[I] may be crazy but I'm the closest thing I have to a voice of reason.

15 April 2010

Teaser

Today in my shamanic work I experienced a life altering shift. That was early this afternoon. The rest of the afternoon and evening I spent at the hospital with my nephew. He’s out of danger and should be fine. I, however, am too tired to post anything more than teaser of tomorrow’s blog. Goodnight all. See you tomorrow.


LONGTIME SURVIVOR (HIV University) teaser

Today less than half my friends are gay. Not long ago most of my friends were gay, but there’s been some attrition. That’s where my education began. My AIDS education. For most of mainstream America it’s fair to say that AIDS education didn’t get rolling until the 1994 release of Philadelphia; until that time, Longtime Companion was the only feature length film to deal explicitly with the subject. In 1990, the same year it hit movie theaters nationwide, Longtime Companion aired on public television and that’s where I saw it, right here in my Portland, Oregon, living room with my husband, Cliff, my best friend, Jose, and his partner, Frank. The movie closes on an empty beach on Fire Island, the same beach that is packed belly-to-back with laughing, tanning, cruising gay men at the beginning of the story; at the end it lays as abandoned as the rumpled sheet of an unmade bed. A woman and two men walk across the sand, just the three, talking about those who’ve died, and as the credits roll, a place called the Post Mortem Bar appears, repopulating the scene with lost companions. Afterward, this ending was all we could talk about, and odd as it sounds, I think I believed our conversation focused on this scene because we found it to be so moving, not because we thought any of us would ever end up there. At least, that’s not what I thought. Not then.


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