I was so afraid

    that I rushed to my desk and wrote this. All I could remember, that is. It was a dream, wasn’t it? It must have been. We were gathered in a kind of luxurious bunker, and it was all my friends and sex buddies. But he wasn’t there, my lover — and I realised that for some reason this tragedy had kept us apart. There were vast windows looking out on numbing, terrifying vistas, I didn’t want to look, but of course I did, we all did, there were spirals of smoke swirling from the tops of buildings — whatever it was, it was a science fiction movie — but it was now happening to us, and we knew we were going to die soon, and that was the torture. There was nothing we could do. I touched someone, someone who I recognised, someone who I had touched many times before — but he didn’t recognise me and turned away. I considered getting very drunk. We were not listening to the newscasts, there was no point, and anyway we were afraid of what we might hear. We saw nothing before us but our own demise. I was wearing a Greek toga— it seems I had imagined it was some kind of party, but the various men that I knew there (or thought I knew) were ignoring me, when I turned to them they turned away. There was no laughter, if it was a party in honour of our own deaths. It seems we were together because we had to be, there was nothing else. And as we gazed out through that enormous wall of glass at the soul-destroying annihilation, well, we knew we were next.  I don’t think we can live this way any longer — and I don’t mean quarantine — I mean the fear and dread used against us. I don’t blame the lock down for my dream, I blame Dr. Fauci. I blame everyone who has ever used fear and dread as a kind of punishment. I’ve lived with fear and dread all my life — how many of us haven’t? And then there were the moments when the veil was lifted, when someone allowed me not to be afraid. First there was the social worker in group therapy who told me that it was alright for me — in my head  at least— to tell my mother off. And I did, in my head. I never told my her to her face — though when I told her that she was no longer my best friend (believe me, I know that sounds cruel but it was the only thing to do at the time) it was like telling her to jump in a lake, which was an important thing for me to do. (And she did jump, eventually, into the cool clear lake of alcohol, but not because of me, because of life). And then there was just — art, which lifted the veil, momentarily. (And there was my boyfriend who— and he said I could talk about him here — who gave me permission not to worry about being ‘the best’ anymore, which was a pretty huge thing for me, as I was eternally terrified that I wasn’t.) There was J.D. Salinger and Jack Kerouac and Frank O'Hara, and Noel Coward and Harold Pinter, and ‘the Barbaras' — Barbara Pym and Barbary Comyns — and Patricia Highsmith and Iris Murdoch and Rebecca West (really just The Fountain Overflows) Elizabeth von Arnhim and all the writers I loved. They gave me permission to relax. But that was an escape, it was an escape from dread, and to some degree, Daddy was still holding the ladder. (That’s Adorno’s metaphor.) You go to escape but when you’re halfway down the ladder with your fiancee in tow you look down and suddenly there’s Daddy — snarling, snorting, chomping at the bit. Which means it’s not easy ridding yourself of fear and dread. And so when some make it their job to utilise those two magical, hypnotic, lethally potent forces to keep you in line for their own special interests — which of course they deem to be yours (i.e.the public good) please don’t do it. No I won’t have it! It’s got to stop — they can tell us what to do, they can enforce the law, but do not manipulate my emotions do not make me afraid for your own special purpose. It used to be the only thing to fear was fear itself— but before that it was always a weapon. During syphilis it was a weapon. It was a weapon during AIDS. But we, the sluts, said 'no way.' I interviewed three people for Toronto Life magazine (1989?), there were two men and one woman with AIDS. Yes, they were diagnosed with AIDS, and the were alive and not on medication, and they were challenging the HIV paradigm, yes they were. You an look it up — I almost won a bloody journalism award for that damn article. And I’m not bragging, I’m just saying times have changed. Or maybe it was just that no one really cared about the fags, so we could be revolutionary, even about our illness. But we knew then — it was our shameful secret — that the doctors couldn’t scare us away from screwing. And when they went after us for blowjobs (‘well blowjobs might cause AIDS you can’t be sure!’) we just went out and had a lot of blowjobs. Because living in fear is not living. That’s what my dream was telling me. You cannot live in shame and fear and guilt and dread with people waving your fingers at you all the time, insisting you can and must be a better person. Screw you Dr. Fauci! Did they teach you that at medical school? That the best way to keep your patients healthy was to torture them with guilt and fear and shame and dread? It’s not for myself, or for those others who live in relative comfort, but for those can’t work from their homes, those for whom the deprivation is actually real, and especially for those who -- of the world -- were already fearful, never had any hope, never wanted to live, who never really wanted to leave the house ever. They. Will. Stop. Living. Is that the idea: to stop us all from living? I think so. Because living is about dying. It’s not about not dying. It’s about doing dangerous stuff — stuff that is dangerous to your health. Or else you may end up like I was last night, waking to a shivering doom and no way to lift the veil. I was there, I was really there, and the creature was slouching towards Bethlehem, it was the very end, and it wasn’t the dying, it was seeing it coming, and seeing no reason to go on living.