happy mardi gras?

saturday is my slow day. sleeping in, reading, several breakfasts, spinning records, J dropping in for a chat, cat on my lap, me sinking into the bed, the bath, the couch. i like saturdays.

i finished reading Patti Smith's just kids. i spilled some tears into the bath.

despite loving it, it left me a bit angry. because it's another story of another dead homo. such a familiar story. it's another HIV/AIDS tragi-drama, this time beginning and ending with Robert Mapplethorpe's death. it's another death that arrives too early. it's another incomprehensible loss (for author and reader).

the book is more that this too. the book is powerful in reminding me of the need to rebel, to push on, to make art, and to make life happen. throughout the book there's an almighty sense of anger. and beauty (writing and art) spills from this anger. and that's somewhat validating for my own anger. and so the early death is fitting in this context, as it generates more fuel for creating life/art.

only beautiful writing can move me to tears. and the dead homo narrative is a powerful generator of tears because it reflects a pain familiar to me. not because i've lost someone to HIV/AIDS - i've never been to one those funerals - but because i've experienced much art and literature that arises from it. i often find myself reading the work of dead homos and getting upset at my loss. the sense of injustice is not only theirs, but mine/ours, because we have to learn to live without more of their work.

i'm angry that i'll never get to read a 4th volume of Foucault's history of sexuality. i'm angry that Patti Smith had to watch her friend die. i'm angry about Keith Haring. i wept all the way through Timothy Conigrave's holding the man. i've shed many tears for AIDS-related death, and i'll keep shedding. and no doubt i'll keep wanting to punch holes in walls, in the hope to bust through to a place where there's no more loss. but people still die, so it goes on.

and perhaps every homo reader, or coffin-bearer, thinks 'that could've been me'.

yet the story of the dead homo, killed before his time, and because of his circumstances, stretches long before HIV/AIDS. i read those books too, and i cry some more. i punch another wall. perhaps because i start to think that it's the homo's lot to suffer. he must fall, in death or in misery. cast out or down, in a casket or on his knees, he embodies the eternally sad pervert.

and maybe that's why so many of them want to get married - to break the curse of the tragi-fag narrative. but possibly only creating another sad narrative of the tragic hetero-fag, as helen razer so beautifully points out.

tonight is the mardi gras parade. i guess if i had my way the crowd would be marching from a place of anger, frustration, and a need to tear down institutions (like marriage). and i can't help hearing many whispers from many graves, and the echoes of much art and activism, all saying "that's not what we fought for".