housebroken ezra pound

Vincent van Gogh

Giant Peacock Moth (detail)

you’re a space pirate captain but it’s also the 80′s and you’re wearing glam rock trousers and a billowing shirt. Some freaky aliens just boarded your ship but it’s okay because they’re here to party

You’re in a post apocalyptic version of the wild west. You stumble across a dusty townscape and into a saloon bar. You are a black hatted, spurs wearing, gun toting assassin. The chatter goes silent as you darken the doorstep. You sling your electric laser pistol across the bar and demand a whiskey

You study English lit or history at Oxford University. You wear tweed and waistcoats and it’s inexplicably always autumn. Everyone thinks you’re really pretentious but really you’re just trying to get over the death of your best friend who drowned in the river and who you had feelings for but never got to tell them

You are an ageless vampire or maybe a ghost and you spend your days wafting around your castle. You fling yourself down on a red velvet day bed in despair. You’re sad and drinking wine in the dark and you want to wallow for a while to miserable tunes while reading poetry and thinking about your dead lover 

You’re a witch who lives in a little hovel in a bog, you make your charms and potions all day and seal them up in jars. The fair folk know who you are but you don’t bother them and they don’t bother you. Occasionally you offer help to a girl who comes to you in need. Sometimes help means a man gets lost in the woods and never comes out again.

it was really interesting because he said before the aids epidemic, being gay was almost cool. like, it was really becoming accepted. but aids forced everyone back in the closet. it destroyed friendships, relationships, so many cultural centers closed down over it. it basically obliterated all of the progress that queer people had made in the past 50 years.

and like, it’s weird to me, and what i brought to the conversation (i really couldn’t say much though, i was speechless mostly) was like, it’s so weird to me that there’s no continuity in our history? like, aids literally destroyed an entire generation of queer people and our culture. and when you think about it, we are really the first generation of queer people after the aids epidemic. but like, when does anyone our age (16-28 i guess?) ever really talk about aids in terms of the history of queer people? like it’s almost totally forgotten. but it was so huge. imagine that. like, dozens of your friends just dropping dead around you, and you had no idea why, no idea how, and no idea if you would be the next person to die. and it wasn’t a quick death. you would waste away for months and become emaciated and then, eventually, die. and i know it’s kinda sophomoric to suggest this, but like, imagine that happening today with blogs and the internet? like people would just disappear off your tumblr, facebook, instagram, etc. and eventually you’d find out from someone “oh yeah, they and four of their friends died from aids.”

I’m 36. I came out in 1995, 20 years ago. My girlfriend and I started volunteering at the local AIDS support agency, basically just to meet gay adults and meet people who maybe had it together a little better than our classmates. The antiretrovirals were out by then, but all they were doing yet was slowing things down. AIDS was still a death sentence.

The agency had a bunch of different services, and we did a lot of things helping out there, from bagging up canned goods from a food drive to sorting condoms by expiration date to peer safer sex education. But we both sewed, so… we both ended up helping people with Quilt panels for their beloved dead.

Do the young queers coming up know about the Quilt? If you want history, my darlings, there it is. They started it in 1985. When someone died, his loved ones would get together and make a quilt panel, 3’x6’, the size of a grave. They were works of art, many of them. Even the simplest, just pieces of fabric with messages of loved scrawled in permanent ink, were so beautiful and so sad.

They sewed them together in groups of 8 to form a panel. By the 90s, huge chunks of it were traveling the country all the time. They’d get an exhibition hall or a gym or park or whatever in your area, and lay out the blocks, all over the ground with paths between them, so you could walk around and see them. And at all times, there was someone reading. Reading off the names of the dead. There was this huge long list, of people whose names were in the Quilt, and people would volunteer to just read them aloud in shifts.

HIV- people would come in to work on panels, too, of course, but most of the people we were helping were dying themselves. The first time someone I’d worked closely with died, it was my first semester away at college. I caught the Greyhound home for his funeral in the beautiful, tiny, old church in the old downtown, with the bells. I’d helped him with his partner’s panel. Before I went back to school, I left supplies to be used for his, since I couldn’t be there to sew a stitch. I lost track of a lot of the people I knew there, busy with college and then plunged into my first really serious depressive cycle. I have no idea who, of all the people I knew, lived for how long.

The Quilt, by the way, weighs more than 54 tons, and has over 96,000 names. At that, it represents maybe 20% of the people who died of AIDS in the US alone.

There were many trans women dying, too, btw. Don’t forget them. (Cis queer women did die of AIDS, too, but in far smaller numbers.) Life was and is incredibly hard for trans women, especially TWOC. Pushed out to live on the streets young, or unable to get legal work, they were (and are) often forced into sex work of the most dangerous kinds, a really good way to get HIV at the time. Those for whom life was not quite so bad often found homes in the gay community, if they were attracted to men, and identified as drag queens, often for years before transitioning. In that situation, they were at the same risk for the virus as cis gay men.

Cis queer women, while at a much lower risk on a sexual vector, were there, too. Helping. Most of the case workers at that agency and every agency I later encountered were queer women. Queer woman cooked and cleaned and cared for the dying, and for the survivors. We held hands with those waiting for their test results. Went out on the protests, helped friends who could barely move to lie down on the steps of the hospitals that would not take them in — those were the original Die-Ins, btw, people who were literally lying down to die rather than move, who meant to die right there out in public — marched, carted the Quilt panels from place to place. Whatever our friends and brothers needed. We did what we could.

OK, that’s it, that’s all I can write. I keep crying. Go read some history. Or watch it, there are several good documentaries out there. Don’t watch fictional movies, don’t read or watch anything done by straight people, fuck them anyway, they always made it about the tragedy and noble suffering. Fuck that. Learn about the terror and the anger and the radicalism and the raw, naked grief.

A visual aid: this is the Quilt from the Names Project laid out on the Washington Mall

I was born (in Australia) at the time that the first AIDS cases began to surface in the US. While I was a witness after it finally became mainstream news (mid-85), I was also a child for much of it. For me there was never really a world Before. I’m 35 now and I wanted to know and understand what happened. I have some recommendations for sources from what I’ve been reading lately:

And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts is a seminal work on the history of HIV/AIDS. It’s chronological and gives an essential understanding of all the factors that contributed to the specific history of the virus’ spread through the US and the rest of the world, the political landscape into which it landed (almost the worst possible)*. Investigative journalism and eyewitness account. Shilts was himself an AIDS casualty in 1994.

AIDS at 30: A History by Victoria Harden

The Origin of AIDS by Jaques Pepin for the science of it all.

Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS.

The Secret Epidemic: The Story of AIDS and Black America.

Larry Kramer is a pretty polarising figure and he had issues with the sexual politics of gay New York to begin with (see: Faggots) but he’s polarising for a reason: he’s the epidemic’s Cassandra. Reports from the Holocaust collects his writings on AIDS.

I don’t think I can actually bring myself to read memoirs for the same reason I can’t read about the Holocaust or Stalinist Russia any more. But I have a list: 

The AIDS Generation: Stories of Survival and Resilience

The Quilt: Stories from the Names Project

Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival by Sean Strub

Borrowed Time: And AIDS Memoir by Paul Monette

Read or watch The Normal Heart. Read or watch Angels in America. Read The Mayor of Castro Street or watch Milk. Dallas Buyers Club has its issues but it’s also heartbreaking because the characters are exactly the politically unsavory people used to justify the lack of spending on research and treatment. It’s also an important look at the exercise of agency by those afflicted and abandoned by their government/s, how they found their own ways to survive. There’s a film of And the Band Played On but JFC it’s a mess. You need to have read the book.

Some documentaries:

Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989) [hard to find]

How to Survive a Plague (2012)

We Were Here (2011)

Everyone should read about the history of the AIDS epidemic. Especially if you are American, especially if you are a gay American man. HIV/AIDS is not now the death sentence it once was but before antiretrovirals it was just that. It was long-incubating and a-symptomatic until, suddenly, it was not.

Read histories. Read them because reality is complex and histories attempt to elucidate that complexity. Read them because past is prologue and the past is always, in some form, present. We can’t understand here and now if we don’t know about then.

That these were all names of over 20 dead people that someone knew, often it was people who’d all been members of a club or threatre group.

Here’s the link to the digitization: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/aidsquilt/

Who: Poets who identify as trans, genderqueer, agender, non-binary, intersex*, 2S*, gender non-conforming, or any variation of the above (including gender-nonconforming identities that exist outside of the United States/Canada that are not explicitly mentioned here), who are 21 and younger.

What: An anthology of poetics** that tell stories of trans euphoria, resilience, becoming, hope, survival, dreaming, prospering, thriving—stories that unsettle or resist (not deny) the dominant discourses and ideologies of transness as defined by dysphoria.

When: The deadline for submissions is June 1, 2018.

Where: Submissions may be sent to [email protected] or submitted to www.transphoriaanthology.tumblr.com

Submission details:

-Please submit a maximum of 5 poems (if sending over email, please attach as Word Documents or paste into the body of the email). 

-Please include a brief bio or statement of poetics (<300 words) that includes the name you’d like to be published under, an email address where you can be safely reached, and where you fall on the trans spectrum (if you’d like).

*We recognize that intersex and Two-Spirit (2S) identities are not synonymous with being trans (though intersex and 2S people may also identify as trans to some degree). Because intersex people, trans people, and Two-Spirit people are all marginalized under the settler state’s rules about gender, sex, and the bodies that may/may not generate both/either, the editors want to carve out specific spaces in this anthology that includes intersex and 2S creators, while recognizing that while our stories and identities may be different, our futures and liberations are very much entwined and interactive.

**We have no formal requirements for this anthology. Any work identifying itself as a poem will be considered. We encourage hybrid/experimental submissions.

Art by Margaret Ely Webb, 1918, “Aldine Readers, Book Two.”

My new book of poems, Spooky Action at a Distance (or SAAAD if you’re a girl who loves drama, like me) is available for pre-order! You can do that here! 

Cover art by me, designed by literally Richard Siken.

Cottage, near Dunquin, Dingle peninsula, Co Kerry, Ireland