I don't know why but this year, World AIDS Day was really intense.
UPDATE: I started this post last World AIDS Day. Turns out, this year was pretty intense as well. I have been thinking a lot about (as I was last year) all the lost fucking potential from so many amazing gay men who have died, especially early on. During the plague years I was young enough that I didn't have to experience all of that, but I was aware of it. As I age, particularly now that I'm solidly mid-thirties and have had a little mortality wake up, I am just so overwhelmed by all that was lost in those deaths. It's so hard to fathom all the creative and productive potential--all the ways that lives would have been touched. I was thinking about the Flirtations song "Living in Wartime" and although I hate the war metaphor, it makes more sense to me now. A whole big swath of young men just wiped out. It's unbelievable, really.
Anyway, last year I stumbled on this, a searchable database of all obituaries that have appeared in the Bay Area Reporter since it began publishing them in 1979. It's this unbelievable testimony to some of the lives lost. I started at the beginning last year and have been making my way through the archive, reading the obituaries, one at a time. Morbid maybe, but I really think of it as a kind of witness, a way of not forgetting, a way of wrapping my head around all that loss. I think it would be awesome to have a whole show of The Stoop dedicated to this--have the theme be the living telling a story about someone who had died of AIDS. A way of preserving, of honoring. Everyone had a story. Here are some of theirs...
UPDATE: I started this post last World AIDS Day. Turns out, this year was pretty intense as well. I have been thinking a lot about (as I was last year) all the lost fucking potential from so many amazing gay men who have died, especially early on. During the plague years I was young enough that I didn't have to experience all of that, but I was aware of it. As I age, particularly now that I'm solidly mid-thirties and have had a little mortality wake up, I am just so overwhelmed by all that was lost in those deaths. It's so hard to fathom all the creative and productive potential--all the ways that lives would have been touched. I was thinking about the Flirtations song "Living in Wartime" and although I hate the war metaphor, it makes more sense to me now. A whole big swath of young men just wiped out. It's unbelievable, really.
Anyway, last year I stumbled on this, a searchable database of all obituaries that have appeared in the Bay Area Reporter since it began publishing them in 1979. It's this unbelievable testimony to some of the lives lost. I started at the beginning last year and have been making my way through the archive, reading the obituaries, one at a time. Morbid maybe, but I really think of it as a kind of witness, a way of not forgetting, a way of wrapping my head around all that loss. I think it would be awesome to have a whole show of The Stoop dedicated to this--have the theme be the living telling a story about someone who had died of AIDS. A way of preserving, of honoring. Everyone had a story. Here are some of theirs...
