Like a Love Story(14)
Then I pull out a stack of worn, oversize index cards, held together with a rainbow scrunchie. My eyes catch the top of the first card, which reads #1 Adonis. Then #2 Advocate, The. Then #3 AIDS. I stop cold. Just that word on a piece of paper scares me, makes me feel like it could be transmitted to me, and I quickly flip past it. The cards are alphabetical, each with a number on top and a subject, followed by a handwritten scrawl, almost illegible. You can tell they were written quickly and with passion. Some entries are longer than one card, sometimes two or three, stapled together. I scan through the cards. I wonder what secrets they hold. There are one hundred and thirty-one of them in total, and a few leap out at me. #9 Baldwin, James. #18 Brunch. #26 Condoms. #28 Crawford, Joan. #53 Fucking Reagans, The. #54 Garland, Judy. #75 Love. #96 Radical Faeries. #127 White Night Riots. #131 Woolf, Virginia. But one card calls to me above all others. #76 Madonna. I pull it out and start to read.
Art
I catch a glimpse of myself in one of Wall Street’s intimidatingly tall glass buildings, and at first I can barely recognize the image as me. My hair isn’t lavender anymore—it’s dyed back to its natural chestnut brown and cut into a conservatively short haircut. My earring is gone, and the hole that once housed it already seems to have closed up. I’m not wearing a tank top, or a Silence = Death slogan on my clothes, or a concert T-shirt of Cyndi, Boy George, or Madonna. I’m wearing a boring-as-dirt gray suit, a white shirt, and one of my dad’s many crisp red ties, which feels like it chokes me. At least I have my camera around my neck, so I don’t feel like a completely lost soul. Then I see Stephen in the reflection behind me. “Ready?” he asks. He’s wearing a dark-navy suit, light-blue button-down shirt, and striped tie. The concealer he wears is so subtle you wouldn’t even know there’s any makeup on his face.
I turn around to face him. Behind him are seven more men in suits. None of the people frantically rushing in and out of these colossal buildings see anything but a group of traders chatting before their workday begins. Only we know the rage that hides behind these suits and ties and conservative haircuts.
“My heart’s beating really fast,” I say.
“That’s normal,” Stephen says. “The first time I protested, I felt like Judy Garland playing Carnegie Hall. Just breathe and enjoy your first drag show.”
“Drag show?” I ask.
“Look at us,” he says. “We’re serving Wall Street realness.” He winks at me, because calling something realness is a throwback to a ball he took us to last summer. It was the most fun ever. “All we have to do now is act.”
When Stephen first told me and Judy about ACT UP, he said it wasn’t so strange that he had found his calling as an activist, because it was close to his first love, acting. Acting, activism, action, they’re all based on creating authenticity in an artificial world. Stephen never was an actor, though. He was a lawyer, and not the kind who got rich defending corporations and screwing people over. He helped refugees resettle into the country. But he had to stop working when his health got bad, or maybe the agency he worked at thought he’d scare the refugees. There was something ironic about a man with AIDS helping resettle immigrants, since people with AIDS are banned from entering the country. But his lawyering is all over anyway. Activism and being a rad uncle are his only jobs now.
“You loaded up your camera with fresh film?” he asks.
“It’s ready to go.”
“Remember, take some photos and then run. We made a deal, okay?” The deal is that I’m allowed to photograph the action but not be a part of it. Because he won’t have me getting booked by the cops, even if chances are I’d immediately be released.
“I don’t care about getting arrested,” I tell him.
“And I don’t care that you don’t care. Leave the risks to those of us who are going to die soon,” he says.
I hate when Stephen does this. He makes these throwaway jokes about his imminent death, which I choose to believe isn’t coming anytime soon. I choose to believe that a medical breakthrough is on the horizon and will arrive just in time to save his life. But I don’t say this. I’ve tried before, and it upsets him. He says he wants to have hope, but not too much hope. “Too much hope will just kill me faster,” he said to me once. I don’t know exactly what he meant by that. But another time he said to me, “It’s the anger that’s kept me alive, you know. Without the anger, I’d have joined José by now. I just have too much to scream about to leave just yet.”
Behind us, one of the seven men, the most handsome one, calls out, “It’s almost nine. We should go in. Here are your badges.” The man hands us fake trader ID badges, with false names but our real photos on them. I stare at mine for a moment, thinking this is exactly who my parents pray I will turn into one day. Something else hits me hard—that when I strip away the punk hairdos and the alternative style, I look so much like my dad. I think about how easy it would be if this were who I was, a person who liked his red ties, and his boring haircuts, and his trades and deals and golf games. A person who didn’t like boys, who didn’t hate convention, who wasn’t so angry. For a moment, I even wish for this, for an easy life. But this wish just makes me angrier, fuels me more. It reminds me that what I want, what I truly want, is to be loved and accepted for being me.