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This One's for ThomFebruary 03, 2006 Today is Gertrude Stein's birthday, and also that of Thom H., a friend and colleague from my Red Cross days. Thom was a "company guy," a Red Cross lifer, and also one of the sunniest people I've ever met -- on paper this doesn't sound like a likely friend prospect, especially when you consider that in those days I was even more hard-edged and prickly than I am now. Thom was one of the few men I've ever met who treated women like people, not as objects, not as exotics, not as aliens. He cheerfully attributed this to growing up as an only son with five sisters. I agreed, but I knew enough of his history -- he was a Vietnam vet, among other things -- to realize that he could have made other choices and become a rather different person. We got to know each other when I was deeply immersed in the lesbian community and the feminist movement, not a time when I was especially tolerant of run-of-the-mill male behavior. Thom was my touchstone: Whenever I was on the verge of declaring that if all men were put up against the wall, it would be no great loss, I'd think of Thom and make it "almost all men." I met him when I was promoted from secretary in the insurance office (possibly the worst, and certainly the most boring, job I've ever had) to staff assistant in the Office of Personnel Training and Development. Thom was a couple of grades up the ladder. The office was presided over by Betty O., a remarkable woman then nearing retirement who had joined the organization around the end of the Second World War. She took the office mission seriously and was as dedicated to the training and development of her own staff as she was to that of the rest of the large and far-flung American Red Cross. She encouraged us all to take courses and think about where we wanted to go; she also did a lot of her own typing so that we clericals could do more than type all day. This was rare among women bosses and unheard of among the men. (To be fair, I should note that most of the men couldn't type, and without discreet secretarial intervention, many of them couldn't turn out a coherent and tactful letter.) When an opening for editor in the publications office was posted on the intraorganization job board, Thom and Betty encouraged me to apply for it. Would I have applied without their support? Doubt it. I barely knew what an editor was, my confidence in my own abilities was not great, and I was looking at a five-grade jump, from the clerical class into the ranks of the professionals -- in hierarchical and class-conscious organizations such leaps are rare. But what they knew of me and saw in my work convinced them that I was qualified. When, after an interview and my first-ever editing test, I was actually offered the job, an official in the personnel office did indeed try to block my promotion on the ground that professional positions required a college degree -- which, since I was a clerical, she assumed I didn't have. I checkmated her with my B.A. in history, magna cum laude, from Penn: the only time I've ever had to prove I went to college, and boy, was it worth it. To celebrate my departure from the training office and my elevation to editor, Thom presented me with three T-shirts: a green one with the figure "0" transformed into a women's symbol; an orange one with "EDITOR" emblazoned across the chest; and a bright yellow one with one of my favorite sayings in dark red letters: "WHEN IN DOUBT, TURN LEFT." Thom and I stayed friends as long as I remained in Washington, though we saw each other less after I left the Red Cross in 1981. After I left for Martha's Vineyard in July 1985, I gradually lost touch with nearly everyone I knew in D.C. (The leap from clerical to professional was nothing compared from the flight from big city to small island.) Around 1990 I was back in D.C. to give a reading (my f/sf anthologies were coming out during this period) and to visit the AIDS quilt. I'd seen it when it was first displayed in, I think, 1987, when I went down for a national lesbian/gay march; then it was displayed on the Mall and numbered fewer than 2,000 panels. This time there were more than 10,000, more than you could see in a whole day of walking up and down the canvas aisles, and they were laid out on the Ellipse. A Vineyard friend had made a panel for four of the Vineyard's early AIDS casualties; my companion and I looked it up in the directory and headed for the coordinates given. Not far from our destination, a big red cross caught my eye. I detoured toward it. The panel was for Thom. One by one I took in the details: name, birthdate, particular incidents, the activities he'd been involved in, the names of the two friends, Bruce and Brad (who himself was HIV-positive at the time and died a couple of years later), who had made the panel. All of them were familiar -- all except one, the date of his death, in May 1988. It was the one time in my life so far that my legs literally wouldn't hold me up. I crumpled and just sat there for a long, long time. I still have those three T-shirts: "EDITOR" and "WHEN IN DOUBT, TURN LEFT" are in the regular rotation every summer. I remember Thom whenever I put one on, and on his birthday, and a lot of other times too.
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