What I Think of When I Hear "Virus"

Nothing is more triggering to me than the words:  Flu-like symptoms. It was what I had to look for if I thought I may have been infected with HIV.

Maricon, 2017

"Flu-like symptoms" is being bandied about when it comes to Covid-19.  With Covid-19, I remember feeling abandoned, scared and alone during the time of AIDS.  I was a boy who grew into a man during the AIDS epidemic. It has carved me into a particular kind of person.

I saw AIDS destroy people, families and communities.  I could have been dragged into that.  I'm grateful for the gutsy, fearless queers and freaks and rebels and outsiders who said, Fuck This!

We will fight the assholes and take care of our own.

Yes, I was damaged, but I was put back together again.

I don't know how I'll weather through this pandemic. However, there's a part of me that feels strong, skilled because of what AIDS had done to me.

I learned to be here...for me, for you. For us.

Los Angeles is Burning

Over 25 years ago, I saw a documentary Paris is Burning, capturing the very queer ball scene of New York. I was blown away of these stories of queer people of color living their very best lives, finding families when their own biological families may have shunned them.

The ball scene made famous "Vogueing" which Madonna brought to the mainstream. 

The ball scene continues today. It is performance, it is fierceness, it is church. With shows like Ru Paul's Drag Race, one can see how competitive and fabulous drag queens and trans people can be.  

Recently, I went to the Proud Festival in Downtown Los Angeles.  There was an impromptu Vogueing competition, very much like the kind seen in Paris is Burning.  But it wasn't New York is was smack down in downtown Los Angeles.

I'm sure many of these dancers weren't even born when Paris is Burning was made in the early 1990s. This tradition of mostly black and brown queers is wonderful.  In these videos, you can hear me screaming, Yaaaas!

What makes this more incredible is that the ball scene was usually hidden away, kept in secret ball rooms.  But here we are in downtown LA, all are welcome to witness. In the above video, I love how there's an Asian couple watching.

Being there, among free queer people, there was a sense of the divine--that God or God-like forces were present.  It was truly uplifting.

Literary Images: On Mapplethorpe, Star Trek and Being Seen

I had the pleasure of going to the Mapplethorpe shows at LACMA and the Getty.  They were amazing.  He shot iconic images and he was one of many artists we'd lost to AIDS.  His photographs tell a story of a time and place in latter part of the twentieth century.  They speak of what was attractive and interesting and edgy during the 1970s and 1980s.

Robert Mapplethorpe

Mapplethorpe's eye was truly one of a kind.  From his photographs, one can see how moving and controversial his photographs were.  He spoke of gay sex and sexuality.  He spoke of S&M--in this world of Fifty Shades of Grey, people would hardly blink now.

 
He loved working with models of color.

 
One of his favorite models was Asian female body builder Lydia Cheng.

He photographed many celebrities.

Grace Jones

Yet through these images, I kept looking for the photographs of Asian men.  As an Asian man who counts the 1980s as formative years, I thought it was interesting that we weren't there.  This is NOT a slam of Mappplethorpe.  However, I do think it was common to treat Asian men, particularly gay Asian men, like we didn't exist. The world, it seems, is merely black or white.

I also saw Star Trek Beyond.  I wanted to support the movie on the first weekend, the most important weekend for a movie.  I usually don't go to the first weekend--too crowded--but I wanted to support this.  Why?  Because it was announced that Sulu, played by John Cho, would be gay.  A gay Asian man in the future!

I was more than thrilled to know that he had an Asian husband and a child.  He had a family!

Actor/Writer Doug Jung

It was important to me that his husband was Asian.  What does it say about a gay Asian man when he couldn't even entertain the idea of loving someone who looked like himself?

I spend years at the Asian Pacific AIDS Intervention Team trying to convince my peers that safe sex was self love.  I enjoyed seeing the new Star Trek.  Even though the gay Asian story line was implied, it was nice to be part of the narrative.  It was nice to be seen.

Writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books

I was thrilled to be asked to write a review for Los Angeles Review of Books.  It can be exciting and scary writing a review.  I'm asked to bring my best critical thinking skills--which is good!  However, sometimes a book can be a real stinker--which is bad.  Fortunately, that was not the experience reviewing Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan.

From the review:

Fortunately, Levithan did not write a mere “It Gets Better” novel. Thank Gawd! “It Gets Better,” a ubiquitous phrase to discourage gay youth from committing suicide, was uttered by every LGBT ally, including President Obama. It was a pat message telling young queers to hold-on-and-things-will-look-up. What was missing in the messaging was this: it only gets better if we make it so. This kiss in Levithan’s novel is a defiant act, one that has actual strength.


The full review can be found here.

My First Dharma Talk

It was a stellar year, academically, creatively and spiritually. A highlight for me was giving my first Dharma Talks (Buddhist Homilies or sermons) for my Buddhist Homiletics Course. Here is my final project. I got an "A" in class.



UPDATE: My dharma talk was featured on the Buddhist Peace Fellowship Website here. 

World AIDS Day—a Meditation on Impermanence, Groundlessness and Reincarnation

INTRODUCTION

I want to acknowledge Sunday, December 1, as World AIDS Day, a time to remember those who passed from Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome or AIDS. I’d been involved in AIDS work for more than twenty years. World AIDS Day started in 1987. In the last 25 years, I’d been involved in some kind of World AIDS Day event for at least 15 of those years.

Even though it is designated for one day it is not uncommon to have events throughout the month of December. In the past, I’ve participated in World AIDS Day events by hosting shows, performing, handing out awards, or going on marches. This year, I’d like to honor the occasion with this presentation. I’d like to add this this talk World AIDS Day—a Mediation on Impermanence, Groundlessness and Reincarnation to World AIDS Day events happening all over the globe.

I was 12 years old when I first heard of the disease. A local reporter named Connie Chung said something was killing gay men. It was initially known as Gay Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome or GRID. It was also known as the “Gay Cancer.” When it was discovered that this new disease was in the blood, that anyone regardless of sexual orientation could get it, it was renamed: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome or AIDS.

It was interesting growing up in the 1980’s with this in the periphery of my burgeoning gay life. I was coming out yet didn’t want to come out entirely because I feared somehow this AIDS thing would get me. I knew enough that AIDS could only be passed doing certain behavior—unprotected sex, using unclean needles—and if I stayed away from those behaviors I wouldn’t get it.

Still.

In my mind I couldn’t stop equating gay life with AIDS. Indeed, that was probably the stereotype for most people at the time. It was a message that had been perpetuated for years to come. I was dining with a friend of mine who went through reparative therapy in the 1990’s. Reparative therapy is a technique some believe can actually repair the internal defect of homosexuality. My friend told me that one of the ways they reinforced heterosexual behavior was by saying that gay people die of AIDS.

This is true. Gay people do die of AIDS. So do straight people. So do old people, and young people. Children. Parents. Whole families died of AIDS. I think about the karmic repercussions of this. When it was GRID, with only a few thousand gay men dead, the government, the world did not respond well. Theories were abound about how HIV was a government plot to rid the world of certain undesirable minorities—homosexuals, drug users. President Reagan finally asked his Surgeon General, C. Everette Coop, to write a report on AIDS in 1986—five years into the epidemic.

In other words, there was no compassion, and a world without compassion, leads to the death of gay, straight, men, women, old, young. I must say many faith institutions failed in this regard. Institutions who failed in meeting the needs of the sick, the infirmed, the hungry, the helpless.

There were beacons. Reverend Carl Bean, Mother Theresa, Bishop Desmond Tutu. They were people of faith who instilled faith. However, their voices seemed to be drowned out by religious or political leaders believing AIDS was God’s wrath on sinners.

IMPERMANENCE

"From the highest heavens to the very depths of hell, there is not a single being who can escape death," wrote Patrul Rinpoche in The Words of My Perfect Teacher.

There are 9.9 million people in Los Angeles County. Can you imagine everyone in Los Angeles dead? Then multiply that by three. That’s how many people have died of AIDS. Since the first recorded cases in 1981, over 30 million people have died. Then imagine two people affected by an AIDS Death—a mother and father or a brother and sister or a best friend and a spouse.

For every AIDS death, at least Sixty million people were affected by this. In some parts of Africa where whole families perished of HIV when babies got it from breast milk, another form of transmission. Millions experienced impermanence, the idea that life, things, places are fleeting.

Nothing is static. This is a brilliant idea.  No one talks about how tragic and hard and sad this can be.

I started doing volunteer work at the Chris Brownlee Hospice for People with AIDS in 1990. There was a mother sitting by her son’s bedside. I knew he didn’t have long. In a way, I hoped he’d die soon, because he seemed to be in so much pain. The day came when he passed, and I saw his mother fall apart. She cried and stomped her feet. She wailed and shook her head.

This was impermanence. This is the ugliness of change. Impermanence is not for the weak.

GROUNDLESSNESS

There was nothing more earth shattering than a death. Then to experience them again and again and again and again is not only earth shattering—the whole universe is obliterated. There is no ground. In 1993, I got a job at the Asian Pacific AIDS Intervention Team.

Groundlessness was part of the work. We prevented HIV by handing out Safer Sex Kits. They were small bags which contained condoms and lubricant. We gave away thousands of safer sex kits a year. My co-workers and I would sit there for hours sometimes making these kits. It came to the point that our boss suggested we get volunteers to make them because we should be doing other more important duties related to our jobs.

Unable to find volunteer, or perhaps unwilling to find volunteers, we returned to making the safer sex kits. Again, our boss suggested we find volunteers to take over. We experienced staff and clients dying of AIDS, but we continued to make safer sex kits. Open bag, fill them with condoms and lube, seal with a sticker. Open Bag, fill them with condoms and lube, seal with a sticker.

A grief counselor came in to help us with the high turnover of deaths. She explained that during these times, repetition was good for staff. It gave us something stable to do in an unstable world. We made the connection that making the safer sex kits was way of coping with grief. It was repetitious behavior that gave a sense of certainty. It gave us Ground. Our boss never bothered us again. I didn’t know it then, but I would come to experience Reincarnation.

REINCARNATION

Let me be clear, when I talk about reincarnation, I’m not talking about a physical death leading to another physical or celestial incarnation. I’m talking about finding a new life in this life. Like this blank piece of paper, which turned into a page for my dharma talk, then an airplane. In a matter of less than 12 hours, it had three lives already. I’m talking about finding new meaning in an old one.

In The Art of Living , His Holiness the Dalai Lama, said, “Personally, I have lost my country and, worse still, in my country there has been a lot of destruction, suffering and unhappiness. I have spent not only the majority of my life but also the best part of my life outside of Tibet. If you think of this from that angle alone, there is hardly anything that is positive. But from another angle, you can see that because of these unfortunate things I have had another type of freedom, such as the opportunity of meeting different people from different traditions, and also of meeting scientists from different fields. From those experiences my life has been enriched and I have learned many valuable things. So my tragic experiences have also had some valuable aspects.”

I wish AIDS never happened, but it did. For me, I don’t want the death of 30 million people to be in vain. I want it to have meaning. On a grander scale, we can see how these deaths came about due to ignorance and stigma. We learned: Knowledge is power, Silence equals death. Personally, I learned love is power, and that power can free someone else.

When I was doing AIDS work, my mother, a nurse was also doing AIDS work. She worked at an AIDS ward in a hospital. There came a point when I wanted to come out to her. I was in my mid-twenties and felt it was time. When I told her, she wasn’t surprised. As a matter of fact, she seemed pleased.

She told me about the gay men, the gay dying men, she met at her job. “They really stay with each other,” she said, referring to a man who kept vigil over his dying partner. “I don’t even see that with heterosexuals sometimes.”

For those gay men, they were doing something natural, something that was part of any loving relationship. For my mother, this affection humanized gay people, allowing a gay son to get closer to his mother.

*****  

Back then, the average age of a person who died of AIDS was 44. A gay man in his twenties was middle-aged. I was that gay man. Like a person going through a mid-life crisis I wondered if there was something else to what I was doing, experiencing, feeling. I learned other things, perhaps took chances I wouldn’t have normally taken. I risked being an artist, risked being a writer, risked falling in love.

Pema Chodron spoke of this in her essay When Things Fall Apart :

“I have a friend dying of AIDS. Before I was leaving for a trip, we were talking. He said, ‘I didn’t want this, and I hated this, and I was terrified of this. But it turns out that this illness has been my greatest gift.’ He said, ‘Now, every moment is so precious to me. All the people in my life are so precious to me. My whole life means so much to me’. Something had really changed, and he felt ready for his death. Something that was horrifying and scary had turned into a gift. “Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”

*****

Last month, I remembered that time in the early 1990’s, a time when more people had died of AIDS than at any other time of this history of HIV. I went to two memorials and Typhoon Haiyan devastated The Philippines, the country where my family is from.

I was reminded of the helplessness and loss. I felt groundless again—things “fell apart.” I also knew that things would come together again.

In The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche, the story of Rick, a man with AIDS offered this: “The first thing I realized was that you must take personal responsibility for yourself. The reason I am dying is that I have AIDS. That is my responsibility; no one else is to blame. In fact there is no one to blame, not even myself. But I take responsibility for that.

“I made a vow to myself and to whatever gods there may be before I came into Buddhism, that I just wanted to be happy. When…I made that decision, I stuck to it. And this is very important in doing any kind of training of the mind. You must make the decision that you really want to change. If you don’t want to change, no one is going to do the work for you.”

Things have, indeed, changed from those deadly days. AIDS is no longer seen as a fatal disease. It’s considered manageable, at least for those in North America and parts of Europe.

For World AIDS Day we must not forget the rest of the world. Let’s remember: love is power, and that power can free someone else.

Get Centric

Please come and support this reading! I'll be sharing the mic with Monica Carter, Glenn Kessler, and more. It's curated by the amaaaaazing Hank Henderson.

November 18th. Read more here.

Outing Myself

Gay.com is honoring October, Coming Out Month. They asked me to contribute by writing a letter to my younger self and give him advice just before I came out. The result was this letter. Read here. With the news of gay suicides, I'm glad I could offer this in some small way. Oh, yeah, that's a pic of me in high school with perm.

Support New Orleans

I just returned from New Orleans. I'd never been to this city and I'm certainly going back! After New Orleans, I believe I'd seen the trifecta of Eurpean colonies in America. New England has its British roots, Southern California has its Spanish roots. Well, New Orleans gave me the point of view of our French Colonizers. Mon Dieu! I learned alot. There's a lot of history in New Orleans: the first colonists were the unwanted of France--thieves, murderers and whores. The French seemd to be the most civil with their slaves--if you want to call owning slaves civil--but the Noire Code, forbid the beating and killing of slaves. In addition, Slaves were allowed to have second jobs in order to buy their own freedom, leading up to Louisiana having the largest number of wealthiest blacks in the South. African Americans were allowed to assemble, which led to the birth of jazz.



Of course we know New Orleans had seen some tough times. Katrina had devasted the city, something the city hadn't quite recovered from. The oil spill in the Gulf threatens wildlife and fishing in the area. This is why anyone reading this blog should flock to New Orleans and support its residents. They desperatly need the commerce.

What I loved about the New Orleans is that it so supports its artists. Buying local art is tax free. There is an array of literary festivals worth attending: the Tennessee Williams Festival, the William Faulkner fest, and Saints and Sinners, the LGBT lit fest.



I was there for the Saints and Sinners conference, a place to talk about writing and develop our skills. I went to accept the James Duggins Award for mid-career artists. This is me with fellow winner Lee Lynch. I dressed as a jass musician to honor the city.



On Sunday morning, the day before I was supposed to leave, it rained. It was quite lovely.

Lammy Noms Are In!

(Above, Lambda Lit. Executive Dirctor Tony Valenzuela)

Congrats to the Lambda Literary Award Noms! Click here. The Lammy's is one of my faves when it comes to award season. It basically mentions some of the best LGBT work that came along in the last year. I'm always amazed at how many books I didn't know about. That, in itself, is why such awards exist: to give publicity to books that so desperately need it.

I was happy to see that a few of the books that I realy enjoyed were nominated (Blue Boy, Salvation Army, Silverlake). I judged one year and know how hard it is to come up with finalists. There was obvious junk in the pile of books I was asked to read, but there were some really great stuff. I was given 22 books to read in my category. Of those 22, there were 8 or 9 books that were really great. Unfortunately, there were only five slots. My peers went back and forth, back and forth and settled on five titles we seemed to agree on.

It's a hard job, but I guess that's why it's called "judging."

Promising on 2/5/10 at 7:30pm

The Promising Series is a reading series that celebrates Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender writers. The first Promising of the year will launch Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books You Must Read, an anthology that “contains fifty succinct essays by critics, public figures, and authors. They illuminate works by fifty men and women that everybody should read.”

In explaining the book, Editor Richard Canning wrote in his introduction, “Fifty diverse authors have each taken a single work of literature and written a brief account of how and why they read it (and, usually, repeatedly reread it), and why others (of any and all sexualities) should do so.”

Some of the writers in the book include Maureen Duffy writing about Sappho’s poems, Christopher Bram writing about Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Jonathan Franzen on James Purdy’s Eustace Chisholm and the Works, and Tani Katan on Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals.

On February 5th, writers who will read their contributions to Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books You Must Read will be Felice Picano, Fenton Johnson, Matias Viegener and Promising Series Curator Noel Alumit. The reading begins at 7:30pm.



Felice Picano is the author of 19 books, including the international bestsellers The Book of Lies and Like People in History. He also wrote the acclaimed literary memoirs Ambidextrous, Men Who Loved Me, and A House on the Ocean, A House on the Bay. He has been nominated for a PEN/Hemingway, several Lambda Literary Awards, and is a recipient of the Ferro-Grumley award for fiction.


Fenton Johnson is the author of two novels, Crossing the River and Scissors, Paper, Rock as well as Geography of the Heart: A Memoir. His most recent book is Keeping Faith: A Skeptic's Journey among Christian and Buddhist Monks. Johnson has served as a regular contributor to Harper's Magazine and the New York Times Magazine. His stories and essays have appeared in many literary quarterlies and have received numerous awards, among them a James Michener Fellowship from the Iowa Writers Workshop and National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Fellowships in both fiction and creative nonfiction.


Matias Viegener is a Los Angeles based writer, artist and critic who works alone and collaboratively in writing, video, installation and performance art. He has shown solo work or performed at The Whitney Museum, The Kitchen and The Drawing Center in New York, LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), New Langton Arts in San Francisco, Beyond Baroque, Machine Project, the L.A. Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), The Silver Lake Film Festival, and the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art.

The Promising Series will take place on Friday, February 5 at 7:30pm. Skylight Bookstore, 1818 North Vermont, Los Angeles, CA 90029, (323) 660-1175.

Literary List

Frontiers In Los Angeles magazine asked me to put together a reading list this Summer that the LGBT community might want to read. I put out a call to agents, editors, publicists, and authors that I knew. I wanted books that would be published between March and September. The reponse has been overwhelming and compiling a list of just ten books has been daunting.

There were some books that I really enjoyed, but I wondered if they were "Summer" reading. I don't want to insult readers, assuming they just want fluffy beach books. I'm hoping to have a spectrum of books available. But just ten?

I e-mailed the editors and hoped they would consider more book features because something I've witnessed: there are a lot of great queer books coming out!

If anything, I hope to feature them on this blog. Oy!

Literary LaQuesta

Calling all Chicagoans! Go and see this play right now! I am thrilled that my one act Mr. and Mrs. LaQuesta Go Dancing is being produced in Chicago. I'm fond of this play. Imaging being a young writer, wondering if you have the chops at this literary thing. You pen a little play about how parents mistreat their child and regret it for the rest of their lives. Through this story, I wanted to explore how our actions can tragically affect other people, particularly young people.


In the mid-90's, I enterd the play in a contest in San Francisco. The prize? The play would get produced in the City by the Bay. Well, I won. It was the dose of self-confidence that I needed.


I'm just giddy that the play is playing Chicago, particulary because that's where Obama got his political footing. From previous posts, you may have gotten wind of how cranky I got about the choice of homophobe Rick Warren at the Inauguration and the pass over of Kay Ryan at the delivering of the Inaugural poem.

I like to think this play asking for tolerance, understanding and forgiveness will contribute to the cultural life of the Windy City.

I like to think that this play, which addresses is somehow contributing to discussions of sexuality

Literary Sheparding

Wow. I can't believe it's been ten years since Matthew Shepard was killed. See more here. His death inspired some writing for me back in the day. I even allude to it in my last novel.

Peace to his spirit and his family. Bravo to Judy Shepard for doing remarkable work in hate crime legislation in memory of her son.