The rose Fiestaware teapot filled with Jon Reilley’s ashes lived on an upper shelf of the wooden cabinet in my dads’ dining room. A tall, dusky pink vessel, rippled in the glaze where its handle joined its body and topped with a pert lid, it sat quietly throughout my childhood and I took little notice of it or of the way it clashed with the rest of our home’s aesthetic. It never occurred to me to open it or look inside. I did, however, take some notice of the term “Fiestaware,” which seemed to come up often in my home. I wasn’t curious enough to do any research or ask any questions, but I sensed somehow that it wasn’t a common term in every household. I knew instinctively that my dads talking about Fiestaware so much had something to do with them being gay. It was also implicitly clear to me from a young age that having a teapot filled with your friend’s ashes was not precisely normal, and the fact that we did was in some way linked to my dads’ gayness.
I have three gay parents: a lesbian mom and two gay dads. All three have been out and active in the queer community since long before I was born. They met at Fenway Community Health Center, an LGBT health center in Boston, where my mom Jenifer ran the Alternative Insemination Program and my biological dad, Robb, worked as an HIV counselor. My other dad Rick had avoided getting tested out of fear and the hopelessness of no real options if he tested positive. Most of his friends had HIV and he assumed he did, too, and intended to live his life as if he were positive. But a longtime roommate, Malcom, who was a nurse and already HIV+, begged him to get tested so that once drugs that successfully treated HIV became available, he’d have a chance. On New Years Eve of 1989, Rick promised Malcom, too sick at the time to join in the festivities, that he would get tested by the end of the month of January. It took Rick until late February to follow through, and Malcom was dead a year later, but at that test Rick met Robb. A little over a month later, after postponing his return appointment to attend yet another friend’s memorial service, Rick returned to Fenway and got negative results. A week later he asked Robb out; 2024 marked their 35th year together, and their 20th wedding anniversary.
I was born into the gay world at the height of the AIDS epidemic. In my house, when you hear the name of someone from my dads’ past who isn’t alive anymore, it’s generally safe to assume that they died of AIDS. I can’t separate my experience of being raised by gay people from my experience of being raised by people who watched a lot of their friends die young, and at some point assumed they’d die young themselves. To me, there is nothing queerer than the matter-of-fact way that the dead are talked about, joked about. When I ask about the story of the teapot, Rick says it was heavy, when it had Jon in it. “He was tall. There were a lot of bones.”
Talk of death and the dead permeated a visit with my parents’ friends Jonathan Scott and Mike McGuill when my dads and I stayed the weekend at their beautiful, colorful house tucked back in the hills of Provincetown in 2022. Within the first few minutes of our arrival, at the mention of an old mutual friend, Jonathan exclaimed that he couldn’t believe it’d been 30 years since that person died. Mike replied, “everyone died 30 years ago.”
Over breakfast on their balcony, Jonathan, Mike, and my dads took turns telling me about the old days, before everyone died and I was born. Rick met Jonathan in the late ‘70s through a group of friends with a shared love of Esther Williams, a 1930s Olympic swimmer-turned-film star with a gay cult following. The group would gather on the beach at Herring Cove with bottles of champagne, strawberries, Pepperidge Farm cookies, and Cape Cod potato chips to share with whomever happened to pass by. Some would dress in drag and give water ballet performances in the ocean, in the style of Williams’ films. The group grew year after year. Contingents from different cities, each with their own variation on the Esther costume scheme, would make grand entrances to the party. Jonathan, who was fit and a good swimmer, would assume the role of Esther Williams. At a strategic point in the party he would disappear behind the dunes only to emerge theatrically in a fur coat, which he’d shed to reveal a women’s bathing suit, topping off the ensemble with a tiara, Carmen Miranda hat or retro bathing cap. Robb made it to the very last of the Esther Williams parties, in 1990, not long after he’d started dating Rick. The planning of the party got to be too much to continue after over a decade, and after many of the original group had died.
Our plates emptied save for residual pools of maple syrup and the odd raspberry as Jonathan and Rick quibbled about who died when. Rick has a list of the death dates of each of his friends on graph paper torn from an old planner notebook. He’d gotten rid of the rest of the notebook but held on to this one sheet, later taking a photo of it on his phone to reference in moments like these. “Memorial Anniversaries” is underlined at the top, beneath which names were added in different colored pen over the years. Some dates are followed only by first names; others have brief parentheticals with a detail about the death: “January 19th, 1991 Malcom (in his sleep);” “Sun Dec. 21st, 1986 (early morning) Jon Rielley.” In 1987, Doug Hershaw and Keith Desmond both died in the month of June, but the list doesn’t have exact dates, just their names in pencil one after the other. Almost everyone on the list died before I was born. The only one I remember meeting was Ed Shannon (“June 1998”) who had red hair and a dog who could howl the tune of Happy Birthday, and did so at his funeral. It strikes me now, looking at it, that it is not organized chronologically as one might expect, but rather by month, for the purposes of referencing which death anniversaries should be remembered at each time of the year.
I think of Provincetown, lovingly referred to as “Ptown” by most of its regulars, as a sort of holy land for queer people. At the edge of the continent, it is the fist at the end of the arm of Cape Cod extending off Massachusetts into the Atlantic. I grew up pilgrimaging there with my parents, indulging in Commercial Street’s many candy stores and Shop Therapy’s abundance of tie dye clothing. My dads would drop me off at the public library when they went to Tea Dance, an outdoor dance club open from 4-7pm, tea time. I would peruse the books in the kids section, an entire level of the library with a giant wooden ship taking up most of its floor space, masts extending through the ceiling into the third floor, surrounded by bookshelves. When I got bored or the library closed, I’d wander down Commercial from the East End to the West, scaling the stairs next to the Boat Slip to peek over the deck where my dads laughed and talked amongst throngs of vacationing gays. I distinctly remember thinking that I couldn’t wait to be 21 just so I could join them there.
Jon Rielley was one of Rick’s best friends, and a member of the Esther Williams party contingent. He lived with Rick and Malcom after being kicked out of his family’s house when he came out. Jon was a house cleaner and introduced Rick to the cleaning business that was Rick’s primary work in the early years of my life, when he’d cart me with him to his clients’ homes, gleefully bouncing around without a seat belt in the back of his utility van.
Kevin Clarke and Jon Reilley were partners, and both avid collectors of Fiestaware. They proudly displayed their collection of dishes in their kitchen, which was wallpapered in the Fiesta colors. Jon found the teapot at a big antiques market. It was apparently a big deal because rose is a relatively rare color of Fiestaware, and teapots are even rarer. So he bought it, probably not anticipating that it would one day become his home. Jon was one of the first of my dads’ friends to die of AIDS, on Sunday, December 21st, 1986. He was 32. He had never reconciled with his family. Kevin wasn’t mentioned in the obituary, but he’s the one who took home Jon’s ashes and put them in the teapot. When Kevin himself was dying, he asked Rick to take the teapot. Rick wondered if he should ask Jon’s family again if they wanted his remains, but Kevin said Jon would have rolled in his grave at that suggestion, if he’d had a grave. Kevin died on Friday November 8th, 1991 and his family spread his ashes along with half of Jon’s together in the dunes of Provincetown. The other half remained in the teapot, where they sat in my dads’ dining room for the next 25 years.
I never met Jon or Kevin, both dead before I was born (but Rick says, “you know who Kevin is. He’s in that picture in the bathroom. He has no shirt on. That’s Kevin.” Photos of naked men in the bathroom: yet another feature of my house that I always had a feeling people with straight parents didn’t share). Still, they managed to leave me a part of their legacy. At my baby shower in the fall of 1993, surrounded by 20 of their friends, the last gift my parents opened came with a big bow but no tag. My parents choked up in front of their remaining friends as they tore open the wrapping and drew out a green bowl, a yellow mug, and a yellow divided baby plate. Fiestaware from Kevin, care of his sister, for the next generation he would never meet.
Once when I was little, sitting with all three of my parents at my dads’ kitchen counter, I mentioned that I liked the word “queer.” They laughed and I felt a bit embarrassed, not sure why it was funny. I still think it’s a beautiful word. The rare first consonant and the sound of something flicking open, widening out, the rhyme with “peer,” the sense of looking intently, seeing through a dark hallway to an opening, an uncertain path to a space of possibility.
We’d polished off our pancakes and pushed away from the table, the sun getting stronger through the ripe August leaves overhead as I asked Jonathan and Mike about their own experiences with HIV. It’s remarkable how forthcoming they both were with these intimate details about their lives, but I got the sense that they had the practical perspectives of public health professionals, and they’d told these stories many times before. It took Jonathan two years to pick up his test results. Like Rick, he was scared and knew there was nothing to be done if he was positive anyway. As long as he didn’t, he could say he’d been tested and was waiting for the results. After he found he was positive in 1986, dating was awful. Most guys didn’t want anything to do with him. One left a date in the middle of dinner. Eventually, he decided to date only other guys who were positive. Couples with different statuses were labeled “discordant” in healthcare settings, he told me with disgust.
Jonathan lost a partner to AIDS at age 31 in 1994. Then he met Mike in 1996. Mike is a veterinarian with a graduate degree in public health and epidemiology. He specializes in the management of diseases that can be transmitted from animals to humans and vice versa. There are many of these. While Jonathan ferried dishes back into the kitchen, Mike told me that the human variant of the herpes virus is fatal in monkeys, and likewise the monkey variant is fatal in humans. So many diseases have mutated from animals to humans: HIV, COVID, Mpox, etc. Returning to the balcony, Jonathan chimed in to tell me that their first date was in a helicopter flying over Cape Cod, dropping raccoon bait (putrefied fish guts) filled with rabies vaccine along a two mile corridor to stop the spread of rabies from the rest of Massachusetts to the Cape. It worked for two years until the funding dried up and Mike left the job. Now rabies is endemic to the raccoon population across the state. Totally fatal, once symptomatic, in both raccoons and humans. But as long as you get vaccinated before developing symptoms, Mike reassured me, odds of survival are excellent.
Jonathan’s life threatening experiences began before his HIV diagnosis. He worked at a transitional housing program for people in substance use recovery as an intern in college. The house was robbed at gunpoint when he was working the night shift as a floor manager. The men robbing the house tried to take the gold chain around his neck, but it wouldn’t come off, so they shot him point blank through the chest. He was dead for a few minutes, but was resuscitated at the hospital down the street. Everyone said they’d understand if he left the job or moved from the city, but he felt like he had to go back to make sure the same thing didn’t happen to anyone else. The organization was on such a shoestring budget that his bloodstains were still on the floor when he walked back in to resume work. He retired after 43 years as the president of the workplace where he’d been (temporarily) murdered. In that time, he expanded the original organization to comprise 30 programs serving the needs of people affected by HIV, substance use disorders, the opioid crisis, and poverty. After all those years, he still had the gold chain necklace for which he’d been shot. He left it on the podium where he and the Mayor of Boston had both given speeches at his retirement party, ready, finally, to let it go.
As I’ve become an adult, I’ve come to appreciate how historically specific my position is as a child born of gay parents in the early 90s, and how precious my access to queer elders is. “Queerspawn” is an identifier that has been taken up by some of us with LGBTQ+ parents and caregivers. There has been some controversy about the term, and people who are not themselves queerspawn tend to laugh when they hear it for the first time. But it resonated with me right away when I first heard it sometime in middle school. I love its reclamation of ourselves as illicit beings, born to people who society thought shouldn’t or couldn’t reproduce, and its double recognition of us as people born to queer folks and as queer folks ourselves, by virtue of the families we were born into. This idea doesn’t always make immediate sense to non-queerspawn, whether queer or straight, and not all queerspawn identify as queer themselves. But it seems to me that our very existence pushes the bounds of queerness, grows it beyond sexuality into culture, legacy, inheritance.
The marginality of that culture and the meaning of that inheritance have changed dramatically over the course of my lifetime, as (some) LGBTQ+ rights and protections have been fought for and won, more queer people and stories have entered popular media and mainstream entertainment, and pride marches have become clogged with corporate floats. Queerspawn of different generations have been born into radically different worlds with widely varying implications for our families. There are certainly queerspawn of earlier generations than mine, but I still feel like part of a vanguard as someone born to gay parents before gay marriage and Modern Family, and like a rarity even among queerspawn as someone with gay dads.
While Mike did the dishes and my dads readied themselves for the day, Jonathan told me about how he and Mike made their own family. He spoke emphatically, with wide eyes, as though still surprised that it all worked out. There were only a few countries that allowed adoptions by single men when Jonathan adopted their son Luis in the early 2000s. The social worker who did the home visit carefully instructed Jonathan to answer her questions truthfully, but not to volunteer any additional information. He considers it a miracle that he didn’t have to lie – the documents asked neither about his sexuality nor his HIV status. Buried on the 3rd page of the social worker’s report, she mentioned he lived with his “roommate,” Mike. By that time, both Jonathan and Mike were on the cocktail of medications that treat HIV and make it undetectable. They’d asked their doctor if they were crazy for wanting to adopt. He’d said no, that he saw them the same way he saw any of his other patients with chronic but managed illnesses.
They are still the only HIV+ couple they know of to have adopted a child, and despite living a very public life as an activist, Jonathan never told this story for fear of how it could be twisted by anti-gay groups to limit the rights of other gay and HIV+ people to adopt. He’d known gay friends who’d had their adopted children taken away after 6 months or more and did everything in his power to ensure his and Mike’s legal connection to their son was as airtight as possible, including playing a major role in the movement for marriage equality in Massachusetts, the first state to legalize gay marriage.
Jonathan went into the house and returned with a photo album. In it is a picture of me and my mom, taken about 19 years prior, holding their baby just after he was brought back to the US. The album contains photos of every person who held Luis in his first year of life. I remember the day the photo was taken, Jonathan telling us how the cribs at the orphanage had been filled with stuffed animals, and how nervous that made him and Mike because of SIDS, how Jonathan went around pulling stuffed animals out of cribs, only to have them put back by the women who worked at the orphanage. So much cultural complication, adopting a baby transracially and transnationally, and on top of that as two gay men with HIV, both facts that had to be kept unsaid in order to get a kid at all.
The photo album is full of people who are dead now. Jonathan said this twice. He was still mourning his old friend Billy who’d died of cancer the previous February. He described the days he’d spent following Billy to his various regular haunts, which Jonathan called “Billy Farmer’s stations of the cross:” Clapps pond, where Billy had named specific trees after friends of his who had died; the breakwater with the jetty by the Provincetown Inn; Snail Road at the top of the dunes; Herring Cove to watch the sunset, and Tea Dance at the Boat Slip, where he’d visit the bar, the dance floor, and a specific view of the ocean in sequence. Daily, he’d shout, “we are so lucky to be alive in this beautiful place!” Jonathan couldn’t bring himself to go dancing at the Boat Slip that year without Billy.
Both Jonathan and Mike have had various health scares over the years, including battles with cancer. Jonathan explained that rectal cancer is more common in gay men and those with HIV. He hated that, yet another disease linked to his gayness. Treatment was brutal: 6 weeks of two kinds of chemo plus radiation, simultaneously. Eight years later and he still has no appetite. But he eats anyway, swims miles each day in the open water of Provincetown, has participated in the Swim for Life raising money for HIV and Cancer organizations every year except the year he was in treatment for both himself.
That afternoon, my dads and I walked the half hour out to a stretch of shoreline known as Boy Beach, remote enough to be mostly nude and mostly frequented by gay men. The most direct route to it is through a salt marsh that fills and empties with the tide. The beach is a bar of sand between the brilliant blue of the ocean and the green of the succulent-looking marsh plants that can survive both underwater and in dry sand, cyclically. I laid on the pebbles of the ocean side next to Robb, our legs lapped at by the retreating sea, and later floated alone, topless in the tidal marsh as the water took me with it, in and back out again. The beaches in Provincetown have changed shape over time, huge swaths of dunes washed away in a big storm years ago, flooding the marsh so that at high tide we’d had to carry our bags over our heads as we waded across. That year, the dunes had re-formed somewhat, and the marsh barely deepened to my shins.
I always wondered as a kid what people thought when they saw me and my dads together, what sense they made of these two men with a young girl. Now it seems perhaps even stranger, as they’ve both gone gray and I’ve grown up. Two aging men with a grown but young woman. Especially at the nude beach, or standing together, drinks in hand at the Boat Slip. I ordered a whiskey sour and Robb remarked with some surprise that he always ordered the same drink in college. What do we inherit in the genes? Taste in cheap cocktails? Do I look like him? I’m not sure people would think so, if they didn’t already know we’re related. On the other hand, people sometimes think I look like Rick, though we don’t share any blood. What do we inherit, instead, through care and time spent?
I wrote the beginnings of this essay in the car ride home from Provincetown to Cambridge, traversing again the roads traveled so many times by my family and the men we’d talked about all weekend. Cramped in the backseat amongst our luggage, I scrawled the stories I’d heard in smudgy blue pen in my journal while my dads chatted up front. When they spoke to me, I told them to wait until I finished my paragraph, getting it all down while I could still remember.
As Rick drove, Robb pointed out the passenger window to identify the pitch pine and scrub oak we passed as rare habitat for endangered moths. After his time as an HIV/AIDS counselor, and then an advocate for queer survivors of domestic violence, hate crimes, and police violence, Robb began a career in land conservation. He’s a font of knowledge about the local ecosystem. He says these trees are fire resistant, evolved to be that way from centuries of controlled burns that this land’s original Wompanoag and Nauset inhabitants carried out to clear land for hunting and travel.
As the car trundles west along Route 6, I think about how my parents, Jonathan, and Mike have all labored to preserve life, in their different ways. How many lives saved, human and non, by these ones who lived? And how many more lives could have been saved, could have been made, by the ones who died?
Jonathan and Mike are divorced now. It feels strange to include that here, as if it muddies or subverts the stories I’ve been telling about them and their triumphs over illness and oppression. They saw each other through such hardship, their relationship surviving such stark mortal odds, it somehow felt wrong to me that they would leave each other after all that. But it’s the truth. They’ve lived long enough to see other kinds of endings. I’m sure this doesn’t make the divorce any easier, but there’s something poignant about it to me. As I’ve been working my way through the dissolution of the longest romantic relationship of my own life so far, I have often comforted myself with the knowledge that my former partner is still alive. Not with me anymore, but not gone. It makes it sometimes harder to understand why we aren’t together, why I can’t see him or talk to him as I used to, but it grounds me to know that we may yet find our way to a future in which we can be in each other’s lives. A breakup, I keep reminding myself, is painful, but not like a death. A heartbreak, but not a tragedy. An end after which more is possible. One of the things you get to weather sometimes, when you are one of the living.
When I talked to Mike to be sure I had his blessing to write about him, he emphasized that Luis is still the most important person to both him and Jonathan, though their marriage ended. He volunteered more memories, tearing up telling me about his survivor’s guilt, about how he wept in the hospital when visiting his first friend to die, how that loss hit him harder than any of the ones that came after it. He said, “in a lot of ways I feel that I am living for them. I feel that I am a community in myself, that I am any number of close friends of mine who have died. There is a burden on me but also a joy in living for them, and part of the burden is making sure that I really enjoy my life, because it is so precious.”
I also interviewed Jonathan, following up on threads of conversation from our visit two years earlier. We talked for more than an hour on Zoom. He cried off and on throughout the conversation, his expressions and gestures vivid on my laptop screen. He told me that the years before effective antiretroviral drugs came out were the saddest of his life, but also the most powerfully compassionate and spiritually rich. When people couldn’t rely on the pharmaceutical industry or any medical, religious, or government institutions, they relied on each other. “I have lived through a couple plagues now,” he said, “and I have seen how people circle the wagons and fight for each other. Ptown was a beacon for so many people who would have died alone and isolated. Nobody with AIDS would have to spend the night alone. You would see hospital beds rolled up and down Commercial Street. It was a microcosm of how the world could and should be, a community taking care of each other. That was our watch, and how we dealt with things during our watch was magnificent.”
He said he probably talks to dead people more than living people. He has shrines to them all over his house. I kind of like it, how full of the dead Jonathan’s stories are. They are present. Here. Or absent, but not gone. Daily, he shouts to Billy, “we are so lucky to be alive in this beautiful place!” and he hears Billy answer back, “yes we are, Jonathan.”
When I tell them I’m working on this essay, my dads bring out albums of photographs of the people I’m writing about, full of 80s outfits and decor, Rick in drag, Robb with thick glasses and a fuller head of curly hair. There are clippings from newspaper obituaries interspersed with friends’ babies’ birthday parties, my parents young and laughing beside photos of quilt squares on which they’d sewn their friends’ names. The square they made for Jon Reilley has a rose teapot sewn in the center, his name, birth and death years in black fabric on one side, the words “A GENUINE FIESTA!” all caps on the other. There’s a clipping with a poem that Kevin wrote for Jon and as I’m reading it, Robb remembers that Kevin had written a whole book of poems about Jon, a journal of sorts that he kept throughout Jon’s illness and death. Friends knew he’d written it, but he’d never shown it to anyone and it was understood that it would accompany him to the crematorium. Robb laughs in some disbelief at his own boldness as he tells me that one day he asked Kevin if he could read it, and Kevin said yes. So Robb guarded it carefully, knowing he couldn’t share it with anyone or make any copies, and read the whole thing in one sitting, finding each carefully handwritten verse more beautiful than the last. He can still recall the striped red sheets on the dimly lit bed in Rick’s old apartment, back before they moved in together, where he read a book that no one else would ever read, of love poems from one dying friend to another already gone. As planned, the book was cremated a few months later, its ashes joining Kevin’s – and half of Jon’s – in the windswept dunes above Ptown.
Jonathan often carpooled with Kevin and Jon from Boston out to Ptown in Kevin’s VW bug, which was impressive to Jonathan at a time when very few of his friends had cars. He remembers riding squished in the middle of the back seat, leaning far forward to reach his head between the two of theirs in the front. I can picture it, his tall lanky frame cramped in the little vehicle, eager to participate in the conversation. The part of the drive he remembers most clearly is the moment, passing through Truro, “when route 6 peaks and you get the first glamorous panoramic view of the entire waterfront of Provincetown. The unmistakable Monument. The gorgeous sun sparkling like crushed diamonds in Cape Cod bay. For years and years now every time I’m driving and reach that peak cresting into such resplendent outrageous beauty, I say out loud, ‘hi Kevin! Hi Jon! Here we are all together again. Home.’”
The rose Fiestaware teapot is still in the dining room, but it doesn’t have ashes in it anymore. On the phone one evening during my senior year of college, my dads mentioned they’d taken the teapot to Provincetown and finally scattered the rest of Jon. This is how they say it, as if the ashes are the person himself. “Kevin had scattered some of Jon at the Victory Gardens in Boston,” or, “That was Kevin we scattered in the dunes.” They scattered the last of Jon in the dunes, too. Not the same dunes, they clarify, but then again, it’s never quite the same dunes.
I come from this, a people intimately familiar with ashes. A people who, weeping, threw each other’s (or, each other) on the white house lawn in protest, held public funerals as rallies, carried each other’s coffins through the streets, covered the Washington Mall in acres of quilt squares commemorating their beloveds, confirming the belovedness of those who had died.
It feels like the straight people of my generation barely think about AIDS at all, and the queers of my generation have had enough of tragic history, are busy celebrating the hard won gains and fighting the battles that still need fighting. Confirming, embodying the words of Chen Chen, that “queer doesn’t have to mean disaster.” I am lucky. For me, queer never meant disaster. I saw its living, breathing, regular incandescence all around me from the very start of my life. Though I was born in an epidemic, I was also born into the parts of town with the bright flags, the beaches, the dancing. I was born on National Coming Out Day, to three people who had been out for a long time, serving the community and circling the wagons. I went with my parents to the Boston Pride march each June, draped in Rick’s mardi gras beads. Me and the other kids I knew from the local gay family scene would joyfully collect the candy thrown from parade floats, learning not to confuse it with condoms. Keith Haring’s National Coming Out Day poster was framed on the wall of my childhood bedroom, and now hangs on my bedroom wall in my Brooklyn apartment. Its colors have faded with time, more pastel than neon. Haring’s Radiant Baby has also followed me from my mom’s living room wall in Cambridge through my various apartments as an adult, residing now above the dining room table I share with roommates. The red background of that one may have faded, too, but the baby shines as bright as it ever did.
Still, I find myself fascinated by AIDS history, asking my parents and their friends for these memories again and again. Because they somehow don’t feel morbid or depressing, all these stories, all these dead. They instead feel instructive, inspiring, like a set of clues for how to go on in the face of devastation, how to keep fighting even when it seems like hope is lost, how to keep caring when caring for, being with, is all that is left to do, how to keep making your life as big as possible even if you don’t think it will be very long, how to fill your home with your dead friends so that they feel like presences rather than absences, how to lose and lose and still say, “how lucky we are to be alive in this beautiful place.”
Because we will lose a lot. Anyone could and will die from any number of causes – drowning, diabetes, SIDS, AIDS, accidents, murders, genocide, war, cancer, climate change. I have been feeling this looming loss acutely as I consider having a child of my own. Is it crazy to want to bring a baby into this mess? Is it ethical? I’m afraid of the answer but I think I might do it anyway. When I talked to my mom about it she said she’d wondered the same thing, before having me, when her community was in the midst of its own apocalypse. So many already dead, more dying all the time, and no effective treatments to speak of. No assurance that any would be found.
Before she asked my dads if they would have a baby with her, my mom first talked about it with her best childhood friend, Joey Fisher. He said he wouldn’t become a parent, thought it wasn’t right to bring a kid into the world to gay parents. He died just a couple months before I was born, after he and my mom road tripped to Pittsburgh together to tell his family both that he was gay and that he was dying of AIDS. But, she says, she’s so glad she had me. Says my good life and all the things I’ve been able to do have been proof of the goodness of her decision. I am not sure how directly her choice in the early 1990s translates to mine in our current catastrophic context, but it gives me hope nonetheless. So many people are dying, and will continue to die in tragic, preventable ways. And yet each life has the potential to be so good, so full. Each life has the capacity to bring and protect more and more life, to keep making and remaking the world.
In the midst of my own recent heartbreaks, I’ve been thinking about how when someone dies, the ones who loved them often say that they’d give anything for just one more day alive together. I want to say to anyone who will listen, we are alive together. We have today. Here we all are, the ones who are still here. Talking about the ones who are gone, looking at their photographs, dancing, and not dancing for them. And someday soon, maybe next summer, dancing again.
