Rutka began outing gay men and women who were not necessarily wicked and dangerous, but merely prominent: several business owners; a local TV weatherman; pols of all stations and creeds; the inevitable slew of Episcopalian clergy; a miscellany of others.

Since there is nothing wrong with being gay, and since heterosexuals' dating and mating habits were described all the time, well-known people had to expect this, Rutka said. His column, called "The Society Pages," was Rutka's way of helping "normalize" being gay and removing its stigma for future generations.

When, on right-to-privacy grounds, Cityscape finally rejected Rutka's arguments and dropped his column, he began putting out his own tabloid, Queerscreed, which was printed at the Kopy-King franchise where Sandifer was assistant manager and then passed out on the streets by Albany's tiny Queer Nation membership. Rutka's column became even nastier in tone and closer to out-and-out hysteria in Queerscreed — "You are worse than AIDS, worse than gay-bashing, you KILL US WITH YOUR HYPOCRISY!" he often screamed in print at his subjects. This disturbed Albany's more sedate gay pols and organizers who'd made gains in recent years using more conventional means, and who feared a backlash.

But Rutka was undeterred. He continued to build his files, and to make enemies. One of whom apparently had now tried to rid closeted gay Albany forever of what a middle-aged, previously closeted gay mortuary owner had recently called "this McCarthy in sheep's clothing."

When I asked Rutka if he planned on turning over his files to the Handbag police for use in their investigation, he said gravely, "You can't be serious," and looked at me in amazement, as if I were the one going around opening up gay people's lives to the scrutiny of the public and the state.

"John, if there's been an attempt on your life," I said mildly, "it's only logical that an important part of any intelligent police investigation will be the questioning of people who felt threatened by your campaign. You said yourself that that's who you thought took a shot at you, somebody you'd outed. Or were planning to out, you might have added."

"No," Rutka said, with a little shake of his head, "I really think I have to be the judge of what use my files are put to. If the cops ever got hold of my unpublished material, who knows what they might do to people."

This was said with not the least trace of irony. And although I could see that Rutka had a point, if somebody had insisted to me that within twenty-four hours it was going to become my point too, obsession even, I'd have said I didn't think so. end user

Up in a fifth-floor corridor, outside Stuart Meserole's room, I met Timmy and told him about the shooting incident and my encounter with John Rutka.

He said, "Too bad Rutka wasn't bending over kissing his own foot when the shot was fired. He might have died in a characteristic pose that would have pleased those few who would cherish his memory, and the rest of us would be rid of him."

It was indicative of the effect Rutka often had on people that his misfortune could produce so harsh a response in so rational a soul. Normally a purveyor of Franciscan charity and the very soul of Jesuit restraint, Timmy had often spoken critically of Rutka, especially since Rutka's outing of a friend of Timmy's, a state legislator from one of the Southern Tier counties whose voting record on gay matters was impeccable but who had chosen to remain closeted out of deference to the sensitivities of his father, an Orthodox rabbi. The old cleric had performed his own monumental act of paternal love by refraining from hurling lightning bolts at his fallen son, the feygele, and merely spent his evenings weeping.

"Nobody deserves to be shot," I said. "Gunshot wounds are always worse than they look even in the movies these days, and they hurt a lot."

"Good."

"And if Rutka had been shot dead," I said, "you wouldn't have liked it. You would have hated it."

"Not him."

"When you told Eldon that Nicky Mertz died, and Eldon said he didn't want to hear about it-'What's one more?'-you almost punched him, you were so mad. You revere life. You're an authentic papist."

"St. Augustine," he said. "Fourth century. Killing another human being can be justified to combat a threatening evil."

"He meant war. The Roman Empire was about to be attacked and the previously pacifistic Augustinians worked out a theory of a just war that would lead to a just peace. They didn't advocate popping off people who were mere pains in the ass."

He looked at me oddly. "How do you know all that?"

"You explained it to me fourteen or fifteen years ago. It was soon after we met. It might have been within the first five or ten minutes."

"You're right. It's starting to come back to me."

"How is he?" I said.

"There's no change. He's the same as he was yesterday, and the same as he was the day before, and the same as he was the day before that."

"Is Mike in there?" I could see the bed nearest the door with its comatose occupant, but not beyond the curtain to the room's second bed, where Stu Meserole lay, also in a "persistent vegetative state," sustained through tubes by machinery that bleeped and ticked dully, not convincing as a life force.

"They're all in there behind the drape. Mike and Rhoda and Al."

"Do they leave after Mike leaves, or are they afraid he might sneak back?"

"No one knows. Rhoda and Al appear to live on another plane of existence from the rest of us that precludes such mundane matters as coming and going. It is beyond our knowing."

"Nah, we could find out."

"I don't think so."

"Rhoda and Al," as Stu Meserole had always referred to his parents, whom he feared and adored despite their coldness toward Stu's lover and friend of twelve years, Mike Sciola, had dedicated their every waking moment to keeping their son breathing even after his brain had been largely eaten away by a ferocious cancer previously found only in kangaroos.

Stu, like Mike, had been found to be HIV-positive six years earlier. Each had defied the odds by remaining entirely healthy until the previous May. That's when Stu had a headache one day, was blind a month later, lost most bodily functions soon after that, screamed and talked gibberish for a week, then went to sleep. The cancer then inexplicably quit growing and left Stu with just a few critical functions, including respiration.

Mike wanted to find a way to let his friend, whose mind and soul were gone, go all the way. Rhoda and Al Meserole didn't. They believed in science and they believed in miracles. They believed one or the other would bring their son back to tortured wakefulness. Stu, having neglected before he suddenly fell ill to complete the proper New York State forms designating Mike as his "health care proxy" and the decider of his fate, was now legally under the control of Rhoda and Al, who feared that Mike would "pull the plug," as they put it, an actual plug indeed being down there somewhere to tug out of a wall socket.

Mike wouldn't have pulled it-he had other means in mind, it soon developed-but the Meseroles knew their man, and he knew they knew him. The three of them spent many hours each day in Stu's room eyeing each other whenever they weren't flipping through TV Guide, or staring at the soaps, or gazing out the window at the June blossoms and then the ripening summer.

Timmy and I dropped by several evenings each week to try to lure Mike away. He didn't have to go to work until close to Labor Day-to his job as a high school social-studies teacher out in Balston Lake-but he was losing weight and his friends feared that his self-neglect would trigger an opportunistic infection and he would fall apart, too. We and a few other friends had become regular standees outside room F-5912, at the end of a corridor not in the AIDS section of the hospital but in a chronic-care unit where Stu and his immediate neighbors were all, as we'd heard one intern put it, "turnip city."