In Memory of World AIDS Day--living after the retrovirals, after the campaigns, after the memoirs ended up in used book stores, after the art ended up in museums, after the plague years, where fucking was less lethal but nostalgia was more so, after coming out thru history. After the exhaustion, a pure Beckett desire to go on, in a moment of what seemed like endless requiem. Growing up in Central Alberta, hearing that you would die of it, as a curse for pleasures that still seemed disruptive--where if you survived the bashings, the institutional neglect, the desire to kill yrself, yr reward would be dying and then realizing every day that you were alive that you had won. Realizing that fucking would still be criminalized, that not talking or talking about fucking would still be stigmatized, still waiting to see if this trick or that lover would be the one that would result (no matter how careful you were) would be the one that resulted in the l

ong term maintenance of another disease, the expectation and then the living without that expectation. Still, even though you know about the world, even though you know that this is the narcissism of privilege, even though you have read from the beginning about Brazil, about Africa, about India--about poverty, about the problems of the west interfering, no matter how angry you are about all of that...the history and potential of AIDS in yr small community, among fellow faggots, isolates you further from the breeders, makes you less straight--no matter how much you love yr straight friends, no matter how much they are allies, the blue black bruises written on the body, the wasting, and the terror can never fully be read on them. This, this World AIDS Day, let us pray.