June 27, 1968, NYC
A story of Stonewall goes like this: On the night of Judy Garland's funeral I was being raped by a man I'd married at Christmas in white velvet. It was something he would never remember, the kind of incident Judy would have endured in a haze of booze, ossified from the waist down, goofy the moment before, as if the bankruptcy rumors were all true.
The amazing thing was his penis—tiny and senseless, it went in and out like a needle and what was I doing this whole time? This is the end of my dreams, I would have thought dramatically, and it was. After the hive of gays exploded on the city and, even though Judy was laid in state, I continued straight for nineteen years. Some men think she was special, misunderstood the way they were, all that dandruff you can say about a star who dies thin and fingered as a Kleenex. To me she will always be the leader of wind and slipper, the child who scraped jelly from a jar with a dull knife, a proud moustache of milk.
Maureen Seaton is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, Furious Cooking (Iowa, J 996), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize and the Lambda Award, and Exquisite Politics (Tia Chucha, 1997), a collaboration with poet Denise Duhamel. She is the recipient of an NEA fellowship, Illinois Arts Council grant, two Pushcarts, and three IAC Literary Awards. Her work has appeared in the Best American Poetry 1997, The Atlantic, and Quarter After Eight. She is currently Artist-in-Residence at Columbia College Chicago.