The Fight of Our Lives: List 5

I’m part of the cohort of gay men who got infected in the 1980s.

Confidentiality was important for two reasons.

But when
I think of how AIDS kills
my friends, especially
the ones whose paths
through life have least
prepared them to resist
the monster, I think of
an insatiable and prowling beast
with razor teeth and a persistent
stink that sticks to every
living branch or flower
its rank fur brushes
as it stalks its prey.

But when I see
Dwight smile and hear his fey
delighted voice inside my head,
I know AIDS is no chess game
but a hunt, and there is no
way of escaping the bloody
horror of the kill, no way
to bail out, no bright
parachute beside my bed.

Then Marc arrived and I photographed him and Denise on the bed with Andrew—a tableau of life and love amidst death.

I think heaven is perfect stasis
poised over the realms of desire,
where dreaming and waking men lie
on the grass while wet horses
roam among them, huge fragments
of the music we die into
in the body’s paradise.

She had the precarious life all mothers try to prevent their daughters from falling into.

Abuse of every type you can imagine was rife in these institutions.

My sister and I grew up in an alcoholic home, surrounded by predatory adults.

A pain that engulfs your existence and won’t go away.

It felt to him like a meaningful way to assemble the dead, to commemorate their lives and protest their deaths.

It is a public catharsis and a political reckoning as the names are read aloud and the Quilt is revealed.

It is a public catharsis and a political reckoning as the names are read aloud and the Quilt is revealed.

He realized the rectory where he was living could be converted to expand the shelter—so he moved out, and twenty-four more beds were created for the ill.

As Steve Rivera, a later director of Project Lazarus, said of Desrosiers, “Father Paul broached a very unpopular topic that was full of fear and he addressed it head-on. All he could see was beautiful people with beautiful souls.”