Learn From It

9 years, 4 months, 16 days, 8 hours and about 15 minutes ago, Allen E. Howland, formerly of San Francisco, CA; Midland, TX; Ft Lauderdale, FL and Holyoke, CO, died.

Approximately 12 hours ago I got to hear Jerry Falwell offer his expertise on the quality and value of same-sex relationships.

You'd think after all the politicizing in the intervening years, I'd become somewhat inured to egregious selfishness and egomania of the Christian Extremists, Right-Wing fuckwits and small-potatoes, petty apers, who offer their “opinions” about the abstractions of homosexuality, marriage and moral values as if—well, I was going to say as if they were academic considerations, but most of those people couldn't find academia or gravitas with both hands and a flashlight—as if they were talking points and nothing more.

But no. It never gets easier.

With Sam, well, he's here to fight that insensitive, rather un-Christian crap, and we're both here for each other, a warm, safe haven against the storms of hypocrisy, crass judgment and hypocritical harangues. With Allen, though, as well as with George (his partner before me who also died of HIV-related causes), I am at once thankful that he doesn't have to endure the ongoing imprecations, the hate disguised as “Christian love”, the vitriol of the desperate egomania of the after-lifers, judgmental idiots who pass the judgy buck to Jesus.

Though I was oblivious in the early years to AIDS (née GRID)—I mean, if the President of the United States didn't bother with it and I wasn't even close to being out of the closet yet, how bad can it be, right?—I learned quickly. I was horrified at the world, horrified with myself, for not being more aware. There was no World AIDS day back then. Back then, the Federal government under Reagan couldn't say the word, much less fund an effort to stop it. Back then, the City of San Francisco under then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein, spent over three times the amount that the Federal Government did on AIDS-related programs, including basic and clinical research.

I could rail on all day and be consumed by the ignorance of the past and the unconscionable stupidity of the present, but to me, that's not what World AIDS Day is about. It's about the future. It's about remembering the mistakes and misery of the past so that we never have a past like this again. It's about thinking and doing now, not wallowing.

Allen Howland, George Grable and far too many others are gone from us. The world is less because of their absence. But I'm still here; you're still here. Politics, religion, ego aside, people are still dying. People are still seroconverting. People are still getting sick.

Remember this. Especially today. And do you part, even if that part is nothing more than making sure you don't seroconvert or if you have already, making sure that HIV stops with you.