READ —excerpt from I’m Still Here

We sit in Tanya’s brown Mazda on Castro Street on a foggy May afternoon in 1985, quietly waiting for our appointment time. Nobody knows our plan except my therapist and the two of us.

“Can’t we go up now?” I ask.

“No,” Tanya says. “They were emphatic that we not arrive early.”

I gaze out the car window. At this moment, in broad daylight, you’d never know that at night the Castro is a gay mecca teeming with well-groomed gay men in flannel shirts and tight jeans and disheveled lesbians in work shirts and baggy jeans. Right now it looks just like any other San Francisco neighborhood of shops, cafes, and businesses, including the Castro Theatre, the Elephant Walk bar, and the storefront that used to be Harvey Milk’s camera shop.

* * *

So here we are, … counting the minutes before our insemination appointment. Sherrin doesn’t want us to come early because she doesn’t want us to run into the donor, who will be in the next room. I suddenly find myself laughing. “I feel like we’re in a California farce. Can’t you picture it? The sperm donor runs up the stairs, late. The nervous lesbian couple arrives early and bumps into the donor on the stairway. The sperm donor hangs out in one room with Playboy. The lesbians wait impatiently in the next room for delivery of the goods.”

Tanya rolls her eyes.

At the appointed time, we pass no one on the stairs.