Say Their Names

It's June. The rainbows are back in the store windows, and this year I keep looking at them and thinking about funerals.

I'm sixty-nine years old, I've buried more people than I can count, and I'm watching a country that did this once start clearing its throat to do it again.

They're passing laws to keep drag off of public stages. They're writing bills aimed at trans kids like a child in a dress is the most dangerous thing in America. The violence is climbing, and the men signing the laws call it protection. I want to be careful how I say this, because I have walked the whole length of this road already and I know exactly what is at the end of it.

Let me tell you, because the people who could tell you themselves are dead.

Stonewall happened when I was thirteen. The people at the front of it, the ones who started the thing these companies drape a rainbow over every June, were drag queens and trans women. The exact people this country is now legislating off the stage and out of public life were the ones who started the fight. You don't get to wave the flag they raised and ban the people who raised it.

Then came the plague.

Reagan sat in the White House and would not say the word while a generation of us died. They laughed about it from the press room podium — there's audio, you can go listen to a reporter ask about the "gay plague" and hear the whole room laugh. That was the official position of the United States government. We weren't a crisis. We were a punchline. The churches called it judgment, some hospitals wouldn't touch us, and the families, God, the families just stopped coming.

So we became each other's families instead.

Over those years the friends who are still around tell me we helped more than a hundred people, people whose own mothers and fathers looked at a dying son and decided that shame was bigger than love, and left. We bathed them, we fed them, we held them, and when the time came we made the funeral arrangements nobody else would make. There was a group of us that went to as many funerals as we could get to, strangers included, because we could not stand the thought of one more of us going into the ground with no one there to say that he had mattered.

I don't know why I'm still here and they're not, I've never known, you don't get an answer to that question, you just get the years they didn't get and a quiet voice that asks what you did to deserve them. I'm an old man now, and that voice has not gotten softer, it's gotten louder. The longer you live the more of them you carry, and the more it starts to feel like a debt.

So let me pay down a little of it. Let me say their names.

Don B. showed me it was okay to be me. He was ACT UP, out loud and in the street, Silence = Death on the placard, the bravest kind of man there was in those years. He taught me that staying hidden was just dying quietly where it was convenient for everyone else. Everything I am out loud, I learned from him.

Joey. My first boyfriend. The pain got to be more than he could carry, and he took his own life. I'm the one who found him, I called 911, I had to say it out loud to his family. AIDS doesn't only kill you with the virus, it kills you with the abandonment and the exhaustion and the years of watching everyone around you go, until a person just can't hold it anymore. It killed Joey slowly and then it left him to finish it himself.

Steve. The same. The pain got past what a body and a mind can hold, and he made it stop the only way that was left to him.

Robbie. My best friend. Diagnosed and gone inside of two months — that's how fast it moved back then, you could have a friend on a Tuesday and a funeral by the end of summer.

And standing behind those four, more than a hundred we helped bathe and feed and bury. I can't say all of their names. I wish to God I could, I'd read them into this page until your scrollbar gave out. There is a Quilt out there the size of city blocks made of exactly this impulse — say the names, sew the names, do not let them be erased. Erasure was always the whole game. It was then, and it is now.

Because that is what a drag ban is. That is what a bathroom bill is. That is what it is when you write a law that makes a kind of person illegal to be in public. It is erasure, it is the same machine. It ran on us with silence and a laughing press room, and it is running now on trans kids with protect the children stamped on the side of it, and I have watched this exact thing kill people I loved. I will not stand here at sixty-nine and pretend I don't recognize the sound of it.

So I'm calling them up. Don and Joey and Steve and Robbie and the hundred behind them. I carry every one of them, and I'm putting them at my back, and I'm turning to every scared trans kid and every drag performer some governor is trying to legislate out of existence, and I'm telling you what they told me.

You are not alone. You never were. There is an army of people who already walked through this fire, and they are standing behind the ones of us still breathing.

I'm here to be their voice. To remember them, to honor them, and to keep fighting the same hate that took them.

As long as I breathe, I have your back.

I will never stop.