Julie Roberts, Alec Baldwin to star in "The Normal Heart"

Hollywood — Glee co-creator Ryan Murphy is bringing "The Normal Heart" to the big screen, starring Alec Baldwin, Julia Roberts, and Mark Ruffalo.

The movie is based on the Tony Award-winning, semi-autobiographical play by Larry Kramer, which chronicles the life of gay and HIV activists in New York City from 1981 to 1984.

Ruffalo will play the main character, gay activists Ned Weeks; Baldwin will play Weeks' homophobic brother; and Roberts will play Dr. Emma Brookner, one of the few health officials in New York to be taking the disease seriously.

Jim Parsons, one of the stars of "Big Bang Theory," has appeared in Broadway version of "The Normal Heart" and will reprise his role as a Southern gay activist.

Ruffalo, who is straight, has been active in helping the gay community, and headlined a fundraiser for a small gay club in his hometown of Kenosha, Wisc., last year.

 

LONDON — Elton John is writing his first book, a personal account of the AIDS crisis.

 

The musician says "Love is the Cure: Ending the Global AIDS Epidemic" will include memories of friends who died of AIDS-related illnesses, including Queen frontman Freddie Mercury.

British publisher Hodder & Stoughton says the book will be published in July along with an audio book read by the British pop star. The U.S. publisher is Little, Brown.

Proceeds will go to the Elton John's AIDS Foundation.

John said Monday the book would ask why more is not being done to cure the disease.
He said AIDS "is a disease that must be cured not by a miraculous vaccine, but by changing hearts and minds, and through a collective effort to break down social barriers."

Gay Marriage Victory Still Shadowed by AIDS

Yana Paskova for The New York Times

Steve Mendelsohn lost a partner to AIDS. “If my partner were alive, I believe we would have married.”

By AUSTIN CONSIDINE 

ON the evening of June 24, Steve Mendelsohn celebrated in the street with his friends and nearly a thousand other supporters of same-sex marriage outside the Stonewall Inn, the storied gay bar in the West Village.

The setting was nothing if not appropriate: In 1969, a riot at the Stonewall would make the bar forever synonymous with the awakening of the modern gay rights movement in America. That night, nearly a half-century later, a bill passed that would allow gay men and women to legally marry for the first time in New York State.

For Mr. Mendelsohn, 54, the moment represented an unequivocal victory: an apex to decades of struggle for equal recognition under state law. Still, the moment was tinged with a sense of absence, as it was for many gay men his age. Amid the jubilation, he couldn’t help but think of Phil Kanner, his partner of 15 years, who died of complications from AIDS in 1995.

“I was thinking, ‘I wish Phil were here with me,’ ” Mr. Mendelsohn said in an interview in the fall, adding later, “If my partner were alive, I believe we would have married.”

For many middle-aged gay men in New York City, the passage of the same-sex marriage law was in part a fresh reminder of the darkest days of the AIDS epidemic, when men like Mr. Mendelsohn, the director of a nonprofit media group, lost innumerable friends and loved ones to a disease that was often as stigmatizing as it was deadly.

At the height of the epidemic, the disease took tens of thousands of lives in the United States each year; it reached its deadly peak in 1995, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with the number of deaths of those with AIDS reaching more than 50,000 that year.

Those who survived haven’t stopped living, forming new relationships and organizing for equality in the decades since. But the memory of what was lost lingers — a shadow cast by marriage equality’s glow.
“New losses can trigger old feelings of grief, but so can successes, so something like having gay marriage can trigger feelings of loss,” said James Masten, a Manhattan psychotherapist and author who has worked with patients with H.I.V. and AIDS for the last 20 years.

“Even though it’s a positive experience, it can still remind us of all the people who aren’t here, who haven’t had the opportunity to see this — all the activists who never lived to this point,” he added.

Jeffrey Sharlach, 58, founder of a Manhattan-based communications firm and an adjunct associate professor of management communication at New York University, said he lost nearly every one of his gay friends in New York during the 1980s and ’90s, including his partner of more than 12 years, Ken Williams, who died in 1994 at age 33. Mr. Sharlach is publishing a novel in May about that period in his life called “Running in Bed,” which he described as about a quarter autobiographical.

For Mr. Sharlach, New York at the height of the AIDS epidemic became an empty shell, its streets a constant reminder of loved ones who were disappearing. “Every single block would be like, ‘Oh, I remember this guy used to live here.’ ”

“It was like a city of ghosts,” he added.

With the passing of time, many of those who survived the 1980s and ’90s have gone on to form meaningful long-term relationships. Some, like Mr. Mendelsohn, took advantage of the same-sex marriage law fairly quickly. In September, he married Wallie Pagunsan, exactly two years after the day they met.
Others, like Mr. Sharlach, believe that the moment for marrying may have passed. Though he, too, has a long-term partner, his second since Mr. Williams died, he has little interest in marrying.

“I think the relationships that you have when you’re older are different than the relationships you have when you’re in your 20s,” he said. “In your 20s you have this idea that you’re going to grow together, build a life together and kind of grow up together.”

His current relationship, Mr. Sharlach added, is “much more mature.”

The generational marriage gap felt by Mr. Sharlach, and echoed by others, isn’t only about age. It’s also a function of history and denied opportunity. While some middle-aged gay men and lesbians leaped at the chance to marry after having been denied the right, others say the concept feels too foreign today because it was such a remote possibility for so long.

“The idea of gay marriage — I mean nobody ever talked about it, it was nowhere on anyone’s radar screen,” Mr. Sharlach said. During the 1980s and ’90s, he said, “we were just worried about people not being fired from their jobs, people not getting kicked out of their apartments. That was the big thing. Really, basic rights were much more important.”

David Norris lost his partner of 10 years, Jeffery Reddick, in 1992, also from AIDS complications. Like Mr. Sharlach, he focused for years on other issues that, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, seemed more urgent.

 

“It also just seemed like such a pie-in-the-sky thing,” he said of same-sex marriage. “It was just like: ‘That will so never happen. Why put energy into it?’ ”

Yana Paskova for The New York Times

Today, Mr. Norris, 57, has a partner of 18 years who lives with him in the Upper West Side apartment he once shared with Mr. Reddick. The two own a house together in Asbury Park, N.J., and were joined there in a civil union to make property ownership more economical and practical.

But it would feel wrong to have a marriage recognized in one home state, but not another, he said. Mr. Norris, a vice president for an insurance group, has long been active in gay equality groups like the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, Lambda Legal and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. He hopes to engage more fully in his advocacy role once he retires.

Mr. Norris is thrilled about the New York marriage law, he said, especially for younger people who, largely because of his generation’s efforts, will never know the same kinds of discrimination. But he is reluctant to marry because he believes the law doesn’t go far enough. “We probably will get married, but I still go back and forth on it,” he said regarding his current partner. “I want the whole enchilada.”

If the federal Defense of Marriage Act were repealed, he would feel more certain, Mr. Norris added. “Then we’d be booking the banquet hall. It would be a real celebration.”

The men interviewed for this article may form an imbalanced picture of their generation because each has gone on to form long-term, meaningful romantic relationships — despite the loss of partners, and regardless of feelings about marrying. But, as therapists attest, there are silent others who remain haunted by the tragedies of the AIDS scourge, and unhealed by the passing years.

“Of course, there’s a sense of positivity around gay marriage, but many gay men of my generation, I would describe us, actually, as a lost generation,” said Darrell Greene, a Manhattan psychologist who spent the worst years of the epidemic working for AIDS-related health organizations, first as part of the AIDS Task Force of Greater Cleveland, then at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and the AIDS unit at Goldwater Memorial Hospital, in New York. It was, he said, “like living through a war.”

“There are many people who are survivors and who have tremendous resilience, of course,” Dr. Greene said. “But in terms of my population, there are many people who were profoundly traumatized by the epidemic. And they are still processing what happened to them.”

Mr. Mendelsohn, who welcomed the news of the gay marriage act outside the Stonewall, has learned above all to place his loss within a larger context — in a way that, though tragically ironic, gives added positive meaning to the otherwise devastating experience.

“I believe that there wouldn’t be any gay marriage today if it weren’t for AIDS,” Mr. Mendelsohn said. “There was so much intolerance and misunderstanding about who was gay and who wasn’t until everyone found out that people were gay because they were dying. And it was their friends, their family, their relatives.”

Support groups for gay men grieving the deaths of their partners helped Mr. Mendelsohn, like many of the men interviewed, cope with his loss, especially in the years just after his partner died. As time passed, his grieving evolved, his nightmares stopped.

“Somewhere, the memories were less and less about the hard times and the illness, and more and more about the happy times,” he said. “It was less traumatic. I came to see him more as my angel looking over me and helping me.”

Larry Kramer, talks about what's missing from gay activism: From Metro Weekly

Since the publication of Faggots in 1978, Larry Kramer has been speaking truth – as he sees it – to power.

What's more unusual, Kramer has been telling his uncomfortable truths to those who, like him, claim to be fighting that power.

Kramer, 76, is comfortable making others uncomfortable. Anger, he says in his cluttered, book-filled apartment off Washington Square Park in Manhattan, is ''a wonderfully healthy emotion.''
Although Faggots brought him attention, it was a few years later, as he began to witness the devastation of the strange disease that would become known as AIDS, that Kramer became an immovable object in a then-radical resistance that began with the founding of Gay Men's Health Crisis. GMHC begat his play, The Normal Heart, which debuted at The Public Theater in the East Village in 1985. That play begat the founding of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, better known as ACT UP.

The Normal Heart's story of an unrelentingly aggressive activist who is fighting for research, drugs and community activism in the face of a new illness that is killing gay men is Kramer's story. Kramer's sequel to The Normal Heart, The Destiny of Me, opened off-Broadway in 1992 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1993.

D.C. is Kramer's hometown – he went to Woodrow Wilson High School – but The Normal Heart has never been staged in the area, despite several attempts to do so.

Following a Broadway staging of the play that received the 2011 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play, The Normal Heart finally is coming to the D.C. area for a staged reading on Nov. 7 by Forum Theatre Company in residence at the Round House Theatre in Silver Spring.

As talk of a movie – helmed by Glee's Ryan Murphy – and a national tour of the Broadway revival make headlines, Kramer says the play that was once a ''cry of alarm'' is now a story of ''our history.''
That doesn't mean that Kramer sees much progress for gay people in the more than 30 years since he wrote Faggots. And, he's sorry to say, he doesn't see much happening in the near future – both because of what he sees as the apathy of ''the gay community,'' and because he sees the ''enemy'' as recognizing that apathy and willing to put the time and money into stopping equality advancements.

But at least there is the play.
METRO WEEKLY: It has to be amazing to see The Normal Heart back in circulation.
LARRY KRAMER: It just came out of the blue. Joel Grey had arranged a benefit reading here. It sold out and was very well cast and directed, and everyone was just dumbfounded by how current it seemed to be. From the very first line, ''I know there's something wrong,'' you could hear a pin drop for the rest of the night.
Daryl Roth, who's a very powerful Broadway producer, was there, and she said, ''I'm going to take this to Broadway.'' And she did. And that's what got us going again, and it's been like that ever since. It's an unreal experience to have a play come back so powerfully so many years later, almost as if it was new.
MW: To a lot of people, it is completely new.
KRAMER: That's the thing, we wanted young people to see it. When we first opened, the older gays who we thought might come didn't. I wasn't surprised because I've learned from previous productions that gays are not always the best supporters of gay art, of gay writers. They just aren't.
It was Daryl's idea to get the youngsters in. If they could prove they were 30 or under, she'd sell them a ticket for $30. And they started coming. And they started telling their friends, and their friends. So the audiences were very young, which was wonderful. And they didn't have any preconceived notions about anything. It was all new to them. They were amazed, because they didn't know all of this.
MW: When you think of the clarion call that you provided in the '80s, when nobody wanted to hear it –
KRAMER: Well, it's history now. It's not so much a message play.
MW: How do you want those ''under 30'' people to see it?
KRAMER: As I said at the speech I gave at the Tonys, this is our history. We must know our history. And I think people come to that now and see it as that. It's a different play than it was when it was first done in [1985]. Then, it was meant to be a clarion call, as you say, a cry of alarm. And everybody thought it was very agitprop, a term I came to loathe. And now it's seen as a play, and critics are – what's been especially nice to me – responding to the quality of the writing. People always overlooked that because the stuff that I write about is so political. Somehow, for most critics, that doesn't seem to go hand in hand. It drives me nuts. I work very hard on my writing.
MW: People want to know, what's the movie status?
KRAMER: The movie is being prepared. Mark Ruffalo is supposed to play Ned Weeks. Ryan Murphy is directing it and I've written the screenplay. I know he wants Julia Roberts to be the doctor, and I know we both want Jim Parsons to repeat his performance as Tommy. I just assume we're going to shoot next summer, but I haven't heard that from him. But I know he seems to be revving up somehow.
MW: That would be good.
KRAMER: It's about time.
MW: What about the fact that The Normal Heart has never been produced in your hometown, in D.C.?
KRAMER: Well, you know the old expression: ''You can't hit a homer in your own hometown.'' A little is that. Zelda Fichandler didn't like the play, and she was running Arena [Stage] then. So, that was that there. And [Studio Theatre's] Joy Zinoman took it on, and proceeded to fire the director that I had given it to without consulting with me. She found some unknown and I wouldn't go along with that. And Roger Stevens, who was running Kennedy Center, didn't like the play and wouldn't allow it to be done there.
MW: You said that you're hoping to take the Broadway production on tour.
KRAMER: Well, it's more than that. Daryl Roth has been the most amazing producer anyone could ever work with. She's just in love with this play, and she pledged to me that she would take it on tour and that she would get it done in England. And she's working toward both of those. It's hard to arrange tours, because theaters are booked way in advance. And George C. Wolfe, who's going to direct it, doesn't want to go into a big theater. He wants to go into a moderate-sized theater. Daryl will find it. She's just that kind of a producer.
Talks are pretty far advanced in Washington. I won't tell you where or how, but we want it done when the International AIDS Conference is there [from July 22 to July 27, 2012]. So that's the goal, and I believe it will happen.
And then she and Elton John and his partner, David Furnish, are working to set it up in London.
MW: Would you come down for the hometown staging?
KRAMER: I might. If it's the first run on the tour, I probably will. George is the most wonderful director I've ever worked with, so I'd be happy to see what he does again. He's just a genius. He directed the Broadway production.
MW: Turning to current politics, you made a splash talking about what, actually, all of the organizations were already talking about: the value of state marriage equality and the reason why there are all these federal lawsuits challenging the Defense of Marriage Act. And now Servicemembers Legal Defense Network has filed a lawsuit challenging military spousal benefits – saying that spousal benefits need to be equal for same-sex married couples in the military.
KRAMER: Good for them. There's just so many fights. I'm sort of surprised that Boies and Olson – they did such unbelievable work, and that somehow it's being held to ransom by the financiers of all these suits that keep the enemy at our door so assiduously. All they do is file lawsuits, and that's going to go on forever. Wherever we win, they're going to come in and sue. I don't know what it takes to make the Supreme Court do its job properly. They're probably happy that they don't have to worry about it yet. So we're caught in this terrible situation. I'm not the only one saying that.
MW: You look at the '70s, when Faggots came out, the devastation of the '80s, and then you see wedding cakes in New York this summer. What sort of a path is that? Is it a coherent path, is it just that history happens?
KRAMER: Are you looking for patterns?
MW: What's the long view?
KRAMER: Take it a day at a time.
I remember in ACT UP, everything was so bad all the time that we just sort of had to make it up as we went along, what we were going to do. Because today's emergency wasn't necessarily tomorrow's emergency, or the other way around. People who were in one job one day weren't there the next, and you were constantly having to educate people.
People always ask me, ''What was it like?'' I don't look back. I look to today and to what we still have to do in the days to come. What we achieved in the past has always been haphazard and more often by luck than by skill.
We're still a leaderless population. The same things I've complained about since the beginning have not been rectified in any way.
I know that there's a lot more sympathy for Obama than I'm prepared to show him. We still haven't got these things, you know. I don't consider ''Don't Ask, Don't Tell'' some major victory. It's a small, dishonest political move that Clinton did to enchain us, and it's been unknotted. But it's for a very small percentage of us. Everybody acts as if it's a major thing for all of us, and it isn't. And he knows that. It's been a small gift he's given us to throw us a bone. The big gifts, he's not giving us – no one's giving us. And that hurts. I don't see that changing.
MW: What do you see as the big gifts?
KRAMER: Equality, pure and simple. From the Supreme Court. That we're allowed to get married, for a start, and get all the benefits that straight people get. That's it. That's the whole megillah, as the Jews say.
Anyway, we do not have equality. That's what the Bill of Rights says we're entitled to. That's what the Constitution says we're entitled to. And we don't have it. I don't see us getting it for a while, quite frankly, because the other side is willing to spend too much money to see that we don't get it. The Catholic Church, the Mormon Church, primarily, have very deep pockets to see that we don't get it. And they've learned this tactic that I don't think any of us saw coming, which is that the minute we win, find something to sue. Tie it up in the courts. And they can tie 'em up in courts until we're all dead. It's pathetic.
MW: Do you think that's more a failure of LGBT leadership or of mainstream leadership, or whatever you want to call it?
KRAMER: At the height of the Holocaust, when Jews were being shoveled into the ovens by the trainload, a great woman by the name of Hannah Arendt, who was a political philosopher – Jewish, obviously, and German – said, in essence, to all of the Jews in the world, ''Why are you allowing this to happen? Where is your army?'' She thought the Jews should actually have their own army, which was an unbelievable thing for a woman to say. And, in essence, she was saying, ''You brought all this on yourselves. You get what you deserve. You're not fighting back. And you've never fought back, ever, in your whole history.'' And I say that about us, too. People don't want to hear it.
Where are the ACT UPs today? Where are the anti-Vietnam [War] demonstrations of such amazing numbers today? This business with Wall Street is fine. I view it as rather disorganized, and I'm glad they're able to keep it together for so long. I don't hear what the demands are that are being met. The banks aren't folding up and going out of business.
I never understood why so few of us are willing to fight. At the height of the AIDS plague, from '91 to '96 when it was really awful – with how many millions of gay people, 10 [million], 20 [million], who the fuck knows how many, but a lot – there were no more than maybe 5,000 or 6,000 people in various ACT UP chapters around the country or in California with Project Inform who were willing to fight for their lives. I've never been able to understand that. So few of us were willing to fight to get those drugs. We got those drugs. ACT UP got those drugs. They're not there for any other reason.
And, now, all these people who want to get married so badly, where are the demonstrations? All these people who are married, don't they know that marriage is what I call a ''feel-good'' marriage – doesn't provide anything except nice, warm feelings? That seems to me to be cowardly – a cowardly evasion of the truth.
We're all in an enormous state of denial somehow – and we continue to be. And it doesn't get any better.
MW: Did you think the Get Equal White House protests about ''Don't Ask, Don't Tell'' were something like what you're describing?
KRAMER: Get Equal is something that was very well meaning that just seemed to come and go. It was well financed by a very rich man, but I didn't see it drawing the kind of support or troops that it needed. I don't know why activism is so scarce now.
MW: Do you even consider something like the Human Rights Campaign to be activism?
KRAMER: I think HRC is the dregs. I think it's the toilet of the gay movement.
MW: So, you have no opinion of HRC?
KRAMER: [Laughs.]
MW: That's a criticism leveled against them by people – maybe not in those exact terms – but, why?
KRAMER: What more can be said? I find them useless, and I find them perpetuating con jobs on all of us. Ass-kissers extraordinaire.
MW: One can criticize things that they do, but then, things like the hospital visitation memo, which might not matter....
KRAMER: What is the hospital visitation memo? We've been able to visit people in the hospital almost since the beginning. It was never a big problem here – '
MW: Maybe not here [in New York City], but it was in Florida, where Janice Langbehn wasn't allowed in to see her partner as she died. I grew up in Ohio, I can certainly see places there where a gay couple wouldn't be allowed to see each other. I feel like, at some point, things that might seem ''past'' for people in New York, California, D.C., have more relevance in other areas of the country that have anti-gay marriage amendments in their constitutions and it's going to be a long time going before they get to the place where New York is.
KRAMER: I think we should have learned by now that this "pebble at a time" attempt to make right is just that. They're pebbles. We need bricks. Until we're ready to throw bricks, we're not going to get anywhere. You can name any kinds of wonderful things [HRC has] done, but they still have not changed the basic problem: We are not equal. We do not have equality. They do not look at the big picture, they look at the small picture. As does every other gay person, who is just happy to go home at night and go back into their state of denials.
It's a very, very passive population, and that is our great tragedy. I love being gay, I love gays. It hurts me to say this. These are all lessons that I've learned painfully since 1981, but until we learn to fight back we get what we deserve.
MW: If you had those troops today, what would you do?
KRAMER: We have the troops, and we did it.
MW: But what would today's mission be?
KRAMER: Same thing. You go after the enemy. You organize yourself, and you divide up what you have to attack, and you go after it. It's no mystery.
ACT UP, at its height in New York, had 1,500 members. We had so many committees going after so many pressure points in getting us these drugs, in getting us this research. There were meetings that you could go to every night, seven nights a week. We were organized, and we were smart. And we got it. We had the smart ones figuring out the strategy, and we had the street troops. The good cop/bad cop. Every corporation works that way. The street troops were there to protest, to show you that we mean business. The strategy is being figured out and being delivered to them at their committee meetings, saying, ''We want this, or else.''
No big mystery. If there's 20 million of us, that's 20 million soldiers. When we get angry enough that we don't have what we deserve, when we get angry enough that the taxes we pay don't get us what they get everyone else, then maybe we'll do something about it. I don't see that happening. So, therefore, we stay like we are, and leave it to the HRCs of the world to pick up the tiny pebbles.
It's not a mysterious process. It's called visibility, anger, unity. We don't have that.
MW: We definitely don't have unity.
KRAMER: Name me one gay leader. Who have we got? I don't see anybody. I don't hear anybody saying what I'm saying to the extent that I'm saying it. Where is a gay leader that people can hear? We've never been able to birth him or her.
The few good ones we've had in the past – [former National Gay & Lesbian Task Force Executive Director] Ginny Apuzzo, [former Human Rights Campaign Fund co-chair] Vivian Shapiro, [former NGLTF Executive Director] Urvashi Vaid, interestingly all women – have all, in the end, given up in despair. My friend Rodger McFarlane committed suicide out of despair for all of this, after having built three wonderful organizations – tried to bring them all together, tried to make everyone work with each other, called all the leaders into Washington to meet and stop backbiting. It doesn't happen. And, I guess, my saying all this just depresses everybody into doing less.
MW: You don't see the birth of a perfect leader who would pull everybody together?
KRAMER: I wish I could. I wish I would make enough people angry enough to do something. I mean, ACT UP was anger. ACT UP was made out of anger and fear. I happen to think anger is a wonderfully healthy emotion. Until you have anger and fear, you don't have any kind of an activist movement.
MW: Do you think that pebbles – to continue your metaphor – actually decrease the fear?
KRAMER: I think the drugs decrease the fear, not the pebbles. Suddenly, we weren't all going to die. And, so you can go back into your state of denial instead of realizing that how we got those drugs should lead us to the next step, building on what we were able to accomplish. That's where organizations like GMHC have fallen down. When Paul Popham and I started the organization, we hoped that its future would be very different, that it would become an advocate for gay health, that we would work with getting recognition and insurance and all kinds of things. It didn't happen. I guess I haven't got much good to say about anything today, and I'm sorry.
MW: But there are accomplishments, there are changes.
KRAMER: I don't look to the past, I look to the future. I used to have this fight with Frank Kameny all the time, who had to constantly be congratulated about all the wonderful things that had been done because of him, instead of looking at the things that still hadn't been done.
I would criticize the past for not giving us the future, and, of course, he's the one that gave us the past in his eyes so he would get mad at me and say, ''Look at how much we've accomplished.'' Well, I don't think we've accomplished all that much. I really don't.
MW: You don't see gay lives as being lived differently, more openly, more successfully than they were 30 years ago?
KRAMER: A lot of that is because the culture has provided that for everybody. It's not for anything we can take credit for. I think we want to take credit for it – ''Look how far we've come'' – but we didn't do much to get there. More of us are here, more of us are out, because that's the nature of life today, for all minorities.
We still are treated like shit, and we still aren't equal. So, if you want to look at that as how far we've come, be my guest. I just won't join you.
I'm glad my play's out there. That's nice. I just want people to see what I'm talking about. People come out of this play crying, saying, ''What can I do? What can I do?'' Well, the play tells you what you can do -- but I don't see you doing it.

New Controversial HIV/AIDSad

Need I say more?

"Aunt Ida Pieces A Quilt" by Melvin DIxon

They brought me someof his clothes. The hospital gown,
those too-tight dungaress, his blue choir robe
withthe gold sash.  How that boy could sing!
His favorite color in a necktie. A Sunday shirt.
What I'm gonna do with al this stuff?
I can remember Junie without this business.
My neice Francine say they quilting all over the country.
So many good boys like her boy, gone.

At my age I ain't studying no needle and thread.
My eyes ain't so good now and my fingers lock in a fist,
they so eaten up with arthritis. This old back
don't take kindly to bending over a frame no more.
Francine say ain't I a mess carrying on like this.
I could make wo quilts the time I spend running my mouth.

Just cut his name out of the cloths, stitch something nice
about him.  Something to bring him back, You can do it,
Francine say.  Best sewing our family ever had.
Quilting ain't that easy, I say.  Never was easy.
Y'all got to help me remember him good.

Most of my quilts was made down South. My mama
and my mama's mama taught me.  Popped me on the tail
if I missed a stitch or threw the patter out of line.
I did "Bright Star"and "Lonesome Square" and Rally Round,"
what many folks don't bother with nowadays. Then Elmo and me
married came North where the cold Connecticut
cuts you like a knife.  We was warm, though.
We had sackcloth and calico and cotton, 100% pure.
What they got now but polyester rayon. Factory made.

Let me tell you something.  In all my quilts there's a secret
nobody knows.  Every last one of them got my name Ida
stitched on the back side in red thread.
Thats where Junie got his flair. Don't let nobody fool  you.
When he got the youth choir standing up and singing
the whole church would rock.  He'd throw up his hands
from them wide blue sleeves and the church would hush
right down to the funeral parlor fans whisking the air.
He'd toss his head back and holler and we'd all cry holy.

And never mind his too-tight dungaress.
I caught him switching down the street one Saturdy night,
and I seen him more than once.  I said, Junie,
you ain't got to let the world know all your business.
Who cared where he went when he wanted to have fun.
He'd be singing his heart out come Sunday morning.

When Francine say she gonna hang this quilt in the church
I like to fall out. A quilt ain't no showpiece,
it's to keep you warm.  Francine say it can do both.
Now I ain't so old fashioned I can't change,
but I made Francine come over and bring her daughter
Belinda.  We cut and tacked his name JUNIE.
Just plain and simple."JUNIE, our boy."
Cut the J in the blue, the U in gold. N in dunagrees
just as tight as you please. The I from the hospital gown
and the white shirt he wore First Sunday.  Belinda
put the necktie E in the cross-stitch I showed her.

Wouldn't you know we got to talking about Junie.
We could smell him in the cloth.
Underarm. Afro Sheen pomade. Gravy stains.
 I forgot all about my arthritis.
When Francine left me to finish up, I swear
I heard Junie giggling right along with me
as I stitched IDA on the back side in red thread.

Francine say she gonna send the quilt to Washington
like folks doing from all 'cross the country,
so many good people gone. Baies, mothers, fathers
and bos like our Junie.  Francine say
they gonna piece this quilt to another one,
another name and another patch
all in a larger quilt getting larger and larger.

Maybe we all like that, waiting to be pieced.
Well, I don;t know about Washington
We need Juie here with us.  And Maxine,
she cousin May's husband's sister's people,
she having a baby and here comes winter already,
The cold cutting like knives.  Now where did I put my needle?


Melvin Dixon died of AIDS October 26, 1992

Larry Kramer on AIDS 2011

"Please know that AIDS is a worldwide plague. Please know that no country in the world, including this one, especially this one, has ever called it a plague, or dealt with it as a plague. Please know that there is no cure. Please know that after all this time the amount of money being spent to find a cure is still miniscule, still almost invisible, still impossible to locate in any national health budget, and still totally uncoordinated.




"Please know that here in America case numbers continue to rise in every category. In much of the rest of the world — Russia, India, Southeast Asia, Africa — the numbers of the infected and the dying are so grotesquely high they are rarely acknowledged. Please know that all efforts at prevention and educations continue their unending record of abject failure. Please know that there is no one in charge of this plague. This is a war for which there is no general and for which there has never been a general. How can you win a war with no one in charge?" - Larry Kramer, from a letter handed to patrons attending the revival of his landmark play, The Normal Heart.

Tribute to Dame Elizabeth Taylor

Newest Poetry

Ok the assignment for this class poem was taking the abstract ino the concrete.  An item of our choosing, I think once you read this you will get it right away

“How Much Did I Really Embrace”

The soft morning glow washes over the sky
A quietness of pink and amber floods over my head
The futon that overlooks Santa Monica beach
My naked form sits, my eyes see the article
Of loss beyond all words and thoughts

It was in that morning glow of day
When the sun turned black as sack cloth
The whole of the hidden moon became as blood
Your presence entered into my very existence
The stars did not fall from the skies
But my life has never been the same

It spoke of a cancerous being
A shadowed affliction
Of beautiful buff bathhouse boys
Beyond the ecstasy of steam and sex
The long slow fading of us began
But it wouldn’t be me
No mere bathhouse whore boy am I

Your strong masculine form filled the patio door
Strength of wisdom the serenity of your beauty
Your nakedness evident of work, time and dedication
The whiteness of your tan lines framing your form
Is that a blemish there on you thigh
But the thoughts of the pending monster
Never crossed our minds

Two years later
Oh the fatality of it all
The script written in hell itself
The deft hands of the serial butcher
Have ripped you asunder
Torn you from the arms that love you

Ravenous sulfur smoking laughter
From the monsters mouth doth spew
After all isn’t it to be just
The beautiful buff bathhouse boys
Religious zealots enforce that theory
Can that be true, signs attest but are they right
That only faggots queers and sissy boys
Deserve this fate

A time of white lilies has come
As early as the first day dawning of spring
Forty-seven calling hours
The people who have shared my life
Only in seven weeks’ time
How did I survive
Do phantom arms hold me up

The silent serial killer stalking us
Smothering our very community in darkest byways
While in the midst of love and passion
Turning that into the cold ashen corpse
Their names sewn and filling the Mall
More than their memories buried in those left alive

The old spiritual choir long ago ended
The pews all but empty and worn
The espresso ugliness of sulfur weeping
Of deep blue demons from Hades bowels
Twenty-five years later
Millions are dead
I stopped counting my friends
Stolen from me at six hundred
NAMES

I have faced this deft handed butcher of lives
Its antiquity ragged cloak weighing as lead
In the firm grip of my hands
How much have I let this demon embrace me
From within the depths of

The insane asylum that is my mind
What was the prison of the straight jacket
This evil must not take reign of my being
How much of this did I really embrace

This blue black espresso ugliness of demon
Has occupied my very body for twenty years
Pills to drown its goliath power over me
What have I learned
That the fear of this demon really is
Has been found out and I alone know it
That we are living longer than we were
The dawn of pink and amber
Once more can flood even the Castro
That the horror, the sorrow and the fear
Have all been very real
But the only power
This blue black espresso ugliness possesses
Is now and forever more
Only what we give it

How then can my brothers you
Not know of this serial butcher with deft hands
That we flock back to the ecstasy of steam and sex
To what was the horrors of the underground
No more just beautiful buff bathhouse boys
The rampant serial butcher of children in Africa
Thousands slaughtered in India the hatchets man’s dream come true
Have we forgotten the blue black espresso ugliness
Of that demon
Or is he after all under control only his voice left
Inside my head

Self written Poetry

All you wanted was snow

Falling to the ground
Burying everything in sight
Funny because
You never really liked it

I called for hospice care
So I could keep you home
My fragile withering bird
I can clearly see every single rib

Eighty-three pounds
Standing five foot one
I cry myself to sleep
Watching you slowly
Fade away from me

Hospital bed arrives
You’re tired and lay down
Never to get up again
Eleven days of fading

Angel’s wings I hear
The snow finally begins to fall
It’s 7:30 a.m. December 21st
Sixteen years of fighting
AIDS has finally won

Rest in peace my love
While I linger still
Fighting ever
To be brave, to be true

Anderson Cooper 360 AIDS Special tonight

Hope Survives: 30 Years of AIDS will Air Friday, January 14th at 9pm ET
CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° will dedicate a special hour to AIDS in America as we approach 30 years since the first diagnosis. The special will focus on the role stigma continues to play in the spread of HIV both here in the U.S. and around the world, and how through education and scaled up prevention there is hope for an HIV-free future generation. The show will also explore the latest medical breakthroughs and discoveries.
In addition to Anderson Cooper’s in-depth interview with Sir Elton John about his foundation’s work to end the disease, the show will also include interviews with Academy-award winning actress Mo’nique, Project Runway’s Mondo Guerra, Phill Wilson, Founder and Executive Director of the Black AIDS Institute and co-founder of Greater Than AIDS, a new national movement developed with the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The special hour will also feature emotional clips from famous personalities on their personal “Deciding Moment” that changed how they think about the disease and inspired them to get involved, including Academy-Award winning actress Susan Sarandon, actress Sharon Stone, singer Barry Manilow, basketball legend Kareem Abdul Jabbar, comedienne Margaret Cho, Author Maya Angelou and Jeanne White Ginder, the mother of the late Ryan White.

Sir Elton John and his Elton John AIDS Foundation have been leaders in the fight against AIDS for over 18 years, serving vulnerable at-risk populations without judgment, reducing HIV-related stigma and discrimination, educating people about HIV/AIDS, and supporting science-based, culturally appropriate HIV prevention programming.
“I’m deeply grateful to CNN and Anderson Cooper for focusing a special hour of programming to bring attention to the continuing impact of HIV/AIDS, not only internationally, but also right here in the United States,” said Sir Elton John “We’ve all become way too complacent about a deadly epidemic that is only getting bigger, especially when we already have creative readily accessible prevention methods that we know to be highly effective at curtailing the spread of this disease right now.”

Established in the US in 1992 and in the UK in 1993 by Sir Elton John, the Elton John AIDS Foundation (EJAF) is one of the world's leading nonprofit organizations supporting innovative HIV prevention programs, efforts to eliminate HIV/AIDS-related stigma and discrimination, and direct care and support services for people living with the disease. Together, both entities have raised $220 million for worthy programs in 55 countries around the globe since inception. For more information, please visit www.ejaf.org.