“Milk” Mustache, Part 2

After I saw “Milk” last Friday, I walked home, closed the door and broke down.  I cried for hours, I couldn’t stop.  My stomach cramped up.  I remember the day Harvey Milk was murdered, along with Mayor Moscone — I hadn’t thought about that day in a long time.  Memories crashed down on me like bricks in an earthquake — suddenly, unexpectedly.  Milk was killed 5 days and 15 years after JFK.  During the 70s, my life evolved like a movie on fast forward, like a 78 record spinning on a turntable.  It was dream-filled and dream-fueled.  As quickly as the 70s had arrived and passed, the 80s slammed down, a deadly barricade against the future.  Milk died before the carnage.  He would have been a leader during the maddening early years of the plague, later AIDS now HIV, when my lovers and friends became sick overnight, when nearly everyone I knew had friends and lovers and family members who became sick overnight with unexplained and undescribable illnesses.  Panic gripped everyone.  I felt my lymph nodes a hundred times a day.  But, oh, there was Kevin, he wasn’t afraid — raspy voiced, 24 year-old Kevin, a man I loved in a way I had never ascribed to love.  He was pissed.  His startling blue eyes threw a javelin at me when I described to him an article I’d read in the Village Voice about how the “gay cancer” might be caused by having sex.  I nearly lost my mind when he died a year later, abandoned by his family, in isolation at Harborivew, nurses and doctors gowned and gloved, masks on their faces.  I recorded a cassette tape of Joni Mitchell tunes and took it to him with a cassette player on one of my daily visits.  I refused to wear gloves and a mask.  It was a few days before he died.  He could barely talk but I understood the message from his eyes — he hated Joni.  It was Laura Nyro he loved.  And I knew that.  But I forgot.  He died before I finished the Laura Nyro tape.       

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