"Christine," Tony growls into his coffee. "A pleasure as always."

"So friendly, when I'm doing you a favor. Again," she says, leaning serenely on the coffee shop table.

"And yet somehow, your 'favors' always end up leading to major bodily harm and my stock crashing. How is that?"

"So you don't want to know that within the week, Jameson at the Bugle is going to be outing Captain America on his front page? I mean, I figured even you would agree that "Captain Gaymerica" is a little bit too tacky for a headline."

"What?" Tony asked blearily. He was too sober for this. "Sorry to break in to your late-night fantasies, Christine - or possibly Jameson's, and wow, <I>that's</i> an image I could have lived with never having, thanks - but Cap's not gay. I know the guy, and believe me, no number of trashy tabloid headlines--"

"Tell that to Lieutenant Roth," Christine said, and slid a sheaf of papers across the table at him.

He unfolded them. They appeared to be microfilm printouts frorm the early '90s, from a small local weekly paper that must not have been fully ditigized yet. A bad photograph of a balding man in what looked like his early 70s was splashed under the masthead; it looked like some kind of human interest piece.

"What does this have to do with Cap?"

Christine tapped the papers. "Somebody stumbled on it by accident. In 1993 the <i>Village Crier</i> did a series of oral history interviews with Gay WII veterans in New York City, for the fiftieth anniversary of the war. Mr. Roth there has a touching story about his old boyfriend Stevie Rogers. I don't think he ever knew he was Captain America, but now that he's in the news again, somebody picked up on the name. You might want to read it, you could learn something about real human interaction."

"Anybody can make up stories, Christine, but thanks for the warning; I'll have Fury kill the story."

"Great," said Christine, getting up to leave. "That's what I was hoping you'd say."

He grabbed her wrist. "Wait, wait, what do you mean, 'great'? You want me to kill the story? Since when does Christine Everhart approve of censorship in the press? Are you ill? Are you dying? Because I'd be glad to--"

She smiled kindly at him. "Well, if you kill Jameson's story, that means I get to publish it first. It's a win-win for me, really."

She didn't have to say, "And Fury won't be able to shut <i>me</i> up," because they both knew he wouldn't. If he had to, Fury could keep <I>anything</i> out of the news, but some reporters were harder to quash than others, and Fury wouldn't want to burn too many resources for a story with no national security implications and a reporter as stubborn as Christine. Besides, Christine had a history of managing to get the information out there, one way or another.

"Aww, don't look so sad, Mr. Stark," she said, pulling her sleeve out of his grip and then patting his hand condescendingly. "You know Jameson would have made it in to as much of a scandal as possible, all about the corruption of American values and the evil of superheroes. I'll do it respectfully, for the sake of Mr. Roth's legacy if not your shiny little hero's."

"Captain America is not <I>little</i>," Tony muttered, sulking, and Christine laughed.

"And if you want to thank me, you can tip me off when you finally trip him into bed. It's a bit trashy for my usual fare, but 'America Screwed By Military-Industrial Complex' is too good a headline to pass up."

Tony stared after her as she left, and then threw a tip on the table and walked out, coffee in one hand and newspaper article in the other. As he walked toward SHIELD headquarters he scanned down the pages for the name  "Rogers"; he didn't need to hear about Mr. Arnie Roth's sickenly sweet long-term relationship or his lgbt activism or his partner dying tragically - ah, there it was; he skipped up to beginning of the section.

<blockquote>'My first boyfriend? Oh, that takes me back. We were kids, really - still in high school. He was this scrawny beanpole named Stevie: Steve Rogers. He was sort of sickly all the time. I guess these days you'd call it asthma and he'd have medication, an inhaler, but back then he just got called a wimp and a mama's boy and a pansy a lot.

I didn't even really know what a pansy was back then, but I knew I was different somehow, and I knew enough to be scared of anybody finding out. I was busy playing Romeo with all the girls, trying to figure out why it didn't feel the way the other boys talked about, and I don't think I would've even noticed him, except, well, he <I>was</i> different, y'know? And not in a way he could pretend about - whenever the rest of us were out winning glory on sports teams, he'd just be sitting in the stands, with a pencil and a sketchpad, cheering us on. He had this friend called Bucky - he was a scrawny little thing too, but all gristle and rage, and when Bucky was around nobody'd try anything physical with Stevie, because Bucky'd put a guy in the hospital once, even though nobody talked about it.

But I was out once - I think my girl had ditched me for something - and I saw Stevie down on a corner with these two boys from school, and Bucky nowhere around; I mean, the guy couldn't be his bodyguard all the time, right? And they were yelling at him about being a sissy and maybe he should just start wearing skirts, and he was just standing there, taking it, with this little half-smile on his face, which wasn't helping his case any, y'know? And then one of them shoved at him, and when he didn't react, they knocked him down, and one of 'em kicked him in the ribs when he tried to get up. And I was nobody's hero - never have been, really, except maybe Michael's - but I couldn't just stand there and watch the kid get beat up, right? So I went over there and shamed 'em out of it, I guess, and when they were gone Stevie offered to buy me an ice-cream in thanks.

We ended up halfway up a rickety old fire escape, I don't remember why, but I'd been thinking the whole time about how he'd just stood there, smiling, while those guys beat him up, and I asked how he could be that brave. And I'll remember this all my life, I think, he just looked at me and said, "Well, it's like this, I reckon: if I stand my ground the worst I'll get is some hurt feelings and some bruises, maybe a broken nose. Bucky gets worse than that from his dad on a holiday weekend. But if I try to get away, I could kill myself running. At least, that's what the doctors say. But I figure it's not a bad rule to live by in general, y'know? If it's going to hurt either way, better take the bruising with a grin than die running."

I'm never going to forget that. And I think, looking back from here, I'd been sweet on him for a long time, y'know, I just hadn't realized that was what it was? But I just, I thought about killing myself running, and I leaned over and kissed him right there.

And he just sort of said "oh" - he was probably more surprised than I was - but I must have been about to pass out from hyperventilating, because he started talking about how if I wanted to kiss boys, that was still okay, that there was nothing wrong with us, that lots of other people felt the way we did and a lot of them were real swell people, and that was probably the first time I'd even felt like I wasn't alone in the way I felt.

And I think - that made a lot of difference to me. I don't think me and Stevie were ever going to be true loves or anything, and it took awhile before he'd even wave back at me across the schoolyard, but it - but liking other boys, it stopped being this terrifying, shapeless thing I was running away from, it was something I could stand up to and face, just knowing I wasn't the only one facing it, and that Stevie had to put up with everybody calling him a sissy, too, on top of knowing he was one. I don't think we'd ever have been in love, and I wasn't that brave - I was still taking out a different girl every Saturday - but for the rest of that year, every week or two somehow we'd end up somewhere private, and we'd talk about things, and sometimes we'd do a little bit more.

After that? Well, there was the War. I joined up as soon as I could, and I heard later that Stevie had, too - he must have convinced the doctors to lie on his physical, I guess - and he was MIA doing something classified in Europe. But I think Stevie would've been glad to die doing something heroic for his country, even if nobody ever got to hear about it - and I bet it was heroic, whatever it was, because Stevie would've stood his ground and grinned at them.

You got used to hearing that about boys you used to know, after the war, dead or MIA. I guess it helped prepare me for what we hear these days, you know, so many young men dying, and that's heroic, too. Michael died as brave as any of the guys I knew in the War, and he used to remind me about what Stevie'd said, about how running would kill you faster than any of it. I still think of him as one of the bravest men I've ever known, Stevie and Michael both.' </blockquote>

The next question was about what it had been like to be gay in the Navy, and Tony didn't care about that, either. He shove the printouts down with his laptop, and nearly gagged on his coffee. Nauseating wasn't the <I>word</i> for it. Was there <i>anything</i> about Captain America that wasn't made out of apple pie and puppies?

 


