Beauty Queen

Armando's bulk and tiny Jewel wedged into the back of Mary Ellen's Vega wagon.
    It was for occasional trips like this that Mary Ellen put up with the hassles of keeping a car in New York, getting up at odd hours to move it to another parking place. Her father had always kept a car. Besides, she told herself, someday she might want to start going up to the cabin in Massachusetts again, and she and Liv would need the car to get there.
    In Washington, they just had time to check into then-cheap hotel. Then they hurried to the First Congregational Church, which was hosting the MCC general conference.
    Mary Ellen looked around in astonishment at the hundreds of people streaming into the big modern brick church. It was the first time she had ever attended a gay convention of any sort. It hit her that Jeannie Colter was right about one thing. "We are legion," she thought. "We are everywhere."
    The big church was packed—it didn't seem possible to shoehorn another body in. The balcony, laden with gay humanity, seemed in danger of collapsing. The organist, an older man wearing a Lambda pendant, was playing a stately old hymn, "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring," on the big pipe organ. But despite the solemnity of the music, a joyous bustle filled the air—people running around talking about MCC politics, talking about the growth of MCC abroad, passing out hymn sheets, greeting old friends.
    Since there was standing room only, Mary Ellen, Liv and Armando inched their way along a side aisle toward the front. Then Reverend Erickson saw them and came quickly to escort them to extra chairs put hurriedly at the front for them.
    Mary Ellen looked out over the sea of gay humanity, and a lump lodged in her throat. Joyous, bra-less lesbians in T-shirts and clean jeans, older women in knit dresses and sensible shoes, young and middle-aged men in faded jeans and silver jewelry, old men in business suits and gray hair— whites, blacks, Puerto Ricans, Japanese-Americans, Hawaiians, Canadians, Australians, Europeans ....
    When the service began, the organ crashed into the opening chords of "Washed in the Blood of the Lamb." That mass of humanity came to its feet and roared out the hymn like she had never imagined it could be sung. Cold chills went racing up and down her body. All around her, arms were raised high in the air in the evangelical gesture of affirmation. She found herself raising her arms too.
    The sermon was given by a forty-year-old lesbian preacher from Oklahoma, Alice DeBolt, who was on the MCC board.
    Striding back and forth on the dais, wearing a man-styled beige suit and cowboy boots, carrying her mike on its long cord, DeBolt presented a fiery sermon on gay liberation in the best tradition of tent revivalism.
    "Every one of you here tonight," she shouted, "is a Moses! Every one of you can go home, to your cities, to your towns, to your schools, to your families, and you can say, ‘My people are in slavery here!'"
    "Amen!" sang out many people in the crowd.
    "You can go back to those Pharaohs where you work, where you live, all over the country, and you can say to them, 'Let my people out of the bondage of ten thousand years!"'
    "Amen! Hallelujah! Right on, sister!" more people shouted.
    "And above all—" she paused, one clenched fist frozen in the air, "those brothers and sisters who live in New York, you're gonna go home and say to Jeannie Colter, 'Let my people go!'"
    The whole church erupted with a roar of amens and hallelujahs. Everybody surged to their feet with their arms thrust in the air.
    Mary Ellen glanced at her companions. Armando seemed to be scarcely reacting to all this. He was just sitting there, staring straight ahead. Sam was all eyes, with a "gee whiz" expression on his face. Jewel and Liv had both let themselves go, shouting and singing at the tops of their lungs.
    After the service, everyone flooded out of the church to where hundreds of pre-ordered taxis were waiting.
    In half an hour, the thousands of conference-goers were massed by the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
    Thousands of white candles were passed out and the MCC leader, Reverend Troy Pearry, gave quiet instructions for the march. Candles flamed to life everywhere in the dark, until the area around the pool was a sea of tiny flickering lights. Ahead lay the Lincoln Memorial, bathed in floodlights in the soft summer night. A few tourists walked up and down the long flight of steps. Mary Ellen noted the D.C. police also