Observations

Today one of our more politically informed trans clients showed up at the office door, looking downcast. "What's going on?" I asked. "This bill is getting to me," she said, referring to the Big Ugly House bill. "It still has to pass the senate, " I told her, "it's not law yet.". She went to grab a seat in the library, and my Assistant shut the door. She follows politics less closely, but is very attuned to the conversations in this office. "What bill?" she demanded. I took a breath. " You know, the big budget bill that cuts medicaid? It has a national ban on trans coverage under medicaid." She immediately started to cry. She has been preparing for her gender confirming surgery for a while now - she stopped smoking, has been undergoing electrolysis so no hairs wind up where they're not wanted, and struggling to lose the weight the surgeon requires. "I just want to be myself," she sobbed. "T...

I was working with a telephone translator for a session late in the day today because my Brooklyn schoolyard spanish is fine for basics, but kind of heavy on the inappropriate vocabulary and totally inadequate for technical details of things like immigration policy. My client is a gender non-conforming person who was tortured as a political prisoner in Nicaragua for being in Sandinista Youth. They still are very much an activist, so they were asking me about upcoming Pride events. As I was telling them that Queens Pride has made Andry Hernandez Romano, the gay make-up artist who was kidapped by ICE to El Salvador, their Honorary Grand Marshal, the translation service suddenly went dead. I had sensed the translator's hesitation over certain words, but I thought they might just be unfamiliar with some of the terminology. But there was no mistaking the abrupt silence. An operator at the translation service came on the line and said something about about technical problems. "T...

"Was this bus stopped for a long time at 58th st?" asked the frail older man with one gold hoop earing and an incongruously perfect smile of fake teeth as he settled into the seat beside me after getting on at 55th St. "No, I was coming from Mt Sinai, so I got on at 58th, it was only there for a minute," I replied, gesturing vaguely toward the infusion center wristband on the my right arm, made out of plastic so indestructible that nothing short of getting to the office and grabbing the scissors can get it off. "I have doctors at Mt. Sinai, too," he beamed. "My cardiologist and my primary doctor." I decided to check out what my gaydar was telling me. "Mt Sinai has a lot of LGBT doctors," I said, and he agreed, confirming my instinct with his smile. "I was born there when it was still St Clare's," he said. So were my three older brothers. We were all born in five years. But my youngest brother was born eight years lat...

We were standing, handcuffed, in the cavernous parking garage under the US Capitol, going through the process of being searched and having our property placed in oversized ziplocs, when we heard unfamiliar voices. Looking around, we spotted two people who had just been brought in, also cuffed. They were wearing white lab coats with the words "Doctors Against Genocide" on the back. We had seen members of their group upstairs, in the hall outside the hearing room where Marco Rubio was lying his ass off about programs that mean life or death to people all over the world. They were both speaking to the police in urgent tones. "I'm a pediatrician," said one. "It's my obligation to stand up for the babies dying in Gaza." The police, making no distinction between our message about the deadly consequences of AIDS cuts, and their message about deaths in Gaza, placed them next to us, and then loaded us all into the van together, still cuffed. Capitol p...

One of the things I hate most about activism is waking up before dawn. Today I woke up at 2am so that I could get myself from Brooklyn to Penn Station for a 4am train to DC. I was approaching Penn station and questioning my life choices, when I noticed a concerning post from a client on social media. He's a client I know well, and I know he has had a lot of challenges recently, so I contacted him. "Mentally, I don't want to be here anymore," he said, "I really don't want to be here anymore." As he started to tell me about the medical and family issues he was struggling with, I got to the station. At that hour, most of the entrances are locked, so I was kind of absently looking for an open door, and also looking for an opening in the conversation, someplace I could insert a little sliver in the unrelenting darkness of my client's thoughts. As he elaborated on the details of his problems, I wandered through the lower level of the port authority, ...

5/10/25 While a lot of queer activists - including most of our marshals- were out at Brighton Pride supporting LGBTQ asylum seekers, I was at Foley Square marshaling the rally against Mayor Baraka's arrest by ICE. As we stood in our pre-rally marshal huddle, someone approached us to point out two known provocateurs lingering in the area. One of them was a man in black with a brightly colored tote bag at his feet as he stood at a distance from the rally. When we finished meeting and turned around, he had disappeared, so we fanned out looking for him. While we were looking, he slipped through the crowd and climbed atop the black granite statue memorializing the Middle Passage of the slave trade. Standing up there, he unfurled a red Trump flag and started yelling things like "Viva Trump"! Knowing that these types respond differently to men than to women, we had assigned our only male marshal to deal with him. He and another marshal climbed up there and began trying ...

5/8/25 Walking through the 42nd st subway station on my way to work today, I passed a pan flute player dressed completely in indigenous apparel, including a colorful feathered headdress. There are often pan flute players in this station. They usually are playing something more traditional but today he was playing Madonna - La Isla Bonita. Pan flutes always give me a tinge of sadness, because they make me think of Dad. Even as his memory faded and his language became jumbled, he stayed conected to music, which seemed to touch a less affected part of his brain. We had a pan flute CD, which we played for him so often that one day he said "that music is very popular!" We were confused by this statement until we realized that he thought the music was coming from the radio, and that pan flutes were on the radio all the time.

5/8/25 Yesterday I woke up with my heart pounding from the quintessential activist stress dream. I was supposed to participate in a big, complicated civil disobedience with multiple parts but when I got there it was chaotic. I didn't know the scenario, and the other participants were all strangers and we were in a rush to get to the location. When we got there it was an old abandoned factory, and there was an ominous feeling. It started to become clear that some parts of the action were not non-violent, and just as I was standing outside the building considering that, there was an explosion somewhere inside. For a moment, I was frozen, torn between my commitment to the action and my instinct to get the hell out of there. And then I ran. When I woke up, three cats were staring at me with concern.

5/6/25 Rushing to get to a client in the ICU, I jumped in a cab just as a radio voice was explaining that it's dangerous to use a ouija board because the spirits you summon might stay.  I felt a little weird about the driver's choice of topic, but I figured it was a short trip.  Next came a man calling into the show who said he was a private investigator who had been hired by a man to find out if his wife was already married.  It turned out she was married to two men at once, and the man who hired the investigator was understandably distraught.  But then the investigator started describing how the man began wrestling with something imvisible...The whole thing was made even stranger by the sound of both the host and the callers, who all had that old radio cadence.  Eventually it became clear that it was an old AM radio show about ghosts and spirits on Coast to Coast radio, which the driver must have found on youtube or something.