And the Boy Played ON

Are you Capital L Living?

I think, before you go any further, you ought know I am a white guy. I think that’ll be important later. I think, later on, you’ll be able to tell anyway.

There are only three things that I tend to think about these days: swimming, banjo, and AIDS.

Believe it or not, somehow these are all related.

Allow me.

When I was younger, I loved swimming, and I loved playing music. So, my parents found ways for me to do both often with other young people who liked them.

As a result, I spent a decade with my head tucked down, either counting strokes while looking at a single black line or counting rests nestled between five of them, all while trying to catch my breath.

But, as the years wore on, I grew to hate the expected rigor of it all.

It began to feel like there were a lot of innate questions and answers being recited in my presence: “If you weren’t getting faster, were you even really practicing? Just another body taking up a lane.” “If you weren’t playing more precisely than you did yesterday, was your practice worth anything? Just blowing hot air.”

As I graduated to the age where I could do more fruitful things with my time (like getting drunk and having sex), I left those grinding activities by the wayside. They were relegated to fun evidence of a time when masochism was a virtue, when I was too young to know better.

But, as I grew older still, I began to miss each of them in their own ways.

So, some eight years after I last drove home cold and soggy in the dark from a practice, I’m willingly getting myself to my local aquatics center and pumping my muscles full of rapidly deoxygenating blood.

Similarly, seven years after I last attended a jam, I’ve picked up an instrument - this time a string instrument rather than a woodwind - and I routinely can’t put it down.

I think a large part of why I chose to do this is because now I don’t have this overhanging ‘should’ in my brain. I don’t feel I should be better at freestyling a mile in the water. I don’t feel I should be able to frail Cripple Creek at 120 bpm.

When I’m in the water, I merely am swimming.

When I’m strumming, I merely am playing.

The activity is the point. Whatever accomplishments I can achieve are just nice stories I hope I can tell one day.

So where does AIDS fall into this? Yes, let me get to that.

See, even before I realized I was bisexual, I knew what AIDS was and what it did to people: it deleted them from life - socially and corporeally - seemingly in an instant.

Of course, I got older, and I came out and was lucky enough to actually speak with people who’d actually survived the worst of the AIDS crisis between 1981-1996.

They played the part of Tommy Boatwright in our conversations, showing me their own version of a rolodex of cardboard tombstones.

They flipped through photo albums with me so I could see into the eyes of young men and women who looked hauntingly like my friends who were still breathing.

And, most of all, they told me about both how much and how little they thought about AIDS during the worst of it.

Some of them had gone to over 20 funerals in the same year.

Yet, they still made time for bocce.

Some of them were there at the Pyramid Club where Madonna held her AIDS benefit, memorializing the friends they thought they’d grow old with.

Yet, before and after, they still wrote short Western stories.

Some of them protested for weeks - even while sick - against the ordinances that shut down San Francisco’s bath houses in 1984, or partook in targeting City Hall with ACT UP in 1989.

Yet, they still worked their ways through cook books sometimes as a fun way to bond with their partner, and others to remember them by.

All of them had, at one point or another, thought they’d be dead a generation and a half ago, but here they are. And, here so many of them aren’t.

The more I spoke to survivors, the more it became clear to me: to catch AIDS during its worst period (in the US anyway) was not so much of a deletion (for everyone), so much as it was a degradation of life itself that you had to fight against.

Still, to me, as a younger bisexual person, their stories always seemed insane.

I wondered to myself “How could they even find the joy in such little things when the rope of their life was being burnt from the inside out? Would it all not feel like a farce?”

Well, I can confidently say now, the answer is no.

Now, make no mistake, I am not dying of AIDS or anything else (cigars are healthy, remember that kids), but I do feel like I am being suffocated daily.

I’m sure you do too.

(Note before we go further: no, I am not equating the two and, if it comes off that way, then I apologize. I’ll try and edit this later.)

With news that merely being pro-immigrant is enough to get you labeled as a potential domestic terrorist, and with I.C.E doing things as dastardly as zip-tying children - all happening within a year of Trump’s election - it is hard to not feel like my spirit is dying.

Like that, no matter what it is that I do, I am still destined to a fate of annihilation sooner-rather-than-later.

It feels, for the first time, like I understand in the smallest way the terror of undressing oneself and finding a lesion. Only, for me, it is opening my eyes to a headline that stretches out its skeletal hand through the screen and whispers, ‘Do you hear the clock ticking?’.

I do.

But I still go to the pool. I still spend hours some days practicing banjo.

Why? I don’t know.

What else am I going to do? Sit and wait until it - they - comes for me?

Isn’t that exactly what they want: for me to psychologically arrest myself before they ever knock at my door?

To feel as though I am an enemy, and that my only logical fate is to be taken out of sight?

But I don’t know what, if anything, this activity leads to. I don’t know what my best looks like in either arena. I don’t know if it’s worth it for me to even have a best anymore.

Maybe that’s the point, though. Maybe I don’t need to care what my best looks like. I just care that I get to keep being mostly okay, with finding joy in something.

But I can hear you already: “Oh great, another asshole about to tell me that ‘joy is resistance.‘”

And you’re right to be pissed at me.

What the fuck does that even mean when our institutions are being sledgehammered in broad daylight? When people are being disappeared into the night? When we have online personalities and even well-known activists telling us to smile more while the world burns?

As if a good attitude could stop a deportation raid.

As if dancing could defund a war machine.

As if my banjo practice matters when kids are zip-tied.

Joy is not itself any form of resistance, genuinely. The survivors I got to know taught me that.

At a point, they had to stop partying and go out and get arrested.

They still had to get dragged and beaten by cops to have a shot at living longer lives.

But I am beginning to see the radicality of the sentence they all said to me at still point: I am still living.

Each of those words, itself, chafes at the minds of the people who’d rather I never say another word.

I - the audacity of my continued existence.

Am - present tense.

Still - despite everything.

Living.

Living.

I don’t know what meaningful resistance looks like at this point, though. I can’t lie.

Much of the groundwork that the very AIDS activists I grew up to admire has since been made hella illegal.

Just ask Peter Staley if he thinks any pro-Palestinian activist would get away with their lives if they chained themselves inside the office of, say, Lockheed Martin the same way he did when he chained himself inside Burroughs-Wellcome in 1989.

They’d be shot. Or worse.

And with that in mind, I don’t fault anyone who thinks it’s all worthless, who flirts with ending it all.

How could I? When the playbook for change has been criminalized and the horizon looks darker each morning?

But what I do know is that the one thing that the powers that be want most of all is for people like you and me to be distracted. Constantly looking at our phones, frenetic like a hit dog, ready to throw our hands up the moment the door is kicked down.

So while joy itself may not feel like its own complete form of resistance, perhaps joy when paired with a little bit of mindfulness is a bit more complete. Hell, it can be partying till you’re blue in the face, too, honestly, I don’t care: so long as you have something that grounds you and reminds you ‘oh, right, this is why I want to keep being alive - to live like this,’ something that makes you ready to break a bottle rather than break down?

Then I’d say throw yourself into that.

The people who survived AIDS did that, not as distraction, but as a way of saying: you will not reduce me to my terror. I will keep practicing being here. I am refusing to rehearse being dead.

So I keep going back.

To the chlorine and the cold water. To the strings that leave marks on my fingertips.

Not because there’s some finish line where I’ll finally be good enough.

But because I just need to keep swimming and playing.

And, to both, I just need to keep breathing.