Beauty Queen

persecute other minorities, among them gays. In the case of the Southern Baptists, you had to add blacks.
    Of course, the conservative Baptists weren't the only guilty ones, he thought.
    The Mormons, for instance, were hostile to homosexuals. They were very secure now in Utah, and appeared to have forgotten the fear and loathing which their own beliefs had once inspired on the American frontier. For that matter, the Catholic Church—whose Pope had only recently made the headlines by condemning homosexual practice —had forgotten the terrible days of the human torches and the arena in ancient Rome, and the days of the rack and the stake in Protestant England.
    To their credit, some churches—he thought—did remember their own dark days and now extended the hand of mercy to gays: Unitarians, Congregationalists, even the Episcopalians.
    And then there were the gays themselves, disunited in peril because they were as human as their persecutors. Being gay did not unify gays any more than being straight made a monolith out of straights. The gay rights movement was forever splitting and regrouping. Some gays were even ready to discriminate against each other in the name of freedom. Some lesbian activists would have nothing to do with the men activists. Many gays of both sexes feared and shunned those who preached what was known as S&M on the East Coast, B&D on the West Coast. And then there were the transsexuals and transvestites who managed to maintain an impeccable dignity despite the unease with which many gays regarded them. He knew some devout churchgoing gays who were shocked if a leather man or a transvestite walked into their church—as shocked as a Southern Baptist would be at a black person entering a segregated church.
    At sixty-one, he felt he had seen it all. The single great regret he had was his lack of courage in one thing. With a little more confidence, he could have been a crusader himself. As it was, he was simply William Frederick Laird, noted realtor, who had softened the skyline of one of the hardest cities in the world.
    The cab screeched to a stop in front of the Sumptuary.
    Bill paid and tipped the cabby, and slowly got out. The noise and oil fumes of the street, and the reek of asphalt melting in the sun, rolled over him.
    He walked slowly into the restaurant. He wondered at his slowness today. Staying fit had been his passion for years now. Did this mean he was slowing down, getting truly old?
    The Sumptuary was a newer restaurant, already a favorite with downtown publishing people and young executives because it provided gourmet food at modest prices to expense-account people for whom restaurants like the Four Seasons were off limits. It was also a restaurant where he was not likely to meet people who knew him in the business world. The bar, with its heavy dark vine-encrusted columns, looked like it had been saved out of a Baroque church just before the wrecker's ball. Farther inside, New Yorkers dined amid the rich glow of tapestries and Oriental rugs on the walls, Renaissance pottery lined the fireplace mantels. A fountain splashed softly out in the skylighted courtyard, amid pots of pink hothouse azaleas.
    Marion was waiting, at their usual table on the far side of the fountain. He looked at Bill across the intervening tables with a hesitant smile and a questioning in those blue eyes. Marion was dressed in his usual dignified style, as befitted one of the top executives for Rolls-Royce in the United States. Bill had seen the navy European-tailored suit many times before, but it still looked store-new, and was set off by a melon-colored silk shirt and a brocaded tie that matched the Renaissance plush of the restaurant. The high fashion and the rich colors gave a solidity to Marion's thinness and to his hesitating walk, the way red velvet and heavy gold jewelry might lend majesty to a crippled Tudor king.
    The old red scar tissue could be glimpsed on the left side of Marion's neck, just above the silk collar, and in a patch or two on his left cheek. The scars were from the fierce gas-fed flames of his exploding Lotus that day ten years ago at Le Mans. The helmet had saved his face from scarring—a face that was dry, lean, well-bred and handsome—plain as a
    Thoroughbred horse, that face of impoverished English gentry. The shy blue eyes, the stubborn jaw and the wasted look reminded one of T. E. Lawrence after his Arabian experience.
    Fortunately, the flames had missed destroying Marion as