Memorial Services: The Unbearable Meaning of Being Introduction: Totems and Tableaux by Michael Bronski One of the enormous effects of AIDS on our everyday lives has been the necessity to constantly reinvent traditional manners, mores, and expectations. We no longer presume that a gay man might automatically live to old age. We no longer say "to die for..." We no longer assume that dinner-party guests can be served at any old time when half may be on a strict timetable because of their protease inhibitors. The word "quilt" no longer simply reminds us of our grandmothers. Not only has the memorial service become a commonplace in our lives, it has assumed a centrality in our socializing. Is it any wonder, then, that our attitudes towards them have shifted and metamorphisized? Once presumed to be solemn events of hagiography and mourning, funerals and memorial services have been drastically altered by AIDS. Stricken by the overwhelming amount of loss, as well as the relative youth of many of the dead, AIDS survivors began constructingand enacting new forms of commemoration and grieving. Often public and political, these memorial services for people who have died of AIDS are testimonials not only to lives cut short, but to the celebration of struggle, of anger, of survival. With the notable exception of funerals of politicians and movie stars, mourning, for most Americans, used to be a private matter. AIDS necessitated that the politics of death become more public and visible. The NAMES Project Quilt is perhaps the emblematic example of a public celebration of the lives of men and women who have died of AIDS. Drawing upon a cooperative American folk art tradition, the Quilt brought the reality of AIDS into the public sphere with dignity and grace. Although some activists complained that its ultimate effect was a sentimental depoliticization of AIDS, there is no question that the Quilt radically changed the way that we as a society, conceptualize the process and public performance of mourning. As a work of installation art, the NAMES Project Quilt remains a splendid way of display the enormity of the AIDS epidemic to a wide public. But in the U.S., it was also a continuation of the public presentations of grief that had been occurring in major cites since the early eighties. In "Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture and AIDS (Indiana University Press, 1998) author David Roman discusses at length the idea of AIDS memorials, rallies, and even fundraisers as performance. It is not unusual for AIDS memorial services to feature show tunes, political speeches, dance, personal reminiscences, humor, or even drag performances. What once might have been simply personal and private is sometimes a public performance. The funeral which once was the totem of private grief has now become a tableaux of public (and often political) mourning and celebration This cultural change has also profoundly affected how we experience memorial services and funerals. No longer bracketed by traditional privacy and proprietary, our appreciation and understanding of public mourning has become more open and unrestrained. The mixture of show tunes and abject grief, drag and emotional desolation, is positive: It accentuates our complexity and underscores the inherent seriousness of communally dealing with AIDS, not to mention the larger project of being human. Over the past two decades many of us have realized that there is no single way to mourn, to endure grief, or to experience loss and the ceremonies and rituals we've constructed for that purpose. Surely we've all had moments at funerals and memorials that were profoundly moving, or massively unsettling, or funny or appalling or just plain weird. In recognition of this wondrous multiplicity of our experiences, Artery is initiating, with this piece, a project to compile some of these unconventional, memorial experiences. We began with writers, but only for convenience's sake. Please email Artery with your suggestions. Michael Bronski is the author of "Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility" (South End Press, 1984) and "The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash and the Struggle for Gay Freedom" (St. Martins Press,1998). He has written extensively on gay culture and art for thirty years. by Dorothy Alison Author of "Bastard Out of Carolina" and "Cavedweller" When I put my hand on my mama's neck, I understood why I have always been attracted to those stone angels in cemeteries. In two days my mama had become like that-a stone angel, the flesh no longer soft and welcoming, but marble and intimidating-something that drew me close and terrified me at the same time. "Did you feel it? Jesus fuck!" my little sister shuddered and backed away hurriedly. She had fastened the watch on the left wrist. I had the little silver racehorse on a delicate chain-the one I had seen Mama wear a hundred times, but now the chain would not fit around her neck. I made one more attempt, trying vainly to lift Mama's head. But this time when I touched the stone flesh my stomach clenched and I knew I could not touch it again. I left the chain wrapped loosely, the little pony resting in the slight hollow above her breasts. When the rest of the family came in, I went over to stand against the wall and watch as one by one they went up to the coffin. Most did not touch her. A few bent to tuck something in beside her cotton blouse. My uncle, looking like a dissolute Abraham Lincoln bent over to kiss her check. He flinched when his lips met the rigid skin. When he straightened up, I saw in his face what I knew was in mine. This was not my mama, not his sister. This was something alien and empty. We should have burned her and put the ashes to use. Grown vegetables or strewn the ashes in a rose bed. I looked over at the minister standing with my stepfather's brothers. He was a stranger paid to come for the morning. My mother had not been to a Baptist church in fifteen years. I looked back at my lover. Alix was standing with my other sister. Barbara had refused to approach the casket and she looked moment-to-moment as if she were going to pass out on the floor. I saw Barbara's eyes shift from the casket to the minister and back again to the bronze finish. I looked where she was looking and saw that the highly polished surface was reflecting the people in the room. It acted like a magical mirror, reducing the sobbing swollen figures to narrow puppets rocking in place. Only the minister was immobile, his figure cramped and impatient. "I don't think Mama was a Baptist anymore," I said to my little sister. June shrugged. "She wasn't anything else," she told me. I nodded. When Alix came over to stand beside me, I took her hand between my icy figures. "When I am dead," I whispered to her. "When I am dead, you toast me. You burn me up and put me somewhere yourself. Don't you do me like this." I could hear the hysteria in my voice but I could do nothing about it. "Shussh, shussh.." Alix kissed my forehead firmly. "I promise." She put her arm around me, the muscles strong and warm.. "I'll do you or you'll do me. No ministers. No caskets. No bullshit." I nodded, relaxed a little, and made myself go over to put my hand one last time on what was no longer the mother I had loved. by David Bergman Author of "Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature" In the late 80s I attended the memorial service for Ray S----, one of the original members of group taking an experimental drug that was later revealed to be AZT. Ray's sister was there, and spoke first. She apologized that Ray's mother could not attend. His brother was dying of AIDS, and since the doctors said that he had only days to live, she felt she couldn't leave one son's death bed to attend another one's memorial service. As much as we grieved for Ray, our sympathies were actually turned to his mother, and yet we also knew how angry Ray would be. His mother had done it again--even in death she was up-staging him. by Robert Atkins Editor of Artery: The AIDS-Arts Forum (Excerpted from "Knowing Barbara") A few years ago I decided not to go to memorials unless the deceased was a close friend. This wasn't always the case. For about five years beginning in the mid-eighties, I went if I respected an artist's or an activist's work. I thought that I could learn something about death this way. I regarded every memorial service as a text, but the narratives tended to simply illuminate the rote responses in which we envelope death: "What a tragedy he died so young," uttered about the person with AIDS. Or "at least he didn't suffer," about the overweight relative who keeled over on a golf course at an advanced age. When my close friend Bob died of AIDS two years ago a number of narratives gave disturbing meaning to his small-town funeral. The official version, known to most of those in attendance, ran like this: "We sat in this very church three years ago after Bobbie's brother's untimely death in a car crash." (The deceased's possible drug use at the time of the car crash was by now old business, but the playing of a tape of the now-dead older brother singing one of his own compositions at his younger sibling's funeral remains one of the most pitiable moments of my life.) A subtext of Bob's funeral, known only to the immediate family and a few of us out-of-towners, was the singleminded denial of Bob's cause of death and his homosexuality. The conspicuous presence of a distraught young mourner--the deceased's lover Matt--went unexplained. I found the subjectivity vertiginous. Public memorials may be more predictable, but not necessarily less disturbing. After artist Keith Haring died, a public spectacle was staged in the elephantine Cathedral of St. John the Divine on May 4, 1990. Before a large audience, then-mayor David Dinkins gushed, art dealers Tony Shafrazi and Jeffrey Deith pontificated, New York City Ballet dancers Heather Watts and Jock Soto twirled, and soprano Jessye Norman trilled. A few speakers vainly attempted to introduce some personality--some sense of the person--to the leaden proceedings; Haring's sister spoke especially movingly about her affection for her older brother. I wondered about Keith's role in this production, whether he'd had a hand in planning the service. For an event as complex as this one, the parchment programs might well have credited someone with "concept." And just who decided that the world famous artist would be memorialized at St. John that day? Among those dying lingering, premature deaths--I'm thinking of breast cancer as well as AIDS--the task of planning funerals or memorials is often taken with the utmost seriousness. The involvement (or non-involvement) of the terminally-ill is also an acutely accurate guage of denial, as in the case of my friend Bob, who left his service in the hands of his psychologically ill-equipped family. When a friend hesitantly asks you to help take care of his obituary, you know s/he's winding up professional affairs. But when s/he asks you to help conceive or execute the memorial service it's a likely indication that s/he is coming to terms with the end. (Ironically, this process sometimes seems to prolong life by providing a reason for living.) Memorials can be complicated: I recall one that featured scripted reminiscences; poems and souvenir copies of them; slides and audiotapes; a rented hall and Kosher, catered food. These sorts of demands frequently pale, however, alongside the psychological provocation sometimes programmed into memorials. I remember a public gathering for a curator who I knew slightly, but with whom I shared many intimate friends. A bundle of contradictions, this flirtatious and difficult man had been active in AIDS causes, but closeted about his own ill-health. He left a detailed plan for his service--a three-minute rap from performance artist X at the top of the bill; a five-minute encomium from museum director Y at the bottom, and so on. But infinitely more fascinating were the responses of those who'd been left off the program. Like spurned lovers, their anger and guilt revealed a surprising reserve of (unresolved) feeling. The deceased, it turned out, was even more adept at manipulating them after death, than he had been during his life. by William J. Mann Author of "The Biograph Girl" Before our friend Victor died, he made us promise there would be no lilies at his memorial service -- too much like a funeral. We said to hell with any flowers at all; we were spending his insurance money on a trip to Florida for ourselves. He liked that. We did have some flowers at the service -- daisies, I think -- plus a boy in leather who stood up at the podium and described how Victor liked to get fucked and rim another guy at the same time. This was in front of Victor's wide-eyed poly sci students and very august colleagues from the University of Hartford. We're pretty sure he liked that, too. by Bob Smith Comic and author of "Openly Bob" and "Way to Go, Smith"   Many of the AIDS memorial services I've attended have been memorable because gay men insist in putting fun into funerals. My friend John was an avid collector of Bauer pottery, the West Coast equivalent of Fiestaware, and at his memorial, his boyfriend Jim held up a bright yellow cookie jar and announced that it was going to John's final resting place. Knowing the lengths that John would go to add to his collection everyone in the chapel laughed. Jim responded to our amusement with an aside, "You know John planned all of this. I had nothing to do with it." And we laughed again ­ knowing that John would never let the notoriously scattered Jim plan his funeral. My friend Bob's memorial service at St. John's Cathedral in New York degenerated into a piano bar competition. I had met Bob cater-waitering and all of our friends were actor/sculptor/writer/you-name-it/waiters. During Bob's service, one of our friends belted out a number in the cathedral. I thought, "He thinks he's auditioning for the lead in Gypsy, and he's trying to out-do Ethel Merman." The next singer then tried to out-do the previous guy. I don't recall exactly what song he sang but I think it was, "I'm Still Here!" I glanced over at Peter, one of the few heterosexual cater-waiters among our friends, and gave him a quizzical expression indicating, "What the fuck is this?" Peter immediately started laughing which made me laugh and we were transformed into two Mary Tyler Moores trying not to become hysterical during Chuckles the clown's funeral. It was only later that I thought how fitting our laughter was because Bob relished the absurdities of his friends. by Wickie Stamps A San Francisco writer with a Southerner's healthy interest in her dead relatives Living never comes easy to my family but dying seems to come harder. Aunt Emily's ashes got lost on the train between Richmond Virginia and Lumberbridge North Carolina. So, it came as no surprise to me when we started having trouble with burying my daddy. It was hot when my Daddy died, Southern hot as it always is when our family chooses to die. It was the kind of hot where sweat was pouring down that back of your neck, your eyes squinted from the headache and you were trying to figure out if what you saw staring through the waves of heat rolling off the flat, hot tar was really a person, a tractor or a mirage. We knew where to bury daddy - Lumberbridge, North Carolina, a red dirt town near Lizard Lick, North Carolina. Lumberbridge was where he was born and where his daddy had been a horse and buggy doctor. It was a town that every few years they hold a Stamps memorial day so that every baby (now in at least their 70's) birthed by my grandfather could show up at the Stamps memorial hall, say hell-o and eat homemade biscuits, macaroni and fruit salad with marshmallows in it. I'd been invited over the years but somehow figured my tattooed, pierced motorcycle riding self wasn't exactly what they had in mind. By the time I, the baby of the family who always the last to know anything, got a call from my sister MF, about the trouble with daddy, things had already turned bad. Trouble started when my brother Tom who hadn't drawn a sober breath since Eisenhower was president, decided he would head up the funeral arrangements. As the only man in the family-so to speak-he felt it was his job to put the "old bastard" in his grave. No one, that being me, my sister Rags or Nenell, had any inclination to be within a thousand miles of our dear daddy. But MF who felt very strongly about protocol for the living and the dead was head to head with Tom. "He's going to put him in a U Haul," she said. I'd just stepped out of the shower and was already sweating. "Uh huh," I said as I wasn't too sure what I was supposed to say but sure as hell wasn't about to get in the way of my sister's wrath. "So you don't think that is a good idea?" "Of course not. It is..." She paused, searching for the right word. "Undignified," I said, know that being dignified and having his obituary in the New York Times were central to this situation. "Yes, God damn it." I started chuckling. "This isn't funny," she said. "Hon, I'm sorry. I think daddy might get a kick out of that." "It's bad enough that daddy's got the Salvation Army involved. I mean they are so..." "Tacky," I added. "I suppose so. I know all of you think I am uptight..." "And your point is?" "God damn, there is got to be some dignity in here somewhere." I slipped into my pants. "So why is Tom putting Daddy in a U Haul? Aren't there businesses that haul bodies. Like the funeral home." I knew it was the South and customs are strange but I was sure they must have something. "Of course there are. But Tom wants to escort daddy down to Lumberbridge. I am sick of being the only person who buries anybody in this family. Tom's down there drunk and..." Despite my instincts I found myself saying "I'll give him a call and see what's up." I got off the phone, finished dressing and dialed Virginia. "I'm working on a suspension system," my brother said. "Tom what in God's name are you talking about? And how along have you been drinking?" "Daddy's too long for the U Haul van. I was down there at the lot, talking to the guy and I measured their vans..." his voice trailed off. I could feel him thinking. "Maybe I could put him in one of their trucks. But then he'd be sliding around back there." "Tom..." I knew it was be the grace of god if I was going to be able to put a dent in this line of thinking. "I've come up with a suspension system so we could suspend daddy's coffin from the van's ceiling. But it would mean we'd have to keep the back doors of the van open and his feet would be hanging out...." I started laughing and so did my brother. "Tom, you've gone mad. Anyway, even though it's the South and if there was anywhere where they'd have loose laws on the transportation of the dead it'd be there but..." My voice trailed off as I realized I was attempting to use logic with my brother, a hopeless tact.. "What if Daddy falls out the back and goes flying down the highway?" "I'm taking back roads. And I've got good plans and will get good equipment." What about the heat?" "What about it?" "Don't you think Daddy might spoil?" There was silence on the phone. I knew I might be getting somewhere. "Good point. I hadn't thought of that." He paused. "Wait a moment! He's preserved!" "Put the bastard in the trash compactor," my sister Nenell slurred when I called her for assistance. I laughed. "Nenell, help me out here." "God damn it, daddy gave me trouble when he was alive and now..." By the time we got off the phone she, who was the oldest, agreed to talk to my brother. It was at the memorial service where I milled about among Salvation Army lieutenants and gospel singers wailed in the background that I got a chance to speak to Nenell who was dressed in a Kaftan, sandals and large looped earrings. Given that daddy's body had been transported by the funeral service I knew she had successfully derailed my brother. "What did you say to him?" I asked. I knew it had to be something as, once my family got an idea in their heads there was little hope of shifting them. "I told him that what he really needed to be concerned about was daddy rising from the coffin and strangling him from behind." She looked over her sunglasses at a Salvation Army sergeant. "How tacky," she said. "Worse yet, no booze." by Christopher Bram Author of "The Notorious Dr. August: His True Life and Crimes" and "Father of Frankenstein" (from which "Gods and Monsters" was adapted). We are not cold people, my family, but we can be somewhat reserved. Or as an Italian friend of mine puts it, "you're not Italian." When my mother died a few years ago, we were all devastated but the pain left us sad, empty, numb. We went down to North Carolina for the funeral, my two sisters, my brother and I. We were standing in the reception hall of the Episcopal church, and one of use ­ I cannot remember who ­ began to cry. These weren't polite sniffles but deep silent open-the-spigots sobs and as soon as one of us began to cry we all began to cry. Tears were as contagious as laughter. We stood there staring at each other as we all shuddered and poured, a salty tidal wave of grief, experienced and shared in public. And I noticed the repeated flash of a camera. Uncle George, my mother's brother-in-law, a physicist who once worked with Robert Oppenheimer, was snapping pictures of our grief, smiling like we were just another physical phenomenon ­ which I suppose we were. by Kirk Read A writer whose memoir, "Home", will be released next summer. AIDS is another American war for me. I've only seen its wake, the decade after the big bomb. I only see survivors who talk to themselves in the street and stumble around looking for their lost platoons. I see organizations that came together to drive meals to people and walk their dogs when they're too sick. I have no idea how they did it. Stephen Gendin was one of those people you never thought would die. He could be sitting next to you, coughing and looking like shit, taking 23 pills in a single gulp. He seemed indestructible, buoyed by anger, a tender grace, and mad creativity in his daily life. I helped Chris Bartlett put on a midnight memorial for Stephen at the Gay Men's Health Summit in Boulder. It was only my second AIDS death. Stephen was a freaky radical faerie sexpig, so we didn't want it to be morose. As 40 guys arrived, I painted their faces with tribal war paint as done by an eight year old failing art student, then sprinkled glitter all over them. I was nervous, painting kitty whiskers on legendary activists who'd buried most of their friends. I didn't want the fun we were having to seem disrespectful. We had a hundred votive candles all over the footbridge above a creek. We circled, told stories, clapped, stomped, moaned, sang badly, and passed around a water jug. Everyone was drinking out of it, but by the time it got to me, I took a big mouthful and spat it into the circle. Stephen was a spitter. We finally packed it in around 2am. As we were cleaning up, I wondered whether Stephen would have liked the gathering. Stephen, we all agreed, would have been pissed that it didn't end with a big orgy in the creek. "Come on...Play!" I can hear him entreat in that squeaky, freaky cackle.