Rick smiled: "Nope, I'll be different. You see, I think its better for two butches to be friends. They think alike, they act alike, they understand each other

shouldn't they be friends?"

"You're wrong. A dame's got to be feminine."

"I thought you didn't like straight people."

so why

"I don't. They're too conventional. Always insisting you've got to be this, or that. But now, about butch-an'-fem, that's diff'rent I mean it's natural!"

·

"Hmph!" murmured Rick as she and Sue moved to the other end of the room.

Pote dropped her briefcase on the bar top and surveyed the room with distant eyes. "Pete's a 'quare one'" thought Gus, "a walking bookshelf. But at least she don't fight nobody. What'chu dreaming about Pete?" she called aloud.

"Just thinking how Riley's is an island, adrift off to nowhere, without anchor or root. Strange thing, that is if you know islands, how limited their flora and fauna are, how bizarre in form, yet what poverty of specios!"

"What?"

"Moreover, sometimes an island sinks."

"Yer nuts, Pete, but I like you. Tell me, kid, what's wrong with the world?"

"Oh nothing, but maybe a confusion of values, a preference to dogma over decency. We forget the ethics of love, tolerance, and plain human kindness. Perhaps

"

"Ya mean, people just don't let anyone be themselves. Yer right! Everybody's typing everybody while we just want to live natural-like

-

"As natural as you can be in your straight jacket of butch-hood?"

"I don't get you."

17