Months later when David Frechette, one of Other Countries
first members, died, I was not able to attend the funeral
but like a legacy between the business of wakes and funeral as comfort
I often repeated to myself lines of his famous poem, titled
after the song by French chanteuse and diva Edith Piaf, “Je Ne Regrette Rien,”
a song in which David adopted the lyrics into his own language and
Black gay experience which states in English, I have no regrets
lyrics which seemed to articulate not just my feelings, but the mood
of a generation.
He wrote: Sister Chitlin and Brother Neckbone
gather around my deathbed asking me to repent
The wicked ways which brought me here
But I don’t regret hours spent in arms of world-class insatiables
Or the hunk I made love to prior to a Washington March
Though my body be racked with fevers and pains “Non, je ne regrette rien.”
And it was these simple lines like lyrics that challenged the sadness and shame
accompanying AIDS, stigmas, and misconceptions that said
gays caused their own illness
these lyrics which challenged the fear and temptation to wallow
in self-pity by spitting back, “Non, je ne regrette, rien.”
I’m not sure where it belongs, but I must insert:
there were times when I, the Funeral Diva, was not always noble,
I was traveling while my dear friend the visual artist Don Reid was dying
and I ran away.
We worked together at the Hetrick-Martin Institute for Gay and Lesbian Youth.
He was an art therapist and at twenty-three years old I ran the afterschool program.
I met him on a panel first at Harlem Hospital.
He was part of the group that existed in the ’80s called
Black and White Men Together.
At that panel, Don carried on his back the baby son he’d adopted
with his white partner.
This is long before gay people adopting children was common.
His son’s name was Max, and he was a tiny brown baby Don adored.
Later, working at the Institute, Don and I would have many adventures
and escapades with Baby Max in tow.
There was a time a year or two after Max started walking, he wanted
to be a peacock for Halloween.
Don being a gay man, a visual artist, and sudden costume designer
searched day and night for real feathers.
He spent all night sewing together Max’s costume.
There was also a time we took Baby Max to church and because
Don raised him to be free, Max wandered down the aisle at three years old,
stood next to the preacher and did an interpretive interpretation of the preacher’s
words.
The preacher seemed annoyed, but Don, a proud parent smiled
the whole time.
I remember our offices at the Institute
located on the Westside Highway, across from Hudson River
and infamous Piers.
There was lots of sunlight.
We were in formation.
We were making ourselves.
While others were dying around us, Don was in denial about HIV/AIDS
We never talked about it.
Even when he got the tell-tale pneumonia, the rapid weight loss,
and the terrible fear.
We never said AIDS.
By then, I had left the agency, I was traveling as an actor and
leaving the next day when I heard Don was in the hospital.
I understand he asked for me.
I heard his voice in my head asking a friend, “How’s Pam?”
But my feet were leaden, I couldn’t go.
I didn’t want my last image to be of a man shrunken down
to a skeleton.
Like the recent survivors of Hurricane Katrina and Maria in Puerto Rico,
I was grief-stricken and waterlogged.
Maybe this is like scenes from the Holocaust or World War II
admissions you won’t find in any history book
but like in concentration camps when stripped to bare essentials.
Like in a novel popular during the ’70s
when survivors of a plane crash devoured human flesh.
Or Margaret Garner, the slave who ran away
and murdered her own child rather than to see it become a slave,
in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, she is haunted
by the child’s ghost.
Like in Chimamanda Adichie’s novel, Half of a Yellow Sun
about the Nigerian/Biafra war, a beloved boy character
whom we believed in is so corrupted and dehumanized by war
he participates in a gang rape.
There’s a story I heard in South Africa after
the end of apartheid
A boy and his friend rape a girl on the road, they kill her.
The boy eventually turns her over and discovers the girl he raped
and killed was actually his own sister.
A teacher hears this story and screams out to her classroom appalled
asking after all Black people have fought and died for
“Tell me, is this the new South Africa?”
Like that South African boy, Margaret Garner, the subjects of Victor Frankl’s essays
about the Holocaust and others, some of us in the AIDS crisis
did terrible things to survive.
Never made it down aisles of the hospital wards
of Bellevue and St. Vincent’s.
Couldn’t bear brown shit-stained walls and
terrible wretched smells of death.
Some of us couldn’t bear the hatred and scornful eyes
as we passed the nurses station
saw doctors and family members who blamed us.
Some of us were so grief soaked and waterlogged
we couldn’t take one more step
having seen and experienced things in our young lifetimes that
no human being or citizen should.
During Hurricane Katrina, I was in Ghana.
On television, I saw a tidal wave sweep downstairs and trap
a young Black girl.
Firefighters yelled through a basement window
“Hold on, Baby Girl. Just hold on. We’re coming. “
But despite hers and their desperate efforts, she drowned.
Some of us were noble, we tried but we just couldn’t carry anymore
and were forced to let go
watched bodies devoured,
the very breath and essence stolen
limbs, life support-cut off
some of us went MIA
AWOL
were forced
into black-market drugs and operations like women in the ’60s,
using cord, wire hangers, and glass
to abort in back alleys.
Some like Sammy, lover of Michael Brody, father of The Paradise Garage,
a beautiful Latino boy with pure soul ravaged by AIDS
shot himself in the head at point blank range
couldn’t stand what the virus did to him
the shame he felt
like something out of Kafka’s Metamorphosis
when a human being is transformed into a bug
we became pariahs, the despised, choosing to wear
in defiance badges, gays in the Holocaust wore pink triangles
like something out of Poe’s The Tell Tale Heart
Like in The Diary of Anne Frank, we hid beneath floorboards
transforming into monsters
