Old Gracefully

No,you won’t grow old gracefully

Thank you to the Tiger Lillies for inspiration,artistry and magic

tigerlillies.com

Photo Trix Rosen

You might say I came out the day I moved to NYC( NOT that I was ever in the closest,Gay Gay Gay as Francis Faye since the Day I was born,got bullied hard in High School like all queers do, then and now luckily it was the 1980s and there were a few cool teachers who saw me right and I was not a hundred miles from NYC) it was the year that AIDS hit the front pages. So there was this mixed feeling about it - excitement that life's finally begun, but it was completely tied up with mortality and danger and politics. I was young horny and filled with love. Luckily I had fallen into a relationship that is elastic enough to go through it all with me...the fun, the ridiculous and the sublime. Somehow decades later its elasticity is still strong...sometimes stretched to its limits but never tearing.

We both somehow made it through those years. Losing many friends, lovers and others along the way, being involved on the streets of NYC, showing up, laying down....yelling our heads off, sometimes getting the other side of NYC's finest hand and boot...but we along with thousands of others persevered. Creating a shift in the world's ability to look at ourselves and seem the commonalities, not the differences. The AIDS crisis has brought us a consciousness of the immune system as the most important health-maintenance element, and a consciousness of how it is under attack! I worked for many years just a five-minute walk from St. Vincent's which was standing there like a ghost ship. Ground Zero of AIDS in New York: a conservative institution that quickly adapted to its unconventional patients and made heroic efforts to try and save them.

"AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them..."

-Susan Sontag

I lost many to AIDS. A couple of my close friends, favorite characters from work and the neighborhood. I lost friends too, high school friends who never made it to their 21st birthdays in the '80s. When it's that close to you, you can't - you can't deny it, and you can't run from it.AIDS is an absolutely tragic disease. The argument about AIDS' being some kind of divine retribution is crap. Death,Fear,And Suffering is not what the price of life is about and NO ONE is a Sinner.

Getting arrested before work,pretending all was going to be OK,felling lime I was loosing my FUCKING MIND .So many things were happening SO FAST in those days...I burned out on AIDS and did no AIDS work for a couple of years. I was so angry that people were still getting this disease that nobody can give you - you have to go out and get it! It seemed as if everyone was doing all they could and yet...Death was Everywhere. Then all the work, protests and more began to really take hold...President Reagan was gone and the country was breathing a new breath.

"One does nothing who tries to console a despondent person with word. A friend is one who aids with deeds at a critical time when deeds are called for..." Euripedes

So many new ideas and treatments and global awareness was going on...Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas were on the move...suddenly people weren't dying they were living. Suddenly those tears of sadness were becoming tears of joy.This, of course, has brought many things along with it...some good others not. But now we are aware that this is not a GAY but as GLOBAL...I could go on and on, the WORK is still there and STILL needing to be done. But, now we are armed and ready for the battles ahead. This is the hope and retribution for those lost lives....out of that morass of tragedy a wellspring of awareness flows.

Now it feels as if the winds are changing course and the world is in that Dark Place again…people are siloing into themselves and building up emotional clannish fortresses of class money and power and the community of humanity is going under fire for being caring and working towards a common goal. In the USA a non educated ,anti science ,anti humanity person is slated to take over some of the legal decision making on the Federal Level which will undoubtedly have some asinine theories about HIV and the meds developed to help those afflicted. But,I am ready willing and able to stand up once again and do all that can be done to shift the attitudes once

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With Respect and Gratitude to all the people everywhere who have created a better world and amazing Technology and Science and a Network of Caring People

This World Aids Day,2024

M Sebastian Araujo

Hemlock House,VT