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. Then she wanted to know how I got involved in AIDS work.

 

I don’t usually bring up my school years at Little Red because only people from certain NYC sub-culture really know what it means.  To most people, private school sounds snobby and elitist, although I was a scholarship student, and Little Red, with the tuition snowballing since I was there, is certainly not exempt from that.  But people who know are aware that Little Red was founded as NYC’s first progressive independent school and that going there meant being steeped in social justice and folk music.

 

I guessed – correctly – that she would understand the subtext, so I told her I went to Little Red and that my dad’s friends, lots of theater people but also other teachers, were hit hard early on.  I still remember Dudley, a fellow teacher, who fascinated me as a kid because he had had hair transplants and his head looked like a newly planted lawn.  He died early in the epidemic.  Seeing AIDS unfold around me as I grew up gave me an awareness that couldn’t be undone.

 

We ended the meeting with an invitation to apply for funding – and a chat about cats, after she apologized for the noise of one of her cats flinging a ball down the stairs to chase since she wasn’t available to throw it for him.  I reassured her that I understood since I have seven of my own.  There are two ways people usually react to that – either some combo of shocked/horrified or a variant of delighted/jealous and she was the latter.  When I sent her a follow up email later, I attached photos of each cat.  Her response had her two – one so furry I asked if he was a Maine Coone.  “No, just hairy,” was the response.

 

After the meeting, I saw a few clients, and then got on the train.  When I got off, everyone was rushing through the rain, eager to get somewhere dry. Outside the Arabic bodega with the black and white cat, a white woman with a cigarette in her hand was lingering. As I got closer, I heard her talking out loud, her words a jumble. Organic psychosis or drugs, it doesn’t matter. As I passed her and continued down the street she yelled at the world in general “learn how to survive! Learn how to survive!” It’s not bad advice, I thought, remembering Bob Kohler. “Listen to the crazies,” he would say.