The streets emptied out. Borders closed. People emptied grocery shelves in panic. And every queer men's gathering I'd been scheduled to lead or participate in was cancelled through July. Who know what will be possible beyond then?
For some of us, the anxiety and isolation echo the trauma of the AIDS crisis. For nearly all of us, our inability to reach out and physically touch one another, let alone to connect erotically, compromises the lovingly embodied communities we've built over decades.
And yet, the patience and kindness and resilience all around us are extraordinary. Neighbours sending around flyers with offers to run errands for one another. People singing to each other from their balconies in Italy. Online heart circles and other programs blossoming in communities like The Billys, the Radical Faeries, the Body Electric School.
The same past history of another, far more deadly contagion that's left some of us affected for life also holds the reminders of how queers rose to meet a health threat not only with courage and righteous rage, but also with grace and inventiveness, playfulness and imagination. We learned new, safer ways to have sex. We created new networks of support and education. We found ways forward. We chose life and went on creating community.
In the 1980s, we ran off zines on photocopiers. We learned how to fuck safely. We sat down in corporate lobbies. We created jackoff clubs. We wrote and painted and danced and acted and took photographs and marched. We put on wimples and makeup and roller skates and threw condoms to passersby.
That history is full of precious seeds for a future that we're now called to imagine. We know how to do what we need to do, even if we don't yet know that we know it. Now's the time to sing from our balconies. To sit in a heart circle via Zoom. To reimagine once again the ways we reach out to one another, and to go on manifesting our faith in the deep truth of transpersonal Love.
