Saturday and my first day officially being on vacation! I feel pretty good this morning. My sleep was most excellent last night, and this morning I am even up before eight! I have a lot to do today, and while it is very daunting, there’s no LSU game today so I may not even wake the television up, let alone put games on. But I feel no stress or anxiety (thank you, not-so-new-anymore medications), and I feel very confident I’ll be able to get this all done by Monday afternoon. Huzzah? Huzzah! I don’t even hate the book, nor am I sick of it–an interesting turn of events, is it not?
We did make it to Costco after I finished working for the day, and ran some other errands. My copies of Double-Crossing Van Dine, an anthology I have a co-editor credit for, also arrived and the book is quite lovely. I’m looking forward to reading it, along with the other anthologies I have a story in that have come out lately. I also cleaned up around here a bit, so it’s not horrible this morning in the apartment. Note to self: if you can do chores on a weeknight, do them. It means less cleaning on the weekend, and that is definitely a plus.
The new Taylor Swift album dropped yesterday, so we listened to it in the car as we ran our errands and I liked it a lot. I saw on-line that there were criticisms of the album from the Swifties and the critics, but..what can I say? I liked it. I need to listen to it again when I can actually focus on listening to it; maybe I can do that on Tuesday once the book is over and done and turned in. But I certainly didn’t think it was terrible, either, or lame or any of the other things I saw on-line. It was inevitable that people would turn on her, I suppose, now that she’s happy and in-love and getting married and super-successful, and MAGA already hated her. Ah, well. She can always lock herself and Travis in their money vault and laugh all the way to the bank.
A new development came to light in the Kyren Lacy case. A former LSU star wide receiver (he was so fun to watch play), he was accused of causing an accident that killed someone in Lafourche Parish–and was charged with multiple counts. The day before his grand jury hearing, he killed himself. The news media was relentless in hounding him, as was the general public. Thing was, he didn’t cause the accident, he was innocent, and the fucking white bitch who blamed him to the cops (it was her fault, of course, may she burn in eternal hell. My guess is she won’t even be charged with anything, because Lafourche fucking parish) who of course told the white woman tears as gospel. I hope his family sues the fuck out of the Lafourche Parish sheriff’s department. “Loss of future income” will be enormous, because he went pro and signed for a shit ton of money.
Yes, racism is alive and well and completely healthy in southeastern Louisiana. Bet the Lafourche sheriffs thought he was “uppity” and “got above himself” and “needed to be put back in his place and know that white people always will matter more.”
Seriously–all you racists so terrified of Black people: if Black people were everything you say they are, they would have justifiably killed us all in our beds long ago.
I suppose my own marginalized status in this country has made me more empathetic and sympathetic to anyone and everyone who is not in the “dominant” culture. It really is staggering to realize how sociopathic so many white people are.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back with a status update tomorrow morning.
Wednesday Pay-the-Bills Day blog, with the country ablaze and the current regime throwing on more lighter fluid every few hours, and who knows what fresh horrors the new day will bring? Yesterday was an exhausting slog. We were busy all day in the clinic, we were using a new testing protocol for the first time, and there were all kinds of glitches in the computer matrix, it seemed. I also had ZOOM calls last night when I got home, one right after another, and when that was all over and done with I was worn to a frazzle. Once all was said and done, I collapsed into my easy chair (Paul was at a board meeting, I think; he was at his office late) and tried to get caught up on the news without becoming enraged. He got home shortly before I went to bed, and tonight I am going to have to make some groceries on the way home before I get back to work on my writing. I feel neither groggy nor completely awake yet this morning, so who knows how the day is going to play out? It’s always funny to me to see how I felt the previous morning vs. how the rest of the day went. I didn’t want to get up this morning–the bed was so comfy and warm–so I’m not sure how this day will go. We aren’t going to be as busy–but there are different challenges to today’s workday. We’ll see how it all goes, I guess.
I really do need to get my shit together. I’ve kind of been drifting for too long. And deadlines are looming. One thing that never changes–you always have to work no matter what the fuck is going on in the world.
Today I need to pay the bills, make a new to-do list (and follow it), and answer my way overdue emails and put on my big boy pants to face this cruel, crazy world of rising fascism. One of my clients told me yesterday that he thinks everything just needs to burn to the ground and then rebuild something better from the ashes…but even that seems idealistic to me; we can’t be certain what the lesson learned would be, can we? But our systems and institutions have been so stripped down, corrupted, and weakened that I don’t see how any of them can be fixed, especially when no one can agree on how things need to be fixed. The rot in our government, and the failure of our elected officials, is too engrained and simply runs too deep to be cut out, repaired, and papered over. Changing health insurance to a single-payer system would result in the loss of thousands of jobs (and as much as I loathe health insurance employees, I have to recognize how that would affect the economy), and what do you do with those people? And what about the shareholders’ money they’ve invested? Again, I personally don’t give two shits–any shareholder in health insurance corporations has just as much blood (if not more) on their hands as the employees do–but that is something that would have to be taken into consideration. You see what I mean? Our country is a Gordian knot of problems, and I am not sure that cutting through it would be as effective as setting it on fire.
And even I–with my deep cynicism about the awfulness of humans as a collective group my entire adult gay life (all it takes to lose all hope and faith in humanity is working for a few years at an airport, trust me)–have been caught off guard by some masks coming off. It shouldn’t surprise me, but it still does. The crime fiction community is filled with these horrific people. As the O’Jays sang in the early 1970s, “they smile in your face, all the time they want to take your place, the backstabbers…” There was another one of those trolls with a humiliation fetish on one of the platforms yesterday telling people not to be political in your books or publicly because “you don’t want to lose half your audience.” Oh, do you mean the trolls who post one-star reviews of every queer book on every review website possible? Bitch, homophobic misogynist racists aren’t reading queer mysteries set in New Orleans and written by a gay man. She was dragged for the filth she was, and I have to say I responded to her several times–ignoring my own advice to simply block and move on–and didn’t want to block her. She blocked me, and I have to say I do kind of revel in making MAGA trash block me–which is intoxicating and addictive and what made Twitter so vile. So, I am going to need to limit my time on social media even more, and I need to stick to my guns and just blockity block block. The mission is to protect my mental health and walk away from abusive conduct; this is counter to my entire methodology after coming out–in which I’m not taking abuse from anyone ever again became my mantra…but social media isn’t the same. In most cases I don’t know these people and I wouldn’t know them if I passed them on the street; so in ignoring and blocking I am making space for myself and not giving strangers my emotional labor anymore. I am not a teacher, and it’s not my job to educate you as to why bigotry and prejudice isn’t the way to go; I can’t make anyone develop empathy for others. I am just glad I never preserved my brain in amber as it was anytime in my life.
At least I can admit I’m wrong, and look at things from a new perspective once I’ve opened myself up to it. I’ve never claimed to be perfect.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely pay-the-bills day, Constant Reader, and I probably won’t return until tomorrow.
I picked up a copy of Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show: A Political History of New York 1987-1993, this week at the Latter Library. I imagine it’s going to be a rather painful read, and probably difficult at times, but I also feel that it’s important for me to read it. I am pleased that she, one of our community’s best writers and brightest thinkers, has written it. Sarah, whom I have known now for over twenty years plus, has written extensively about HIV/AIDS, both in her fiction and non-fiction; her non-fiction work is always thought-provoking, incredibly well thought out, and written beautifully. Her fiction is always fascinating; she always tackles enormous and important themes in her work–and often plays with form and style, in innovative and creative ways that would never occur to me, let alone attempt (Empathy is one of the most creative novels I’ve ever read; she reminds me of Faulkner in her willingness to experiment with styles and narrative form). She’s always incredibly fun to talk to–I have greatly enjoyed every conversation we’ve had; she is fiercely intelligent and yet has the remarkable ability to not make you feel stupid, or incapable of understanding what she is saying. (As someone whose intellect has always been somewhat less than, or been made to feel less than, I’ve always appreciated her speaking to me as an equal and peer; even though I am inevitably humbled and awed by how her mind works.)
Lately, I have found myself worrying that the truth and actual history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and the societal neglect and systemic homophobia that made it so much worse than it could have, should have, been would be erased from history and forgotten. I am reminded of this every day at work, really; as I’ve aged in my job, the people I test and see regularly become younger and younger. At first, I was always a little taken aback by clients born in the 1980’s; now those people are nearing forty. As we move into the third decade of the twenty-first century, I am now starting to see people born after the turn of the century; 2000 babies are turning twenty-one this year, which is stunning to me. Those born in the 1990’s don’t remember a time when infection was a death sentence; and slowly but surely the horrors of the height of the plague seem as distant as the Spanish flu epidemic of the World War I era, or the bubonic plague in the Middle Ages.
This month was the fortieth anniversary of the New York Times article announcing the discovery of the first cases of what was soon to be called the “gay cancer”, eventually renamed GRID (gay-related immune deficiency) before it was finally labeled as HIV/AIDS (human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome)–this is a vast over-simplification of the history of the disease and its naming; you can find an excellent timeline for it here:
1981 was the year I turned twenty; it was also the year I moved to California, putting Kansas in my rearview mirror once and for all (I’ve never returned); and I can remember the feeling, the excitement, of moving to a more progressive state (or so I saw it at the time) from one that was deeply mired in conservative values and Christianity. I already knew I was a gay boy before we moved to Kansas when I was fourteen, but that short period of time spent there (short in the overall scheme of my life; at this point as I stare down sixty rapidly approaching on the road ahead, I spent about a twelfth of my life there) was warping. (Then again, what part of my life wasn’t warping?)
It’s also very weird to think HIV/AIDS has now shadowed two-thirds of my life.
I tend not to look back at the plague years before 1994 very much; it’s all a part of my “never look back” mentality. I made some great friends in college–the ones who didn’t give a shit when I finally came out to them; I relish and love those memories made with them during the 1980’s, but the shadow always falls over that part of my life too; I was, as I said on the San Francisco Public Library panel the other night, trying everything I could think of to make myself straight (or able to push my true self so deeply into the closet that it would never ever see daylight) and yet there was still the other part of my life my straight friends knew nothing about; the sneaking out at night to gay cruising areas where other closeted types like myself met up; the furtive visits to gay bars and hoping no one from my other life saw me coming or going or saw my car parked nearby; the trips to hospitals to visit the always held at arm’s length gay friends who tried so hard to help me be myself, even when they were dying alone and unvisited in their quarantined hospital beds. The specter of HIV hung over me at all times; the shame of what would happen if I got infected, and the certainty that my family and straight friends would turn away and leave me, too, to die alone and unmourned, getting what I deserved.
And even when I moved to Florida, getting away from Texas and California and trying to get my life and act together, trying to be who I was, to live openly and honestly for once on my life, the phantom was always there, just out of my line of sight: the death sentence we were all sentenced to by fate, by timing, and by the callous indifference of the mainstream American community.
By some strange twist of fate I survived the plague years, never got infected, never got the bad news I expected was my inevitability.
I merely served witness, and even then, I was never anywhere that saw the worst of the decimation: New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and even New Orleans; this small Southern city’s community was ravaged and decimated; that shadow was over this city too. I can remember coming to New Orleans every month after I discovered its magic, and seeing the evidence of the plague here in the disappearances of people from previous visits; a waiter at the Clover Grill, a bartender here or a bar back there–service people who made me feel welcomed, made me feel like a part of the family, helped convince me that my gut feeling New Orleans was the right place for me, helped me believe that gut instinct was correct. Now, years later, I don’t remember their names and maybe, if I try hard enough and come up with other memories, I can also summon up their faces but the names are gone–just like those I lost in the 1980’s, names I never recorded in my journals for fear someone might find and read them, experiences and joy and laughter gone forever because I was too afraid of leaving a record behind if and when the plague came for me.
Never look back was the theme of my life from 1994 on; a maxim or motto that should have been cross-stitched onto a sampler for me; the only words I ever thought about having tattooed on my body: NEVER LOOK BACK. There was only pain in the past, and I wanted to move beyond that pain, forget the scars, and try to live in the now and for the future–whatever it might hold, if I was even fated to have one.
I always thought, even as a child, that I was destined to die young. When I became aware of HIV/AIDS, I assumed that was the ticket to the hereafter I would eventually punch. And yet here I am, nearing sixty, and the last twenty-seven years of my life have held more joy than I ever dared to dream were possible for me, and the dreams I held wrapped so tightly to my chest, those dreams that got me through even the most difficult of times, eventually did come to pass, and came true for me.
Watching It’s a Sin earlier this year brought it all back to me; as I have mentioned to friends, it hit me much harder than any other HIV/AIDS film or series; primarily because in films like Longtime Companion and in the fiction that has come to be known as “witness” or “survivor” fiction inevitably the story began in the pre-HIV hedonism of the 1970’s before the change; and while the lives were always cut dramatically short, they were somewhat older. It’s a Sin was the first time I saw it all through the eyes of characters who were the same age I was when it all started; and while their experiences and what they went through was so different than my own, it was impossible not to watch and remember and think my God, we were all so young when it hit. Watching the show allowed me, for the first time, to grieve; I know at some point back then I simply went numb. I know where my aversion to funerals comes from; I’ve always known, really, just never faced up to it before.
I’ve never wanted to write about the plague years, never wanted to write about what I witnessed and what I saw, the unbearable sadness I lived with for so many years. Others had it so much worse than I did, and so I never really felt like it was my story to tell; there was always a sense, a feeling, a fear, that I would make it all about me when it wasn’t, and sometimes I do wonder–since watching the show–if the work I do at my day job is, in some ways, an atonement for still being alive when so many are not. Survivor’s guilt is very real, and something I think about on those days when the pendulum of my moods swings too far in the wrong direction, when despite my best efforts not to look back, I do. I also think I don’t ever want to write about that time because my memories are so untrustworthy; and I am not entirely certain that I can tell those stories without centering myself…because it’s not my story but theirs.
So, I am both looking forward to and dreading reading this book, but no matter what, I am very grateful that it exists and that the record of the times, the anger, and the way the community rose up to challenge authority and thus changed the world will not be lost to the passage of time.
There is still, to this date, no vaccine for HIV–and yet, one was developed in less than a year for COVID-19.
Queer and Loathing in America 