old needs a little lubrication to loosen up his inhibitions, just like I did when I was twenty-one and just like Nelson did.” Hunny’s nephew stiffened and, if I wasn’t mistaken, blushed. “It’s possible, of course,” Hunny went on, “that a few of these boys might have been just a smidgen short of twenty-one. I mean, if a kid is obviously post-adolescent I don’t see any need to check his driver’s license. Would you?”
Hunny seemed to be addressing me. I said, “I’m in a longtime relationship, but that’s beside the point. I don’t have young guys from my past lining up and threatening to haul me into court unless I cough up thousands of dollars. You do. Can any of these under-twenty-ones prove that you got them sauced up 14 Richard Stevenson and then — did whatever it is you do?”
“Gave them blowjobs,” Hunny said cheerfully, glancing around for an ashtray and then flicking ash into my wastebasket.
“There could be a few pictures out there somewhere. No videos, though, I don’t think. And no pictures from any of the guys who have called so far.”
Nelson muttered bitterly, “Oh, so far. That’s great.”
Art said, “Hunny, if anybody accused you of being a pedophile, you could get testimony from tons of people saying you like sex with guys of all ages.”
“Like at work,” Hunny said. “I’ve blown half the straight guys at the warehouse. But they’re mostly married, so I really can’t say how many of them would stand up for me. Hey,” Hunny added.
“Good choice of words — stand up for me,” and he and Art cackled.
Nelson looked close to tears.
“And then in addition to the men who are explicitly threatening to expose you for illegal acts,” I said, “are a dozen or so who have asked for money and used language where there’s an implicit threat. We’re talking nearly twenty of these characters to deal with, and maybe more on the way, no? If I do take you on as a client, Hunny, this could run into time and money. As a sexually active gay man about town, you’ve had a busy career.
Tracking all these guys down and then explaining to them in the nicest way possible that blackmail and extortion are illegal in the state of New York could take up a sizeable chunk of my work week or month.” I went over my standard fee schedule, and as I sat across from not-so-plutocrat-looking Hunny and Art, I left off the surcharge I normally add for any billionaires who find their way to my Central Avenue walkup.
Hunny looked at me speculatively and said, “Your office is kind of tacky, but your rates aren’t.”
“Those are my normal fees. Once in a while people ask for their money back, but most are satisfied.”
Hunny smiled and said, “Don, have you ever fooled around with an older, more experienced man?”
“I told you, Uncle Hunny, that Donald is gay. That’s one reason I brought you to him. But he just told you that he has a boyfriend. God, can’t you ever leave it alone? All this sex, sex, sex, sex. People just get sick of it.”
Hunny flapped his wrist at his nephew. “Well, get her!” He looked over at me and said, “Nelson and Yawn prefer collecting gym equipment to collecting boys. How silly can a drag queen be?”
“Do you and your partner do drag?” I asked Nelson conversationally and maybe because I was curious as to what I might get Hunny to come out with next.
Nelson said, “Lawn and I do not do drag, no. That’s just the way my uncle talks. Constantly.”
“When you were twelve,” Art said, “you got caught wearing your mother’s underwear. Hunny’s mom told us about that.”
Art and Hunny chuckled, and Nelson went red again. “Uncle Hunny, I am trying to be helpful. You called me and asked me if I knew anybody who could deal with these ghastly seedy characters who came oozing out of the woodwork as soon as you won the lottery. I bring you to this man who knows how to deal with predatory scumbags and might be able to keep you from being conned, or even — let’s just get it right out there — out of jail.
And what do you do? You and Art spend the entire time insulting me and dishing detective Strachey. So, do you want help, or do you not? If you do, then I suggest that you start acting like a mature adult for the first time in your life.”
“Anyway,” Hunny said, “I’ve been in jail before. That’s something I know I can handle, if it comes to that.”
“That was entirely different,” Nelson said. “This time it wouldn’t be about social protest. It would be about corrupting a minor or something really serious you couldn’t wriggle out of so easily. And it wouldn’t just be overnight, either.”
I asked, “You were arrested at a protest, Hunny?”
“Yes, on June twenty-eighth, 1969.” He smiled at me and batted his eyelashes and flapped his wrist once.
“Stonewall? You were there?” I had goose bumps.
“Both of us were,” Art said. “Hunny and I met when they shoved us both in the same paddy wagon.”
“Wow.”
“Some of us in the Van Horn family,” Nelson said, “are actually quite proud of Art and Uncle Hunny. Lawn and I are both grateful for the social revolution that made it possible for us to live as comfortably and openly as we do as gay men. But that was then and this is now, and throwing beer bottles at the police is no longer either appropriate or necessary. And there certainly is no need anymore for gay men to go around shrieking defiantly and sexualizing every utterance and affecting the personalities of ten-year-old girls. Art and Hunny and the other people at Stonewall that night could afford to act like that because they had nothing to lose. But now, thanks to the post- Stonewall social gains, we all have plenty to lose. And lose things we most certainly will if our most prominent role models go on TV and start rolling their eyes and waving their arms around and shrieking about Matt Lauer’s ‘nice basket.’”
As Nelson gave his speech, Hunny made a show of looking bored, and then he picked up the lists of blackmailers and extortionists that he had placed on my desk earlier.
Paying no attention to anything Nelson had said, Hunny looked up at me with a queasy expression. “You know, Don,” he said, “there are a couple of these humpy numbers that we might have to end up paying something to. Annoying as that would be.”
“Why is that?” I said.
“Because two or three of them I think would have to be considered maybe kind of…dangerous?”
Art leaned over and peered at the list and nodded, and Nelson slid even farther down in his chair.
Chapter Three
“I think I should get half,” Stu Hood said. “It’s only fair.
Hunny told me lots of times he was gonna ditch Art and marry me. Just ‘cause Hunny never got around to doing what he promised is no reason for me to suffer. Anyway, I was underage when Hunny popped my cherry. That’s against the law, and I was an impressionable youth.”
“How old were you?” I asked.
“When Hunny introduced me to the homosexual lifestyle, I was eighteen or nineteen years of age, I forget which. I was only a child.”
“But the age of consent in New York is seventeen, Stu. Dewy-browed stripling that you might have considered yourself to be, in the eyes of the law you were a consenting adult.”
“No shit. I thought you had to be twenty-one.”
“To drink, yes. But not for sex. Voting is eighteen and alcohol consumption twenty-one, but seventeen is the age of consent for sex in New York.”
“Well, he served me alcohol.”
“Uh huh.”
“He told me it was happy hour on Moth Street.”
“This was in Hunny’s house?”
“Yeah, Art wasn’t home and Hunny was sneaking a quickie, apparently.”
We were seated at a table near the dimly lit rear of the Watering Hole, a gay bar of robust semi-down-at- the-heels antiquity down the street from my office on Central Avenue. Hunny had told me an hour earlier that Hood was likely to be hanging out there on a Saturday, and Hunny had been right. The bartender had pointed Hood out, a
