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indelibly carved into our memories. Charles Sanchez vividly remembers hearing a radio report that Magic Johnson had just tested positive for HIV, and how awkward (then relieved) he felt getting his first kiss after his diagnosis. Claire Gasamagera remembers the courage of the activists who promulgated The Denver Principles in 1983, and Larry Kramer’s empowering slogan “Turn your grief into rage.” Some of us even found romance through our activism. Charles King recalls that “I met Keith Cylar at ACT UP New York in the summer of 1989. It started with a public debate and ended up with him seducing me. We were together for fifteen years before he died and helped to found and lead Housing Works during that time and fought and won many battles.” Along with the major, life-shaping changes that we’ve undergone, we’ve also been shaped in smaller ways by the pandemic. Victoria Noe: “What has stayed with me most——even more than the suffering, injustices, and deaths——is one way it affects me to this day. For a long time, if someone disappeared, if I lost contact with someone (I’m talking about gay men in particular), I assumed they were dying or dead. It made me paranoid about losing touch with my friends. I even made some of them promise they would tell me if they were seriously ill.
Sanchez (now) photo by Stephen Churchill Downes; Rev. Yolanda photo by Alina Oswawld
be spared. [I joined] ACT UP New York in the fall of 1987. Being a member of ACT UP made me a better, brighter, more compassionate, more defiant person.” Butch McKay: “The last time I held Tivvis in my arms, he asked me to promise to get involved, and almost thirty-five years later I’m still involved. I honor Tivvis with everything I contribute to the fight.” Charles King: “I came out as a gay man to my mentor, Reverend Cofield, tendered my resignation, and began my journey to do something about HIV and AIDS.” Over the course of this forty-year pandemic, we’ve experienced great losses as our friends and family members succumbed to AIDS; we’ve dealt with unfathomable grief, we’ve struggled through years of confusion and chaos and false cures, and we’ve dealt with death as a constant in our daily lives for four decades. Steven F. Dansky asserts, “Within wakeful consciousness and in the dominion of dreamscapes, what we’ve experienced over the four decades since the beginning of the AIDS pandemic are flashbacks of suffering and loss through illness and death; disappearance and displacement; surviving perpetual heartache whether in silence or in public.” Some of the seemingly random moments we’ve lived through over the last forty years are
Top: Charles Sanchez (1993 and now) Bottom: Reverend Yolanda Vega (now)
• JUNE 2021
