no idea how to interact with another girl my age. It just wasn't as easy to realize these things back then.

That night with Georgia after the party broke open something inside me. Never before had I felt romantic passion. Never before had I wanted to touch another person. What I realized that night was something that had always lived inside me. Coming back after Christmas break to see Georgia's name scratched from the door forced me to close that cracked eggshell within me once again.

The next three and a half years went by rather quickly. When Georgia was around, I thought maybe it was possible for me to make friends. Now that her extroverted touch was gone from my life, there was no hope for me. I continued to put all my focus into my studies.

The world started to change. The Civil Rights Movement was sweeping the nation and sweeping New Orleans. Lunch counter protests were taking place on Canal Street. My senior year of college had just begun when I watched Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech on the television in the lobby of the dormitory. An integrated university, I still remember the immense passion I felt in my body when I sat in the group of white and black girls all crowded on the floor around the TV, watching with watery eyes. Then, barely three months later, we watched news anchor Walter Cronkite announce that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.

The popular opinion on Lyndon B. Johnson was mixed, but most Americans had the general idea that tensions in Vietnam were coming to their head. At home, the people polarized. Conservatives and liberals alike radicalized, but the prospect for equality among race and sex were progressing faster than they ever had. I took notice in the way that when the gay community was targeted, it now struck back. Organizations for minorities' rights were formulating every other day, and America was growing unsettled.