SIN BUG: AIDS, Poetry, and Queer Resilience in Philadelphia

for Penny Arcade

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Thirty thousand nurses and doctors just came out of retirement in the United States to help with the Coronavirus pandemic, which is extraordinary news! During the early years of AIDS, many of the doctors were compassionate and ethical, but my friends and I experienced a few hostile, homophobic doctors. Every nurse I met was amazing! If the nurses had discriminatory ideas about queers, they kept it to themselves and did everything in their power to help loved ones survive, or made them comfortable as they died. In Philadelphia, my friends and I dreamt together of statues honoring these tireless frontline workers.

While I was in the middle of writing this essay, reports from China told of the first cases of Coronavirus in the city of Wuhan. The US media focused mostly on the virus's negative effect on Wall Street. I kept looking for stories of how the sick people and their families were coping. When the virus landed in Europe, we finally got to hear accounts of human suffering and how people were navigating the tragedy.

President Trump calling the Coronavirus the "Chinese Virus" is stunning! The violence this president can conjure is immediate, as there is now a spike in attacks against Chinese Americans across the nation! Instead of working with China to learn from them about what we can do to help American's survive, our president chooses to scapegoat an entire race of people to divert attention away from his inability to govern properly.

In 1982 I was in high school when President Reagan's press secretary chose to tell a gay joke when asked about AIDS at a press conference. That is real, that certainly did happen, and so was the brutality that followed. President Reagan and his staff set the tone for years of sanctioned heterosexual violence, which still resonates today. Imagine if these horrible men had taken the virus seriously! They might have rescued millions of lives! People of color and gay men were not worth saving in their opinion, and for years, they did nothing!

That photograph of me in the title-banner is from the 1980s, and I remember the notebook I am reading from, filled with angry rants about Reagan and dying friends. We would not allow sex and love to recoil during the epidemic, we insisted on this, and if we had not chosen to do so, we would have collapsed under our nation's existential fist hovering above us. Here is one short poem of mine I read many times on stage as a teenager:

he wrote "I have AIDS 
and kissed this wall" 
X marked the spot 
I wrote "I'm not afraid" 
and kissed him back 
wherever he is

Many people have said that AIDS brought the LGBTQ community together, but I think it also showed the world the devotion we already had for one another and our struggle. The love was already in place, which made everything else work better at the worst time. There are so many beautiful departed friends who I would like to introduce you to, people I want to come back home so we can fall in love all over again!

Seven years ago, I first tried writing this essay. Seven years of almost writing it, but each time I was overwhelmed by the destruction of too many extraordinary people who I love and miss! It was late last year when I ran into an old straight "friend" who had abandoned me and all of our mutual queer friends in 1988. That night I went to bed annoyed from seeing them on the street after all these years. When I woke, I was able to see the finished essay in my imagination. I went to work immediately. Seven years to write it to release decades of grief. The game of survival is treacherous but worth every bit of effort; at least I think so most days. Lately, I have been writing small poems at night while we are on curfew, and the helicopters pass overhead. Here are two:

CORONA DAZE 9:
it was over half my life ago
since I told this many friends
I hope we all survive
we did not that time
but I say it again
I hope we
all survive
I hope we
all survive
 
CORONA DAZE 18:
if we are to dream anything
during this plague
let us please                         
consider
the things
we do not want
to return to normal

Seven years ago, I moved from Philadelphia but still come back in the winter to house-sit briefly for the poet Eleanor Wilner. Many thanks to Eleanor for providing the time and space to write this essay finally. My thanks to the Poetry Foundation for publishing it, and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore for the much-needed encouragement, as Matilda knows how painful it is to write about these years. Thanks also to my dear old friend Elizabeth Kirwin who I am currently with on lockdown in New Jersey until the virus finally subsides. Elizabeth and I weathered many storms together during the early years of AIDS—we are now 2nd Plague Sisters, and I cannot imagine life without her!

 

1

In 1984 my friend Mabel introduced me to a man looking for young guys to dance in jockstraps for a rich man's birthday. A penthouse party in Philadelphia's affluent Rittenhouse Square sounded like rent money to me. I insisted on dancing to Siouxsie and the Banshees and handed the DJ the vinyl of their latest album Hyaena. I asked him to play the second side, and men gathered to watch me dance to "Bring Me the Head of the Preacher Man." Whose party was this anyway? I was never sure which graying skull was in charge, moving my entire body to the haunted sounds of a terrifying world. AIDS had turned my last two years of high school into a combat zone. I grew up in a factory town in rural Pennsylvania, where they enjoyed their daily, petty torments. Some call it homophobia, I call it heterosexual violence. I won the war, enduring fists and promises of Satan's quarantine in Hell for faggots with AIDS. The problematic weapon to master was concealing pain, but I was good for a cheese-ball insult, "Do you know the difference between being a big dick and having one?" I cannot remember the name of the guy who said his mother told him Jesus has no room in Heaven for deviants like me. But I do recall telling him, "When I write my memoir, you will be the asshole whose name I forgot who was talking about his ignorant Momma confusing Jesus for a Nazi sympathizer." Here I was, dancing for strangers in Philadelphia, wondering what war I had actually won. Some days my fear of this disease suspended itself above my every desire until it filled me with inertia.  

A handsome young man was weaving through the men while I was dancing. He stopped to watch me. I held his gaze, and my dance was suddenly just for him. One of my rules for survival was to only sleep with guys my age, thinking that would keep me safe. He was a hustler named Adam. After we had sex at his place, he commented on how good we were together. "You should work with me tomorrow night; there's this rich guy in Rittenhouse Square who will pay to watch us. He jerks off next to the bed. I can feed him our cum by hand, and I promise you never have to deal with him by yourself." I was touched by Adam's concern for me, which was the only thing that made the job offer appealing.

Was I a whore? "Yes, you are a whore, and tomorrow night won't be any different." But I didn't have sex for money tonight. "Men were jerking off to you while you danced." Did they? "You covered your jockstrap in red glitter, and everyone got turned on. I brought you back to my place, didn't I?" An older man had recently paid me to sit with my nose an inch from his nose to stare into his eyes while he took a shit. "Was he playing with himself?" No, just shitting, and he never touched me. After he finished, I kissed his scaly head, smooch-smooch-smooch, walked through his living room of antiques, and Greta Garbo posters singing Prince's "Little Red Corvette," his money now my money, onto pizza and quaaludes, liquor and weed. I'm a capitalist. "What do you think we whores are if we're not capitalists?" Actually, I'm a socialist. "We whores could use a good union rep."

2

When I was housesitting in upstate New York a year ago, many people I met had Lyme disease, and they were a little too cavalier about it for my comfort. "Hey, don't worry," one man said, "If the bull's-eye shaped sore appears on your body after a tick bite, the doctor will give you the antibiotic shot, it's not a big deal." Not a big deal? My first night in the house, I dreamt of lovers and friends from the 80s dying of AIDS. My dreams made an unwelcome morning as I looked out the window at the beautiful Catskill mountains. Still, I was a prisoner only walking on cement, never touching the grass, never entering the forest, and cringed when I saw people power-walking through gardens and tree-lined hiking paths. The internet was more than happy to fuel my paranoia with facts about ticks going without food for over a year; someone kept saying "540 days," and how they drop on us from trees when they smell our carbon dioxide. I thought, can I wear a mask to prevent them from smelling my exhale? If the disease goes untreated, it can destroy your heart and joints, and it can cause excruciating headaches and partial paralysis of facial muscles. Decades earlier, I was obsessed with reading every detail of symptoms indicating how I might be HIV positive. The effort of paranoia is overwrought, exhausting, and any peace we find is hard-fought.

As a teenager in 1984, I took off to Philadelphia to be a poet and to live openly in the queer neighborhood. It was like arriving in the middle of a family tragedy, everyone talking about AIDS like a serial killer targeting our community. And who was next, who would be the next victim? My new friend Jim took me to a party for a sick friend, and he whispered, "I hope it's not his last." Jim taught elementary school and loved art. He had a plaque made to mark the building where 19th-century artist Thomas Eakins had his studio. It said from 1884 to 1900 Eakins painted many of his most famous pictures there. At the bottom, it read, "This tablet placed here by an admirer, June 15, 1966." I told Jim that he hung the plaque the year I was born, which made him squeeze my hand. I knew that he wanted his friends on the street to think we were fucking, but I didn't mind. He loved to teach me things. "Eakins was fired from his job at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts for being queer. It's a hundred years since he first moved into this studio space, and we are still getting fired." Jim was paranoid he would lose his job, "The other history teachers where I work are straight men, and they only tell the kids about war, never about women's lives, never about growing food, caring for children, healing the sick. If I lose my job, history will be nothing more than a bloodbath." At the party, it moved me to witness Jim's friend, surrounded by his loved ones. He was frail, and I remember thinking it probably took him great pains to dress in his best clothes. People kept arriving, singing with him, hugging him. In a few years, nearly everyone at the party would be dead. Soon after Jim's HIV positive diagnosis, he killed himself. It will always make me sad when I wonder if he did it to keep his family and students from knowing. How much affection do we shun to save face? How do we make heterosexuals less oblivious to their numerous forms of violence against queers?

3

My friend Alexandra Grilikhes was a fantastic poet who developed chronic fatigue syndrome but cured it with the macrobiotic diet. When I first met her, she was eating cheeseburgers with my friend Rex. I noticed they had both taken the pickles off their burgers, Rex laughed and said they were bonding over their hatred of all things healthy and green. A year later, he would test HIV positive, and I made him a macrobiotic meal he thanked me for, but hardly touched. I failed to convince him to change his diet as I would with many other sick friends, but on the day I met Alexandra with Rex, her angry girlfriend appeared with a large button that read, "SUPPORT MENTAL HEALTH OR I WILL KILL YOU!" She insisted Alexandra come home, making our first meeting short. In a few years, Alexandra would be a macrobiotic mentor, have a nicer girlfriend, and we would start a newsletter for natural healing practitioners called Green Fire.

Every lesbian I knew was handing me condoms, which I always used every time I had sex, but there was still no doubt in my mind I would be dead before 1990. For my birthday, Alexandra bought me a consultation with Michio Kushi, the rock star of macrobiotics. I first met him a year earlier when she and I took a train to Boston to hear him give a series of talks on the philosophy of the diet. On the train, she told me, "I know how angry you get when people say stupid things about our queer community, but promise me we will both keep quiet and get the information we need to come back home and help our friends?" Sure enough, at one point during his talk, he said, "The homosexual needs up to a dozen sexual partners a day." I wrote on my notebook in all caps for her to see, "FUCK HIM!" I get angry at straight men who are too afraid of themselves to have a conversation with us. It is easier for them to tell us who we are rather than ask us. During lunch, I walked up to him surrounded by his protégés, and said, "Sweetie, I would love to have sex with twelve men a day, but that sounds exhausting! I could do an orgy, but one at a time, all day long? You flatter me, Darling!" Alexandra was furious that I broke my promise to keep my mouth shut. I couldn't help it!

Since his talk, I had obsessed over his homophobic remarks, but when he came into the room to give me my consultation, he was very kind. I remember my nervousness when he was studying me for a diagnosis. He was a wise man, and I was confident he was going to tell me I would be dead in a year. He praised me instead, said he could see that I was working hard, and he was right, I had been fully macrobiotic for over a year and feeling fabulous. I had never felt better in my life. He recommended a broth from carrots and other vegetables to help me with my sweet tooth. When I told him that I made vegan cheese by coating a block of tofu in miso paste and hanging it in cloth for a month, he smiled and said, "One day, your wife will make these things for you." I looked him in the eye and said, "I'm queer, Mr. Kushi!" His smile widened, and he said gently, "After a few years of steady macrobiotic practice, you will begin to have new feelings for women. You will not feel so alienated from your nature as you are now. Keep up the good work, and one day you too can achieve balance."

Alexandra was angry at him for saying this to me. She said he had never talked like that to her, but she could tell he thought she needed a husband. We vowed to stay queer, but also to remain macrobiotic despite the homophobia, and to help as many sick friends as we could. By the way, I was macrobiotic from 1988 to 1998, some of the queerest years of my life, and the less I felt myself to be a man or a woman, the more balanced I became.

4

HIV Negative my test results said, and for the first time in years, I was able to see that I actually had a future. It was 1990 after a new law compelled doctors to stop sharing their patients' HIV results with family and employers. I met HIV positive white-collar workers who became homeless after vigilante doctors shared their test results with their bosses. Adam and I got tested together, and he was holding my hand while being told the news. Before going into the room, a nurse asked, "Are you together?" and he put his arm around my shoulder and said, "You bet we are!" That felt beautiful. I have tried to remember how long it took for the results to come back, but I know it was more than a week, and it was the tensest, most neurotic week of my life. Wait for just a second, wait, let me catch up, I'm HIV NEGATIVE!? It was as if I had sprinted across a minefield for six years without being blown up. Before that day, I was secretly planning my funeral and making notes about where lovers and friends should scatter my ashes. I had three locations: one was the Liberty Bell, just throw me at the bell, and scream my name! Each location included handing out safe sex brochures. My friend Rex told me once, "Honey, always remember that every gay man in the 1980s was secretly planning his funeral."

Then Adam was told, "Your test results are also HIV negative; I'm happy for you both." It was the most unexpected news of my life. I kept pushing tears off my cheeks and laughing after we were on the street. Adam mumbled something I asked him to repeat. "I said, I was wishing we were both going to be HIV positive." The good news had shocked me, but this sentence out of his mouth, well, to be honest, no one has said anything since that upsets me more. Are you high, I asked? But I knew he was not because he never got high without me. "No, I was just hoping to get it over with, you know, together." I demanded that he walk with me to Essene, the macrobiotic cafe and grocer. I remember that meal well because it was such a confusing day, exhilarated about our test results, but also angry and bewildered with Adam. It was a basic macrobiotic platter, and precisely the way they always served it, but it never tasted better than it did that day, tasting my life with an unexpected future in it! Miso soup with wakame, daikon radish, shitake, cabbage, and burdock root, a side of brown rice topped with gomasio, some adzuki beans cooked with kabocha pumpkin and kombu, steamed carrots, cauliflower, kale, collards, and a side of arame made with pickled carrots and freshly toasted black sesame seeds. I will always remember that first meal after the results. Everything suddenly tasted so new. "Suppose Michio Kushi is right, and this shitty food does make us straight?" Shut up, I said, you really don't like it? "I hate seaweed. It always tastes like it was cooked in toilet water. I would rather have a cheesesteak." Many of my friends had barbaric taste buds. I hated even the smell of cheesesteaks. On hot summer days, the charred flesh of cheesesteak shops in Philadelphia made entire neighborhoods smell like crematoriums.

Later that evening, Adam told me he was thinking about deliberately contracting HIV. The term was Bug Chaser. Every older queer I knew at the time told me never to discuss the Bug Chasers because straight people will never understand. "I just—I just don't want to be here anymore," he said, "We planned on taking a cruise and jumping into the ocean together!" Yeah, of course, but that was if we were HIV positive, but we're not, and we're young. So many of our friends are doing everything they can to stay alive! What the fuck is wrong with you!? Am I going to have to tie you up until you come to your senses?

5

Adam came back to my apartment, and we had sex without condoms for the first time to celebrate our test results. I did not own a telephone, but while he was sleeping, I used the payphone outside Mama Angelina's Pizzeria to call our friend Peppy. She had been asleep, but when I told her what Adam wanted to do, she said to bring him over and to make sure he did not run away. I woke him and told him we were taking a pizza over to Peppy's. Yes, I said, we are both going, so put on some pants before this pizza gets cold!

Peppy was our New Age Queen, a transwoman who was like a mother to many of us younger queers. She taught me to read tarot when I was 19. We would be naked in bed and study one card at a time, which may sound kinky, but it was just naked tarot. At that age, I did not even ask why—I just took my clothes off and brought my cards to her bed. She had a giant Eye of Horus tattoo on her back, statues of goddesses, many candles, lots of books on herbs and spells, and an eagle feather from her parents who were both Native American. She explained how white people brought shame to America, how trans and queer people had once been an essential part of Native life and culture. Besides teaching me to read tarot, she also taught me the power of crystals. She told me once, "Crystals breathe one breath a century, fifty years inhaling, fifty years exhaling. If we are patient, we can hear whether they are on the inhale stage or the exhale." We would sit naked with our backs pressed together, both of us holding her giant crystals by our stomachs, breathing the energy in through the naval. After we exhaled, she would yell, "SEND IT TO OUR FRIENDS! SEND IT TO OUR LOVERS!" The first time we did this, I had a dream that her Eye of Horus tattoo was pressed against my back until it copied itself onto me. It burned like a branding iron, and woke me delirious with joy!

Adam did not have a lot of respect for older people, but he loved Peppy. She asked him to explain why he would want AIDS? He said he was tired. She said, "You are a strong young man. How can you be tired?" She got on her knees and took his hands in hers. He burst into tears, repeating he was tired over and over. We both held him while he trembled and sobbed. It was one of the worst experiences of my life because I could feel his pain, but I also had a feeling there was nothing we could do to stop him. Peppy made one of her special teas, which we drank while holding onto each other. I remember him looking me in the eye and thanking me through tears. The intervention was nothing but love, and he understood that.

The next day my friend Nail and her girlfriend Prank said they saw Adam go into the gay bathhouse near their apartment. When I told them what he wanted to do, Nail went inside with me to find him. The man at the counter asked if she really wanted to go in, and she said, "Honey, I have served gin and tonics at orgies!" When we found him, he was naked, bent over with cum dripping from his ass. Oh my god, Adam, my dear friend! What upset me the most was his smile while I wiped the cum off his ass with a towel.

6

The first time I met my friend Nail, she was working as a dominatrix. She was with a gay guy client who got off on having sex with bisexual men while Nail screamed at him. It was so specific that it gave me pause to marvel at his courage to ask for it. How many people live their entire lives craving something they only have to ask for to receive their happiness? Both men were naked, and the gay guy was on a round pillow curled up by a crackling fireplace like he was the family dog. The bi-man was hot, standing there with his big smile and huge erect cock, hands on his hips. The first words I heard out of her mouth were, "GET OVER HERE RIGHT NOW AND SUCK MY PUSSY JUICE OFF HIS COCK!" The gay guy walked on all fours, whimpering, "Not pussy juice!" She stood up, "What did you SAY!?" He coward and sniveled, "Sorry, sorry," before shoving the cock in his mouth. I thought, I have to know this woman!

My boyfriend at the time was a coke dealer named Angel. Nail made the gay guy run on all fours to retrieve the baggie of coke with his teeth, and she said, "Who is a good boy?" He barked, and she pointed for him to go back to his bed by the fire. Angel made most people nervous with his rugged, chiseled beauty and angry sneer. He was a sweetheart; his hostility was part of his business plan to keep anyone from questioning his inflated prices. The poet Gil Ott had a fatherly talk with me one night when Angel was selling coke at a poetry reading. "He carries a gun!" Yeah, but so does everyone where I grew up. "He's selling drugs here!" It's a simple case of supply and demand, Gil! Talk to the poets, tell them to stop doing coke, don't blame my man! Gil meant well, of course, but I was an angry kid, sick of always being told to worry what the straight people will think. Fuck them! was my daily mantra.

Nail was happy to see Angel and asked who the cream puff was on his arm. "This is CA," he said. We got to talking about tarot cards when I saw her deck on a table. The next day she and I went to a place called Garland of Letters on South Street to have our past lives read. It was not the last time I would have my past lives told to me, invariably hoping I was happy, but I never was, in fact, it always made me grateful for the life I have now. That day with Nail, the woman told me I had lived in a village in Europe during the Black Plague. She said a friend was secretly marking the doors of the sick in the middle of the night.

A few years later, Nail helped me pull Adam from the bathhouse after a dozen strangers had fucked him. After his HIV positive diagnosis, he moved into a room on Rodman Street where someone was writing SIN BUG on a few of the doors. Nail reminded me of the past life reading where someone I knew was marking the doors of the infected during the Black Plague. Only the homes with HIV positive men were marked. I kept nail polish remover in Adam's medicine cabinet to wipe off the thick black magic marker on his door. In a week, it was back. It made me so angry that I slept in a chair by the window a couple of nights to try to catch the vandal, but I never did. One morning Nail's girlfriend Prank helped me clean SIN BUG off every door on the street that had it. After that, it never happened again to our relief. In the past life reading, I knew the person marking the doors. To this day I wonder if I knew who wrote SIN BUG on doors like a fascist getting everyone ready for concentration camps and other preludes to genocide.

7

There was a pagan spiritual gathering in New York state called Starwood. I went to study with the herbalist White Wolf after hearing about several HIV positive men thriving on an herbal formula she was making called ESSIAC. It consisted of four different ingredients: burdock root, slippery elm bark, turkey rhubarb, and sheep sorrel. She explained the importance of cooking the herbs with the right measurements, but also which should be powdered and which should only be cut into chunks. When I told her that I was going to make large quantities for many friends in Philadelphia living with HIV, she gave me Dr. Gary Glum's phone number. He was the person who shared the recipe with her after he brought it back from Canada, where it had been used for many years to cure cancer.

White Wolf began the workshop by telling the history of ESSIAC, which was a Native American recipe from the Ojibwa tribe. A nurse named Rene Caisse received the recipe from an Ojibwa woman who had cured herself of breast cancer by drinking the ESSIAC tea. Caisse spelled her name backward to give the tonic a name as she began working with Canadian doctors to cure hundreds of patients diagnosed with cancer.

Back in Philadelphia, my friend Aisha Bey and I had a meeting with her friends Joel and Tish to convince them to help us finance the operation costs, which for us, were significant. They were very generous and gave us what we needed to purchase the herbs, the amber glass bottles, the giant stainless steel cooking pot, and the double strainer. We had trouble grinding the sorrel to the proper consistency, and Aisha reminded me that White Wolf had given me Dr. Glum's telephone number. He had already used ESSIAC with AIDS patients in Los Angeles to great effect. I asked him about it over the phone, and he said several of the men were now testing negative. This news made me burst into tears. I apologized, and I remember him saying we need to shed more tears, which made me do just that. When I blew my nose and composed myself, I asked why ESSIAC was not being used nationwide. He told me AIDS was the new moneymaker, and CEOs of pharmaceutical companies did not want people spending money at the health food store to cure themselves. He warned me to be quiet about making ESSIAC, never to advertise, and never speak to newspapers about it. He believed AIDS was a manmade virus designed to target people of color and queers.

Dr. Glum's theory that AIDS was a form of population control haunted me but focusing on helping friends kept me from falling apart with grief most days. The trauma of those years still hums in my blood, meat, and bones. There were plenty of joyous moments, though, like taking my friend Rex to an Essex Hemphill poetry reading where he made Essex laugh by saying he pleaded with doctors to fix his knees so he could continue his life as a whore. Rex died a year later, Essex the year after that. I knew so many people who died of AIDS—every time I shake a new friend's hand, I remind myself we will all vanish, and there is nothing we can do about it. The more terrifying AIDS became, the harder my friends and I danced at the clubs. Through the lens of our crisis, we were investing in the natural rhythm of our lives. We danced for hours; our emotional bodies kept close to the fragility of our flesh. As long as the music is playing no one is allowed to die.

8

I decided to write this essay after recently running into a former friend and her daughter. In 1988 I had confided in her that I was convinced I was HIV positive and terrified. Not only did she never speak to me again, she told all of our other mutual straight friends who also stopped talking to me. There she was on the street, overacting her surprise at seeing me. Yeah, I'm still alive, I said, then turned to her daughter: your mother deserted me in 1988 because she thought I had AIDS. It turned out I was HIV negative, but if I had been HIV positive, I would have needed my real friends more than ever. If you love your friends, love them like family, and never do what your mother did to me. "Hey, what's wrong with you telling her those things!" I calmly looked her in the eye and told her it made me happy to run into her, and I meant it! She was absent at all of the funerals of every queer man we knew in common who died of AIDS. You are goddamned right I was keeping track! For some straight people queers are cool to have around to inject a little sparkle and wit into a party, but the moment they think I am the entertainment, I change the subject to anti-queer legislation and my dead friends and lovers. I will never surrender to the role they expect me to perform!

There were strangers I saw at multiple funerals in the 80s and 90s, which made me want to say hello, which I often did. Bonding over death? The living should talk to one another as soon as possible, something I still believe today. The urgency of AIDS made love more palpable and unaffected. AIDS made love easier? After Adam's death, a straight friend was upset and confused about the Bug Chasers, and he shook his head in disbelief. I explained how Adam was raised in an orthodox religious household, and when he was 16, they found out he was queer and threw him out. He became a prostitute because there were not a lot of options for a queer teenager living on the streets. He never said a mean word about his family, and often lovingly quoted his father. Imagine yearning for your family and never being allowed to see them again. Then you create your own family, and they all start to die one after the other. Almost no one wants to hear this, but I say heterosexual violence created the Bug Chasers.

It is 2020, and it is still illegal in the USA to be LGBTQ in 30 of the 50 states, meaning we can be evicted or fired by born again Christian bosses and landlords. This state-sanctioned violence leads to murder on a regular basis, especially for transwomen of color. Misanthropic people are not amusing to me; they tend to be people with deeply wounded, unexamined lives who lash out at everything around them. I am not a misanthrope; I love this world, and my anger is on behalf of my love. When I went into the hospital in the 1980s to visit friends, I was very protective. I can still see Derrick in tears while telling me the doctor had sneered and accused him of partying too hard. What kind of monster says that to a youngster, or anyone for that matter? I found the doctor in the hallway and screamed at him for abusing my sick friend, told him to work at McDonald's. He threatened to call security, and I threatened to bring a horde of friends to protest outside the hospital until he was fired. Even when confronting him about his abhorrent, unethical behavior, he still thought he could do and say whatever he wanted with no consequences. But when I returned his threat with a possible protest, he decided to quietly walk away with all the nurses and families of patients watching. AIDS often made me find my strength for the love of my friends.

9

One day my new friend Earth told me ACT UP was doing a demonstration at a politician's office, and they needed as many bodies as possible. He came back to my apartment after the demo and immediately shed his clothes. He noticed I was acting oddly and asked what was up. I told him how electrified the time chanting on the street was, then burst into tears. He was kind and attentive, and his tenderness broke my dam. I was so busy being strong for others that I had neglected my own needs. Sex that night was some of the best we had in our relationship. Earth is one of the many beautiful people who made me a better poet. He was a few years older than I was and taught me to integrate my spirituality, poetry, and activism. We planted rouge gardens of vegetables and flowers in Philadelphia's abandoned lots and along the banks of the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. We would have sex, then fertilize the seeds with our cum. 

I wish Adam had been on the street protesting with us; he might have changed his mind. I also wish he had waited to see when AIDS was no longer a death sentence and more treatable, as it is for many HIV positive people around the world today. I miss him so much, and Peppy, Tommy, Essex, Richard, Jazz, Dave, Milton, Derrick, the list would go on, too long and tragic to say aloud. And Earth, oh my dear Earth! We both came through that time alive and actively trying to stay healthy when he was murdered in Tennessee. I thought the worst days of our lives were behind us, then that happened, and it fucked up the direction of my life for years. This generous, brilliant, loving man had been hogtied, tortured, raped, and burned alive. The police refused to look for his rapists and killers. Delinquent Films made a documentary about my life, and they interviewed one of the paramedics who alluded to the sexual assault on film. However, the police still insist he killed himself, which also means he raped himself? Fuck them!

At a potluck dinner in the early 90s with Earth, there were a few straight people who asked what they could do to help. I jumped in and told them to call their families, bosses, landlords, friends, everyone they knew, and come out of the closet as queer. They were shocked and said, "But we're not queer!" Earth said, "Look, you asked what you can do, and you have been told!" If every straight ally came out as queer, we could put an end to the violence in our community overnight. Does it mean I want to be straight? No, it means I want straight people to be queer, and queer is political, queer is against racism, misogyny, and transphobia. Queer is also anti-war, and if you are not, queer will show up to your party and fuck things up! Queer wants this world beautiful, and it is not truly beautiful unless everyone has the room we all need to make it so!

Earth was kind to my friend Adam and never judged him for being a Bug Chaser. One day I thanked him for helping Adam find a massage therapist, and someone said, "Why should a Bug Chaser receive our help?" Earth yelled at them to shut their mouth and that it was none of their business how the disease was contracted. Adam made me promise never to tell his family he was a hustler who died of AIDS, not that they will bother to find me to ask, but I will always keep my promise. If you are reading this and wonder if he was your brother or son, don't call me, you missed your shot. In fact, if you call me and say you shunned your queer child, whether it was Adam or not, I will tell you to fuck yourself and hang up. There are people who will help you find redemption, but I never will.