I’m dizzy. It feels like I’m in a taxi going too fast down Broadway and the storefronts and buildings are spinning around too quickly to identify.
What am I doing?
I walk into the office and ask to see the school counselor. It’s going to happen anyhow, and I’d rather just face my punishment head-on and get it over with.
Since I’ve never been in trouble before, Ms. Davis calls it an unfortunate act of impulsivity “given the times.” Aside from the mandatory day of suspension, I have to clean and re-stain the wood panel and then check in with her once a week for the next month.
Then she adds that, due to the suspension, she’s going to have to notify my parents.
My chest constricts, and I take in a shaky lungful of air. In my head, Connor says, Control the situation.
But really, what does that mean when everything in the world is out of my control?
I ask her to wait until the end of the week to call them and promise to apologize to the library staff. Oddly enough, she agrees.
Talk builds through the halls in a rumble, and I hear my name whispered for days. I spend a lot of time looking over my shoulder, waiting for what happened to James to happen to me. But aside from a couple of under-the-breath comments in the hall, no one bothers me. A few kids even come up and thank me or just smile sadly and then turn away.
Mr. Solomon pulls me aside and sternly tells me I shouldn’t have chosen to write on a library wall, but then he softens and says quietly that he’s proud of my courage.
I nod, but really all I’ve done is scribbled some words onto a wall. And I’m not sure how much that means or what it could possibly change.
Surprisingly, it’s Adam Rose who spells it out for me when he pulls me aside after a spirit event.
You’ve got guts, he says. I’ll give you that.
I didn’t really do anything, I insist.
He’s quiet for a minute as the room empties out. Then he says, Do you remember my cousin Paul? He graduated last year.
Paul. Stocky. Baseball player. Catcher, I think. Straight brown hair. I seem to remember him having some issues with drugs that got him kicked off the team.
Yeah, I say. I remember him.
Did you ever meet his dad?
I shake my head.
Adam’s eyes go misty and he says, Well, Paul’s dad in New York Presbyterian. He’s my favorite uncle, and I don’t think he’s going to make it. I told him what you’d written, and it made him cry. He said he didn’t know that anyone our age was even paying attention to what’s going on.
A chill goes through me. Being afraid of some enemy you can’t see, regardless of how big or deadly, is one thing. Starting to recognize the people lying dead on the battlefield is something else entirely.
Unlike Connor, I don’t deliberately out myself to my parents. That task is left to Ms. Davis, who is, I guess, just doing her job.
I find this out when I come home from school on Friday. When my mother, drinking sherry out of a thimble-sized glass, tells me in grim voice, Your father is on his way home.
A list of the immediate casualties caused by my writing sixty-six words into a language lab wall:
• One bruise on my arm.
• Fourteen pieces of broken glass from the old Christmas picture over the TV that fell when my father threw a pepper mill at it.
• A hundred of my mother’s tears.
• An infinite number of shards from the shattered metaphorical closet door.
I try to ride out my father’s anger and hope that, at his core, he doesn’t really want to kick me out.
The next morning, a Saturday, I creep out of my bedroom and approach him while he’s eating breakfast.
I didn’t do this to piss you off, I say. It’s just who I am, and I can’t ignore what’s going on in the world. People are dying. How can I just stand by and watch?
How could anyone?
My father eats his toast and boiled eggs. He doesn’t look up from his food for a very long time.
When he does, he says, I always knew that nothing would come from your brother. But I had hopes for you, Michael, and you’re throwing them all away just to spite me. How do you expect me to face my friends? Our neighbors? What is your mother going to say to the women at church? Why couldn’t you have just kept your mouth shut?
This has nothing to do with either of you, I reply before I can stop myself.
My father’s face goes a familiar shade of red, and I picture how things might have gone down with Gabriel and his father. I’m bringing a boy home for dinner, Gabriel might have said. Tell him to be here by six, his father might have replied. That scenario will never play out with my family, and I just can’t do it anymore. It’s completely clear that it isn’t about whether I’m having sex or not or who with, it’s about needing to breathe. I’ve never understood my brother more.
So, what? You want me to move out too? I ask my father.
He looks at me, and more calmly than I’ve ever heard him, in a voice completely devoid of emotion, says, Yes, Michael, I think that might be for the best.
At first I assume Dad will just pretend Connor isn’t here. That his older son isn’t standing at the door for the first time in years, ready to help his younger son move out.
Wishful thinking at its best.
Instead, before he walks out and slams the door so hard, the pictures slant on the wall, it’s: This is your fault, Connor. I knew you were going to drag Michael down into the gutter with you.
The stuff I care about fills a couple of boxes.
• Some clothes, tapes, and books.
• A few photographs.
• The star off my ceiling.
• The beads from Pride.
• My guitar.
That’s it.
My mother has gone to church or a friend’s or a bar. I have no idea where my father went.
Connor stops at the door to my room. His expression is complicated when he looks around and says, You’re sure, right? I’m not telling you that you shouldn’t be, just…
As his voice trails off, I glance around the room. At the stuff I’m leaving behind. At the ceiling I’ve stared at all my life. At the bed where Gabriel and I came so close to having sex.
Then I look back at my brother and see him in a way I never have. At the courage he must have needed to stand tall on that stage and write his own future.
I’m sure, I say, picking up my boxes. I’m sure.
Instead of having dinner with just Connor on Wednesdays, we both meet up with Mom.
Every week, she brings a bag with a little more of my stuff, and I finally feel moved into Maurice and Connor’s apartment.
Every week, she grills me about school and asks about Becky and whether I’ve heard from James. She asks Connor about work and, as an afterthought because my brother keeps bringing him up, about Maurice, and we talk about everything except for my father, because really, what is there to say?
She never apologizes.
Only once do I manage to get her alone and ask why she stays with him.
She hugs me and says, Life looks different from my age than it looks from sixteen, Michael. I’ve made my bed.
No one expects you to stay in a bed once you’ve found a scorpion in it, I think, but realize there’s no point in saying it out loud.
One of Mom’s bags is filled with last year’s school papers. On top is my list of goals from Mr. Solomon’s class.
• Fall in love
• Figure out who the hell I am
• Have sex without catching something
• Repair my family
• Escape
I guess I could have done worse than four out of five.
Becky and I huddle around the speakerphone in Maurice’s home office. Honey, call your friend, he�
�s always telling me, Life is too short to worry about international phone rates. I try not to take advantage, but Becky comes over so we can talk to James when we can arrange a time.
Once Becky’s recounted stories of her newspaper editorship (“Seriously, supervising sophomores is like the hardest thing ever.”) and James has caught us up on London theater life (“If I have to hear about the rain in bloody Spain one more time…”), it’s my turn.
So, Ms. Davis gave me the name of the talent rep at a new coffeehouse in the Village, I tell them, and I think I’m going to call.
Next to me, Becky squeals and grabs my arm. Why didn’t you tell me? she asks.
He’s telling you now, kitten. Lord, at least you’ll be able to go watch and report back. But seriously, Michael. Do it. We need art to get us through this.
Because it’s James, I call and sign up for a slot.
Then, there’s one more call I make.
Connor said he heard Gay Men’s Health Crisis was looking for volunteers.
I’m going to be stuffing envelopes twice a week after school.
It doesn’t feel like a lot, but it’s a start.
It’s strange to have a spot in a showcase planned. An instrument to tune. Songs to write. Music to share.
And so I hop the D train, relish the smell of incense and pot in Washington Square, and find a spot near the arch, but not too close to where the break-dancers are working the crowd and passing the hat.
I lose myself in sound, the feel of my fingers on the strings, the light breeze. I close my eyes and let the world dissolve.
Until.
A feeling on the back of my neck, a racing of my heart that I barely remember.
I look up, and it’s Gabriel’s eyes that catch me. It was always his eyes.
My fingers stumble on the strings. I restart the measure. Stop. Force myself to laugh. Breathe. Hold myself back from running to Gabriel and throwing my arms around him.
I slow down. Bite my lip. Surrender. Pack away my guitar, my capos, my strap. Drawing out this moment of possibility.
My pulse betrays me by racing like that old wooden coaster at Coney Island, loud and out of control, surging forward at breakneck speed. I’m made of adrenaline.
I glance up, hesitant. Scared as hell. Filled with hope.
Gabriel is still there.
The other people drift away as I pack up. But he stands there, the smallest hint of a hopeful smile on his face.
He lifts his arms and goes into an easy cartwheel like the ones he did here for me before. Then he holds out his hands as if he’s offering me a gift.
I shiver, wanting to reach out and touch him. Pull him into some dark corner and kiss until we run out of air.
I want to run my fingers over him, feel his skin under my hands.
I want to ask if he’s found a way to go back to school and how his mother and sister are.
I want to tell him I’ve moved out and moved on.
I want to know that he’s healthy.
Mostly, I want to tell him I still think about him all the time.
He steps toward me. I step toward him. He says my name just as I’m saying his, and suddenly, the world contracts so that our lips meet. Magnetic. Hungry. Holding on to everything we have. Everything that makes us human.
Time is a circle surrounded by a growing storm. And we’re in the eye of it.
James says that things will get worse before they get better, and it’s James so I believe him.
I don’t know how I’m going to keep everyone I care about safe. Or if I can. Or what safe even means.
But I’m going to own my fear.
Own my voice.
Own my love.
Own my life.
And I’m not giving any of them up without a fight.
Afterword by Ron Goldberg
The New York City of 1983—the world of We Are Lost and Found—was exciting, if dangerous around the edges. Stocks were high, rents were relatively cheap, and gay life was thriving, at least in certain neighborhoods. AIDS was a matter of concern, but not yet a crisis. In hindsight, I suppose we should have seen the darkening shadows, but at the time, it all seemed so unimaginable, and there was so much we didn’t know about this newly named disease or how our city, country, and fellow citizens would respond to it. Or to us.
I was a twenty-four-year old gay man sharing a one-bedroom apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, several blocks north of where James and his roommates live. The neighborhood was dicey, its safety judged on a block-by-block basis. I lived on a “good” block, with a couple of upscale apartment buildings and restaurants. James—not so much.
I can’t say for sure whether I saw the infamous article, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals,” when it was first published in the New York Times in July 1981—but I certainly heard about it. It was unusual enough for the Times to write anything about gay life—the paper refused to even use the term gay unless it was part of a quote or the name of an organization until 1987. But whatever concerns I may have had about this outbreak, it didn’t translate into worry.
Besides, there was so much to enjoy about gay life in New York in the early eighties. There were fabulous gay dance clubs like The Saint, Twelve West, and the Paradise Garage. There were gay neighborhoods, like the West Village, where hot men cruised the streets in flannel, denim, and leather; the East Village, with its pierced punks and edgy artists, drag queens, and performance art; and the Upper West Side, where a strip of preppy gay restaurants and bars had turned Columbus Avenue into “the Swish Alps.” And in the summer, you needed only to hop a ferry to be whisked away to the glamorous gay beaches of Fire Island.
Gay life had even begun to invade mainstream culture. There was the bisexual Steven Carrington on TV’s top-rated Dynasty and gay-themed Hollywood movies like Making Love, Personal Best, and Victor Victoria. In 1983, Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy—the play about gay life, love, and family that Michael sees with Becky—won the Tony Award, while the hottest ticket on Broadway that fall was the musical La Cage Aux Folles, about a “married” gay couple—the owner and the headline performer of an “exotic” drag nightclub—meeting their straight son’s girlfriend and conservative family, complete with a cross-dressing chorus and the gay anthem, “I Am What I Am.”
But this didn’t mean it was safe to walk down the street holding your lover’s hand.
Gay bashings were a regular occurrence, particularly in those neighborhoods we called our own. Often, it was just a bunch of teenagers “out for fun.” Sometimes, they brought bats or metal pipes. Sometimes it was worse. Just two weeks before I moved into the city, a man with an Uzi shot up the crowd outside two gay bars in the West Village. The cops, who were largely unsympathetic, refused to keep statistics on anti-gay violence. Meanwhile, we couldn’t even get the city council to pass a simple gay rights bill.
The truth was, whatever our gains in the fourteen years since the Stonewall riots, gay rights remained debatable, and gay lives expendable.
As if to prove the point, Ronald Reagan, who had been elected president in 1980, brought with him a collection of homophobic archconservatives and right-wing religious figures, who would come to embrace the epidemic as God’s punishment for our “immoral” lifestyle.
But for the first few years of the AIDS crisis, politicians, like everyone else, simply ignored the disease and its victims. After a quick flurry of articles in the summer of 1981, there was barely any mention of this new “gay cancer” outside of the gay press. It would take nine months and more than three hundred new cases in twenty states before the Times published its next story, in May 1982, about the disease now called gay-related immune deficiency, or GRID. By the time the paper’s fifth story appeared in August of that year, there were 550 cases, and the disease had a different name, AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome), to avoid stigmatizing a caseloa
d that now included IV-drug users, Haitians, and hemophiliacs.
The Times wouldn’t publish another story about AIDS until January 1983, eight months later.
The lack of interest by the Times had a ripple effect—if a story wasn’t covered in the “paper of record,” it wasn’t worth reporting elsewhere. As a result, there was no information available about this deadly new epidemic. We didn’t have computers or smartphones. We couldn’t google “AIDS” or look it up on Wikipedia. Instead, we were forced to rely on rumor and word of mouth and whatever was published every other week in the New York Native, our local gay newspaper.
But in 1983, there wasn’t much to know.
We didn’t know what AIDS was—how it worked, how you got it, or how it could be prevented—nor was it a priority for the Reagan administration to help us find out.
Looking back, you’d think it would have been a time of mass panic, but except for the occasional fear-mongering headline, AIDS remained largely under the radar. Unless you knew someone who was sick, the epidemic was something you were vaguely aware of, like background noise—a distant hum, not a siren. As far as we knew, it was happening primarily to a certain subset of gay men, mostly older than me, in their thirties and forties, whose fast-lane lifestyles included a lot of sex and drugs. And while I may have visited—and enjoyed—this world on occasion, I didn’t consider myself a part of it. Nonetheless, I kept my ears open and eagerly read every issue of the Native as soon as it came out.
It was in the Native where, like James and Michael, I first read Larry Kramer’s mind-blowing article, “1,112 and Counting,” in March 1983. In it, Kramer describes a rapidly approaching holocaust, with nothing being done to stop it. Kramer is a central figure in the history of the AIDS crisis—a founder of both Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), the first AIDS organization, and the legendary AIDS activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), and he is the author of countless angry articles and speeches, as well as the landmark play, The Normal Heart.
At the time, however, Kramer’s feverish warnings were waved away by many in the community as the over-the-top ranting of a cranky, anti-sex hysteric. His article, while truly terrifying, was not at all empowering, and I saw little I could do beyond giving money to the cause and cutting back on my already limited number of sexual encounters. And since I didn’t go to the baths or the back rooms and could name most of my sexual partners, I didn’t really think I was at risk. AIDS hadn’t invaded my circle of friends or pool of acquaintances.
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