Standing In Your Own Light
By Todd Swindell
January 1999, San Francisco
“Do you want to clean Harold Norse’s kitchen?”
The invitation came from Ronnie Burk, Chicano surrealist poet, at a Monday night General Body meeting of the militant AIDS protest group ACT UP San Francisco. By the mid 1990s, these meetings were being held in a collectively run, punk rock record store called the Epicenter, on Valencia at 16th street in the city’s Mission District. Filled with old couches, band graffiti on the walls and bins of seven-inch records, the Epicenter was the only place that would provide us space. ACT UP SF, once the fashionable vanguard of gay rage, had become ostracized from the city’s nepotistic AIDS industry, threatened by our continuing calls of accountability and conflict of interest.
Ronnie, a skinny gay Mexican/Native American from Texas, knew everyone from poets Charles Henri Ford and Allen Ginsberg to experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger and was one of the first students at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. During the 1980s, he lived in Manhattan and was involved in the artistic scene there, which included filmmaker Tommy Turner and artist and writer David Wojnarowicz.
Ronnie lost a lover in 1991 to the toxic chemotherapy AZT, the first treatment for AIDS that was pushed on the gay community at a dangerously high dosage. He joined ACT UP SF because he related to our informed protest against pharmaceutical promotion and our sense of performance art.
For the last couple months Ronnie had been visiting Harold at his home, just down the street from the Epicenter. Harold was in his 80s and living by himself in a small cottage at the back of an apartment building on Albion Street. Over time, Ronnie had taken to straightening things up around Harold’s place during their visits.
Ronnie was in his early 40s, and though he enjoyed these visits with Harold, he was focused on writing visionary poetry, creating Max Ernst-like collages and raising hell with San Francisco’s racist, elitist gay leadership. Ronnie knew that not only did I have the time to help Harold, but that I could, in my own way, benefit from such a connection.
The suggestion to help was made before the General Body meeting when I was flipping through the newest arrivals in the record bin. Ronnie showed me a copy of Beat Hotel, Harold’s cut-up novel written while living in Paris in the early 1960s. Long out of print, I had never actually seen a copy of the infamous book and here was Ronnie with a copy signed recently by the author. I was hooked.
Thus began my friendship with the great gay poet of the Beat Generation whose work I first connected with in 1990 while in my late teens. I had stolen a copy of his classic collection of gay-themed poems, Carnivorous Saint, from the Orange County Library system and I poured through it daily, comforted and electrified by Harold’s evocative description of his erotic exploits as a gay poet exiled from America.
Visiting Harold at Albion often felt like stepping back in time as the very experience had many classic aspects of ritual. To speak with him on the phone I had to call precisely at 11:30 a.m.- never before. Harold was very clear that his mornings were spent writing or, as he would often say, rewriting. To not disturb this creative period was sacrosanct. Following a brief chat, an appropriate meeting time was agreed upon.
The specific visiting instructions continued as I was told to press his buzzer exactly three times. This, according to Harold, allowed him to avoid unwanted visitors and peddlers of assorted goods who would sap time away from his precious writing.
Harold’s residence was a back cottage separate from the three-story complex. Following my buzzed entry through the outer door, I walked underneath the building’s first floor, down a passageway lined with storage spaces. Even on the brightest of days, it felt dark, subterranean and I couldn’t help but wonder, in the two-plus decades he’d lived there, which of Harold’s contemporaries had passed through this tunnel. Burroughs? Bukowski? Ginsberg?
From the dimness, I entered into a light-filled back courtyard with jasmine and jade bushes as Harold stood, smiling, at his doorway. A short man with vibrant eyes and a disheveled toupée, he was happy to have a welcomed visitor, especially one young and interested in poetry.
Harold’s cottage was raised above a dirt ground floor, which was used as storage space for bulk shipments of canned goods and pallets of printed books. Off a short hallway, there spread out a total of four rooms, including a kitchen and a split bath.
Brimming with excitement from those first visits, I hadn’t noticed that Harold’s place was rather shabby. One could spend all day cleaning and not remove the base level of grime. From my suburban middle-class background, it seemed bohemian. For Harold, I would think that it was familiar to the tenement rooms of his Brooklyn childhood. The rooms that were most cluttered, like his bedroom and the guest room, remained closed from view. Padlocks guarded these doors, placed there in reaction to the theft of some of papers stolen by a nefarious friend of a former roommate some years ago. When I learned about this later, it made his opening of home and heart to me that much more special.
Harold would have us sit in the front room, just off the entrance, as it was the least cluttered. Its west-facing windows framed the back courtyard, letting in shards of bright light. It was here that we first began to relate to one another, my visits adding to the sunlight warming Harold’s loneliness.
Though Harold lived a rather cloistered existence, he always came alive in the presence of a guest, especially if they were young. As the conversation developed Harold would become increasingly animated. After a spell one could literally see the years receding in his face as his vibrancy and gregarious nature returned to the fore.
“Ronnie says that you are an activist?”
“Yes, I’m a member of ACT UP San Francisco- the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.”
“What a powerful name. You come from the type of background I dreamed about, educated parents, three brothers. How did you get involved in activism?”
“Growing up in such a bigoted time and place, ACT UP spoke to my feelings of isolation and outrage. For the first time, I felt like I belonged somewhere, that I could make a contribution.”
“Interesting. I’ve stayed out of politics. My life has been dedicated to my writing, sometimes to my own disadvantage.”
“I’m surprised to hear you say that. When I first read your poetry, it spoke to me like an ACT UP protest: informed, angry, hopeful, and passionate.”
“Really?”
“Oh indeed…like when I read your poem on the assassination of Lorca, ‘We Bumped Off Your Friend The Poet.’ I understood the sacrifice for speaking an uncomfortable truth. For why else are we here?”
So it began, and over the coming months I would visit Harold as often as I could. Having joined ACT UP after its vibrant peak in the early ‘90s, I found myself on the outside of the outsiders., Street activists had taken jobs at pharmaceutical companies or AIDS organizations and the sense of urgency was replaced by complacency and hints of assimilation.
Despite a 60-year age gap between us, we bonded through our mutual distrust of authority and interest in the historical roots of oppression against gays. It was through Harold that I began to learn how the Christian church manipulated our sexual and spiritual consciousness for its own political and financial gains. I was fighting to reclaim the lost promise of gay liberation: freedom from bourgeois conventions maintained by a militarist patriarchy, which divided us along lines of race and gender.
I had read Harold’s Memoirs of a Bastard Angel cover to cover numerous times. From his youthful exploits in the Greenwich Village of World War II, to his travels through Europe and North Africa, to his repatriation to California following the Summer of Love, his memoirs were a rich evocation of the artists and intellectuals during a pivotal time in the 20th Century.
I found myself sweeping Harold’s kitchen floor as he made these stories come alive, imbued with a sense of eloquence by his current state of fragility. For instance, the summer of 1944 that Harold spent in Provincetown. He was sharing a cottage with a then unknown playwright named Tennessee Williams who was completing his first play, The Glass Menagerie.
“I was probably the first person to read the completed manuscript. Tennessee was so nervous about how it would be received. He dismissed it as only a ‘pot boiler.’”
“How surprising as it’s now regarded as a classic. I remember how it affected me when I was taught in my high school English class.”
“During the War, we all struggled to make our mark, being queer only added to the burden of recognition. At night Tennessee and I would lie in our bunks and, under the cloak of darkness, discuss the difficulty we endured just for loving other guys.”
Harold also spoke to his connection with his mentor, the poet William Carlos Williams.
“He was an important influence on my writing. For too long I held under the sway of the academics. Dr. Williams encouraged me to use my native Brooklyn tongue, to find the poetry in everyday speech, what he called the American Idiom.”
Though it wasn’t all nostalgia. Harold took a keen interest in my political activism, which opposed the conventional approach of the funding and treatment of AIDS. More often he would express his concern for my safety as my jacket sported a large patch that read “Fight Homophobia.” He was worried that I could be attacked on the street.
I found it odd that Harold’s poems could be so strident in opposition to oppression, yet he remained apprehensive about personal public displays. It took sometime for me to appreciate the level of hostility and fear that was ingrained in him as a gay man from those pre-Stonewall days. But his writing allowed him to speak his truth and express such bold courage.
Though, at that time, I was unable to grasp his insight into my abilities, Harold was resolute in his support and encouragement of my creative development.
“You have such a strong intellect; you should write more. The way in which you connect different issues is powerful and illuminating. Don’t stand in your own light.”
August 2007, Sonoma County
Ronnie was the first to go. After two protracted court cases brought against ACT UP SF by San Francisco’s AIDS establishment, he moved back to New York City in 2001 to focus his energies on poetry. Though I would miss him terribly, I supported his move and the work that would come from it. The future still seemed filled with possibility.
Then September 11th happened and, overnight, we were irrevocably plunged into a shadow realm of before and after. Rents began to rise along with racial tension. The details of Ronnie’s troubles became murkier.
Bronchitis was followed by an undiagnosed stroke, then another stroke, only this time much more serious. Without receiving the critical care so vital in the days following a stroke, Ronnie returned to San Francisco in the winter of 2002. He died the following March.
I had fled the city by then. What had once fueled my fire now threatened to consume me. I had painted myself into a corner of an activist identity, the pain and fear from my adolescence still there, beneath my skin, as I remained standing in my own light.
Harold now resided at an assisted-care facility in the Hayes Valley neighborhood. His dementia had increased to the degree that he could no longer remain alone. His new residence was a bright and supportive environment, as long as he didn’t have to share a room. Somehow Harold’s psyche was making sense of his final transition.
I would visit him on the weekends, having driven down from my new home in Sonoma County, an hour north of the city. Harold’s face would again light up with my arrival. He referred to his room at Hayes Valley Care as his “office.” We would sit and visit like old times.
Though his short-term memory was weak, the past existed with an emotional immediacy that was like listening to an old time radio show. The vulnerability of Harold’s age permitted these long-departed spirits to return as a reminder of the vibrant life he had lived.
I mentioned that I’d been reading through the works of James Baldwin. His eyes lit up. They had been close friends during their youthful days in Greenwich Village. The friendship continued despite time and distance as Baldwin wrote the preface to Harold’s memoirs.
“Jimmy was a youth when we met in the Village.”
“What an amazing time that must have been, when everyone was still struggling.”
“Jimmy would say, ‘I’m black and gay and ugly. Who would ever want me?’ You know he wanted to sleep with me but I couldn’t.”
“Did that make it awkward between the two of you?”
“No. I was incapable of being with someone without feeling attraction to them. I still felt a great affection towards him. His intellect was so strong; you knew he would achieve something of great importance. Of course we were all so young then, young and poor.”
Harold’s final testament was a massive edition of his collected poems published in 2003. He would invariably pick up the book and show it off with pride. Flipping through the 600+ pages, he would remark, “I was a good poet.”
“You were a great poet Harold. Your voice will live through the ages as an antidote to hatred and conformity.”
“Do you think so…?”
“I know so. I’ll make sure your work remains available. That’s why I’m working on your archives.”
Over the past year, a group of Harold’s friends would gather every few weeks at his cottage as we began to excavate his archives from the detritus of his decades there. Over the next three years, I prepared the salvaged material for its eventual deposit at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library.
Though it was an immense undertaking, for which I had no previous experience, I felt privileged to help ensure that Harold’s material remains would endure for scholars and researchers. Sorting through photographs and postcards, physique magazines, signed first editions and yellowed pages of poems, I began to understand the weight of an original existence.
As my closest ACT UP SF comrades passed away, I began to struggle with my own sense of legacy. As the gay community’s political discourse digressed to more mainstream issues such as marriage and military service, what would future generations make of our confrontational and controversial activism?
Having fought so long to reclaim the mantle of gay liberation and the progressive, inclusive politics it engendered, what would remain of our fight for freedom? Harold would actually outlive many of my ACT UP comrades, dying in 2009 a month shy of his 93rd birthday. His last known words: “The end is the beginning.”
February 2014, Sonoma County
Sitting at my kitchen table, I’m scrolling through video footage of Harold shot during one of our visits at Hayes Valley Care. To lift his spirits, I would play Harold songs from opera arias sung by great Italian tenors. His reverie would transport him back to boyhood Brooklyn where he first heard the emotionally melodic songs on his family’s wireless radio. He would begin to conduct the orchestra with grand, elegant gestures, as his memory carried him back in time.
My roommate enters the kitchen and, noticing the face on the computer screen, asks if I am chatting with a friend over the Internet. I laugh as I tell her that I was actually reviewing video footage of a departed friend.
Then I began to wonder. In many ways I was still communicating with Harold, collaborating on projects and receiving inspiration. After a year of rejections from numerous publishers, my selected edition of Harold’s poetry finally found a home. I Am Going to Fly Through Glass will be the first posthumous book of Harold’s, rectifying his writing’s current out-of-print status.
My apprenticeship working on Harold’s archives provided me a roadmap, as it were, on the possibilities for the enormous amount of material related to ACT UP SF, which I have been storing in a friend’s attic space.
The technological capabilities for preserving and broadcasting such material are becoming limitless. Still, it comes down to someone sitting down and doing the physical labor. Would the work of the group still resonate? That is not for me to decide.
Like young Jimmy Baldwin, full of youthful hunger for his intellect and rage to be heard, or Tennessee Williams, in doubt of his talent as a dramatic playwright, it’s impossible to know the outcome of one person’s voice. To step into the void and speak one’s truth is the eternal call of artists.
Though it has come at the cost of great loss, I can now heed Harold’s advice and no longer remain standing in my own light.
© Todd Swindell 2014
“Do you want to clean Harold Norse’s kitchen?”
The invitation came from Ronnie Burk, Chicano surrealist poet, at a Monday night General Body meeting of the militant AIDS protest group ACT UP San Francisco. By the mid 1990s, these meetings were being held in a collectively run, punk rock record store called the Epicenter, on Valencia at 16th street in the city’s Mission District. Filled with old couches, band graffiti on the walls and bins of seven-inch records, the Epicenter was the only place that would provide us space. ACT UP SF, once the fashionable vanguard of gay rage, had become ostracized from the city’s nepotistic AIDS industry, threatened by our continuing calls of accountability and conflict of interest.
Ronnie, a skinny gay Mexican/Native American from Texas, knew everyone from poets Charles Henri Ford and Allen Ginsberg to experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger and was one of the first students at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. During the 1980s, he lived in Manhattan and was involved in the artistic scene there, which included filmmaker Tommy Turner and artist and writer David Wojnarowicz.
Ronnie lost a lover in 1991 to the toxic chemotherapy AZT, the first treatment for AIDS that was pushed on the gay community at a dangerously high dosage. He joined ACT UP SF because he related to our informed protest against pharmaceutical promotion and our sense of performance art.
For the last couple months Ronnie had been visiting Harold at his home, just down the street from the Epicenter. Harold was in his 80s and living by himself in a small cottage at the back of an apartment building on Albion Street. Over time, Ronnie had taken to straightening things up around Harold’s place during their visits.
Ronnie was in his early 40s, and though he enjoyed these visits with Harold, he was focused on writing visionary poetry, creating Max Ernst-like collages and raising hell with San Francisco’s racist, elitist gay leadership. Ronnie knew that not only did I have the time to help Harold, but that I could, in my own way, benefit from such a connection.
The suggestion to help was made before the General Body meeting when I was flipping through the newest arrivals in the record bin. Ronnie showed me a copy of Beat Hotel, Harold’s cut-up novel written while living in Paris in the early 1960s. Long out of print, I had never actually seen a copy of the infamous book and here was Ronnie with a copy signed recently by the author. I was hooked.
Thus began my friendship with the great gay poet of the Beat Generation whose work I first connected with in 1990 while in my late teens. I had stolen a copy of his classic collection of gay-themed poems, Carnivorous Saint, from the Orange County Library system and I poured through it daily, comforted and electrified by Harold’s evocative description of his erotic exploits as a gay poet exiled from America.
Visiting Harold at Albion often felt like stepping back in time as the very experience had many classic aspects of ritual. To speak with him on the phone I had to call precisely at 11:30 a.m.- never before. Harold was very clear that his mornings were spent writing or, as he would often say, rewriting. To not disturb this creative period was sacrosanct. Following a brief chat, an appropriate meeting time was agreed upon.
The specific visiting instructions continued as I was told to press his buzzer exactly three times. This, according to Harold, allowed him to avoid unwanted visitors and peddlers of assorted goods who would sap time away from his precious writing.
Harold’s residence was a back cottage separate from the three-story complex. Following my buzzed entry through the outer door, I walked underneath the building’s first floor, down a passageway lined with storage spaces. Even on the brightest of days, it felt dark, subterranean and I couldn’t help but wonder, in the two-plus decades he’d lived there, which of Harold’s contemporaries had passed through this tunnel. Burroughs? Bukowski? Ginsberg?
From the dimness, I entered into a light-filled back courtyard with jasmine and jade bushes as Harold stood, smiling, at his doorway. A short man with vibrant eyes and a disheveled toupée, he was happy to have a welcomed visitor, especially one young and interested in poetry.
Harold’s cottage was raised above a dirt ground floor, which was used as storage space for bulk shipments of canned goods and pallets of printed books. Off a short hallway, there spread out a total of four rooms, including a kitchen and a split bath.
Brimming with excitement from those first visits, I hadn’t noticed that Harold’s place was rather shabby. One could spend all day cleaning and not remove the base level of grime. From my suburban middle-class background, it seemed bohemian. For Harold, I would think that it was familiar to the tenement rooms of his Brooklyn childhood. The rooms that were most cluttered, like his bedroom and the guest room, remained closed from view. Padlocks guarded these doors, placed there in reaction to the theft of some of papers stolen by a nefarious friend of a former roommate some years ago. When I learned about this later, it made his opening of home and heart to me that much more special.
Harold would have us sit in the front room, just off the entrance, as it was the least cluttered. Its west-facing windows framed the back courtyard, letting in shards of bright light. It was here that we first began to relate to one another, my visits adding to the sunlight warming Harold’s loneliness.
Though Harold lived a rather cloistered existence, he always came alive in the presence of a guest, especially if they were young. As the conversation developed Harold would become increasingly animated. After a spell one could literally see the years receding in his face as his vibrancy and gregarious nature returned to the fore.
“Ronnie says that you are an activist?”
“Yes, I’m a member of ACT UP San Francisco- the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.”
“What a powerful name. You come from the type of background I dreamed about, educated parents, three brothers. How did you get involved in activism?”
“Growing up in such a bigoted time and place, ACT UP spoke to my feelings of isolation and outrage. For the first time, I felt like I belonged somewhere, that I could make a contribution.”
“Interesting. I’ve stayed out of politics. My life has been dedicated to my writing, sometimes to my own disadvantage.”
“I’m surprised to hear you say that. When I first read your poetry, it spoke to me like an ACT UP protest: informed, angry, hopeful, and passionate.”
“Really?”
“Oh indeed…like when I read your poem on the assassination of Lorca, ‘We Bumped Off Your Friend The Poet.’ I understood the sacrifice for speaking an uncomfortable truth. For why else are we here?”
So it began, and over the coming months I would visit Harold as often as I could. Having joined ACT UP after its vibrant peak in the early ‘90s, I found myself on the outside of the outsiders., Street activists had taken jobs at pharmaceutical companies or AIDS organizations and the sense of urgency was replaced by complacency and hints of assimilation.
Despite a 60-year age gap between us, we bonded through our mutual distrust of authority and interest in the historical roots of oppression against gays. It was through Harold that I began to learn how the Christian church manipulated our sexual and spiritual consciousness for its own political and financial gains. I was fighting to reclaim the lost promise of gay liberation: freedom from bourgeois conventions maintained by a militarist patriarchy, which divided us along lines of race and gender.
I had read Harold’s Memoirs of a Bastard Angel cover to cover numerous times. From his youthful exploits in the Greenwich Village of World War II, to his travels through Europe and North Africa, to his repatriation to California following the Summer of Love, his memoirs were a rich evocation of the artists and intellectuals during a pivotal time in the 20th Century.
I found myself sweeping Harold’s kitchen floor as he made these stories come alive, imbued with a sense of eloquence by his current state of fragility. For instance, the summer of 1944 that Harold spent in Provincetown. He was sharing a cottage with a then unknown playwright named Tennessee Williams who was completing his first play, The Glass Menagerie.
“I was probably the first person to read the completed manuscript. Tennessee was so nervous about how it would be received. He dismissed it as only a ‘pot boiler.’”
“How surprising as it’s now regarded as a classic. I remember how it affected me when I was taught in my high school English class.”
“During the War, we all struggled to make our mark, being queer only added to the burden of recognition. At night Tennessee and I would lie in our bunks and, under the cloak of darkness, discuss the difficulty we endured just for loving other guys.”
Harold also spoke to his connection with his mentor, the poet William Carlos Williams.
“He was an important influence on my writing. For too long I held under the sway of the academics. Dr. Williams encouraged me to use my native Brooklyn tongue, to find the poetry in everyday speech, what he called the American Idiom.”
Though it wasn’t all nostalgia. Harold took a keen interest in my political activism, which opposed the conventional approach of the funding and treatment of AIDS. More often he would express his concern for my safety as my jacket sported a large patch that read “Fight Homophobia.” He was worried that I could be attacked on the street.
I found it odd that Harold’s poems could be so strident in opposition to oppression, yet he remained apprehensive about personal public displays. It took sometime for me to appreciate the level of hostility and fear that was ingrained in him as a gay man from those pre-Stonewall days. But his writing allowed him to speak his truth and express such bold courage.
Though, at that time, I was unable to grasp his insight into my abilities, Harold was resolute in his support and encouragement of my creative development.
“You have such a strong intellect; you should write more. The way in which you connect different issues is powerful and illuminating. Don’t stand in your own light.”
August 2007, Sonoma County
Ronnie was the first to go. After two protracted court cases brought against ACT UP SF by San Francisco’s AIDS establishment, he moved back to New York City in 2001 to focus his energies on poetry. Though I would miss him terribly, I supported his move and the work that would come from it. The future still seemed filled with possibility.
Then September 11th happened and, overnight, we were irrevocably plunged into a shadow realm of before and after. Rents began to rise along with racial tension. The details of Ronnie’s troubles became murkier.
Bronchitis was followed by an undiagnosed stroke, then another stroke, only this time much more serious. Without receiving the critical care so vital in the days following a stroke, Ronnie returned to San Francisco in the winter of 2002. He died the following March.
I had fled the city by then. What had once fueled my fire now threatened to consume me. I had painted myself into a corner of an activist identity, the pain and fear from my adolescence still there, beneath my skin, as I remained standing in my own light.
Harold now resided at an assisted-care facility in the Hayes Valley neighborhood. His dementia had increased to the degree that he could no longer remain alone. His new residence was a bright and supportive environment, as long as he didn’t have to share a room. Somehow Harold’s psyche was making sense of his final transition.
I would visit him on the weekends, having driven down from my new home in Sonoma County, an hour north of the city. Harold’s face would again light up with my arrival. He referred to his room at Hayes Valley Care as his “office.” We would sit and visit like old times.
Though his short-term memory was weak, the past existed with an emotional immediacy that was like listening to an old time radio show. The vulnerability of Harold’s age permitted these long-departed spirits to return as a reminder of the vibrant life he had lived.
I mentioned that I’d been reading through the works of James Baldwin. His eyes lit up. They had been close friends during their youthful days in Greenwich Village. The friendship continued despite time and distance as Baldwin wrote the preface to Harold’s memoirs.
“Jimmy was a youth when we met in the Village.”
“What an amazing time that must have been, when everyone was still struggling.”
“Jimmy would say, ‘I’m black and gay and ugly. Who would ever want me?’ You know he wanted to sleep with me but I couldn’t.”
“Did that make it awkward between the two of you?”
“No. I was incapable of being with someone without feeling attraction to them. I still felt a great affection towards him. His intellect was so strong; you knew he would achieve something of great importance. Of course we were all so young then, young and poor.”
Harold’s final testament was a massive edition of his collected poems published in 2003. He would invariably pick up the book and show it off with pride. Flipping through the 600+ pages, he would remark, “I was a good poet.”
“You were a great poet Harold. Your voice will live through the ages as an antidote to hatred and conformity.”
“Do you think so…?”
“I know so. I’ll make sure your work remains available. That’s why I’m working on your archives.”
Over the past year, a group of Harold’s friends would gather every few weeks at his cottage as we began to excavate his archives from the detritus of his decades there. Over the next three years, I prepared the salvaged material for its eventual deposit at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library.
Though it was an immense undertaking, for which I had no previous experience, I felt privileged to help ensure that Harold’s material remains would endure for scholars and researchers. Sorting through photographs and postcards, physique magazines, signed first editions and yellowed pages of poems, I began to understand the weight of an original existence.
As my closest ACT UP SF comrades passed away, I began to struggle with my own sense of legacy. As the gay community’s political discourse digressed to more mainstream issues such as marriage and military service, what would future generations make of our confrontational and controversial activism?
Having fought so long to reclaim the mantle of gay liberation and the progressive, inclusive politics it engendered, what would remain of our fight for freedom? Harold would actually outlive many of my ACT UP comrades, dying in 2009 a month shy of his 93rd birthday. His last known words: “The end is the beginning.”
February 2014, Sonoma County
Sitting at my kitchen table, I’m scrolling through video footage of Harold shot during one of our visits at Hayes Valley Care. To lift his spirits, I would play Harold songs from opera arias sung by great Italian tenors. His reverie would transport him back to boyhood Brooklyn where he first heard the emotionally melodic songs on his family’s wireless radio. He would begin to conduct the orchestra with grand, elegant gestures, as his memory carried him back in time.
My roommate enters the kitchen and, noticing the face on the computer screen, asks if I am chatting with a friend over the Internet. I laugh as I tell her that I was actually reviewing video footage of a departed friend.
Then I began to wonder. In many ways I was still communicating with Harold, collaborating on projects and receiving inspiration. After a year of rejections from numerous publishers, my selected edition of Harold’s poetry finally found a home. I Am Going to Fly Through Glass will be the first posthumous book of Harold’s, rectifying his writing’s current out-of-print status.
My apprenticeship working on Harold’s archives provided me a roadmap, as it were, on the possibilities for the enormous amount of material related to ACT UP SF, which I have been storing in a friend’s attic space.
The technological capabilities for preserving and broadcasting such material are becoming limitless. Still, it comes down to someone sitting down and doing the physical labor. Would the work of the group still resonate? That is not for me to decide.
Like young Jimmy Baldwin, full of youthful hunger for his intellect and rage to be heard, or Tennessee Williams, in doubt of his talent as a dramatic playwright, it’s impossible to know the outcome of one person’s voice. To step into the void and speak one’s truth is the eternal call of artists.
Though it has come at the cost of great loss, I can now heed Harold’s advice and no longer remain standing in my own light.
© Todd Swindell 2014