Poetry Speaks to Memory

     After getting too much sun at the AIDS Memorial yesterday, I decided to sit out the Flag Day action – the NYPL steps at midday is another blazing-sun situation.  Instead, I headed to the LGBT Center to hear Ray read his poetry at the Bureau, a small queer bookstore.  The room was full of mostly familiar faces from ACT UP and Rise and Resist.  Ben was moderating in an informal way.

    The first poems were about his boyhood in the early 70s, before I was born, since he is 13 years older.  I was struck by how similar some of the experiences are to what my clients describe to me now about their childhoods in the 1990s.  Twenty years later, queer kids are still growing up isolated, being shamed and punished for non gender conforming choices, like when Ray chose Madeline from the book mobile.  And they are still discovering the rush of freedom of arriving in NYC.  It’s a harder landing now, I think – even over the course of my career, things have gotten harder for queer kids landing in NYC.  There’s more public acceptance, but the job market is tighter and housing is astronomically more expensive.

   When Ray got to his shared apartment on Sullivan street in a building full of old Italian woman, I could hear echoes of my mother’s voice describing her apartment on Sullivan street in the 70s.  In a way, I lived there too, growing inside her until she moved to the loft on Kenmare street to have more space for a child.

   And then he got to the AIDS crisis, our shared years, the sight of people with KS blooming all over them like a malevolent tropical flower in shades of purple deepening to black.  I laughed at the familiar image of Jamie and Alexis and Ray cramming into his bathroom to mix wheatpaste to glue posters around the neighborhood. I did my share of mixing wheatpaste in odd places, including at the Children’s Aid Society, further down Sullivan St.  I had access to the building  during pottery studio time and a friend and I would slip into a rarely used bathroom by the back stairs and turn on the hot water.

    Then I teared up at his memories of his friend Howard, slipping away like so many friends and fellow activists did, sitting beside you at a meeting one week and gone the next.  I remembered Aldyn McKean, deep in conversation with me after a Monday night meeting suddenly saying, “I really have to sit down,” and sinking into a folding chair as we kept talking.  The next week, during the weekly memorial section of the meeting, he was the one we were remembering.

    Good poetry is like that, filling your mind with images and associations, pulling forth feelings you weren’t expecting.  I couldn’t linger in the memories though, I had to rush to work, to sit in the basement so hot and humid my hair started to curl checking  people in and putting out fires as they arrived for dinner.