Cracks in Everything / A Goodbye/ Know Your Rights/ World AIDS Day
Lately, my mind has repeatedly trailed back to our trip to Ireland 13 years ago, to see The Book of Kells, the seventh-century illuminated manuscript, with its message, “turn darkness into light.”
Its very construction embodied the adage. Tracing the story one can imagine the artists depicting the four New Testament Gospels, the monks and missionaries, who drafted page after page in from the 7th to the 9th centuries, by hand, re-copying the texts, book after book, page after page for centuries before Gutenberg.
I’m certainly sure Martin Luther King Jr. knew the story of the manuscript and the monks, who drafted the Gospels by hand, the struggle, preserving the story of their faith, in between Viking invasions. King understood, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that."
The poetry of the words seems to echo, age after epoch. Lightness into darkness, forced to contend with lightness, back into darkness, story after story, tumbling again and again, descending. ascending as the mutually reinforcing and opposing forces grapple with each other, vanquishing foes, love vs hate on Radio Raheem knuckle’s, blow after blow, kiss after kiss.
Over and over again Brendan makes his way through the dark forest, wandering, more and more lost as he walks, losing the light of day, stumbling into the domain of Crom Cruach, the pagan god of Irish mythology, overcoming him. I think about their devotion to their beliefs, despite the obstacles, those looking out for each other, for the words, for print, for people, for ideas to guide them, to help them aspire and make sense of the world.
Throughout the week, we had a similar story.
My friend Neil and I talked about Shabbat on Friday.
And the songs of Leonard Cohen, the prophetic, even theological bards, ever riffing on Christianity, loss, even the story of Jesus:
“And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him
He said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them”
“That was just to sell some records,” said Neil, with a twinkle in his eye.
"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in," said Cohen.
So we looked for cracks.
Students told stories about lost loves, trying to connect, to keep their friends around, to make sense of a messy world, seeming to paraphrase Erich Fromm and Bell Hooks. Look out for each other, we said over and over again.
Thinking about Love
Walking out of Judson, Baldwin’s words followed me through the afternoon:
“Love has never been a popular movement. And no one's ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people. Otherwise, of course, you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you've got to remember is that what you're looking at is also you. Everyone you're looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.”
A few moments:
Know Your Rights, City Tech, 285 Jay Street
Know your rights, know your power. Leave no one behind, we said at our campus workshop attended by faculty students and staff, preparing for the new administration and their plans to deport immigrants, to restrict civil rights for queers. 60% of this is about fear, Jackie told me to prepare. They can't deport everyone. But they can arrest and deport a lot of us. Even an accusation can be grounds for incarceration and deportation. Our opportunity is to look out for and get to know more of our neighbors.
Rise and Resist in Person Meeting.
All week, I saw my friends out.
Lights out, December cold, in person Rise and Resist meeting with Ray and Jay and Jamie, getting organized for a strange deja vu. I remember running into Gilbert Baker at an early Rise and Resist meeting eight years ago. He didn't last long after that. We gotta look out for each other. Not everyone gets out of this. We all know that. That was certainly the lesson Monday.
Monday, World AIDS Day
I found myself thinking of Tim and other lost friends, looking at an old picture of World AIDS Day in 2017, when AIDS activists helped beat the attacks on the Affordable Care Act. We'd just gotten back from DC when this picture was taken.
The 2024 demo was on Monday. I rode over to the AIDS Memorial to join the other activists on hand, from ACT UP and Housing Works.
Arriving at the demo, I greeted Valerie, who's been at it as long as I can remember. I recall meeting her with Keith Cylar in 1998, a few years before he died. Valerie was at the Housing Works reading the names of those who have passed to say it's not over till it's over for everyone. We all remember Keith, Elizabeth, Fred, and Bobby and all the other friends from the early years, Steven G., and the overlapping overdoses, deaths from HIV and Hep C, and covid. And here we are, on another World AIDS Day. Brandon and ACT UP were there. Housing Works was there. So were the ghosts, as well as the unfinished business. We pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living, for joy and justice, revenge and glory, for the future and the past.
Eric Sawyer and I talked about the moment we are in, the friends and demos long passed, the work still ahead. Eric had heavy eyes as he spoke with me:
"It again is World AIDS Day, a day to turn attention to the fight against AIDS and to remember those loved ones we have lost to the disease.
When we started ACT UP in 1987 we had no effective treatment and had buried many friends N loved ones.
And while today the treatments AIDS Activists fought to get developed and distributed now reach over 30 million people globally, at least 9 million people who need treatment - lack access.
In conflict situations like Gaza, the Ukraine, Sudan and countless other war zones, and in migrant camps housing millions - many lack treatment, prevention, testing, safety from violence or any healthcare or human rights protections- let alone safe housing, food security or clean water.
There are so many people in world who lack the basic necessities of life, housing, food, clean water, healthcare, human rights protections, safety, and access to a safe way to make a livable wage.
I am thankful to have the life I have and to have been privileged to have been in a position to help advance healthcare related to HIV/AIDS. I pray that people become more human, less selfish and find a way to make the world more just, more equitable and more loving than it currently is.
Let’s pray and work to make the world a better place for everyone, regardless of their race, their religion, their identity or who they love. "
Cleve Jones, another legend, recalls, "In 1980, San Francisco State Assembly Member Art Agnos, who would later become Mayor, hired me to work for Assembly Speaker Leo T. McCarthy. I was assigned to the Assembly Health Committee. With no background in public health I scrambled to educate myself with subscriptions to all available publications on health and medicine, including the Morbidity and Morality Weekly Report, published by the US Centers for Disease Control. It was there, in early June of 1981, that I read the first report of what we know now as HIV/AIDS. Four years later, almost everyone I knew was dead or dying or caring for someone who was dying. In San Francisco, over 20,000 people died before effective treatments were brought to market. Most were gay men and a majority of them lived and died in my neighborhood, the Castro. None of were prepared for a calamity of such magnitude but most of us stepped up and did what we could. We built systems of care, launched education campaigns, marched, got arrested, made quilt panels, lit candles, prayed and never stopped fighting.
In 1993 I got sick. A year later I got very sick and thought that I would soon die. But the expanded access programs to experimental treatments, that ACT UP and others had fought so hard to win, saved my life. I was forty years old.
Now I am 70. Most of my old friends, comrades and lovers died years ago. Some are remembered by the world, most are not. I remember them all.
The young people in my life are a joy to me. They of course have no memory of that time and I am grateful that they have not yet had to experience such a vast scale of loss.
I am frightened by the future. With the second pandemic of my lifetime - Covid - we saw so many of the same mistakes play out, it seemed to me so astonishing that lessons learned at such great cost could be so quickly forgotten.
The young people who enrich my life know that I am concerned about them and some are willing to speak with me about the challenges we face. Most of the young gay, bi and trans people I know protect themselves from HIV with PrEP. If the Affordable Care Act is gutted by the new regime, PrEP will no longer be affordable for most.
Long-term survivors like myself live healthy and productive lives thanks to medications that the Affordable Care Act requires insurers to cover. If the old rules that denied coverage for pre-existing conditions return I cannot begin to imagine the consequences.
Cuts to the Ryan White programs and other sources of funding of HIV prevention, treatment and care are likely, indeed almost certain as the new regime takes control of all three branches of government. And funding for PEPFAR - the principle conduit for US funding of global HIV initiatives is also certainly threatened.
Some of the young people I care about are very smart and some can imagine what it would be like to live in a country where the government did not care if you lived or died.
AIDS is not over. The virus was never defeated, just gradually and incompletely held at bay. The moment we let down our guard, it will explode again. Please understand that with certainty.
Some young people might be able to imagine what that would be like, but we who are old remember.”
Sunday, Joe’s Pub.
"Walk all the way to the dream," sang Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping choir. It had been a full day dropping the teenager off, backpack in hand, on the Chinatown bus to Boston with the other college kids on their pilgrimage up to the best college town in the US. Listening to Ruby recall testing positive in 1992 and live to get old when so many did not. And lunch with Mom, biking to Virginia's, conversation with Lisa, back to Manhattan for the show, and back to Brooklyn.
Buy Nothing Day
"In Vienna there are shadows. The city is black and everything is done by rote. I want to be alone. I want to go to the Bohemian Forest," said Egon Schiele before he died. We found ourselves feeling the same way, looking at his show at the Neue Galerie.
Walking down 5th Ave we joined Yana and Silver for Buy Nothing Day. And walked past the protests, through the grey day in the Village afternoon. Al lit candles. And Ron shared gumbo. And Allie greeted us all.
Thanksgiving
We stayed home, inviting everyone for the meal and other adventures. Al and Mom and Irwin and Sophia came over and then Max and Cara and Jenn dropped by and we chatted for hours and the Cowboys won.
Had a dream about some lost keys. Old objects and tapes, stories, pieces of my life, disappearing, reappearing, back and forth in my mind, dreams and reality, overlapping, not sure which is which.
A photo came up from seven years prior, arrested in DC fighting the tax scam, gonna have to do that again.
And I'm not sure.
How can we be smarter and less reactive, I wonder to myself.
I read Hopscotch, the surrealist novel by Cortázar, tracing a secret history of past meetings with a society of writers, the games they play, the puzzles we try to solve.
“You live your life and in a corner of your soul there's a little drawer where you put things you might need another time,” says Cortázar in Hopscotch.
I think about the pieces of my life, the activists, high school friends, here and there, people I no longer know, and others I continue to count on.
Recalling walking Mexico City with Baby C, the streets the Visceral Realists of Roberto Bolaño’s ficciones took place, secret societies of bohemian intellectuals, the "Serpent Club," from Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch, planning a trip to China or Columbia or Argentina.
Irwin tells stories about friends, his buddy Lenny who he’s been friends with for 73 years, who he chats with everyday, who said he would remember if they’d ever had sex.
Mom talked about the trip to the Middle East.
Al and Irwin swap tales about their families coming to New York from the old world in 1918.
Sophia talked about her family and hiking and getting away from it all.
And Cara and Max and Jenn talked about family and football and we enjoyed a little peace and sleep.
And I tried to figure out the plot of Hopskotch, thinking about Thanksgiving mornings for years and years of it, the people passing through our lives, part of our city, of our mind.
Happy to ride up and meet you up town any time.
A Goodbye
Onward through December, through classes on love and loss, struggles with it all, walking through a quiet Sunday, the wind howling, thinking about Bob who was here, now he’s gone, meeting Irwin after Judson, off to Village Works, to say hi to Brennan at Tompkins, before saying goodbye to Karma, a friend who was in my life for decades, who I read Macbeth with, ran track, studied the religions of man, celebrated New Years and bid adieu to. Sad to realize I won't run into her again, no more greetings at a random party, no more gossip, not in this life.
Starting the zoom service in Dallas, Doug said goodbye, recalling a two and a half day road trip from Dallas back to New York for college in 1991.
And then Jenn read a poem, next door, by Ullie Kaye:
“And when you miss me most, remember that I
have only built a house next door .
A single breath away .
We can whisper through the walls
and send love notes in the shape of stars and sunsets
and the way that the light glistens on the water just so .
And although things are hard for you now
I am not far away .
I am absent only in flesh but my spirit is dancing with the heavenly ones .
We will reach each other once again, I promise .
Just not yet .
Find laughter again, okay ?
Find music and purpose and ways to feel alive.
We are only separated by a glimmer of time.
An interval .
Take comfort .
I have only built a house next door ....”
A college friend recalled a trip to the emergency room with her.
Should we pray she asked.
Karma agreed, the two needed to pray.
And years before, an adventure in Berlin:
“We got separated at Berghain, making new best friends, meeting in our rental at 10 AM the next morning…”
I used to go to Berghain, the most notorious club, all the time in Berlin. I can imagine running into her in the bathroom line and sharing a hug and laugh.
In a eulogy for the ages, Pastor Michael Walker preached, tracing quote after quote, reflecting on our lives and times.
“Oftentimes we get so caught up in human doingness, then we totally lose our human beingness..” the pastor preached, paraphrasing Georg Lukács.
He followed with a 1934 poem The Rock by T.S.Elliot:
"All our knowlege brings us near to our ignorance, All our ignorance brings us nearer to death, But nearness to death, no nearer to God. Where the the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
AI Karma lived, the pastor told us, African Intelligence.
And read from “When Death Comes” by Mary Oliver
“I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
…
When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.”
These are times, we need some Faust, not Mephistopheles. We need some Karma.
We need the best of us to rise up, cause these are catastrophic times.
We must maintain a candle flickering against a dark barbarism… he preached, paraphrasing Shakespeare, from Macbeth, the play we read together all those years ago.
Don’t let catastrophe have the last word, Walker preached.
It doesn't mean a thing if it dont have that swing.
Thinking of your old friend.
Karma who consoled me when Grandad died.
Karma who sang in between classes.
Gorgeous Karma.
“only separated by a glimmer of time…”
Well done.
Godspeed.
Rest in peace Karma.
