Days of Contrast: "Rent" & My 1989

Everything happens for a reason. If this is so, and the older I get the more I believe this, my hasty move to San Francisco in 1989, literally days after my college graduation ceremony, was Predestined.

What I found after the requisite rocky start - my Richmond District, hole-in-the-wall dwelling run by a southasian slumlord, the October 1989 earthquake - was a fabulous pool, fabulous swim team [USF Masters], and the 727 Clayton Clan: Nicko, Molly, Olivier, and me. Lidi came later, hanging her bedclothes from our front window a la French style.

We were young, full of ourselves. Nick and I writers. Molly an actress. Olivier seemed to me a man of letters. I think he was the first Intellectual Gay man I'd ever met. I'd certainly met Out ones, proud ones, fierce ones, even in high school. But Olivier was, like I thought of myself but pale to him, studied. Oh, we had "Jobs," but that was never the Point. It never seemed the Point: we were climbing up a Big Tree to where the Big, Red Appples were.

Along with everyone's ambitions - Michael Moore opined that no one seemed to work in San Francisco in those days - was desire for social change. ACT-UP [AIDS COALTION TO UNLEASH POWER] started in New York City and spread to the Bay Area in response the Ronald Reagan's official silence toward the rising epidemic of young, gay men dying of AIDS. QUEER NATION followed suit to combat homohatreds in whatever city council or strip mall or trolley stop. Both countering not only Reagan [and his evil sister, Margaret Thatcher, in the UK] but also what was woven into the fabric of our very streets, the marches, the hangings-out at Cafe Flore: that is, Death.

Nineteen-eighty-nine was several years before the supposed improvement of HIV medications: this is a topic I will have to put my attention to another time, since there is persuasive debate about the evolution of meds and the evolution of survival. At that time, at that year, I could see men walking the streets of the Castro, being held and supported by friends, lovers, neighbors, god-knows-who. Weathered, whithered men not much older than I.

The Christians said their crimes were ... but why give more Voice to that din of unreason and superstition?

I was a Black, Midwestern kid, born of Southern roots, set in the middle of a white affluence in Southern California, and did not know up from down what to make of the world. Or, as my dear grandmother, Mary Adele Denny, would observe: "You have nothing to say [as a writer]". So it was not coincidental that I should feel a hunger to forgo a silly Marching ceremony at a prestigious university that, at bottom, is just as evil as Siblings Reagan and Thatcher, and rush headlong into the Bay Area, a better schooling.

Like a later headlong rush into Cuba in 1992, San Francisco was just the right chill of cold water to begin the breaking of something, an initiation. My godmother says "to gain wisdom you must sacrifice your ignorance." Despite myself, I was striving a knife into an enemy.

Clinton came. ACT-UP would split. Queer Nation dissolved. The poor began to be evicted from the City to make room for the dot-commies. I'll never forget the canary in the mine for me was hearing my godsisters become disenchanted with Club El Rio in the Mission because a new Class of men - macho and aggressive - tried lording over them: who were these arrogant fuck-heads? I came to my own conclusions about the decay that followed in what seemed like a Wonderland. I hadn't seen or read anything that touched the slice of that life until I picked up a DVD of the film, RENT.

I don't like musicals as a rule. I take myself much too seriously. So the opening scene of the cast singing to me made me uneasy: had I made an error and wasted $10? Another song. Another song. Does anyone not speak? Then: Angel rescues Tom, and I no longer noticed the songs.

RENT is about my generation, my social-economic Class. My real class. Not the class of 1989 Washington University. RENT seems to me to be the first, unique portrayal of a working class, imaginative bunch who will take shelter together, piece together their small fortunes, and dream big - big in their Art and Activism and exorcizing the world - at least the country - of the ghosts of Reagan and Thatcher and the offfical hatred of all things Queer and black and brown and working class.

"FIGHT AIDS" Tom scribbles on the board in the coffeehouse during the performance of "La Vie Boheme".

So what can I say? I cried like a baby so much of a slice of the wonderment of those days, days of contrasts. Swimming with my team at 6am. Running in Golden Gate Park. Walking up the hill to the Castro. Meeting an amazing bunch of fascinating, vibrant, real people who would show me how to be the Man I Could be. Then, seeing Angel fade like that made me conjure the last real-life moments of Andy, Gerald, Martin. They went like that, those Deaths every day ... Andy back home in the UK; Gerald a few weeks before I could return to see him one last time; ... Martin. And many others went with them. Every week - every, single week - the BAR [Bay Area Reporter] displayed two to three pages of thumbnail-pictured obituaries of our NEIGHBORS who had just died "from complications from AIDS."

How did we survive that? What balls we had! I guess in our own way, we sang through it. By the way, before my grandmother died, I think it was my musing one day over those years - an analysis of sorts - that she exclaimed: "See, now you have something to say. I can't wait to read your Book!"