It's not over.

So, there I was at the AIDS Walk this morning, waiting with Desert Voices (our local GLBTSQIA.... chorus) to sing at the end of the quilt opening ceremony so that I could get back to work and not miss too much. I was watching the pinwheel unfolding-and-lofting maneuver that’s become standard practice for opening quilt panels, and I thought to myself that using only one twelve by twelve panel just doesn’t get the same loft as when you have four of those panels tied together into a twenty-four foot square.

I recalled how I learned to handle quilt panels in preparation for going with the Pittsburgh contingent to a March on Washington DC where they opened the entire Names Project quilt on the National Mall. I thought about the fellow (whose name escapes me right now) from the national team that came and taught us the procedure, calling it his tribute to the June Taylor Dancers. Each panel was prepared in a lotus pattern fold and laid out on the field. Four people unfolded each corner in pairs, starting with opposite sides and taking turns, working out until the panel was opened. Then each person grabbed a corner and together they lofted the entire four panel square into the air, rotating it an eighth of a turn into its place as it caught the air and then settled back to earth.

I even caught myself thinking this morning about how these kids (many school kids from a local middle school) just didn’t have the style that we had, and that’s when it hit me: It was almost exactly twenty years ago (September-October of 1989) when we learned how and went to Washington. None of these kids were alive then. Most of the college kids around us weren’t alive then, either, or they were babes in arms.

Twenty years.

It’s been over twenty-five years since I first heard of GRID, or Gay Related Immuno-Deficiency. It’s been about that long since I first heard of HTLV-III, the virus that after further research was better isolation was renamed HIV.

Ronald Reagan, the great do-nothing and say-nothing president, has been out of office now for almost twenty-one years. Act Up and Queer Nation have been effectively over for almost as long. (I know, Act Up is still around and still fighting for HIV-AIDS awareness and treatment, but its last great civil disobedience action was during Bush I. Queer Nation died almost as fast as it was born, suffocating under the weight of nearly impossible to create and totally impossible to sustain consensus governing.)

It’s been almost exactly twenty years since Guy died, in the summer of 1989. He died just short of his twenty-ninth birthday. He said that the worst part of dying so young was that his mid-life crisis was adolescence. It’s in his memory that I won’t wear a red ribbon. He said “Don’t wear a ribbon, anyone can wear a ribbon. Get out there and do what needs to be done and let other people worry about silly things like ribbons.”

Guy was one of my first friends (and the first person that I could conceivably refer to as a boyfriend, even if it was of extremely short duration) who died. Unfortunately he wasn’t the last.

Since then, things have gotten incrementally better. I’m not burying friends the same way anymore, but still hardly a month goes by when I don’t hear about someone I’ve lost touch with who’s now gone. The new drug therapies are working and many are living longer, healthier lives, but acquaintances, friends, and loved ones are still getting infected at alarming rates. The nation has seemingly forgotten about it, but it’s still affecting me locally in a major way.

Twenty years. It’s still not over.

It’s time to stop worrying about the ribbons and get back to work.

Okay, I admit it, I have been everything I hate about lazy bloggers. I signed up for an account a year ago last spring, started off strongly with several good posts, tapered a little, did the obligatory “Can’t let a month go by without posting” post, and then went six months without posting anything. Now it’s been another four months with nothing posted. Lame.

So, what do I do about it?

I could write a catch up post about what I’ve been doing since the last post (end of the school year, final DV concert at Saguaro, summer schedule at Saguaro and Emanu-El, quick solo road trip through Albuquerque, Flagstaff, and Sedona to Mesa for the National Stereoscopic Association convention, planning for next year, Temple High Holy Days choir starting up again, DV starting up again, and the usual end-of-summer ennui), or I could simply ignore the enormous time gap and go on, or I could write an annoying, indecisive, and wishy-washy post about not knowing what to do about the time lapse.

Then again, I could just delete the whole damned thing and start over without the self-referential self consciousness of it all.

Then again, the trip was fun.

Happy mother's day

5-6 May 2009

Around midnight

So I just finished listening to the This American Life podcast from last weekend (broadcast Saturday/Sunday 2-3 May 2009, a radio cut of the live show broadcast to movie theaters in April 2009) and in it Dan Savage told of losing his mother to pulmonary fibrosis in a hospital in Tucson and the Catholic sediment that stirred up in his psyche. I don’t know for certain, but it sounded like the same place where my mother died here in Tucson in 2003. (It’s a great show. You can look it up and listen to it at the This American Life website.)

Dan’s mom died after a five year battle with a chronic lung disease that essentially caused her lungs to come apart. On vacation visiting family here in Tucson she took a turn for the worse and was hospitalized. Everyone was expecting her to rally and be well enough to go home to Chicago in a week or so, but instead her lungs gave out and she died rather suddenly one afternoon.

My mother died during an operation to attempt to undo some of the damage from a botched medical procedure. She had a colonoscopy just before Halloween of 2003, but somehow her transverse colon was punctured during the procedure. Exactly how it happened, I don’t know. I have never gotten a clear explanation of how it happened and why it wasn’t negligence, but I never pursued it out of respect for Dad’s feelings. Her transverse colon went necrotic (a section of it simply died) and ruptured, flooding her abdomen with fecal matter. Sepsis set in and she spent a very awful last couple of weeks, finally dying on the Friday just before Thanksgiving.

They had taken her into surgery to attempt to clean up some of the mess, but she hit the anesthetic and just kept going, dying on the table before they could even open her up. A full autopsy was not performed, and her body was cremated a few days later.

Dan’s story brought much of this back up for me. He told of coming out to his mother, and her roaring out of the closet as a PFLAG mother after a short period of trouble with it. She had gone to her priest and bared her soul to him, crying about what she could have done to make him turn out that way, how god could have done this, and rather than cluck his tongue about the horrible-ness of it all, the father laid his hand on her knee and came out to her.

Shortly after that, Dan’s mother issued a statement to the family, saying that if anyone had a problem with Daniel’s orientation, they had an even bigger problem with her.

That sounds so much like my mother. My mom actually did much the same thing. After crying for a bit she turned around and laid down the law to the entire family: He’s your son, your brother, and you will respect him and love him, regardless. I didn’t even know that she had done that at the time. It was only recently that Dad told me about it.

I found out from my mother that she’d had a very good friend in high school (in the late forties in rural Eastern Ohio) that had come out to her. Not seeing any other options in rural Ohio in the late forties, he killed himself. Part of her tears at my coming out were for him.

It’s also not like I’m the first gay person in her family. Scanning some slides of a family picnic shortly after her wedding to my father in 1951 I saw a pair of unmistakeable “maiden aunts” in the crowd. I asked her about them and she said, “Oh, those were my Aunt Verna and Aunt Lillian. (Those aren’t the right names, but I can’t recall now exactly what she said.) They were spinster school teachers who lived together to save money. We always called them both Aunt, but really only one of them was the sister of my grandmother. The other one was her roommate for forty years.”

I said, “Roommate? For forty years?”

“Oh, yes, they even slept together in the same bed so as to save on heating costs. They only had to heat the one bedroom that way.”

I cocked an eyebrow at her and said, “Really? Just to save heating costs? For forty years?”

I watched a light dawn on her face as the tumblers slid into place and she realized that I wasn’t the first gay person in the family. “Really? Do you suppose? Huh. Well, that would explain a lot.”

That exchange took place in the summer of 2003 and I never got the chance to talk with her any more about them. Since then, I’ve seen my great-great aunts staring out at me in other family pictures. Judging from when they stopped appearing in the photos they must have died sometime in the late fifties.

Listening to the radio show tonight I almost cried when I heard Dan choking up talking about his mother. It’s been hard for him, I know. It’s still fresh (only a year), and he’s never really talked about it in any public way before this. Near the end of the show Ira Glass spoke about losing his mother about five years ago, and then played a clip with both his and Dan’s mother on the show from 1998. Ira was wistful, and he seemed a little pained about it.

It's a little spooky-strange that Dan, Ira, and I are all about the same age. Ira's about the age of my older brother Bruce, and Dan is either a few months older or nine years younger than me, depending on which source you believe. (Of course, if he's nine years younger, that means he started writing Savage Love when he was fifteen, so I don't think that's right.)

Even after more than five years, it’s still hard for me to talk about my mom in any serious way. It’s gotten better, but I still miss her terribly. Just today Dad was reminiscing about her and the pool and how much she loved swimming in it. Occasionally I’ll hear something on the radio or read something somewhere and think how she should hear this, she should know about this, before I remember that she’s gone.

Oh, well. I love you, Mom. Happy Mother’s Day.