Wednesday, January 28

Angels in America

I Replayed (which is like Tivoed, only we like it better in our house) HBO's Angels in America a while ago and I finally got around to watching it. It was a compelling film that didn't get my full attention because it's hard to give anything full attention when you're trying to bounce a Doodlebug on your knee to keep him happy. I know the film had its critics, but as I never saw the play (it opened when I was still in New York, and I remember wanting to go, but never going. I can't remember if it was a financial issue or a laziness issue), I thought it was moving. Part of it is that I remember those days so well. When I was just out of college, I volunteered as a "buddy" with GMHC. I worked as a buddy for about three years before I burnt out and then I did easier work for another year. AIDS, while as serious as ever today (I am in no way trying to trivialize today's AIDS epidemic), was different back then. For starters, in 1989, it was a fairly immediate death sentence. No one lived with AIDS. This was when people knew how HIV was transmitted but much of the public was still frightened that they could get it from toilet seats or from sharing a water glass. This was when "Silence=Death" began appearing all over the City. In college, just a couple of year earlier, my friends and I had all trooped in for HIV tests from the city, because "you never know." All of us sweat out that two week period between taking the test and getting the result, even though I don't think a single one of us truly had anything to worry about (I take that back--one friend was a former junkie, but the rest of us were just pseudo-cool East Village-wannabes who had never done anything to seriously warrant the test). To show you how much things have changed, in those days, the nurse administering the test tried to talk me out of taking it. "You should have safe sex no matter what," I was told. "And if you find out you have it, there's nothing you can do about it. So why ruin your life by finding out?"

My first "client" was a sweet guy who fired me from the case. Yes, you can be fired from volunteer work. In my naivete, I asked my team leader (we worked in teams so we'd have support), very concerned, what happened, and he told me (in his sweet Georgian accent), "Honey, you aren't blonde enough and you don't have a dick." My next client, Glenn, wasn't so picky and we were together not quite a year and a half. I don't want to delve into the relationship here--I've written about it enough elsewhere--but in the film, one of the men is a Mormom and his mother (played by Meryl Streep) keeps talking about "ho-mo-sex-uals," in that way the emphasizes every syllable. The character in some ways is so out there that my first thought was "too fake, too cliche." But she struck a chord with me and I realized she was incredibly like Glenn's mother and that she was the truest character in the film. Glenn came from Texarkana. He wasn't very close with his family--femme gay ballet dancers apparently aren't the most welcome in some parts of this country--yet toward the end, his parents came up to visit. I think they appreciated my presence not necessarily because I was helping their son, but because I was a straight haven for them to retreat to. At the end, when Glenn was having hallucinations about Korean men at the foot of his bed, his mother would wail to me, "Oh, why did the Lord make my son a ho-mo-sex-ual?" I swear, somehow she managed to add a few extra syllables to the word. The difference between her and the Meryl Streep character is that the Streep character redeemed herself. Glenn's mother never did. In the end I felt bad because the mother wrote me a nice letter and I never responded. I didn't know what to say to her. Glenn and I had such a difficult go of things (many times my GMHC team leaders tried to pull me from the case) that I didn't know what to tell her. So I just let it go. Sometimes that's all you can do.

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