There, I went to my first gay bar-Hoedowns, on Cheshire Bridge Road, where good-looking men in cowboy hats whirled in line-dance formation. So I arrowed east each weekend, sometimes at a hundred miles an hour, to Atlanta. I knew I could lose my job just for being gay. Still, I believed coming out would come with unbearable consequences: I knew Alabama had no work protection for gay people. Two women who tended a beautiful garden called my neighborhood home.
In 1997 I lived a double life in Birmingham, Alabama.
