The Secret Life of This Life Now #6
The 6th in a series of mercifully short essays about the life cycle of my Lammy-finalist first book of poems, This Life Now (A Midsummer Night's Press, 2014)
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The Secret Life of This Life Now is the story of how I came to write my first book of poems, This Life Now, a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry (which that year rightfully went to Danez Smith). The series is also a belated tenth-anniversary gift to the book that put me on the poetry map—albeit some tiny little corner of the poetry map—and caused me sorrow along with joy.
In each of these essays, I share a bit of my poetry journey and we get a sneak peek at a few lines form the sequentially next poem in This Life Now. We are in the first section of the collection—My First Ten Plague Years—which includes poems about my experience of living with HIV after testing positive in October 1990. This is post #6 in the series, and the sixth poem in the book is “After.” The excerpt below includes the fourth of the poem’s five seven-line stanzas.
See where you have come—
this is a different time;
this is after.
A few of us remain,
but nobody knows
if we are survivors
or merely hangers on.
In these essays, I seem always to be commenting on the “you” addressee of each poem. I think my tendency to write poems of erotic second-person direct address is a legacy of my experience as a student of Ancient Greek and Roman lyric poetry—poems by the likes of Sappho in Greek and Catullus in Latin.
The “you” in this poem is, like the “you” in “Instead of Names” (TSLTLN #4), is hypothetical. Just as the speaker in “Instead of Names” was talking to anybody he might potentially meet in a park or promenade, the speaker in “After” is talking to anybody he might meet in some mysterious unidentified space of homoerotic rendezvous. In “real life,” the poet—me—was thinking about Brighton Beach, where I lived at the time, and where I spent lots of time cruising for sex under the boardwalk.
No need I think to say more here about this poem. If you are intrigued, I invite you to read it in the book!
In TSLTLN #5, I promised you more about the freelance editorial work I did in those years as an an indexer, a fact checker, and a copyeditor. But in fact I want to start that saga with my foray into journalism. As I wrote last time, when I got fired from my job at Legal Action Center, I took my six months of unemployment benefits and began my long-deferred journalism career.
Like short fiction, journalism was a part of my schoolboy youth. In fact, what inspired my desire to attend Columbia University was the Columbia University Scholastic Press Association Conference in the spring of 1976 when I was a fifteen year old ninth grader. Then I wrote for my high school newspaper and eventually became its editor in chief.
And then in 1979 I entered Columbia University, my dream school, where you’d think I would have gone out for The Columbia Spectator, the (then) daily campus newspaper that was considered a springboard to journalism careers. But no. It seems related on some level to my decision to stop writing fiction. But it had nothing to do with being closeted as gay. I had been so extended in terms of extracurricular activities and special academic programs in high school that I decided I wanted to see what it was like just to be a student. Looking back, I think that was a mistake. But as I like to say of late, We only have the one timeline. By which I mean, that was then, this is now. Yeah, Faulkner, the past is never dead, it’s not even the past—But like I say: Only the one timeline.
So now its 1991. I have HIV. That’s something I wanted to write about. I was bad at direct action, i.e., the kind of AIDS activism that ACT UP* was doing. I did not feel energized by demos, I felt enervated by them. For better or worse, I always saw the other side. Yes, women, people of color, and injecting drug users should be better represented in clinical trials; but at the same time, we needed to get drugs evaluated and approved as fast as possible, and so on. I thought that counted me out of grassroots street activism. To a degree, I think that was another mistake. I did not yet know all the super smart (okay, yes, smart and sexy) ACT UP and TAG* boys who could square sophisticated analysis with die-ins at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. But again, we only have the one timeline. That was then.
*ACT UP = AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power; TAG = Treatment Action Group, a breakaway group started by members of the Treatment and Data Committee of ACT UP
So instead I started writing articles for newsletters at AIDS service organizations, and then writing about AIDS-related social, cultural, and political issues for queer publications, housing publications, downtown publications, etc. None of that paid much, if it paid anything at all, but I was getting a lot of experience, and I was thrilled by virtually every minute of what I was doing. I interviewed Mathilde Krim in her celebrated Beaux-Arts townhouse on East 69th Street. I attended the 1992 Democratic National Convention at Madison Square Garden. My July 1991 cover story “High Risk, Low Priority” in the Black lesbian and gay newsmagazine BLK was included in a packet of materials distributed to members of Congress for hearings on the national response to AIDS. I rubbed elbows with the likes of trailblazing lesbian journalist Donna Minkowitz, who at that time was writing the first-ever weekly lesbian and gay column at The Village Voice. I was exactly where I wanted to be and doing exactly what I wanted to do.
I know, it’s not like me to end an essay on such a high note. But there were an awful lot of high notes in those years, and we are already over 1,200 words. So adieu à la prochaine. More next time.
Get your copy of This Life Now, well...now. The bargain-basement fireside-sale price of $10.00 includes SHIPPING in the US. If you are elsewhere, I will probably need to reach out and ask you for some additional funds for shipping.
Scheduling Note: I am going to try to publish posts in this series on Mondays and Thursdays at about noon eastern time. Second Coming posts seven days a week at 6:45am eastern time. Other new sections of Beachcomber Mike may be starting soon. I’ll keep you posted.
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