GAY HEAD IN INFECTED SPACES

We met thru mutual friends, around mid eighties, brought together by the aids crisis. His lover was among the first ones to die and I was caring for my roommate at the time. A crisis can serve to bring out the best of humanity. It did with with him. The West Village was not the neighborhood it is today. No fabulous queens walking around all dressed-up in black looking for the “restaurante de moda” or the latest trend in whatever is fashionable at the moment. The once bohemian neighborhood looked, at times, like the yard of a sanatorium for the walking dead. He was not sick and, for whatever reasons, did not become infected with the virus. After so many memorials, burials, he decided to go back to where he was from originally, Wisconsin, and live a more conventional life. I stayed in New York, and when time was ripe, moved to another neighborhood in the city. The Village apartment and neighborhood where I lived for quite a few decades was to close to pains and memories that needed to be put away in the long term space where our soul stores them. I ran into him recently. We were happy to see each other, and that was it: only the joy of seeing that we were alive was the sensation felt; nothing else could bring us together again. He married another Wisconsian, and from the conversation I concluded that, had it not been for the anti-homosexual climate spreading itself around, he would support the kind of neo-fascist-racist-petite-beourgoisie mentality running the country today. What was even more surprising is that -my feeling- he thought he was part of a world that he was not nor ever will be from, ruled by the book (1954), by Gay Head, Etiquette for Young Moderns: How to Succeed in Your Social Life.