It seems like years ago, but only Monday I got off a train in New York Penn Station to help a friend. I’d warned him I can get lost on the way to the kitchen. Directions to his place went to a part of town I haven’t spent much time in, so I asked him to meet me at Penn Station. He said sure, then said to make certain I got on the Downtown A train. You know, you can’t convince people you tell the truth the first time, so I asked six people in Penn Station where the Downtown A was, and only one of them was right. I almost got on an Uptown A, but was saved from taking that train by the absolute certainty that if I thought I was right I must be headed in the wrong direction. Eventually, I found two tiny women who said, “Downtown. Brooklyn. Aqui.” At this point, I thought my friend would meet me at the Canal Street subway stop. Why? Because I am sometimes pretty stupid, that’s why.

I got off the subway at Canal Street and didn’t see my friend. My friend was not on the stairs to the street, and not on the street. I looked around for a person to recognize, a face. When I didn’t see one, I felt a blind and choking terror. I walked to a spot where I could put my back against a plywood wall and stood there a long time, unable to see where I was and unable to think. As anyone who has ever been in a car with me can attest, I grow distinctly more hysterical with every minute I am lost. Time passed. If I were you, dear reader, I’d get some popcorn and wait for the chase.

Slowly, the panic cleared, and I do mean slowly. When I could read the street signs, I could see Canal, Varick, a couple more, and West Broadway. My friend’s place, I was reasonably sure, was on Broadway – or Fifth. Suddenly, I was less sure. The thing to do – because I don’t carry a cell – was to find a working pay phone. Two booths down on West Broadway, I found one, called my friend and ot voicemail. Sighing, I described my location and said, “I don’t know what to do.” I hung up and walked back to the corner, feeling desperate and a little frightened. Now that I’d said, “I’m at the corner of Canal and West Broadway” I was stuck there. And I stood there for some time, telling European tourists I was lost, too.

Logical thinking returned slowly, and I mean slowly. I was standing on West Broadway, right? If you don’t know any better, you think, ‘If I can figure out which way is east, I’ll know which direction to walk in and I’ll just start off.’ I looked up and it was of course just about noon, so that was no help. I went back to the payphone and dialed my friend’s cell again, and got voicemail again. I said I was going to start walking, and I told him what my intended destination was. Then I asked a shopkeeper which way was Broadway, thinking he’d point either right or left. He pointed over my shoulder and straight behind me, so I thought he was crazy. I thanked him and went left outside his store.

Blocks later, when West Broadway was suddenly LaGuardia, I turned and walked in the direction the shopkeeper had pointed. Two lights later, I came to a corner on Broadway, looked at the numbers and turned right. Broadway and West Broadway run parallel to one another, they’re not the same road. Finally, I came to the correct address and asked the guy in the foyer where I’d find my friend. Twice, the gentleman told me no. I went to read the names on the directory. Still somewhat panicked and now tired, I didn’t immediately see his name. Then, there it was, with a number. I told the man at the desk, “Here, this person.” He pointed me toward the elevator. When the elevator door opened, there stood my friend. Still shaking and upset, I didn’t respond well to, “How was your trip, dear?”

Tata: Go Cheney yourself, you bastard! Next time I tell you something, believe me the first time. Try this out. What is your response if I say, “It’s raining outside”?
Friend: “I’ll get an umbrella.”
Tata: And if I say, “I’ve never faked an orgasm” and responding with laughter will cost you your life, what is it?!
Friend: “Intriguing. I believe you.”
Tata: You are making excellent goddamn improvement. And if I say, “Please meet me at Penn Station because I could get lost on the way to my kitchen,” what is your response?!
Friend: “Your wish is my command, princess.”
Tata: Thank you! Fucker! Let’s get to work and don’t speak to me until I return to my human form. Damn it!

On the one hand, it was an ordeal I would not care to repeat. I considered turning around and taking the train back to New Brunswick but I didn’t, and I was really pissed when it turned out he was waiting for me at Penn Station after all. Where? I have no idea. I never saw him. He never saw me. Penn Station is like that: there are few landmarks like the clock at Grand Central Station where two people could meet. So the plan was doomed from the beginning.

On the other, the ordeal offered a hard lesson I needed to learn, during a hard week in which I felt small and covered with fur. To wit: once panic subsides, I can think my way out of a tough situation. That is important knowledge to have about oneself.

Also: we had really delicious sandwiches for lunch. That might’ve been totally worth the trip.

I return from court unevicted, though the only proof of this is that I am not curled up under my desk and sobbing. Fortunately, Ted the lawyer was there and witnessed the whole thing, including the part where I didn’t understand what was happening and thought I was supposed to leave. Ted came running down a crowded hallway, shouting my name, telling me to go back and sit down. Poor people are being evicted like crazy – like you wouldn’t believe if you didn’t see it yourself. After I realized that nothing really would happen to me I was horrified by the number of people around me who couldn’t say the same. I’ve been upset and fearful for weeks. How must they feel?

Thank you to everyone who wished me well and assured me I would be fine. I appreciate your confidence. It’s time to get back to the business of peace, love, understanding, melted cheese and kitten heels, in a Jersey Chick accent. I am wearing lipstick.

Kiss me, you fool.

As a last resort, I call Daria.

Tata: Come with me to the hearing tomorrow. You look like a normal person!
Daria: What? Is that thing tomorrow?
Tata: As you know, I need a translator between me and the rest of the world.
Daria: …And I look respectable?
Tata: Even with all that hair, yup. Are you free at 11?
Daria: Wednesday…11? I can’t, orientation at Sandro’s preschool at 10:30.
Tata: Drat.
Daria: What about Sharkey? He looks respectable!
Tata: Everyone works. He might be in North Carolina, I’m not sure. Paulie’s out saving the world. Siobhan’s in Mahwah. Scout’s teaching. I could make you a list.
Daria: What did Ted say?
Tata: He said he’d see me there. He’s got cases tomorrow.
Daria: Okay, so stand next to him and tell him to hold a briefcase. He barely knows you and still thinks you’re nice.
Tata: That’s always a shocker, huh?

Ted is a family friend and a tenant’s rights lawyer. Whenever he sees me, he says nothing is going to happen to me, then tells me a horror story about one of his clients. The crap that people do to one another is absolutely unbelievable to me. Sunday, he told me about a landlord that took the rent from two federal agencies and locked out a tenant while she was in the hospital. You can practically smell the sulphur. I mention this to Siobhan.

Tata: I’m going to that hearing alone. I’m very nervous!
Siobhan: Sorry to hear it. Let us remember that you totally kick ass.
Tata: …I totally…kick ass…
Siobhan: Remember?
Tata: …I do remember. Huh! Thank you for that timely reminder.

As Daria, tireless mixer of pop culture metaphors would say: Holy Ruby Slippers, Batman! I haven’t slept in weeks and my face looks awful. This morning, I had dreams about children breaking into my house and stealing my things. I’ve postponed errands and conversations until after this hearing because I have felt helpless and out of my element. Well, that’s enough of that. No matter what happens tomorrow, it is not the worst thing I’ve ever faced alone. I am not weak. This morning, when I felt timid, I compared this unnerving experience to court hearings throughout history, wherein millions of people faced terrifying judgment with a great deal more to lose, and I was embarrassed to be so upset by my landlord’s manipulation. No one is going to chain me up and burn me slowly if I answer questions the wrong way. And I am a Force of Nature. I forgot that for a few weeks, but I remember that now. When I am nearby, everyone knows it’s Windy.

With perspective once again restored, let us consider how a normal life can go from zero to horrific in one little paragraph:

“We must exterminate these people (homosexuals) root and branch…We can’t permit such danger to the country; the homosexual must be entirely eliminated.”

With these chilling words, the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, set out the Nazi master plan for the sexual cleansing of the Aryan race.

Heinz F, now 96, was a care-free young gay man living in Munich in the early 1930s. He had no idea of what was about to happen. “I didn’t fully understand the situation,” he admits with pained regret. One morning, out of the blue, the police knocked on his door. “You are suspected of being a homosexual,” they told him. “You are hereby under arrest.” “What could I do?” he asks, struggling to hold back the tears. “Off I went to Dachau, without a trial.”

I knew all this had happened, and because all my life we have talked about the Third Reich in honest terms I believed I’d read or heard everything I needed to read or hear to remain appropriately horrified and respectful until the end of my days. Apparently, there’s plenty more horror where all the previous horror came from.

Before the nightmare years of Nazism, Berlin was the queer capital of the world. Jewish lesbian, Annette Eick, who escaped to Britain shortly before the outbreak of war, recalls with fond nostalgia: “In Berlin, you were free. You could do what you wanted.”

The city boasted dozens of gay organisations and magazines; plus over 80 gay bars, restaurants and night clubs. In his narration, Rupert Everett describes it as “a homosexual eden.”

Although homosexuality was illegal under paragraph 175 of the criminal code, prior to the Third Reich it was rarely enforced. In the Reichstag, MPs were on the verge of securing its repeal. A new era of freedom seemed to be dawning. Then came Nazism.

Within a month of assuming power in 1933, Hitler outlawed homosexual organisations and publications. Gay bars and clubs were closed down soon afterwards. Storm troopers ransacked the headquarters of the gay rights movement, the Institute of Sexual Science, and publicly burned its vast library of “degenerate” books. Before the end of the year, the first homosexuals were deported to concentration camps.

Reminds me of the reason I have no interest in visiting Kansas.

At the age of 17, Frenchman Pierre Seel was detained by the invading Germans, who rifled local police files on homosexuals. “They saw our names of these lists,” he says. “I ended up at the camp in Schirmeck.”

“There was a hierarchy from weakest to strongest. The weakest in the camps were the homosexuals. All the way at the bottom.”

“I was tortured, beaten…sodomised and raped!” Seel screams in anguish. “The Nazis stuck 25cm of wood up my arse…(it) still bleeds, even today.”

His lover Jo suffered a worse fate. “He was condemned to die, eaten by dogs. German dogs! German Shepherds!” Seel shouts with rage. “That I can never forget.”

The Nazis again intensified the war against “abnormal existence” in 1935, broadening the definition of homosexual behaviour and the grounds for arrest. Gossip and innuendo became evidence. A man could be incarcerated on the basis of a mere touch, gesture or look.

I don’t know that I have the courage to sit through a documentary of these men’s real lives, and that frightens me. It gets worse.

But [seventy-eight year old Gad] Beck survived, although nearly everyone around him perished. Two of his lovers were seized by the Nazis. “I met this beautiful blonde Jew. He invited me to spend the night. In the morning the Gestapo came…I showed my ID – not on the list. They took him to Auschwitz. It had a different value then, a night of love.”

Later, Beck tried to free another lover, Manfred, from a Gestapo transfer camp by posing as a Hitler Youth member. This incredibly dangerous deception was successful, but as they walked to freedom, Manfred told Gad he could not abandon his family in the camp. Beck watched helplessly as his lover returned to be with them. He never saw Manfred again.

Never in my life have I had to demonstrate a degree of bravery putting on a rescue effort like that would require. And I don’t know what to make of this.

Heinz Dormer, now a very frail 89 year-old, spent nearly ten years in prisons and concentration camps. In a quivering, barely audible voice he remembers the haunting, agonised cries from “the singing forest,” a row of tall poles on which condemned men were hung: “Everyone who was sentenced to death would be lifted up onto the hook. The howling and screaming were inhuman…Beyond human comprehension.”

This “homocaust” was an integral part of the holocaust. Contrary to false histories that claim the persecution of Jewish people was distinct and separate from the victimisation of other minorities, the genocide against Jews and queers was part of the same grand design for the racial purification of the German volk. The Nazis set out to eradicate all racial and genetic “inferiors” – not just Jews, but also gay, disabled, black, Slav, Roma and Sinti people.

Even after the Nazi defeat in 1945, gay survivors continued to be persecuted. Men liberated from the concentration camps who had not completed their sentences were re-imprisoned by the victorious Allies. Since they were regarded as criminals, all were denied compensation for their suffering. The German government still refuses to pay reparations. As a further insult, the former SS guards are awarded better pensions. Their work in the concentration camps counts toward their pension entitlement, whereas the time spent in the camps by gay inmates doesn’t.

I don’t know what that means – or worse, I’m afraid I might.

In all humility, I’m sure I’ll be fine.

Beautiful stuff.

Feel the love!

At the store today, sultry Latin lounge music plays as a sweet breeze drifts through and tickles the wind chimes. I am wearing a pair of pants I couldn’t zip last week and a very flattering sweater. For the last twenty minutes or so, I’ve finished a few more blankets for shelter cats. In contrast to yesterday’s depressing and isolating torrential rain, today’s sunshine makes me feel blissfully buzzed. On a day like this, a free-thinking person could fall in love.

I can’t say why, because everything about today has been disruptive and peculiar, but I feel joyful. The store is having a good day. I am having a good day.

I hope you get outside and fall in love, yourself, whoever you are, and wherever.

Outside, wind drives the rain sideways in dramatic sheets and tugs open the family store’s front door. Miles Davis’ trumpet, the very sound of ache and longing, offers the room a glittering wishfulness, as if each glass ornament, each hanging paper star, each smooth bamboo plate hopes to be loved. My sister Corinne womans the till in the toy store next door, where I found two new lunchboxes to adore. I seldom carry purses. I carry lunchboxes. One lists the planets. Corinne warned me about Pluto. I scoffed.

Tata: Semantics, darling. My solar system didn’t lose a planet – it gained three dwarf planets. Everyone knows that means more moons for me!
Corinne: You make it sound like a reason to go shopping.
Tata: Yes, and wherever will we seat them at Thanksgiving dinner? Are high chairs an insult? Hospitality is no laughing matter!

When I first typed that, I transposed letters, but I’m wearing new reading glasses picked out for me by that fashion maven, my pharmacist. That sounds dreadful, but a gal on her own has to use her resources wisely. During one of my weekly excursions to the drugstore to pick up medicine for Larry, the little black cat bent on stealing your soul, I found that cardboard rack of reading glasses one finds everywhere, and this was fortune worth celebrating. My other reading glasses lost that little pad-thingy that keeps the frame from digging into the bridge of my nose like a backyard fence post, so I asked the pharmacist, an older man and the father of a high school acquaintance, if there were other styles besides the Lisa Lubner models on display. He promised to order some. Yesterday, I found a rack full of new reading glasses he’d plainly chosen to coordinate with my hair color, which is red and visible from space. Yes, it is. I tried them on but with no mirror handy I resorted to the only quality control available to me.

Tata: Do these look terrible?
Pharmacist: They work with your hair and the shape contrasts with the arch of your eyebrows.
Tata: Sold!

Naturally, the first thing I did was try them out on 50% of my sisters.

Tata: New glasses: opinion!
Anya: Ooh, cool!
Corinne: I can’t.
Tata: Why?
Corinne: I need new glasses.

Yeah, whatever. Sometimes life throws you groaners. Sometimes you get headliner material. Yesterday, a student worker I rather like, who usually dresses like a schlub, walked past me wearing an ensemble and heels. On her way back, I barked at her.

Tata: Why are you dressed like that?
Her: Lost a bet.

No kidding! I couldn’t have asked for anything so great. I now love her.

Tata: Really? Who hates you this much?
Her: My best friend.

Oh. My. God. I am so happy.