Through the Looking Glass by Sarah Schulman   The present does not resemble the past. We went through a mass death experience and then we took a break. Instead of constant morbidity there was puking, diarrhea, never-ending adjustments to toxic drug combinations, a lot of swallowing and a certain facsimile of robustness, everyone feeling "great." Back to the gym. The funerals slowed or stopped and the neighborhoods changed, a new kind of AIDS body modification came into being. No more KS and wasting syndrome on the street, now we have the Crixovan Look: sunken eyes and a pot belly. Guys who are HIV can bulk up the way the steroid-pure cannot. Now they're larger than ever. Some men got their power back. We could not, did not face what we had really endured. Looking clearly at the gay dead, locked in their youth, their youth is now locked in the past. Eighties haircuts, ACT UP demonstrations, tentative first novels from defunct presses. I find that my memories fade. Men are increasingly reduced to specific moments played over again and many are moments of dissipation. John Bernd Phil Zwickler Michael Callen Assotto Saint Steve Abbott Stan Leventhal David Feinberg John Bernd, the dancer, the performance artist. Something was wrong with his blood, but he didn't know what it was. GRID. His skin fell apart. He got sick so early in the scheme of things and seemed to live on will alone. But was it truly will that made some people live longer than others, or was that a placebo. Did they just have a weaker strain of virus? ARC. One day on the subway I offered him a sip of my orange juice. He thought twice and then refused. Whom was he protecting? AIDS. He came into the coffee shop where I was working. "How can I get better if you say I have AIDS?" I didn't know the answer. I know there is more there. We were in two shows together, all that backstage banter. I saw his collaboration with Anne Bogart on a version of Picnic and we had a long, long talk about it. I saw him perform many times including his last piece with Jennifer Monson-he was so disoriented he could barely follow her. He waved at me crossing the street. I went to his funeral. The world before protease inhibitors is clearly The Past, emotionally for me now. That was the world of the helpless well watching the ill fade, suffer, and disappear. I think of my artist friends who are healthy today: Jack Waters, Peter Cramer, Mark Ameen, Dudley Saunders, Scott Tucker, Harvey Redding-I am so grateful for their presence on this earth as equals. And my dearest, the writer Joe Westmoreland, struggling with endless medical poisonings, swollen tongue, frozen retinas, IVs, toxifying, detoxifying. They live in another time from the dead. It has ceased to be a continuum. Of course memory is a reflection of the self. I recall the moments that meant the most to me; they are unrepresentative and historically subjective. Massaging Phil Zwickler's feet in the hospital while he explained to his mother that "that's what we do for the dying." Traveling with Michael Callen in Germany, watching Customs trying to cope with his gym bag filled with pills. Despite his claim of having had three thousand penises up his rectum, Michael was sure that he knew who infected him, and he was mad about it. Assotto Saint's family at his funeral. His mother knew all his friends' names. "When he received an award from the Black Lesbian and Gay Leadership Forum," said a young conservatively dressed Haitian woman at the church podium, "I was so proud of my cousin." Bo Houston, the writer. He died while we were angry at each other. Vito Russo in the hospital with an ACT UP button on his striped pajamas. He wanted to know everything that was happening out there in his beloved world. Others couldn't bear to hear about what they were missing. There are two guys in particular whom I think about a lot. The one who was my real friend was a writer named Stan Leventhal. All of his books are out of print now. And the harsh truth is that Stan never really became a great writer. But he wanted to be. My favorite story of his was in the final book published in his lifetime, Candy Holidays and Other Short Fictions, where Stan remembers the last man he unknowingly infected. However, Stan was a great friend. He liked to have a Jack Daniels and a cigarette; he took AZT with bourbon sometimes. A tall skinny guy, clean shaven with short brown hair, he was kind of a hippie, wore a jean jacket, T-shirt and had a backpack. Stan read everything and was one of the first men I'd met who actually read lesbian fiction and loved it. He lived in a filthy apartment on Christopher Street overlooking the park. It was packed with books and CDs, his guitar and TV. He'd come to the city from Long Island to be a singer and started out on the folk circuit. He'd broken up with the love of his life right before we made friends and plunged himself into the creation of Amethyst Press, which probably published the most interesting collection of gay male writing in the history of our literature. He published books by Dennis Cooper, the late Bo Houston, the late Steve Abbott, Kevin Killian, Patrick Moore, Mark Ameen-all important, under-appreciated artists. After working at porn magazines like Torso for years, Stan had a formula. He'd publish a highly intellectual, formally innovative novel by a gifted writer and then slap a piece of beefcake on the cover so it would sell. His favorite writer was Guy Davenport, to whom he'd written a comprehensive and adoring monograph. Near the end of Stan's life, Amethyst got wrested away from him in a power play, and then the new bosses destroyed and folded it. This depressed him deeply; he was filled with anger. I remember one lunch at a Chinese restaurant when I saw tears splash into his food, only to look up and discover it was sweat; he had such a high fever but was still running around. His true love died. My final visit to his apartment, the place stank. The toilet bowl was black and there were no sheets on the bed. Stan gave me one of his books, Resurrection of a Hanged Man by Denis Johnson, which unfortunately I didn't care for. I was surprised, actually-usually we agreed on books. I saw him in Beekman Hospital the week that he died. He was bald and shaking, could barely sit up, but did. That was the first time I met his mother, Pearl, an old uncomprehending woman. "There's so much to say," Stan told me. Then he told me something I won't repeat here. I stepped out into the hallway as the doctor fiddled with his body and Pearl followed. "Stanley always wanted a hard cover," Pearl said. Then he was dead. Stan's best friends were Chris Bram and Michelle Karlsberg. Later Michelle told me about her final conversation with Pearl. "Should I ask Stanley if he wants to be buried in Florida?" Pearl asked. "Stan doesn't give a shit where he's buried," Michelle told her. Like all the dead and the living, I think I see him everywhere. But it is just new versions, young versions of guys like Stan. Most of us seem to be re-created every fifteen years. I see a twenty-year-old me almost once a month, and a twenty-year-old, forty-year-old, sixty-year-old Stan passes by on the street often enough. The other guy I think about a lot is David Feinberg. He's famous for being the guy who was so creepy to his friends that when he died they were all mad at him and never got over it. He forgot that people have responsibilities to others until they are dead. He thought he was absolved. The great thing about David is that his work gets better as the years pass. He wasn't sentimental and now, neither are we. We've caught up with the sarcasm, hatred, and resentment of the dying for the living. We're not ashamed of it anymore. In fact, it's funny. That's the thing about gay people-we're not really especially caustic or campy, we just get bored very easily and move on to whatever sensibility is waiting around the corner. So David's books, Queer and Loathing, Eighty-Sixed, and Spontaneous Combustion, have become documents of justifiable anger and the guts it takes to have it. There are famous stories about David, famous lines. "You can't wear a red ribbon if you're dead." Or the time he hauled himself out of Saint Vincent's Hospital and across the street to the ACT UP meeting to tell everyone there that we had failed because he was dying. The way he'd stop people on the elevator and tell them that he had AIDS. How he went to a department store covered in KS and asked for a free makeover. How he went to see Love! Valor! Compassion! with his portable IV and slept through the show. There was a lot of pain there and a lot of expression of it-two things that are not supposed to go together. He was a real Jew in that way. I remember when David threw a dying party. He invited his closest friends and had us stand around eating and drinking while we watched him, emaciated, lying in the living room dying in front of us. Then, he had diarrhea accidentally on the couch and ran screaming to the bathroom. Stan Leventhal was there, and after David shit his pants, Stan left. That's when I realized the cruelty of David's act. He wanted to make everyone else who had this in his future stare it down now. No mercy. I visited him in the hospital once when he called his mother and asked her to send him some cookies. She sent them parcel post because it was cheaper. Another time I was there, American Express called up to ask if he was the one buying plane tickets and charging hotel rooms on his card. No, David was busy dying. It was an ex-boyfriend who was ripping him off. This is a story I heard, so I'm no witness, but after he died his parents decided that they wanted him to have a Jewish funeral. The friends were so shell-shocked by his abusive behavior, they had lost all judgment and went along with it, getting a lesbian rabbi. The whole works. But the parents got caught in traffic coming from upstate and were hours late, so the lesbian rabbi had to leave and the house rabbi was called in to take her place. When the family finally arrived he started the service. "David was a great . . . athlete." Oh my God, his friends thought. "He loved to go to the gym." These are stories but the pain they contain is immeasurable. The impact of these losses requires a consciousness beyond most human ability. We grow weary, numb, alienated, and then begin to forget, to put it all away just to be able to move on. But even the putting away is an abusive act. The experiencing, the remembering, the hiding, the overcoming-all leave their scars. Early this year I was in the political funeral for Matthew Shepard. Of the five thousand gay men and lesbians who showed up there were a lot of guys in suits, a lot of younger people who'd never been in a real demonstration before, and a lot of friends from the old ACT UP. The feeling in the crowd was so unusual. It was something I've never experienced in a demonstration before. A certain calm. There was an absorbed alienation, a lack of concern, really. We'd seen it all. It was an action of the emotionally experienced. No matter how stupidly the police behaved we all knew just what to do. There was a beautiful nonverbal communication. We just stepped around them, kept going forward, ignored them, their horses, their stupid threats. And I realized that this was the result of compartmentalized grief. This alienation, this total disregard, this lack of fear, this common understanding, this quiet perseverance, the impossibility of either being stopped or getting upset about anyone trying. Our disappeared friends have taken our fear with them. After all, they knew what we did, who we were. Without them, so much of what we, the living, have done, also goes unremembered. Increasingly I vaguely recall my dead friends and in those ways I vaguely recall myself. Rereading Stan's books for this essay was a strange experience. This good man who was a loyal friend, who had impeccable taste in literature, who started a literacy program at the Lesbian and Gay Community Center to teach gay people how to read, who has a library named after him, who published some of the most important gay male writers of our day-this guy could not really write. I feel guilty saying that because I know how much Stan wanted to be a great writer. But on the other hand, one of the paradigms we've created about AIDS is that of the dead genius. And of course, most of the people who died were not great artists. They were just people who did their best or didn't try at all. Some of them were nasty and lousy, others mediocre. Some knew how to face and deal with problems, others ran away and blamed the people closest to them. Stan was unusual because he gave so much to other people, both personally and in his never-ending contributions to the community. These actions alone make him exceptional. But as an artist, he had, as one colleague put it "an ear of lead." That's partially why I decided to focus this essay on him, because his death is just as horrible even though he never wrote a great book and possibly never would have. I'm older now than I was when we were friends and when Stan died. I've suffered more and learned more about people. This makes me appreciate him so much more. Looking over the Davenport monograph, I'm impressed all over again. How many writers take the time to praise another living writer? Most people can't; they're too small. They resent everyone else's achievement. I honestly believe that most people have not realized their dreams, cannot face and deal with the problems that obstruct them, and consequently feel inadequate. For these reasons most people resent other people's strengths, unless they've fully realized their own. Because Stan did not become the kind of writer he wanted to be and yet was able to see and praise beauty in someone else's work, he was an exception. That's what made him such a great reader and publisher. He had that rare maturity to not project. I think I can see that maturity, retrospectively, in the way he died. For those of us who are experienced death watchers, we know that many people die resenting the living. But up until the last moment I saw him, Stan appreciated other people, he did not begrudge them. When they were evil, like the guys who destroyed Amethyst Press, he knew it and had appropriate anger. But when people had integrity and depth, he loved his friends. How many others can have that said about them? Photograph of John Bernd by Dona Ann McAdams; all Others by Robert Giard Sarah Schulman's play, "The Child," will have a workshop production in February, 2001, at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island, which will be directed by Craig Lucas. Also read Michael Bronski's Introduction "Witness" and her premiere publication of "The Child"