Gardiner Brown

A Study of Intimacies

Gardiner Brown

When I was very young, my mom stored business cards in the cupped palm of a black, wooden hand. Its curled fingers were a perfect fit for the small pieces of cardstock. The hand had been a gift from her friend, Todd, who’d snatched it off the arm of a mannequin. He took it home, painted it black, and gave it to my mom. This was almost a decade before I was born, and I was fascinated with this hand when I was little. I would remove my mother’s cards and turn it over in my hand, enjoying the feeling of its pointed fingertips pressing into my palm. The object was imbued with something special because it was a connection to my mom’s past from before I’d existed—still a strange concept, then—and because it had been a gift from someone who’d died—even stranger. The hand was an article of history. It was a relic of a person I never knew but who, because he was close to my mother, I felt a kind of kinship with.

As a field, ecology is well-equipped to explain similarly distant relationships if space is what divides them. Parts of Canada and Mexico are ecologically connected by butterflies who migrate between them. Unlike the more restrained concept of an ecosystem as a contained (though porous) unit—ecology accounts for these distant relations. I am not an ecologist, or really any kind of scientist, but I find the field’s attention to connection moving. In its definition of ecology, the Oxford English Dictionary includes that ecology is not just the study of these relationships, but “also: the relationships themselves.” Ecology grants us language for understanding how entangled we are with the fabric of life.

If we also use ecology as a way to study lives separated by time, not just space, then we open ourselves up to examining the relationships between beings who never lived a single day together. Ecology across time can help us understand our own place in a biological history. Where I grew up in Central Texas is one of the places where the migration lines of monarch butterflies making their way south converge. When I was six, my elementary school pulled us all outside one afternoon to watch as a steady stream of butterflies passed overhead; when I was twenty-eight, my partner and I made a game of spotting the monarchs as they emerged from behind the tree line. What are the interrelationships of these events? What is the connection that enables butterflies to so reliably make the same pilgrimage decades apart? Did my mother and her friends catch sight of the butterflies when they were in Dallas in 1984? What is the relationship between me and this person I never knew who, once, was friends with my mother?

That Dallas summer in 1984 was when my mom first met Todd. He was tall, with a Romanesque nose: a model for a local agency in Dallas. He was a good cook. He was “real loyal” despite coming from a conservative evangelical family who showed him no loyalty. If my mom got scared at night alone in her apartment, she called Todd and he’d tell her to come over. He and his boyfriend Joe would set up a bed for her to sleep in there.

It’s strange to think of this nearly-mythic version of my mom being afraid of the dark, because I grew up thinking she’d been fearless. She was nineteen at the time, living in Dallas to attend fashion design school and swiftly becoming the person friends would call “the Contessa.” I’ve heard bits and pieces about the Contessa all of my life—this version of my mom I never got to know—from her and the friends she still has from that time. The Contessa was a partier, a club-goer who always skipped the line inside

because the bouncer knew her. She didn’t pay for drinks. She once met Stevie Nicks on the dancefloor. She’d earned her nickname after one such night, when a friend announced her entry: “The Contessa!” The name stuck.

She never really used the design degree, but for a while she interned at a small, local fashion company. They’d send her out to department stores to sneak a sketch pad into the changing rooms so her company could create knock offs of the name brand clothes. There’s a black and white portrait of her from around this time—she was also trying to get into modeling—she’s posed in front of a fountain, and the exposure of the photo makes the drops of water look like a shower of light. This photo, like the mannequin hand, was a strange artifact for me when I was little—the laughing, posing woman in the picture looked both like and unlike the mother I knew. Now, that photo lives with my mom’s best friend, Michael, who’s among the people who knew her at that time.

This time in my mom’s life, Michael’s life, and the lives of their friends, was defined by the rise of the AIDS crisis. When my mom first moved to Dallas, the crisis was already under way, but although her circle of friends included many gay men, she barely heard AIDS mentioned in the early days. When she did hear it mentioned, it was euphemistically called “the bug” as in “You better back that shit up. Don’t wanna get the bug.” When she left Dallas five years later though, the subject had long since stopped being avoidable.

Susan Sontag called AIDS “a disease of time.” As compared to other diseases believed to develop in a spatial spread across the body, she claimed AIDS was understood in terms of its linear progression. AIDS was the final phase in a series of temporal stages in HIV’s development. For this reason, those with HIV, she argues, are always already regarded as being ill—whether or not they are symptomatic or have developed AIDS. This element of eventuality was part and parcel of the discrimination faced by people with HIV.

Sontag’s argument was about how AIDS (the disease) has been understood, but I am interested in thinking about how AIDS (the crisis) might be understood. The crisis, of course, had both spatial and temporal elements: it congregated in clusters; it changed social ecosystems; and, like any disaster, its consequences have continued long after any declaration of the crisis as over. I am interested in what the present can tell us about the past and what the past anticipated of the present which was, once, a future.

I would like to extend Sontag’s claim to say that HIV is a disease which puts us in relationship across time. I was born in 1993, just as the drugs meant to treat AIDS were improving, after the first great wave of deaths had crashed. I am of a generation of gay men who weren’t alive for the worst of the crisis, who came of age at a time when the most major queer activism centered marriage equality, a metaphor for life and joy that emerged in part out of a communal exhaustion with activism that centered death. My generation also grew up with a lack of older gay men, in part because so many of them were lost to the crisis. I am interested in the ways in which AIDS continues to define what it means to be gay and in the relationships between “then” and “now.”

AIDS emerged into a moment of political activation of gay folks across the nation. Cities with large, concentrated gay populations were seeing an emergent gay political movement, and growing ecosystems of gay spaces. Queer health clinics were emerging in major cities across the country a decade before

the AIDS crisis. Local Gay Liberation movements organized around the repeal of sodomy laws and the promotion of gay rights bills. Many major cities had neighborhoods (called “gay ghettos”) where a greater density of gay people lived and gay-owned businesses thrived.

Dallas had Oak Lawn, one of the only true “gay ghettos” in Texas, but the city’s broader, more traditionally conservative culture had fostered a gay community that was notably less politically organized than those in other large American cities, including Houston. Even in less politically-active cities, spaces like Oak Lawn were a matter of safety. The existence of sodomy laws necessitated the creation of a network of gay businesses and social clubs safe from patrolling by the police. In the early 80s, Dallas resident, Donald Baker, was fighting the state in court over Section 21.06 of the Texas Penal Code: an anti-sodomy law. This statute, which reads, “A person commits an offense if he engages in deviant sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex,” was rendered unenforceable by a 2003 Supreme Court ruling emerging out of Texas but has not since been repealed.

In light of politically-sanctioned oppression, identifying gay spaces was a matter of legal and physical safety. Bob Damron’s Address Book was an annual series that began in 1964 listing known gay spaces nationwide. The titular Bob Damron was a gay traveling businessman. The address books were small paperbacks with vibrant, monochromatic covers (I’m personally a fan of the deep purple of the 1971 issue). Inside, the listings use a series of annotations to provide further details about individual locations. Of particular note is HOT, which in this case isn’t speaking to how good looking the men in a given spot were, but to the presence of danger: HOT indicated a place subject to regular police raids.

Digital historians Amanda Regan and Eric Gonzaba have been working on creating a map of all the sites that were listed in Bob Damron’s on their site, “Mapping the Gay Guides.” Their map shows the growing size and connection of Dallas’ own queer ecosystem in the mid-century. Between 1965 and 1980, Dallas went from having six listings to sixty-three.

I reached out to them while I was working on my research about Dallas in the 80’s—their maps currently only go to 1980, and I was looking for a particular club that didn’t open until ’84. I wondered if they might know where I could find online archives of later editions. Their response though, was even better than I’d hoped for: they sent me PDFs of the pages of Bob Damron’s covering Dallas between 1948 and 1989. I opened the files as soon as the email came in, scanning the listings for the club I hoped was listed. There! In 1988 and 1989, the Starck Club was listed. Bob Damron listed the club as “Very Popular, Trendy, and Very M.” “M” stands for mixed, meaning, like my mom’s friend group, the Starck Club hosted a mix of gay and straight people.

My mom, Todd, Michael, and all their friends were fixtures of the Starck in the five years that it was open. It was through the friends that she made there that she became the Contessa. I have been hearing about this club all my life, and even now Michael and my mom describe this time in idyllic terms. The Stark was housed in an open, multi-level warehouse that the owners had decked out with heavy drapes along the walls. There was a staircase down from the main floor onto the dance floor, and you could watch everything happening from a wraparound balcony above. By their account, the Starck Club was a place removed from the prejudices of the outside world, where anybody danced with anybody; I can’t say whether this was the universal experience or not, but my mom and her friends certainly remember it that way. My mom and Todd were going out most nights to party, and most of these nights were spent at the

Starck. Many of the friends she made in Dallas—including Michael—she met there.

There is a photo of Michael holding me on the beach when I am too small to walk yet. Now, I am taller than Michael, but he has retained his appearance of striking physical solidity. He just looks sturdy, and his angular jaw and broad shoulders match an equally stubborn personality. These qualities make him a good match for his rambunctious pit bull. He’s got a country accent like my mother, but his is sharper, more Texan.

I was nervous about talking to Michael in order to write this essay. I felt guilt asking him to talk about the AIDS crisis. My mom lived through the crisis in a way that was more embodied, more real than many straight women did at the time, but Michael continues to live with it. Michael is a rare survivor of the early days, someone who contracted HIV when the medications were making people sicker and still lived.

Looking at that photo now, I realize it must be from around the time he started taking medication. He hadn’t accepted treatment for years before that. Michael is likely an “HIV controller,” someone who doesn’t exhibit the same progression of symptoms as others with the virus and whose viral load usually remains low. Michael was twenty-five when he was first diagnosed, though he’d likely been positive for a while. “We were all walking around with it. We just didn’t know, or we didn’t want to get tested ‘cause we didn’t want to know…that’s the way most people were. if you didn’t know, you didn’t have to address it.” He was living in Houston at the time. He described the woman at the clinic who gave him his diagnosis as looking at him “real lovingly.” He was offered counseling, but he left. “I didn’t need to talk to anybody. I learned what I needed to know, so what else did I need to know?” It wasn’t until doing these interviews that I really understood how remarkable it was that Michael lived to be in that photo. I knew he was positive, and I knew that he’d been positive for a long time. I did not realize though, how unlikely that was. He’d become positive at a time when the life expectancy after diagnosis was vanishingly low, at a time that he himself would describe to me as “the dying off time.”

When I first wrote a draft of this essay, I had no idea that, elsewhere, a virus was bridging the species gap that would in just a few months radically change our world. In the spring of 2020; I was in school in Salt Lake City, two thousand miles from my family. I was living alone and single. I stopped seeing all but one friend in person. I rarely left my apartment except to go on walks through the city—I didn’t even go walking in the park because there were too many people there, and I could imagine their breath as the miasma I walked through. I kept my windows open almost constantly, afraid that the air from other apartments might drift in.

After a couple of months of this near-total isolation I packed what I needed for the summer, and moved back to Austin. In the two weeks before I left, I didn’t step out of my apartment once—I refused to take chances. I made the drive in two eleven-hour days, peeing only on the side of the road and eating from the cooler I’d packed in the passenger seat. In Austin, our pod was just myself, my parents, and Michael. I was aware, even in those early months, that we were among the most tightly-locked down people I knew. Michael wasn’t even seeing his parents in the early months because they weren’t being as cautious as him. At one point, he bought a hazmat suit just in case (of what I cannot remember). My mom, Michael, and I were all more alarmed than

my dad, who mostly just went along with our desires to remain locked down. This was largely a position of privilege—all of us could work remotely—but I also couldn’t help but feel that the past was making itself known to us. Michael had good cause to be more cautious than any of us—the prospect of contracting a new, deadly virus with an already-compromised immune system was frightening regardless of how high his T-Cell count stays. My mom knew that if the rest of us weren’t being so careful, Michael might not see us either, at which point he’d have stopped seeing anyone else at all. This played a role in our family’s decision to remain extra careful, but so I think did her and Michael’s past. My mom and Michael were reacting to this new threat from their lived-experiences during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Despite a degree of removal, I was reacting with them.

I was no stranger to risk aversion before COVID. I did not wake up one morning that March and decide that any amount of risk was intolerable. It was a familiar feeling—I joked with my sister at the time that I was either perfectly or terribly equipped to handle a pandemic. I was willing, eager even, to go above and beyond to keep myself and the people around me safe, and I zealously followed the rules. I also lived in constant anxiety. After experiencing my first earthquake that April, I started waking myself up trembling. Worse, I started feeling ghosts of aftershocks in my waking life—I would have to look at my water glass to confirm whether the shaking I felt was real or not. This only added to my fear about COVID, and I imagined ways that even the slightest infraction might open myself—or worse, my parents or Michael—to exposure. I acted with the certainty that perfection could lead us through the pandemic safely.

This was all familiar because, in many ways, it was how I’d organized my sex life for much of my adolescence. I grew up very aware of HIV because of my proximity to it through my mom’s work, aware that though it was no longer described as a crisis it hadn’t simply vanished, but this awareness did not make me a capable, thoughtful sexual being. Instead, it filled me with fear. I don’t think that my early experiences with sexuality were unusual in that they were tentative and halting, but an early STI-scare calcified that early stage into a protracted stuntedness.

I dated all throughout college, but even after I got my negative tests back, insisted on keeping everything above the belt. Like I would later do with COVID, I refused to take any risks at all. I ceased to have sex or any deep connection. I broke things off with men early or let them fizzle out, because becoming closer would have meant that eventually I’d have to accept the everyday risk of trusting them with my body. Wonderful relationships passed me by. I believed, foolishly, that I could have intimacy without risk, which is about as easy as sprinting without breathing.

I lived in this fear for five years. I’m ashamed of this version of myself, because that level of fear is not reasonable caution in the face of a serious chronic illness, but the product of stigma and internalizedhomophobia. These stigmas though, do not appear from nowhere. I grew up aware that I was in a “risk” population for HIV. That is an official designation from the federal government and the CDC. “Risk” isn’t referring to any inherent condition of gay men but to a higher concentration of HIV within our population and to an aspect of all human physiology. The skin is, by design, porous across its entire surface, but the skin surrounding the anus is especially so, and so anyone having sexual contact at that place is particularly vulnerable to infections. That gay men do not universally practice anal sex, and that

this type of sex is not exclusively practiced by gay men are not distinctions being made when we talk about “risk.” It’s this perception of risk, and the fear it inspires over our material interrelatedness, that bars me from donating blood. This perception is also what made it possible for me to access PrEP for free. For two years, I swallowed a daily pill, oblong and blue, made available to me because I am in a risk population.

The very idea of a “risk population” reveals that “risk” is being used euphemistically not to describe any action but an identity. Whether I am “at risk” has nothing to do with how I have sex and everything to do with being gay. I can get this medication for free because I’m understood through a history of death. Risk and its antidotes tether me and my body to a different time.

Anal sex is as close to a complete embodiment of our own porosity as there can be; it is contact at one of the points where our body is closest to the rest of the world. It’s a moment when there seems to be no distance at all between the self and another. I know what the sheath feels, the singing moment when the sword is drawn. Even in the empty afterward, the body remembers the feeling.

The STI scare that triggered my celibate period happened when I was 18. The friend I’d been on-again off-again dating throughout high school called me the summer after our senior year to tell me we hadn’t been exclusive partners like I’d thought. He had had unprotected sex with other people and lied to me about it, and then had unprotected sex with me.

This was six years before I started PrEP, and I think the last year that the official guidance on HIV testing was that you couldn’t get a fully accurate test any earlier than three months after exposure. So I waited that whole summer, uncertain what my status was. When my ex texted me that his test had come back negative, I didn’t write back that he hadn’t waited long enough. I dated again, but kept everything above the belt with my new boyfriend, saying it was because I didn’t know my status. Now, I see that it was because I hadn’t yet metabolized the pain of what I’d learned about intimacy: its double edge.

“Ecology” could otherwise be understood as the study of intimacies. We are, all of us, entangled in intimate relationships not just with friends and partners, but with people we may never meet and with the land itself. I call these distant relationships intimate because they quite literally shape us. While distance and intimacy might at first seem at odds, consider how an unwashed vegetable, if eaten, can suddenly and materially connect you to the insects and microbial creatures of its original soil, or the ways that the statements of the long-dead can reverberate through time and shape own thinking without us knowing. Consider that when Ernst Haeckel first invented the word that would become the English “ecology” in the 1860s, he did so using the Greek oikos, meaning “house,” so from its inception we were conditioned to think of ecology as happening within a contained space (a house), and not as an unruly series of distant relations.

My mother and I’s initial relationship—pregnancy—was not easy. Our bodies struggled against the profound porosity we had to share, and her body poisoned itself trying to flush me out. She was sick, and I was born premature. This fact might be an apt metaphor if it weren’t further from the truth of our eventual relationship, which has always been close. Close enough that she used to say that she could be more herself with me than with anyone else. Close enough, also, that I could eventually tell her I actually didn’t want to be that person. Close enough that when I asked for that distance, she could hear me and

give it to me. This closeness is what made her response to my STI scare so painful. The weight of the past crashed on top of us.

She was on a work trip when I found out, so I waited until she got home to tell her. By the time she returned though, I was bursting with the news, desperate for comfort. I didn’t even give her time to unpack her suitcase. She ferried folded clothes between the bed and her carved, wooden armoire as I said I needed to talk to her. She paused, listened, while I anxiously told her what had happened.

“Well,” she said, “That’s how it happens. That’s how people get HIV.” She turned back to put another load of clothes in its place. I asked for more. “Well, what do you want me to say?” she asked, exasperated. She returned to unpacking, having said what she would.

I felt profoundly betrayed. I was heartbroken and afraid, and the coldness of her response only intensified those feelings. I needed to be told, unconditionally, that all would be alright, regardless of what happened. Instead, I felt I’d been told that, regardless of what happened, I had behaved wrongly by misjudging the safety of a relationship.

We have since talked about this moment, and I have gotten from her what I needed then plus some comfort about the moment itself. I was able to tell her how failed I felt by her, how rejected. We repaired the distance it created between us, or learned to live with it.

I can see this moment from her perspective too though, because I don’t believe she was only thinking of me in that moment; I think she must have been thinking about Todd too.

In the Spring 1988, Todd started losing weight. He joined my mom’s family on a lake house trip, but stayed inside sleeping all day. My mom knew something was wrong, but when she tried to say something, Todd brushed her off. Later that year, he called and asked her to come over, and when my mom got to their apartment, Todd’s boyfriend was the first one she saw, and she knew. “He didn’t have to say anything, and I didn’t have to say anything.” She went back to the bedroom where Todd was laying on his back in bed. “He had gotten really skinny. He said come lay down with me, and I lay down with him on my stomach.”

“Well, I got tested, and I’ve got AIDS.”

There was very little available in terms of treatment when Todd was diagnosed, and like many his care became an act of community. He could take AZT, and there was a clinic in town that could give you a breathing treatment that helped with opportunistic infections. At some point, Todd’s boyfriend was diagnosed too. Todd stayed behind when his boyfriend left for New York City where he believed the treatments would be better. After that, my mom and another friend became Todd’s primary care.

Their friend circle only grew smaller in what Michael called “the dying off time,” when those who’d first gotten sick started to die almost all at once, and when people were swept up by family and not seen again. Michael lost a lot of friends during that time. Another friend of my mom’s went back home to Georgia where he passed away. He said he had some kind of cancer, but my mom didn’t believe it.

Meanwhile, the gay community of Dallas was organizing systems of care for the ill. As AIDS became more prevalent in the city, gay community centers changed their missions to focus on the crisis, and new care programs emerged. The University of North Texas’ library has a collection of materials documenting this period of gay Dallas. There’s a pamphlet for the third annual Texas Gay Rodeo.

Looking in a magazine published by ARC called “The AIDS Update,” I find a calendar of local actions— every Wednesday and Saturday there was a support group for surviving partners of PWAs (Persons with AIDS), and on May 5th and 19th they hosted “Hot, Horny, and Healthy – Eroticizing Safer Sex” workshops. There’s a blurb in the magazine that simply reads “Hug a PWA today!” and cartoons with a character named “Patti Le Plae Safe.” Pin-on buttons from Oak Lawn Community Services advertise the organization’s services including AIDS counseling and a buddy system. In a notice from the counseling center, they’re looking for volunteers to run an “adult day care” as well, with classes, transport assistance, and medical support.

It got harder and harder to take care of Todd as time went on. There was a day when he wanted to go out to eat at this nicer restaurant in town. He had opportunistic infections on his face; he couldn’t really walk without assistance—“He looked like he had AIDS.” My mom was scared they’d be turned away, people were watching them, but they had a kind waiter, one who seemed like he was probably gay. He was sweet with them. Before their food came though, Todd got sick and they ended up leaving. Todd’s body could no longer keep up with the simple things he wanted to do.

As Todd grew sicker and his care became more difficult, he got back in touch with his family in East Texas. They refused to take him in at first, but he eventually convinced his mother to take him back in while he died. The conditions though, were that he’d have to renounce homosexuality (something my mom sardonically points out was hardly relevant by the time he was that sick), and he would have to give up talking to the friends his mother saw as sinners, including my mom. He moved home in the spring of ’89, and my mom stopped hearing from him.

A couple of months after Todd left to live with his family, my mom went to see a tarot reader. “I wanted to ask her about Todd, but I was scared to. At the end of the session she said, ‘I know there’s something you want to ask me but you’re afraid, and I’m just going to say you need to go see him. It won’t be long.’ That’s what she fucking said to me.”

My mom called Todd’s family home, and, to her surprise, his mom put him on the phone with her. He asked her if she could come see him. She drove there the next day.

The house had a lower floor off the main one, and that’s where Todd was. He was in a hospital bed, and his family had wallpapered the room with glued-on bits of scripture. Todd was so thin you could see the bones in his skull. He couldn’t lie down flat because he had pneumonia and would suffocate. My mom brought white roses—Todd’s favorite—not realizing he could no longer see. But he smelled them when she came in, asking, “Oh, did you bring me white roses?”

My mom stayed the afternoon. Their time together was repeatedly interrupted though by Todd’s mother bringing groups of boys from the church community into Todd’s room, telling these boys that this was what happened to a person if he was gay. At some point, Todd’s mom came in alone and said Todd had made a video she wanted her to see. In another room, my mom watched a VHS tape they’d recorded of Todd saying goodbye to people. When he got to my mom, he said he wanted her to stop being a sinner, that he wanted her to go to heaven.

There are other videos of Todd in his last few months that are now online. They were recorded, presumably against his will, by his mother and the women of her church. Todd’s mom describes the “feminine little ways that he would do with his hands when he was little” to explain how she’d known

from a young age he would be gay. One of these women from church, Joyce, sits next to Todd in his sick bed explaining to the viewer how Todd’s life of sin is what led him to this death, and Todd, barely able to speak, nods assent.

My mom returned twice that summer. The last time, as she was getting ready to go, she told Todd she’d be back the next weekend. “He said:

‘Ok. Well I may not be here.’

‘Yeah you will. Yeah you will.’

‘Well let’s just hug and say goodbye.’

‘Ok.’

We did hug and kiss goodbye. And he did die three days later.”

My partner and I recently discussed the particular position we grew up in. We were born at the tail end of the AIDS crisis, and we came of age just a few years before PrEP was as common and accessible as it is now. We were the generation after a disaster trying to understand how to live well, living in the shadow of perhaps the most significant historical event of our identity group’s history without having lived through it. We were being told both that the crisis was over and also that we were still in material danger from its lasting effects. It was a confusing time to come into queer adulthood. I understood that my feelings were being affected by what came before me at the same time that I knew I did not understand what it had been to be there at the time.

As Sontag points out, our bodies always harbor infections; more-than-human biotics shape us, but the person with HIV is the one regarded as ill whether or not they are, in fact, sick. This is because HIV has been tied to a kind of eventuality: “Infected means ill, from that point forward.” This rhetorical bent can be seen even in the idea of a “risk population” whose members are always understood as on the brink of illness. Rather than eventuality though, which is only tied to the future, I want to consider the present’s relationship to the past. I want a reckoning with queer inter-generationality, queer space. I want to take the past into the future on my own terms.

My mom’s life exploded in the months after Todd died. She lost her job, her friends were dying or moving or both, and she could no longer afford to pay her rent. She called my grandmother, not knowing what to do. “You’re just going to come home,” she told my mom, and that week my uncle Mark came down to Dallas and helped my mom pack all her things to move back home to Louisiana. She didn’t live in Dallas again.

My mom’s proximity to the AIDS crisis, and her relationship to Todd, changed the course of her life forever, which in turn shaped the environment I grew up in. After she left Dallas, she got into grad school, and when an internship at an HIV prevention clinic was offered through her program, she jumped at the chance. After that, her career centered HIV services and counseling. Last year, she retired from facilitating Austin’s longest-running HIV-positive support group. That group was run through the same community health clinic that prescribed me PrEP for years.

When I came out, my mom called Michael and asked him to visit Austin to talk to me about what it would mean to grow up as a gay man. The mannequin hand was eventually lost in a different move. Something

about that object stuck with me though, enough that I still think about it almost twenty years after it was lost. It was a migratory object through time, a figure of the relationship between the then and now.