Lois: You're never gonna meet anyone hanging around here with the tactical nuclear family. - Alison Bechdel

Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb. He really was there all those years, a flesh-and-blood presence streaming off the wallpaper, digging up the dogwoods, polishing the finials... smelling of sawdust and sweat and designer cologne. But I ached as if he were already gone.

I did not draw a conscious parallel to my own sexuality, much less my father's. But the immersion — like green dishwashing liquid bathing a cuticle — left me supple and open to possibility.

[on Stonewall Inn] And while I acknowledge the absurdity of claiming a connection to that mythologized flashpoint...might not a lingering vibration, a quantum of rebellion, still have hung in the humectant air?