Not in Oz Anymore

Residents call it Oz, Xanadu, Heaven, or just Here: a collection of urban neighborhoods, college towns, and resort areas where most gay people live, or have lived in the past, or plan to live someday. It is surrounded on all sides by “Kansas,” not the U.S. state but a vast expanse of cities, towns, farms, and forests, where straight people live and speak and are visible. Some gay people live there, too, but they are generally silent and invisible. After 17 years in Oz, Joe returned to Kansas for a job. It was a like exploring a new, alien planet, where the basic rules and conventions of the life he knew are turned upside down. The most pervasive rule was erasure. Friends, co-workers, his doctor, his auto mechanic, movies, tv pro-grams, magazines, novels, college classes, all of them proc-laimed, over and over, day after day, with giddy certainty, that gay people did not exist.