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Avalanche

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It’s beginning to feel like the bad years of the AIDS epidemic again when deaths were happening so frequently that you didn’t have time to absorb one before the next and your calendar was filled with memorial services.  We didn’t even make it to Iris Long’s memorial on June 13 th  before the news came that James Wagner had died on June 7th.  Then on June 30 th , our client Nahla died.   Yesterday I was sluggishly getting breakfast ready while trying to stay cool on a 100 degree day, when Antoine, a long ago client from Sylvia’s Place called.  He was calling to tell me he just moved back to NYC and ask me for help getting in contact with his old friends, but while we were talking he mentioned that Bradley Curry was gone.   Sylvia’s Place is located at Metropolitan Community Church and when I was the Director there, Bradley was the Pastor’s omnipresent assistant. He was a small, bald man who was always on the move, seemingly single handedly hol...
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Nahla

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  6/30/26 Nahla One of the things that happened in the tumultuous time right after Kate died was that I forgot how to sleep.  I had no idea that was even possible -I had always been someone who tilted towards the sleep too much side -  could never stay up until midnight on New Year’s Eve, was always getting woken up by the other residents of the queer dorm tipsily belting out MacArthur Park to the point that I wanted to shove their faces in the rain-soaked cake.  I assumed that sleep was as automatic a function as breathing.  Then, with painful irony,  it disappeared at the same time as the one person I could reach for in the middle of the night, whether in person or on the phone.   It didn’t  really seem to matter since everything had been subsumed into a dismal grey miasma with intermittent stabbing spikes of agony. Day, night, awake, asleep, alive or not, none of it made any difference for a long time.   ...
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Out of Steam

Saturday I woke up in slow motion, bogged down by all the things I hadn’t had time to think or feel while dashing between fundraisers and speeches and various other rainbow festooned events. I pruned down my to do list, figuring I could save some energy by just doing the most important things, filling the cat’s fountain and washing the dish.  But even those felt like an effort.   The Saturday of Pride weekend is the Dyke March, an unpermitted march for people who identify as women that starts at Bryant Park and goes south on 5 th  Ave.    Since many of the  Church Ladies are men, we don’t join the march.  Instead we post ourselves at 30 th  and 5 th , so we can sing the traditional “Gods is a Lesbian” as the crowd goes by, with various friends popping out of the crowd for greetings and hugs.   I have been there every year for so long that I can’t remember when I started. I have watched new Ladies, including an increas...
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Pride Infusion

  My infusion wound up on the same day as ACT UP’s Grand Central action demanding money for AIDS and healthcare instead of ICE and warfare.     Even though I can’t get arrested     until we’re sure the bones in my neck have fused, I would have shown up to do support, but despite a lot of effort, Misty could not get another infusion slot before Pride.     I had to do it before Pride because being around a lot of people with waning, end of the month antibody levels is inviting trouble.   I showed up at the infusion center and Kayla got the IV in easily enough, but couldn’t draw blood from labs from it, so she used my hand for that.  She asked me about my cats and told me that she is planning to bring her senior cat to New York – he’s been staying with her mother in California.  “He was just in the hospital,” she said.  “He had a urinary blockage.”  “from crystals?” I asked and she nodded.  “The holis...
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Electricity

  6/25/26   The guardianship report was finished, but still had to be notarized.  Usually David, our volunteer notary, stops by our office but he couldn’t do it on short notice, so I agreed to meet him at his office at NYU Law School at 9am.  That was already early by my standards, but then John Henry, who lives in Gloucester, got assigned to a job in CT, and decided to use the relative proximity to come fix my kitchen light, which we both thought was out due to a bad fuse.  He wanted to miss rush hour, so he showed up at 7:30am and by the time I left at 8, he was down in the basement tinkering with the fuse box.   The semester’s over at NYU, so the main entrance was closed and I had to go around to the Macdougal St. side where a security guard equipped with all kinds of monitors and tech ignored all of it in favor of a battered clump of stapled papers where she quickly found David’s extension.  I got on the elevator with an older u...
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Queer Liberation March

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  Queer Liberation March   Pride Sunday was awash in blazing sun and Union Square and the surrounding streets were full of queer people just out enjoying the day.  I was pulling on my neon green marshal vest as I headed across the park, and people started asking me questions about the Pride parade and the day’s events.  I kept directing them toward the Queer Liberation March, which many had not heard of but were excited about.     When I got to the west side of the park, at first all I could see were vendors tables’ but then I saw a flash of neon and found Matthew and the other marshals assembling.  “Can you take the front?” asked Matthew.  “Jamie wants to take a break and be in the back.”  It had been so long since I was a front marshal that I couldn’t remember doing it,  and the dogged patience required to herd people into the march at the back, cajole them into keeping up, and hold back the rear line...
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A Very Long Day

  Waiting for the N today, a man standing nearby asked me how long I had to keep the collar on. “A total of 6 weeks,” I told him.  “Did you just have it done?” “I had it done in May.” I had a fusion,” he said, gesturing to his neck. “ This is my third spine surgery,” I replied.  I had a lumbar laminectomy, and a cervical decompression and now this.” “The lumbar one must be worse,” he said.  “It is because you can’t really sit or stand,” I told him.   The train came, we got on and he sat beside me. “After my surgery     I fell 10 feet off a ladder while I was visiting my mother in Florida. I thought I hurt my shoulder because I landed on it so the next day when I couldn’t lift my arm I went to urgent care. They did an X-ray and then called me back to say I needed a CT scan. I had broken one of the titanium screws and shattered the spacer between the discs and fractured the bone.     So then I had to have surgery again. The surge...
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