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Clearwater

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I woke up with Pete’s voice in my head and Marley on my chest.    My life flows on in endless song Above Earth's lamentation I hear the real, though far off hymn That hails the new creation Above the tumult and the strife I hear the music ringing; It sounds an echo in my soul How can I keep from singing?   What though the tempest loudly roars I hear the truth, it liveth What though the darkness round me close Songs in the night it giveth No storm can shake my inmost calm While to that rock I'm clinging Since love is lord of Heaven and Earth How can I keep from singing?   I sing it to Gretchen while I am dusting her off because she decided to crawl behind the unused stove for some inexplicable feline reason.  Gretchen, I have learned, is a cat who does not appreciate any form of grooming by humans, but she approves of the song and starts to purr.    Washing the dishes as rain pours down outside the kitchen window, a very welcome break in the heat, ...
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Learn to Survive

7/6/26   Today I had a meeting with the Keith Haring Foundation to talk about possible funding.     We got on zoom, and their Director, herself an artist, started to tell me about Keith Haring, his life, and his activism. I stopped her. “I remember,” I said, “I was there. I was in ACT UP.”     “You were at the meetings at the Center?” she asked, and I nodded yes.     I didn’t mention it, but my awareness of Keith Haring goes back even further because he used to draw on empty black spaces meant for subway ads at West 4 th   St and I passed them all the time as a kid.   Later she asked me how New Alt came about, so I explained that it had grown out of my years as Director of Sylvia’s Place.  That satisfies a lot of people, but she kept going, wanting to understand how I had gotten from being a teen in ACT UP to starting New Alt.  I took her back to the Neutral Zone, and then CASES and our HIV peer educators before that....
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Heat Wave

  7/7/26   After three days of extremely hot weather, the church basement felt like a sauna today.  I thought the volunteers would probably serve a cold meal, but they had the stove on, adding to the heat.     S., an alum, came in wearing their heavy black winter coat which had acquired some tears since the last time I saw them.  When we first met S. they were an ambitious young person with some college under their belt and always impeccably dressed.  After years in the drug-infested HIV SROs, they had gotten into crystal.  As the addiction deepened, they started pointing, injecting it with any syringe nearby, creating deep pockets of infection that landed them in the ER over and over.  The drug ravaged their mind as well as their body, reducing an articulate, polite person to shouting incoherently at nobody in particular.  It also created paranoia, so that despite the heat, I could not convince them to...
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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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