"I take it that wasn't the case with you."

His face tightened and he said, "No. I was lucky in that respect. Actually, they didn't know. I was pretty fucked up as a kid. I kept everything hidden. My first experiences were not what you would call ideal. I didn't really come to terms with my sexuality until I was in nursing school in 1980 and met some gay people who had their shit together. And even then I didn't come out and start thinking of myself as gay until I hit New York.

"I got down there just in time for the plague, which was horrible, but fortunately I met Eddie a couple of months after I arrived.

He was just out of the Marine Corps and really ready to let loose too. We hardly got out of bed the first month we knew each other, we had so much sex and emotion pent up inside us. I brought him home whenever I came up, and everybody in my family just sort of knew. Ann said they figured it out when I decided to become a nurse. How's that for sexual-orientation stereotyping?"

"Competent enough."

"So they knew, and it seemed to be okay, just as long as nobody spoke the dreaded word."

"And you never spoke it?"

"Nah. Not in Handbag. Not until later, in New York, when I went to a couple of ACT-UP meetings and started to understand how all-pervasive homophobia is in this society and how it kills people. Then I spoke the word."

"I suppose," I said, "Chief Bailey was forced to speak it when he was here, or at least to allude to it."

Rutka sneered. "He said he thought the shooting might have had something to do with my being 'an activist.' That's all he said, 'an activist.' "

"And you conceded there might be a connection?"

"He asked me for the names of anyone who had threatened me in recent months, and I gave him my list."

"You have a little list."

"These are the ones who I know who they are. I've gotten so many anonymous threats in the past year I've lost count."

He reached over the edge of the glider, retrieved from the end table a photocopied single sheet of paper, and passed it to me. As I read over it, Rutka scooped up another handful of M amp;M's and crunched on them noisily while I studied his list of names and brief biographical descriptions. The list had on it the state senate aide, the TV weatherman, and seven other names I recognized from Rutka's Cityscape outing column and from Queers-creed.

I folded and pocketed the list and said, "These are all people you've already outed. You haven't been threatened by anybody who hadn't been outed yet but was afraid you might go after them? Somebody in your files?"

"No. Not yet."

"Where do you keep these famous files, anyway?"

"Hidden."

"Here in the house?"

"Upstairs. I'll show you. They're locked up. Eddie has a key. I have a key. And I'll show you where there's another one. Nobody else has ever seen the files."

"I'm flattered."

"You should be. I take my responsibilities with the data that I've gathered very, very seriously."

This was an interpretation of Rutka's activities that would have been challenged through clenched teeth by many in Albany, but I was now his security consultant and not his conscience, or linguist, and I let it go.

"How did you compile these files?" I said. "How do you dig up all this dirt on people?"

"I'm surprised to hear you call it dirt," he said, looking annoyed. "That's a retrograde term I'd expect to hear from a person who has internalized his or her own homophobia."

"That's what I meant. It's dirt to them."

"Exactly. So, Strachey. You're a detective. If you were going to build up a set of files on homophobic closeted people, how would you go about it?"

"I'd keep my eyes open and ask a lot of questions wherever gay people congregated. I'd stake out cruising areas and see who turned up. I'd make myself available to people who wanted to sell information that somebody somewhere would consider damaging. And of course I'd cultivate in-the-know gay people who share my beliefs about outing or who might be brought around to my way of thinking."

He nodded. "You've got it."

"I'd build up a network of informants, too. In the police department, among the press, maybe in the area's hotels and motels, where lots of gay people are employed, and closeted gay people show up for trysts wearing shades and red wigs that don't fool sharp-eyed nosy desk clerks and room-service waiters and busboys."

Another nod.

I said, "I guess the motives of your informants don't count for much. Just so they deliver the goods."

He looked at me with both eyes and said gravely, "I occupy the high moral ground in this. It doesn't matter if many of my informants don't. They can deal with their own consciences. I'll deal with mine. I think of tips from sleazy people as just that tips, leads. I would never out anybody on the say-so of just one person, even if that person was sincere and reliable-which some of them are. They aren't all scuzzbags.

"That's why it pisses me off that people say I use McCarthyite tactics. Joe McCarthy was reckless and sloppy. He'd go after somebody on the basis of anonymous calls or letters from crackpot organizations. I would never do anything like that. The idea of it makes me sick."

When I thought about it later, Rutka's indignantly drawn fine distinction between his approach and Joe McCarthy's kept blurring in my mind. But as Rutka sat there on a sunny Wednesday morning shaking his head in disgust over McCarthy's failure to double-check his sources, he came across as the consummate professional: exacting, judicious, fair-minded, wise: the Benjamin Cardozo of outing.

I said, "Well, John, whatever I might think about your outing campaign and the way you go about it, you've convinced me that I can rely on your skills as a researcher-reporter. That's quite a data bank you must have stored away up there. And I guess I agree it's all but certain that the name of the person who shot you is buried somewhere inside those files. So if I'm going to help keep you from getting shot again, we should get to it. It's time for me to take a look at those files."

Rutka seemed to pause for just an instant to consider the gravity of the step he was about to take, and then he swung both feet onto the floor, sat up, and reached for my hand. end user

Rutka slid up the stairs backwards on his seat, pushing himself upward with the good foot. On the second floor he pulled himself upright and hobbled into a dim bedroom with drawn shades that had been a teen-aged girl's in the early seventies and had been frozen in time: orange shag throw rug; pink chenille bedspread with a heap of stuffed animals on the pillows; a stack of Carole King records; an Osmond Brothers poster on the wall; some group photos showing the Handbag High cheerleaders hoisting their pom-poms and thrusting up their breasts with military precision.

"Your sister's room?"

"You are good."

Rutka unzipped the belly of a stuffed hippopotamus and pulled out a set of three keys. "Now you know where a set of keys is, in case I'm not here."

Down the hall, he unlocked the attic door with two of the keys and we climbed up, him on his seat. The wall of dry heat that hit us when we got to the top felt like a visit to Khartoum. I helped support Rutka and we bent low so as not to have our skulls pierced by roofing nails. Past the piles of old furniture and boxes labeled "XMAS" and "GRANDMA," at what I took to be the rear of the attic if my orientation was correct, was an old World War II-vintage desk.