To my best friend and most indispensable guide through plotting, Sasha Smith, thank you so much for your mom’s potatoes. Endless thanks to my early readers: Elizabeth, Lena, Leah, Season, Agnes, Shanicka, Sierra, Somaya, Isabel, Remy, Anna, Elisabeth, Rosalind, Grace, Leah, Liz (yes, three separate Elizabeths read this book, and yes, two out of three have wives), Lauren (third Elizabeth’s wife), Courtney, Vee, Kieryn, Amy, and more. To the authors who so kindly and generously read and blurbed, including Jasmine Guillory, Helen Hoang, Sara Gailey, Cameron Esposito, Julia Whelan, and Meryl Wilsner: I look up to each of you so much, and I’m still so stoked that you liked my book. To my perfect audiobook actress, Natalie Naudus, thank you for bringing my girls to life. So many thanks to my friends in the industry for making all this so much less scary—you know who you are.

To my thoughtful and thorough sensitivity readers, Ivy Fang, Adriana M. Martínez Figueroa, Gladys Qin, and Christina Tucker, thank you for your time and your care. Hugest thanks due to the resources I used for research on this book, including but certainly not limited to Stone Butch Blues, Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation, The Stonewall Reader, the New York Public Library’s Stonewall 50 installation, Jarek Paul Ervin’s article on queer punk in 1970s New York, and the GLBT History Museum in San Francisco.

More thanks than I can express to Lee and Essie, who welcomed me into their home for dinner while I was revising this book and let me in on a real-life story of two women who fell in love in the 1970s and have endured to the present. It meant the world to me. I hope I managed to infuse even a little of what I saw in both of you into this.

To my family, thank you for building me into a person who chases something when I want it. Thank you for the vocabulary to talk about love and the capacity to feel it. To my FoCo fam and my NYC fam, thank you for afternoons in the garden and socially distant picnics in the park, for being a constant foundation of warmth and care.

To K, thank you for believing in me, for always having my back, and for all the sponge cakes. You have given me things I thought would only ever exist in fiction for me. I love you.

To the queer reader, thank you for existing. So much of this story is about building a community. I’m so happy to be in community with you. Be defiant. Love yourself hard. Take the energy in these pages and get involved in your direct physical community. Take care of one another. Know that you are wanted and loved and awaited by millions of us.

To every reader, I’m one of many, many but not enough queer voices in fiction. Each of them deserves to be heard. When you close this book, seek out a queer author you’ve never read before and buy their book. Don’t begin and end with any one work. There are so many to love, and supporting them creates a space for even more queer authors to print their words. Also, support your local Black-owned diner or your local Chinatown or your local drag bar.

Thank you so much for letting this book exist. For seeing me. For seeing this story. I’ll see you in the next one. Until then, fight like hell and be good to those you love.