Like a Love Story: May and June 1990

People are chanting, demanding changes to the underrepresentation of women and people of color in clinical trials, demanding more and better treatment for all the opportunistic infections that come with AIDS.

It’s so hot in this room that our palms are sweating profusely.

They will shine a light on the lack of inclusion, on the inherent corruption of AIDS research.

The clink-clink of his camera against the whistle sounds like a metronome and reminds me how different we are.

“Yeah, you fellas in the mood?” he asks lasciviously.

I cried because the movie was so beautiful, and because the story was so poignant, and because the character Mary-Louise Parker played reminded me of Judy and I miss her.

“I’m just angry that the straightness is implicit in everything...”

“Thanks for rubbing it in,” I say ruefully.

“You’re all kinds of awful,” I say, impishly.

I remember those early days with my camera, learning everything about lenses and apertures and focus.

He’d definitely go into some diatribe about the homophobia of high school party games.

When I walk in, my parents are awake, just as I expected. And they look livid.

“They won’t let me go back and see him. I told them I’m his health care proxy, and they say I’m not family.”

As the doctor explains that Stephen’s vital signs are looking promising, it hits me that he looks a lot like José before he was sick. It’s uncanny—the messy black hair, the olive skin, the thick eyebrows, crooked nose, and soccer build.

"I counted sixteen...“ Which puts this train right in line with the world at large...

In this moment, I realize that Art’s parents are combative and reactionary, and that some of those qualities have rubbed off on Art.

The lobby of the hotel we are staying at looks like it has not been redecorated in a few decades, which gives it an eclectic charm.

The venue is mobbed when we get there.

“And we saw this crazy, bawdy show, and it made me think of you.”

“We had our flapper phase and our MGM glory years. We just survived our box office poison days, and we’re about to get signed to Warner Brothers. Watch out, ’cause there’s an Oscar and a troglodyte in our future.”

Morbidly, he chooses movies about illness.

And I get the strange experience of seeing how doting my mom must have been when I was a baby, to see how great of a mother she is.

Reza looks apprehensive, unprepared to be here.

I move toward his feet and try to pull the boots off unsuccessfully. I pull harder and harder, to no avail.

“What I mean is that, yes, it is hard, but I can’t change it.” I close my eyes for a second, wishing for eloquence. “I think what I’m trying to say is that I wouldn’t change it if I could.”

He then lip-synchs the song from that scene, Mahalia Jackson’s “Trouble of the World,” imbuing every movement of his lips with so much passion that it sometimes feels like it really is his voice we are hearing.

To our taxi driver on our way to the airport, we bequeath #95 Provincetown.

#75 Love.
We stare at it together, read it as if it’s Lady Liberty’s new epitaph.

“I get how crazy and impulsive this is. But I’m impulsive, and maybe that’s one of the things you loved about me...”

“Hey, don’t let anyone else call you Frances,” he says with deadpan seriousness.