"Silence=Death"

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Missing My Friend Robert Today

Robert Kingoff of blessed memory was Southern, Jewish, funny, my friend and HIV+, and then dead of AIDS relatively swiftly 18 years ago. I wrote about him in #23 of http://sarahsiegelstories.blogspot.com/2008/07/making-history-in-chicago.html. When I think of AIDS, I think mostly of Chicago, where I lived when I first made friends who were directly affected by it and by HIV.

For once, I clicked on tags in this blog, and saw what else I've written on AIDS and HIV in the past and found http://sarahsiegelstories.blogspot.com/search/label/AIDS and http://sarahsiegelstories.blogspot.com/search/label/HIV

Why Always...

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

Gay, Gay, Gay?

Reading an essay on Susan Sontag's journals from 1947-1963 earlier today, I'm re-inspired to feel unapologetic about the frequency of my writing about gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender (GLBT) -- well, mostly lesbian -- themes.

Now that I'm back in at least Facebook touch with so many of my early-learning and high school classmates, I think sometimes about the eyeful they're getting of my lesbian identity -- an identity I tried so fiercely to keep hidden for most of those years; they can't miss it, even if they avoid this blog and peek only glancingly at my Facebook "news." I'm always joining or creating this or that GLBT group. Ironically, as I write this, a childhood friend might be this very moment tagging me in a photo her dad took of me in a Charlie Chaplin costume and posting it on Facebook. She told me she'd be posting a couple of photos she had of us this weekend, including that tell-tale one.

In the essay, I see two quotes from Sontag's journal from when she was 15 and 17, and feel vindicated about my focus:

I wanted so much to feel a physical attraction for him and prove, at least, that I am bisexual....I marry Philip with full consciousness + fear of my will toward self-destructiveness.

In the same essay, her son and editor, who published the journals, says that his mother was not typically a "self-revealing person."

What touches me is the image of a vulnerable, teenage Susan Sontag, feeling the same sort of panic and internal war that I felt at that age, even though until recently, I've known of her only as the mostly-too-erudite-for-me culture essayist.

In the Wikipedia article on her, she is said to have been quoted by Brendan Lemon of Out magazine as follows:

Maybe I could have given comfort to some people if I had dealt with the subject of my private sexuality more, but it's never been my prime mission to give comfort, unless somebody's in drastic need. I'd rather give pleasure, or shake things up.

I guess that's where we differ -- I'm always looking to gain, if not also give, comfort, as well as pleasure and amusement. And I have little desire to shake things up.

24 Hours a Day

Thinking about Susan Sontag and Reverand Ted Haggard as I've been doing this week, I'm reminded that each of us is doing the best we can. Talking further with my mom about "Prayers for Bobby" and Reverand Haggard, my mom said, "Remember that Jewish couple you helped, whose son was dying of AIDS?"

"No."

"In Florida. When you lived in Chicago."

"Oh, yeah, he went to our synagogue."

"They had rejected him. And you called them and masterfully convinced them to speak with him, and they reconciled before he died."

"I had forgotten all about that." I still have the piece of smoky quartz he gave me from his things the last time I saw him alive; I keep it on my desk in my office at work. I remember my friend via the quartz, but I had forgotten about the one long-distance exchange with his parents.

It's for the experiences like the one my mom recalled for me that I'm honored to be "all gay, all the time." I trust it's clear that it's not noble on my part to be this way; instead, I'm on a mission to enable people to see GLBT people's humanity, including my own, until one day we're routinely recognized as human, rather than as Other.

World AIDS Day

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

December 1st

It's hard to believe that World AIDS Day is a group I can join on Facebook. It was nearly 22 years ago that I first became aware of HIV and AIDS; I was ignorant till then, perhaps, since I spent 1985-86 in Jerusalem and didn't make many gay friends till my return, as I was still "on the down-low" myself then.

I did have one gay friend in Israel that I knew of, and he never spoke of AIDS, and apparently behaved as though he was unaware of it. I've run into him at my synagogue's High Holiday services in recent years, and so either he was genetically lucky, or modified his behavior, or both.

How tragic a distance I've traveled since then, losing a number of dear friends, who were just in their twenties, and have had to wonder at God's plan more than I had ever meant to.

This morning, I read an article in "The New York Times" about a reporter's infertility and her decision to enlist a surrogate mother to carry her egg to term after the reporter had been devastated by a number of miscarriages. She wrote that she wanted to do whatever she could to fix God's plan and I thought: Your drive was greater than mine, since only half of the baby's genes would have come from one of us in my family; Pat couldn't contribute, and so after nine IUI attempts, as I've written here before, I gave up and deferred to what I said must have been God's plan.

This occurs to me on the eve of World AIDS Day, I guess, because my inability to create life organically is the closest I've come to dying myself.

Please, God, let me honor the friends I've lost to AIDS through my behavior on the 1st of December and always.