Rebel Friendships: “Outsider” Networks and Social Movements 9781349570713, 9781137479327

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Rebel Friendships

Rebel Friendships “Outsider” Networks and Social Movements Benjamin Shepard

rebel friendships Copyright © Benjamin Shepard, 2015. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-47931-0 All rights reserved. First published in 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-57071-3 ISBN 978-1-137-47932-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137479327 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shepard, Benjamin, 1969– Rebel friendships: “outsider” networks and social movements / by Benjamin Shepard. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Social networks. 2. Social movements. I. Title. HM741.S54 2015 302.3—dc23

2015010783

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: September 2015 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

List of Figures

vii

Acknowledgments: On Beer on the Sidewalk

ix

Notes toward an Introduction: Friendship as a Way of Life

1

1

Toward a City of Friends: Affinity, Autonomy, and Social Movements

17

2

Fred Mayer: A Tragicomedy of Sorts

35

3

Reviving the Tribe: Friendship and Social Relations in the Work and Play of Eric Rofes

75

4

Not Quite Queer

85

5

Sylvia Rivera, Her Myth and Mentors: On Support, Friendship, and Social Movements

101

From Drag to Occupy Wall Street: Street Protest, Gay Marriage, and Resistance to a Neoconservative City

115

Do-It-Yourself Urbanism as an Environmental Justice Strategy: The Case of Time’s Up!, 1987–2012

129

Connection and Separation: Occupy Wall Street and Friendships

141

9

Revolutionary Games and Repressive Tolerance

159

10

Friendship, Fighting, and the Need for Support

171

11

Surviving Plagues and Recalling Heroes

187

12

Notes toward a Conclusion: Activist Rituals and an Homage to the Disappeared

199

6 7 8

References

217

Index

231

Figures

Figure i.1 Figure 1.1

Figure 1.2 Figures 2.1, 2.2, 2.3

Figures 5.1, 5.2 Figures 6.1, 6.2

Figures 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4

Figures 8.1, 8.2 Figures 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 9.4

Austin Guest at Occupy Wall Street “We’re gonna fight #racism with #solidarity” (Fred Hampton). #Ferguson #BlackLivesMatter #HandsUpWalkOut #mickeyz Occupying the Robert Indiana Love Sculpture The site of the old Keller’s Hotel at West and Barrow Streets as it stands today Scenes from the 2014 Drag March Throngs of people in drag march west from the East Village to the Stonewall, where they sang “Somewhere over the Rainbow.” Time’s Up! Occu-Pies of March ride and pie fight, 2012. An abiding sprit of silliness propelled the group’s clown affinity group. Scenes from Spring Training and Occupy Mayday Scenes from the Occupy Wall Street Revolutionary Games working group

14

18 20

63 113

119

137 144

166

Acknowledgments On Beer on the Sidewalk

We all walk on the footnotes of giants, Robert Merton used to say. A book is such a process. Writing this book, I engaged with my father about his best friend, who passed my junior year in college. Dad shuffled off this mortal coil while I wrote the final drafts of this text. “Seeing this finally in print will be really special,” he said to me in one of our last conversations. This book really is for Dad, who inspired me to think about the practice of friendship. These talks helped me see the ways in which rebel friendships change lives, extending from my family, my mom and my brothers, through networks of comrades. These friends have helped me understand our lives in relation to each other. They include friends from Time’s Up!, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), Right of Way, and Public Space Party, Barbara Ross, Brennan Cavanaugh, Keegan Stephan, Monica Hunken, Steve Duncombe, Ron Hayduk, and so many others. Thank you, Stacy Lanyon, Erik McGregor, Mickey Z., and Catherine Talese, and all the other photographers who donated their materials to this book. This book is about you and what we’ve done together. Thanks also go to the anonymous reviewers as well as those such as Peter Nardi, Rob Smith, and Steve Duncombe, who read multiple drafts of this book. The book incorporated many of their suggestions, but it could only be one book. Friendship is the cornerstone of human life. There are a thousand ways to write on this topic. With their work and thoughts in mind, along with a few interviews and reflections on my experiences, I wrote this small volume, offering this highly idiosyncratic reading on the topic. My dissertation advisor, Irwin Epstein, constantly talked about his advisor, Robert Merton, and mentor, Richard Cloward. His point, of course, was that we build on the collective efforts of countless others. Finishing this text, I am thinking of my mentors, including Eric Rofes, Stanly Aronowitz, Ray Buchanan, Bertram Cohler, and Irwin Epstein, who have given me so much. Like Harry Stack Sullivan, Bert Cohler reminded us that we all

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need “essential others;” we all need “chums,” and not just as children, but throughout the course of our lives. These connections can be the source of profound connections and even social change. In his retirement talk at Hunter College School of Social Work, Epstein framed the end of a four and a half decade teaching career in terms of friendships: “Bob Marley sings about ‘friends we’ve lost along the way.’ At this moment and at my age, I can’t help but think of all the dear friends at Hunter and elsewhere that I’ve lost along my way.” “Only connect,” he explained, paraphrasing E. M. Foster’s message of longing in Howard’s End, concluding, “Freud wrote ‘lieben und arbeiten’— love and work with people you love—on his prescription pad as the central elements of the good life . . . I would add ‘lachan’ [laughter]. ‘Lieben und arbeiten und lachan!’” I thank you for that as well Irwin and all the other friendships known along the way. Dad suggested the subtitle of the book be “Beer on the Sidewalk.” I didn’t understand the meaning at the time. But he thought anyone could be a rebel friend. When we brought his ashes to New Orleans, strangers walked up to us and toasted to his urn, pouring beer on the sidewalk for him and those who came before us. This gesture of remembering and honoring our ancestors is what rebel friendship is about. Here’s some beer on the sidewalk for you, Dad, and my other rebel friends everywhere. This book is for you Caroline, Dodi, and Scarlett—my everything— thank you for being there as we move forward through time together. “Siamo Forte!”

Notes toward an Introduction

Friendship as a Way of Life

I

n late August 2012, I received an email from Wendy Brawer, a New York environmental activist and the global director of Green Map System, announcing a plan for a guerilla gardening action in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The action was planned to take place at 181 Stanton Street, which had been listed on 596 Acres’ list of vacant lots in New York City. In the Lower East Side, 181 Stanton Street was one of the last vacant lots that could be turned into a garden. On Sunday August 19, I met a group of activists, including many of my friends, standing outside a fence in front of 181 Stanton Street. There they held clipboards with petitions, asking people if they wanted a new community garden. Those walking by enthusiastically supported their efforts. The group dismantled a fence at the entrance, and we all walked inside the dirty lot. Inside, my daughters and I joined a half-dozen members of the Time’s Up! Gardening Committee as well as other neighborhood members. We spent the afternoon digging, cleaning, throwing away trash, and finally planting a few flowers. By the end of the afternoon, the vacant lot had been transformed into a community space (Segel, 2012). Within a few weeks, many of the 250 people who signed the petition in favor of a new community garden swayed the Parks and Recreation Committee of Community Board Three to pass a resolution of support for a green-thumb lease for the garden, now dubbed Siempre Verde. Thanks to the work of the neighbors on Stanton Street, members of Green Map System, and Time’s Up!, 181 Stanton Street became the newest of a generation of gardens planted in the neighborhood since the Liz Christy Garden was planted in the Bowery in 1974. The work of this community of friends, their gesture of direct action, was not an isolated event. Today cohorts of people the world over are striving to create a better life through the process of collective engagement. From bike rides to community gardening, groups of friends are disrobing alienating social relations in favor of affect, care, and connection. Each of these gestures forms

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a sort of “pocket of resistance,” suggests Subcomandante Marcos. And he argues that they are multiplying. “Each has its own history, its specificities, its similarities, its demands, its struggles, its successes. If humanity wants to survive and improve, its only hope resides in these pockets made up of the excluded, of those left for dead, of the disposable” (quoted in Merrifield, 2011, p. xvi). Through such collective striving, nonantagonistic social relations are taking shape as regular people, the world over, are reframing a politics of everyday living, electing themselves and their friends into their own imaginary parties (Holt, 2015). Here collective action, affective bonds, and convivial social relations are favored over institutional social arrangements, with collectives of friends striving for a common path to realizing their dreams beyond the state, social class, or party affiliation, disencumbered from competition, capitalism, or the modern grind of improving one’s lot by stepping on others (Merrifield, 2011, pp. xvi, 64– 65). This “blurry, still unrealized realm of global friendship,” is viewed as an outcome and extension of such efforts (p. 132). The practice of rebel friendship, after all, reminds us there are other ways of living and being (Invisible Committee, 2009). This is not to suggest that the politics of friendship is simple or represents some sort of substitution for effort or organization. “Making friends equally requires perseverance and certain patience, taking time to get to know each other, to enter genuine dialogue, talking as well as listening,” notes Merrifield (2011, p. 133). Like family, these engagements contain their own messy, often contradictory, approaches to love, care, and social relations. This is a blurry space linked between love, affect, and efforts aimed toward social change. Friendship informs such movements, infusing them with the social capital necessary to move bodies of ideas. Such innovation is rarely witnessed in formalized settings, few of which today’s social movement participants seem interested in joining anyway (Writers for the 99%, 2011). Gerald Suttles (1970) suggests that friendships are social relations that can exist across various strata of social groups. By their very nature, they lend themselves toward deviance. “The logic of friendship is a simple social transformation of the rules of public propriety to their opposite,” explains Suttles (p. 96). “Friends can touch each other where others cannot. Friends can swear or become exceptionally pious around one another. Friends can entertain certain utopian notions that would be laughed at in public circumstances” (p. 96). As the nexus between individual and community, friendship glues the social capital propelling organizing (Nardi, 1999). Yet when people think of friendships and their links with social movements, theories regarding social networks, weak ties, collective identity, and fluidarity tend to come to mind (Juris, 2008; McDonald, 2002). The problem with these theories, of course, is they leave us flat, rarely coming close to the feeling of working

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with a group of friends—the trust, solidarity, care, tension, and joy of connection with a group of people that one comes to know and spend time with as if they were a surrogate family. Throughout the social movements—from anarchism to gay liberation, from the settlement houses to the Beats, from the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) to Occupy Wall Street, from public space to environmental justice—one can trace a story of friendships coming together, supporting audacious, bountiful images of beauty and justice (as well as quarrels along the way). Rebel Friendships traces a few of the tributaries meandering between these cultural stories and personal quarrels over the very nature of organizing, connecting, breaking up, making up, and the ways in which human struggles inform the workings of movements. The book considers ideas of social capital, autonomy, and affective politics, exploring stories of friendships leading to, supporting, impacting, and departing from social movements. A review of a few of the meanings of friendship helps us trace a means for individuals to connect their lives with larger social forces impacting their world. Through a close reading of this concept, scholars come to grips with both a way of supporting civil society and a generational turn away from political parties toward affinity groups. Here, a consideration of friendship helps us expand on the very nature of what is political, connecting individuals with questions about participation, adding an affective dimension to discussions of social networks, movement participation, and understandings of “emotions” in politics (Gould, 2002; Goodwin, Jasper, and Polleta, 2001). A politics of friendship builds on the recognition that that “interpersonal emotional realities” are part of organizing; they are “directly, simultaneously connected to the community work being carried out” (Burghardt, 1982, p. 26). Here, a rambunctious engagement between friends opens up spaces and scripts for individuals and groups, allowing those involved to find new things about themselves and others. We grow and evolve in relationships with others after all (Mead, 1963). People must be allowed to grow personally and emotionally if they are to succeed in organizing (much like anything else in life). Such thinking moves away from cold calculations of resources and analysis of costs and benefits, favoring the meanings, practices, and lived experiences of those involved in the effort to create change (Jasper, 1998, p. 26). Such approaches to movement scholarship stand in stark contrast to dominant institutional approaches to social movement scholarship, which emphasize rational choices, collective behavior, and allocation of resources (Gould, 2002; Goodwin, Jasper, and Polleta, 2001). While the politics of friendship has often felt neglected by movement scholars, this may be changing. Perhaps, just perhaps, the time has come to take friendship seriously.

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To Create a New World “Come, my friends, ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world,” Alfred Tennyson writes in Ulysses (1922). Rebel friendships take us there, conjuring new worlds, supporting us in difficult times as well as good ones, and helping us move forward. In his 1970s-era dystopian novella about gay life, Faggots and Their Friends between Revolutions, Larry Mitchell (1977) advises his housemates, “When you feel pain, fall into your brothers’ arms and create the world you have dreamed of.” Throughout this story, we follow a group of friends living in a community house as they form new families of choice. Yet it is not easy. Efforts to create alternate social relations tend to emulate larger struggles against oppressive social mores. Still, such social movements can and do support cultural change. This is what Foucault talked about in his seminal 1981 interview, dubbed “Friendship as a Way of Life.” This “way of life” is the subject of this book. After all, “Every story grows out of a conflict,” explained a friend of mine as we talked about rebel friendships, Romeo and Juliet, Cain and Abel, and the politics of friendship. So what would this one be? What would propel this story? Every relationship takes a dialectical shape, from formation to conflict to either a resolution and some sort of new awareness or a rupture. These transformations become the subject of the rebel friendships, including my own, traced throughout this story. Michel Foucault saw gay liberation as a space propelled by friendships. This movement opened up a new way of looking at others, connecting, and “becoming homosexual.” Yet this was not an end in itself. Through such friendships, we encounter someone different than ourselves—the other— with whom we engage in a conversation involving mutual estrangement and engagement (Roach, 2012, p. 43). When we come out the other end of this conversation, we find out that the other may be closer to us than we could have imagined. Here friendships help us find new ways of engaging the world, connecting with a city of friends, and taking on multiple targets, hopes, and aspirations. “Friendship and freedom were the values most important to us,” explained Franz Muller, the surviving member of the White Rose, an antiNazi resistance group of German college students, many of whom were sentenced to death on February 22, 1943, after distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets throughout Munich (quoted in von Lüpke, 2013). “We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience,” he explained, echoing the group’s mantra. Narratives of friendship and resistance overlap in countless ways. They can be found throughout the history of social movements, in works of fiction, and in the movies.

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5

Recall the 1942 film Casablanca. “Round up the usual suspects,” Captain Renault declares, rather than turn in his friend, in the final climactic scene. “This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” says Rick, smiling at Renault, in homage to friendship and its links with a struggle against fascism. “The theater goes wild,” my dad cheered as we watched, recalling his days watching the movie in Harvard Square five decades prior. Huckleberry Finn refuses to turn in his best friend, Jim, a runaway slave, as they travel down the Mississippi River in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Finn knew hanging out with his buddy was more fun, and their friendship more valuable, than following unjust laws. Here friendship meant rebelling against social mores, acknowledging a different logic of living. Friendship fueled this dialog on difference. In J. R. R. Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf advises those forming the fellowship that “in this matter, it would be well to trust rather to their friendship, than to great wisdom” (p. 269). Such thinking points to a lesson: Through friendship, little people can sometimes achieve far more than formal structures, armies, or institutions. Such thinking was on the minds of the New York City group Friends of Brad Will, an affinity group formed after the death of US journalist Brad Will in the fall of 2006 in Oaxaca, Mexico. Among the New York City activist communities of squatters, summit hoppers, and garden supporters, Will was everyone’s friend. We ate, organized street parties, drank bad beer, sang songs, supported community gardens and squats, rode on Critical Mass bike rides, and went to jail with Will, where the revelry only continued. “Being in jail is not supposed to be fun,” the police chided us after we meditated with a loud “oooom,” the sound drifting between cells after an arrest for defending Esperanza Community Garden. Friendship with Will made us all stronger; it helped us grow, be more courageous and joyous. Marina Sitrin recalled Will being “our compañero.” She said, “Brad was my mentor in the Direct Action Network—me being from the more traditional left and him orienting and mentoring me with the more horizontal and antiauthoritarian ways of doing and creating.” He opened up new worlds for us. Philosophers have long argued that friendship can support such efforts (Badhwar, 2009). After Will was shot during labor unrest in southern Mexico, his friends carried signs declaring “Brad Will Presente” to demonstrations. They brought them to the Mexican consulate or whenever the Mexican president came to New York City. The point was that Will was still around. Through their organizing, they would remind the world of what had happened, keeping his memory alive while supporting each other along the way (Anonymous, 2008). Their friendship with Will

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helped intensify the call for justice for those struggling to create another world in southern Mexico. All power to the imagination, Will reminded us. The memories of the way Will supported all of us, all of his friends, even in messy moments, would linger in time for years and years after his death. Brad Will was one of many friends and activists I have known and watched pass whose friendship still feels vital and connected to the present moment. These friends have created a vast network of care and resistance over my two decades of AIDS and public space activism. Many of these friends were on my mind as I participated in the International AIDS Conference in Washington, DC, in July 2013. While activists planned to chain themselves to the White House, I stood, taking in the scene. My friend Sean Strub walked by. Strub has been an AIDS activist since the very beginning. Whenever I see Strub, we recall our friend Steven Gendin. His name was on a piece of paper Strub carried that listed friends he was remembering at the AIDS Quilt display. Strub was standing with Susanne Braun Levine, a writer whose subject is friendship. The two of us talked about friendship, agreeing that we are better able to cope with life when we have friends around. “The surest route to decline as we age is isolation,” Levine (2012) elaborated in a Huffington Post article. Careers and family tend to dominate much of adulthood. Yet in thinking about the rest of life, “the notion of close friends comes to mind.” For Levine, friends form “the support group that will see you through the changes that lie ahead; they will accept your eccentricities and show up when you need them. And they will make you laugh . . . They can also contribute to a longer life.” These friends affect people’s health across their lifespans. Making good grades becomes a great deal more manageable when kids have good friends. These ties sustain us in countless ways (Levine, 2012). We all benefit by recognizing that we need each other. This is a point Viktor Frankl (1963) made in Man’s Search for Meaning. Lovers and friends, comrades and people one can joke with, are all necessary ingredients for a good life. Such friendship helps us survive, while isolation does just the opposite. After all, “none of us is an island,” poet John Donne reminds us; we are all part of this together. Friendship supports relationships built from voluntariness, equality, and mutuality (Badhwar, 2009). In friendships, we are all equals. Through them, we do amazing things: we fight, we make up, and we listen to, learn from, and revel in dialogue. We do not destroy each other through our disagreements; rather, friendship is a space from which we learn, from which we imagine a new world, while learning about who we are, what we can be, and where we have been. Walking through the crowd at the International AIDS Conference rally, I talked with friends from jobs in San Francisco and street activism in New York City and an extending network of comrades from the AIDS

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movement. I sat on the grass with my friends Peter and Jack of Le Petit Versailles Community Garden in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. We talked about the friends who had come and gone and what the world would be like if they were still around. “It was just a matter of course to become AIDS activists,” explained Jack, who lived in the East Village as the virus first raged. “All our friends were dying.” Peter noted that he just wanted some kind of an acknowledgement that this is still going on—that AIDS is not over. As we talked, the civil disobedience began. Walking over to the action, I saw Eric Sawyer. Sawyer is one of the heroes of this whole battle—still at it after so many years with ACT UP, Housing Works, and Healthgap. “We are people with AIDS! We are alive!” screamed a speaker to the roars of the crowd. A few activists put ribbons and messages for those gone at the fence surrounding the White House. Yet sometimes it is hard to fight and remember. Standing there, I saw Raffi, a former colleague now running a syringe exchange in Puerto Rico. We talked about our friend Michael, who had just died (Shepard, 2013). Every death opens all the old graves, they say in AIDS caregiver training. Michael’s death opened up memories of decades of friendships, many traced through the 12 chapters of this volume. Here death is lifted as a mirror on friendship, reminding us of those engagements that matter, the struggles they represented, and why they mattered. On my way back to New York City on the bus, I recalled my first AIDS demonstration two decades prior, back when AIDS activists used to carry the ashes of those lost to the epidemic to spaces of power, such as the White House or the California State Capitol. My first trip to Sacramento with ACT UP began in San Francisco on a fall day in 1993. Excitement filled the air as we got on the bus. Feelings of possibility start days such as these. Hope floats, propelling spirits and activism. In between police and rushing horses, we spread ashes of loved ones lost to the epidemic on the steps of the state house. Several participants were trampled and arrested. Several hours later, we went home, napping much of the way there. Looking at the activists on the bus ride home from the International AIDS Conference in Washington, DC, some braiding each other’s hair as they drifted in and out of sleep, I thought of the trip home from Sacramento, the same look of the tired bodies, cozy, crumbled into each other, embracing the same fatigue, the same effort to fight off an illness that in so many ways is life itself. The epidemic was still with us. And so were the memories of the comrades who had passed as well as thoughts of those remaining; the friendships we make along the way push us forward. On the way home from that Sacramento action, we told stories and later went dancing. These friends are what inspire me to organize. They make the process both enjoyable and

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meaningful. For many, the friendships engendered through activism are some of the most important relationships they have. “The friendship was everything,” notes Donald Grove, a veteran of the ACT UP Syringe Exchange Committee who is still active in the harm reduction movement today. Sometimes friendships support movements. And sometimes they fall apart along with the movements they support. This is a story of the friendships that help us experiment, create change, and revel in being alive—the social ties that bring us into movements and support our efforts. A subtext of this, of course, is that affinity groups can do powerful things when working well together. It is also a story about the messy ways in which we navigate struggles when human nature trumps solidarity. What happens to friendships or social movements when trust breaks down? Why did Joseph Stalin have Vladimir Lenin’s friend Leon Trotsky killed? What happens when issues of power become involved? How does this play out on the ground in social movements? When can friendships endure a fight, and when is it too much? Chapter 10 of this book considers a few of these questions and the conflicts impacting organizing. This is a theme that runs through the entire book. Most groups traverse through a cycle of storming, norming, performing, and breaking up for any number of reasons. What would the story be here? What would propel this story? And what would it tell us? What do we do when a friend fails to behave according to a basic moral code? Hannah Arendt had established a close relationship with her mentor, Martin Heidegger, years before he joined the Nazi Party in 1933. Heidegger went on to personally fire the Jewish faculty from Freiburg University, dismissing his mentor and the man to whom he had dedicated Being and Time. Can we be friends of those with moral failings? For Hannah Arendt, the answer was a clear “yes,” yet not without a struggle between thinking and feeling, as well as a long separation. In 1950, she forgave her former mentor. She was able to find mercy for him without forgiving the murders or betrayals of his actions. “I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective—neither the German people nor the French, nor the American, not the working class or anything of that sort. I love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons” (quoted in Hendrix, 2010). We are people first. In friendships, we navigate complicated emotional and ethical terrain. The challenges of friendship arise over and over again. They also make movement work worthwhile. These friendships have made my life more meaningful. They also help me differentiate between the more institutional forms of engagement of professional reformers and the groupings of those with shared affinity—networks

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of friends with similar interests and commitments toward egalitarian social ties. These small groups remain the driving force of many in activism. Some friends are still here; others are gone. But we are still connected in time. Rebel Friendships is a story of some of those shared engagements and their impacts on movements. What it is not is an exposition on the various definitions or philosophical debates about friendship—dating from Plato to Cicero, Montaigne to Rancière—or the theories of social movements. Still this story has been inspired by a few of them. Reading Foucault’s musings on friendship almost a decade ago (Gallagher and Wilson, 1987/2005; Williams, 2009), I started to wonder how friendship really works as a component of organizing. How does friendship support movements, if at all? And what happens when these relationships crumble? Can organizing endure? Can organizing sustain itself through friendships alone? To answer some of these questions, I reflected on the organizing efforts in which I have taken part, observed newer movements, reviewed interviews, engaged in a content analysis, and talked with a few current organizers. Borrowing from the principles of participant observation and ethnography (Butters, 1983; Patton, 2002), the project grew to consider the experiments in living that are created through the shared practice of friendship and movement organizing over a quarter-century, building on the interplay between personal narrative, friendship, and social activism (Davis, 2002; Flyvbjerg, 2001). Each chapter is shaped through the triangulation of multiple forms of data, including interviews, historic sources, stories, correspondence, and reflection on movement practices in which I played a role as an observer and participant through meetings, conversations, assemblies, rallies, riots, fights, flame wars, overdoses, and other premature losses (Butters, 1983; Lichterman, 2002; Shepard, 2013). Here the interplay between experience and recollection, narrative and history, interviewer and interviewee, helps us consider the intangible and often messy subject of friendship and social change. “Anyone who gives you enough to talk about himself to you is giving you a form of friendship,” confesses journalist Lillian Ross (1999) in her memoir about her friendship with Ernest Hemingway. “If you spend weeks or months with someone, not only taking his time and energy, you naturally become his friend. A friend is not to be used abandoned; the friendship established in writing about someone often continues to grow” (p. 58). The interviews that shape the backbone of this story serve both the form and content of the larger end of this ethnography. The story makes use of my feelings, thoughts, and reflections as a subject in itself, inviting readers into a few of my personal and emotional subjectivities, moving between personal observations and larger cultural stories of movements and friendships, dovetailing between

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the Beats and ACT UP, Occupy and struggles for public space (Butters, 1983; Lichterman, 2002). This book is very much about my own “queer,” sometimes blurry, relationships with movements and their supporters. In July 2012, I celebrated the twenty-fifth birthday of one of my favorite groups, Time’s Up!, the subject of Chapters 6 and 7. The next day, a small group of us got together to cheer for the birthday of one of the most iconic activists in town, Monica Hunken. That night, everyone rode from the East River to Coney Island, riding, swimming, and romping all night long in various states of dress and undress. After her birthday, Hunken wrote, “Thank you everyone for the birthday messages yesterday. I am hugely grateful to have the strong, beautiful community of friends that I have. You all make my life sparkle.” Participating in these events, I was thinking about this book, the friendships I have enjoyed, and the ways they have helped propel movement making as well as my happiness. This story represents an effort to make sense of this space between friendship and social-change activity. I started thinking about friendships and movements after my friend Eric Rofes died in 2006, only a few weeks after we had taken part on a panel together in California. At his memorial, a colleague who had worked with Rofes in the gay liberation movement of the 1970s recalled Rofes as an artist of friendship for his use of friendship to connect people and movements, helping us connect self, movement, and history. “Friendships are a key to this genealogy,” noted Rofes’s friend Christopher Bartlett (2014) years later. Rofes understood this, helping us bridge a gap between generations and cohorts of activists. His approach to friendship is the subject of Chapter 3 of this volume. Researching my first book two decades ago, I interviewed San Franciscans about their experiences with gay liberation and HIV/AIDS. Of all the losses people endured, it was the fabric of friendship disappearing that wore at those I interviewed. It was opening a book of photos and seeing that hundreds of friends from images of pride parades throughout the years, from Harvey Milk to friends in the mid-1990s, were gone—“all gone,” one interviewee recalled (Shepard, 1997). Hank Wilson recalled friends he used to trust when he entered a community meeting: I see some incredibly strong people who aren’t here. I have a lot of sadness. I have people that I used to call up at night and we would bullshit and talk. I don’t have people like that now. That was fun and I still remember that. I still value that. They are a strength. I think I’ve been very lucky. I’ve worked with some incredible people. I remember a group of people who moved this community forward, who asked the hard questions. They weren’t career politicians or career in the industry. It used to be that I would go to a

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community meeting and I would look around and I would see two or three honest ethical people in there. It didn’t matter, you knew if they were present. I still think of them when I go to a meeting and I want to be powerful. We gave each other support. We’re at the right place at the right time to make history. (Shepard, 1997)

In Wilson’s narrative, loss extended from friendships to collective memory and practices, stretching across time, impacting his activism long after their deaths. Philosopher Michel Foucault was, of course, a part of the same social movements Wilson was. His writings on power informed ACT UP, while his support for GIP (Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons) took shape through his advocacy for those in the movement to find their own voices, needs, and desires and to give them expression. The point was that power could be found in multiple voices of the body of the group, not from the analysis of one charismatic leader. This disposition was part of how he supported friendship as a way of transforming social relations. Rather than dictate the implications of friendships, he asks readers to think about what it means and how it strengthens means of resistance to regimes of the normal. Delinked from as well as connected to sexuality, friendships could be “the sum of everything that moves between one and the other, everything that gives them pleasure,” even if “without form.” Sex and friendship were not opposed or linked; the ties between the two fostered communities of care and pleasure (Roach, 2012, pp. 44–45). Here friendship found its way into multiple movements, including a distinct position in gay liberation. With marriage not being an option for queers in most of the world or throughout history, friendship, however imperfect, found an important place in these movements, supporting the formation of distinct families of choice (Nardi, 1999). Instead of defining what these relationships could mean, Foucault suggested this practice entailed new ethical codes and ways of living (Roach, 2012). This, of course, is part of what social movements help us experience across cohorts. Letters from participants in the Freedom Summer of 1964 indicate that experimentation, friendship, social eros, dancing, drinking beer, singing, hooking up, and an unbridled sense of social connection were just part and parcel of the movement. The struggle to break down social barriers included a wide range of experiences and experiments, offering a distinct “freedom high” (McAdam, 1988, p. 72). Such forms of collective experience challenge social controls, while conviviality breaks down social hierarchies. Over and over again, friendship has shown the potential to destabilize (and restructure) unequal societies while pointing to new ways

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of thinking and living, connecting people, strengthening community, and increasing the possibility for engagement. Many of these practices take shape in the webs of organizing, activism, cruising, and hanging out that extend through the travails of queer New York City. For many years, I used to meet a group of friends from harm reduction, AIDS, sexual civil liberties, anarchist, and reproductive rights circles at a bar in the East Village of New York City called Dicks. We would meet at Dicks at six. It was an exquisitely tacky gay bar on Second Avenue with a jukebox of 1980s dancehall hits, some punk and even a few Velvet Underground tunes, a pool table, and bathrooms where all sorts of things used to go on. Between whisky, beer, and vodka cranberries, we shared conversations about the intricacies of injection drug use, street protests, riots, syringe exchange, the loss of public sexual culture, dating, organizing, cocaine, gay liberation, the ebb and flow of movements, the limitations of queer politics, and stories of demonstrations. Many of those conversations started for me after the Matthew Shepard political funeral of 1998, when thousands of queer activists overflowed into the streets of New York City, only to be thwarted, arrested, and even beaten by the police. One friend had his hand stepped on by a New York City police horse and later won a significant legal settlement. For years, we put together the details of the night. In jail I met trans icons Leslie Feinberg and Sylvia Rivera, AIDS activists Charles King and Keith Cylar, and so many more. Over and over, we shared stories about who went to jail and who stayed outside. Different participants hashed through the details of the night for months. My friend Randolfe Wicker stayed outside. “Oh, it was incredible,” Wicker mused in 2006 in a typical recollection of the evening. There was the march over the avenue, and at one point they said Times Square. The police had picked off the leadership. And so we were marching towards Times Square. People were mad and would have died. So instead, they listened to what was left of the leaders and went back down to Fifth Ave. They even grabbed one of the MCC Ministers that was in a wheel chair, took her into custody, and parishioners surrounded the truck and made them release her. I was wearing my American flag shirt. When I got down to the park, it was unbelievable. We took over the avenue. And there was thirty police trucks. What did they think we were going to do—burn down the city? They had six hundred cops. What was really frightening, we were blocked on Forty-Fifth Street, and they wouldn’t let us go on Sixth Avenue, and that was when the police horses rushed into the crowd. And it was this incredible feeling that you were in a canyon. And you were fenced in in the front and the back. All I could think of were the Jews going into Auschwitz. We were totally blocked, like captives. No one was going anywhere.

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In jail, one group of arrestees arrived after another, bringing in new dispatches from the streets. Between pieces of this narrative, told and retold at Dicks, we were creating our collective memory (Plummer, 1995). As we told stories, we reveled in the “desire-in-uneasiness” of friendship (Roach, 2012, p. 45). Some of us even talked about Foucault, then thought of as a sort of saint of queer theory (Halperin, 1997). Others read Fear of a Queer Planet by Michael Warner (1993), who sometimes attended meetings but mostly just dropped by for street actions or faery events. One arrestee worried about the panopticon forming around the security culture of Giuliani’s New York City. Instead of defining anything, we helped organize, design, experiment, build connections among movements, and create new arenas for resistance. Balancing pleasure, eros, and expression, these practices helped shape an ethics of care that aimed to reduce harm while allowing for the safe expression of desire (Shepard, 2009; 2013). Prohibition was dangerous, we acknowledged (Crimp et al., 1997). Yet so were unwanted pregnancy, HIV, and drug overdose. So we aimed to celebrate sexual selfdetermination and autonomy, as well as safe, less risky forms of expression (Crimp, 1988). Throughout these engagements, we extended the limits on the conditions and possibilities of friendship while rejecting the punitive logic of our puritanical culture. Rather than follow traditional models, it was up to us to establish the new moral codes. Through activism and friendship, we strove to create such a new ethics of living. “People over profits,” AIDS activists screamed, fighting drug company greed. “Human bonds are worth more than treasury bonds,” Occupy Wall Street supporter Austin Guest declared on a sign he carried in April 2012. Throughout these constellations, relational boundaries blurred as we all connected within the multitude. Sometimes we acted up together; other times we gathered to remember lost friends. In December 2007, a group of us helped organize a support network to take care of a dying friend, iconic gay activist and Stonewall veteran Bob Kohler. We had meals and visitations scheduled by the day and week. Toward the end, I spent the night and hung out with Kohler, chatting, and holding him as he faded in and out of this world. When he eventually died, we took to the streets, chanting “Wash Your Ass” during a street memorial rally in homage to Kohler’s singular advice to the patrons of his 1970s-era bathhouse. Some of his friends placed his ashes on the ground in front of the space that had been Kohler’s old store on Christopher Street, The Loft. “Bob Kohler ACT UP,” one activist chalked on top of the ashes as the drum beats got louder and louder. Looking at those words in the chalk and hearing those drum beats, a feeling of loss for both a friend and a piece of history consumed many of us. There is a limit to words.

Figure i.1 Austin Guest at Occupy Wall Street Source: Photo by Stacy Lanyon

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Finishing the rally, we spread Kohler’s ashes in the Hudson River, where Sylvia Rivera’s ashes had found their final destination with those of Masha P. Johnson. Chapters 5 and 6 of this book consider the friendships between Bob Kohler and Sylvia Rivera and the ways in which we remember them, the final chapters taking on the ways in which we cope with both connection and loss, which surround such movements. Connections among friends, losses, and the blurrings of sexuality with social bonds are themes dating back to Homer’s Iliad: “The games broke up, and the people scattered to go away, each man to his fast-running ship . . . only Achilleus wept still as he remembered his beloved companion, nor did sleep who subdues all come over him, but he tossed from one side to the other in longing for Patroklos, for his manhood and his great strength and all the actions he had seen to the end with him, and the hardships he had suffered; the wars of men; hard crossing of the big waters” (Homer, 1951, 24.1–8). It is hard not to imagine a blurring of feelings between friendship and eros in Achilleus’s longing. Throughout the epic narrative, friendship transforms relationships and conflict itself. Here, “guest friendship” inspired enemies to exchange armor rather than rage against each other. “Let us avoid each other’s spears, even in the close fighting” (24.229). Hector emphasized the point to Aias: “Come then, let us give each other glorious presents, so that any of the Achaians or Trojans may say of us: ‘These two fought each other in heart-consuming hate, then joined with each other in close friendship, before they were parted.”’ (7.299–302). War is seen as inevitable, yet the loss of friendships must not be, though it often is. Over time, one gets the sense that loss is a part of modern living. Many find themselves isolated from communities, sitting and looking at computer screens, and isolated from their own labor. Friends come and disappear; modern living is an ongoing loss exercise. People are forced to move away from their communities of origin and belonging to find work. Once away from home, others hope to find less repressive communities in which to build their lives. Struggling against isolation, movements build new cultures of their own (Marla, 2004). Here the intersection of friendship, harm reduction, and support make participation in social movements feel authentic. New ideas and innovations take shape through this mix of bodies, actions, and ideas. We also worry about our friends and the inevitable risks and disappearances that follow. Supporting friends is a way of life. The story of friendships engages us in this messy cultural tale of connection, separation, and ongoing engagement. Rebel Friendships traces this ethos vis-à-vis social movements. Chapter 1, “Toward a City of Friends,” looks to the interaction among affinity groups, autonomy, and social movements, recalling histories of efforts to build movements and struggle with friendships, from anarchism to gay

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liberation. Chapter 2 explores the relationship of my father with his best friend, Fred Mayer, a man who lived well, coped with HIV, and faded into oblivion. This story traces the lines between the Beat movement, travel, and AIDS activism that would transform their lives. Rebel friends ran away from Cambridge to follow the Beat poets, hitchhiked through California, hung out in leather bars in pre-Stonewall Greenwich Village, traveled through Afghanistan and the Middle East, experimented with what this friendship could mean, and remained the best of comrades for decades until Fred’s premature demise. We watched him literally lose his mind in the way that Ginsberg described in Howl: one of those “best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” The cruelty of the loss struck me. His story, narrated by my father and his poetry, lays out a trajectory for both this story and my life. The first of an extended family of friends lost to the epidemic, his disappearance still lingers in my mind. “People that had risky personalities were more likely to die than people who didn’t,” argued Schulman (2002) a decade later, wondering about the cultural impacts of these losses. “And those people who had risky personalities were the ones who [invented] new ideas that [moved] the whole world forward.” Fred’s story and the many others chronicled here are a testament to this loss. His story propels the rest of this book. Chapter 3, “Reviving the Tribe,” follows this struggle for a new way of being, tracing the story of the most iconic of gay liberation organizers, Eric Rofes, another friend who understood friendships as a component of living, staying engaged, and organizing. Chapters 4 and 5 look at the ways in which friendships transform social mores, creating new ethical practices and formations based on blurred boundaries and embodied experiences. Chapter 6 serves as a case study in a group driven by friendship networks that propel and sometimes undermine its development. Chapter 7 considers the ways in which friendships invite people to participate in social movements, such as Occupy. The final chapters explore the conflicts that take shape when friendships and lines of solidarity are lost or support breaks down. What happens when we lose friends or when friends depart too early? Where do these friendships reside in the recesses of our minds and memories, and what do they mean? What is the legacy of these friendships for organizing and for our lives? Over and over again, friendship has shown the potential to destabilize unequal societies. This is a story of a few of these rebel friendships and the worlds they hoped to change.

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Toward a City of Friends Affinity, Autonomy, and Social Movements

On Affinity

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uch of the story of friendship and movements starts with the concept of affinity among “small, face-to-face groups that form the basic units for a protest” (Kauffman, 2002, p. 36). Here organizers work in autonomous units of sometimes five to ten people instead of bureaucratic structures. Autonomous movements tend to steer clear of professionalized models of advocacy or party politics, functioning as “rejection[s] of the mediation of struggles by institutional forms, especially since representation and mediation are all too often the first step in the recuperation of these struggles” (Shukaitis, 2009, p. 17). Such movements are characterized by “nonhierarchical organization, horizontal communication and relationships, and the necessity of individual autonomy in relation to collectivity” (p. 17). Flexible rather than rule bound, countless groups, including the Spanish Anarchists and the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) working groups, followed this model of engagement among like-minded peers (Kauffman, 2002; Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, 1968). Here compañeros meet, share space and expertise, and take care of each other as equals (Sitrin, 2006). These phenomena extend around the globe and across time. For example, after a grand jury found the police who strangled Eric Garner to death for selling cigarettes not guilty, the Trayvon Martin Organizing Committee NYC (2014) framed their support for waves of street actions in terms of friendship and affinity among equals: We are meeting in streets, corners, bridges and highways daring to take back what is ours. And we will not leave one of ours behind.

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We will not leave our friends, comrades or lovers in the hands of the white supremacist police state. People have de-arrested people before us, and we will continue this tradition. We envision a world where the police are abolished and will live this dream by manifesting it in the present and that means delegitimizing the police and state at every chance we get. Our desire burns today’s empires into tomorrow’s ashes. We are not the first and we will not be the last. We are numerous. We are the future and the now. We are here. We can’t stop. Won’t stop.

The same sentiment can be found in Marina Sitrin’s (2006) interviews with people after the economic crisis in Argentina in the early 2000s. Many described the ways in which friendships helped fuel organizing as well as survival efforts. Carina, a member of the Argentine World Social Forum Mobilizing Committee, talked about meeting her neighbors and building social connections: “It’s partly a reclaiming of the old social spaces that had been lost . . . What we lost was meeting face to face with our neighbors.” She explained, “You saw your neighbors. And you said, good morning, not, and here my neighbor is also banging a pot! Or, my neighborhood butcher is cacerolando! The neighborhood pharmacist!” (quoted in Sitrin, 2006, pp. 28–29). Yet now these neighbors were meeting in the street. “It was

Figure 1.1 “We’re gonna fight #racism with #solidarity” (Fred Hampton). #Ferguson #BlackLivesMatter #HandsUpWalkOut #mickeyz Source: Photo by Mickey Z

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a reconnection with something that was lost. Many ways of being social had been lost—like the neighborhood club, the neighborhood library, the unions as a place to meet.” Gradually, the postcrisis city was becoming a space of friends. “One of the first things we regained with the nineteenth and twentieth was face-to-face interaction. We regained our community. There’s always something new and something old. It feels like the collective memory is always at work” (p. 29). Faced with an economic crisis, including frozen bank accounts, people met and talked about their problems. “It sounds crazy, but some of the social interaction began in banks,” continued Carina. “I went to the bank with my mother and she started talking to a neighbor.” They described the problems their kids were facing and said that they were planning to leave. “And they exchanged phone numbers. Because of the situation, they were suddenly friends. A multitude of people went to the banks and became at least acquaintances. The feeling of community began with this: let’s share our problems” (p. 29). By the end of the process, those friends had reoccupied their old factory, taking control of their life and work. History and Philosophy Organizing around friendship involves a distinct way of looking at the world. The idea has long history. Aristotle (1934) suggested that “friends must enjoy one another’s company, they must be useful to one another, and they must share a common commitment to the good,” explain Bellah and company (1985, p. 115). Some of us enjoy time with each other, recognizing pleasure as a value unto itself. While those who support the common good share pleasure and respect, they also seek larger social transformations. Some see such thinking as statist, too contaminated with regimes of domination. For example, Uri Gordan (2014) suggests that, in general, there is a problematic tendency to identify anarchic practices with the civic underpinnings of the democratic tradition, whereas the civic ideology rests on loyalty to an imagined community that is always already racialized, gendered, and stratified from any critical historical perspective. Recognizing these challenges, this book suggests that democracy can be a metaphor for organizing as well as the practice of living publically. For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Aristotle’s and Cicero’s conceptions of friendship were openly acknowledged. Today, definitions of friendship emphasize shared pleasure without building on the notions of good character that require a degree of work or useful activity (Badhwar, 2009). They support a good society. Montaigne (n.d.) argued

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that people are at their best in the practice of building friendships, noting that in Aristotle’s day, even the legislators valued friendship over justice. For anarchists, friendship could be clearly delineated from notions of romantic love. “The concept of friendship seems more accurately [than love] to express the outlook of participants in affinity groups,” notes Francis Dupuis-Déri (2010, p. 47). “Unlike love, friendship does not generally evoke exclusivity or jealousy, but rather reciprocity and common interests; moreover, the activities shared by friends maintain and reinforce the bond of friendship. And friendship is not—in principle—determined by the gender or sex of individuals, or by their sexual preferences. Added to this are the sentiments of complicity, trust, and, yes, affinity, to which friendship

Figure 1.2 Occupying the Robert Indiana Love Sculpture Source: Photo by Eric McGregor

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is crucially linked, according to psychologists. What is more, love can be unidirectional, while affinity implies reciprocity of sentiment.” Yet the spaces do blur. Such is the nature of love and wanderlust: for freedom and space just to be. Dreaming about a nude she recalled seeing in an art museum that she found “so exquisite,” Anne Frank confessed to her diary that she had to “hold off tears.” “If only I had a girlfriend,” Anne Frank confessed to her diary on January 5, 1944, cooped up in her “secret annex” while hiding from the Nazis, a desire for a freedom of bodies and imaginations to connect with a universal longing for something, anything, to be better (Frank, 1952, pp. 130–31). She eventually did find a friend in the annex. Such connections made the world better, helping her challenge the most oppressive of odds while her sanity and hope persevered. For ancients like Aristotle and Plato, friendship would take place among good people. Plato (380 BC) offers two dialogues on friendship (philia) and love (eros) without conclusions (Badhwar, 2009). After all, there is nothing morally certain about friendship, or philia. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur suggests that friendship helps us sustain and cultivate knowledge through our relations with others (Bucur, 2009). On the other hand, sustaining these friendships is rarely simple or value neutral. In recent years, countless theorists have looked to the ways in which friendships overlap with broader questions of civic life. Taking a dim view, Robert Putnam (2000) suggests that the ties between individual and community life were becoming unwound. On the more optimistic side, sociologist Peter Nardi (1999) argues just the opposite. To support his case, Nardi collected reams of data from surveys about friendship. He also made a nod to probably the most important contemporary theorist of friendship, Michel Foucault, who discussed friendship’s implications for political resistance in several interviews at the end of his life. Jacques Rancière (2008) suggests that new social relations are created from the relationships that take shape as people organize with each other to create social change. In a recent talk at the New School for Social Research, anarchist political philosopher Todd May (2011) argued that friendships have a political impact. While not all friendships are political, these relationships often do maintain a sense of hidden solidarity, challenging prevailing social and cultural forces (May, 2011). These friendships cut against what neoliberal economic systems do to colonize in our lives (Gautney, 2010, p. 176). Through these social relations, we create alternatives that resist the commodification of desire, imagination, and the deepest recesses of our lives. This is why Foucault suggests that society fears friendships as a way of life (May, 2011).

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A City of Friends Gazing at the multitude of bodies converging in urban spaces and movements, networks are taking shape everywhere (Juris, 2008). Still, Bellah and company (1985, p. 115) suggest that today many “do not understand the moral meaning that was once given to such relationships.” For a long time, “it was precisely the moral component of friendship that made it the indistinguishable basis of a good society” (p. 115). Connected with civic life, the practices of friendship represent “habits of the heart.” More than private, “they are public, even political, for a civic order, a ‘city,’ is above all a network of friends” (p. 116). “Without civic friendship, a city degenerates into a struggle of contending interest groups, unmediated by any public solidarity” (p. 116). Such friendship fuels civil society (May, 2011). Its absence undermines democratic living. One needs to look no further than the government shutdowns, budget shutdowns, and other workings of the US Congress for examples of what happens when a sense of virtue or friendship disappears from civic life. Conversely, the practice can open new ways of living, as urban space crackles with the kind of interplay that Whitman (1900) calls the “body electric” when he refers to his dreams of a “new city of Friends” in Leaves of Grass. He says, “It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city.” The kind of city Whitman describes is an ideal urban space, a polis (Kitto, 1951). Here democracy takes shape through the connections among bodies as people seek the good of one another in caring, awareness, and even forgiveness. “Democracy has seldom represented itself without the possibility of at least that which always resembles—if one is able to nudge the accent of this word—the possibility of a fraternization,” notes Jacques Derrida (1997, p. viii). “Here, women and men, sisters and brothers, friends appeal . . . from fact to law, from law to justice” (p. xi). Such friendship entails shared activities, passion, affection for commitment, and an acknowledgement of the interplay between the three (Telfer, 1970–71). After all, the practice of friendship, like activism, requires tending, especially if those involved are seeking the betterment of the world. Be it a hospital visit, a shared bike ride, or introducing another activist to a girlfriend, as Sarah Schulman (2002) suggests Lesbian Avengers should do—these gestures connect us with others (Nardi, 1999; Shepard, 2002). While capitalism requires sadness, social ties challenge this isolation (Shepard, 2011). Such activities remind us that another world is possible when egalitarian social relations find space among a city of friends. After all, in friendship, we are all equals (May, 2011). Through these shared engagements, we create alternative ways of seeing the world, creating new scripts for our lives.

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From Foucault to a Multiplicity of Relationships “I think now, after studying the history of sex, we should try to understand the history of friendship. That history is very, very important,” philosopher Michel Foucault explained in an interview in the late 1970s (quoted in Gallagher and Wilson, 1987/2005, pp. 33–34). For Foucault, friendship was a space to challenge conventional understandings of gender and sexuality (Roach, 2012). He saw social movements as spaces to experiment with new experiences of pleasure, desire, organization, and social connection. Rather than coupling up, formless friendship offered a new way of relating to others and the community (Williams, 2009). The theme would come up again and again in his interviews. Early in his seminal 1981 interview with the French gay magazine Le Gai Pied, Foucault said, “The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one’s sex, but, rather, to use one’s sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships.” Through these engagements, we find something desirable in each other. “The development toward which the problem of homosexuality tends is the one of friendship.” This “multiplicity of relationships” blurs identities and actions, expressions and movements of bodies in time, pointing to a postidentitarian model of living. Foucault’s short but suggestive musings on friendship emphasize a concept of friendship as shared estrangement and engagement, suggesting movements can do profound things few institutions can achieve (Roach, 2012). “I think that what happened in the 1960s and 1970s is something to be preserved; that there has been political innovation, political creation, and political experimentation outside of the great political parties, and outside of the normal ordinary program,” Michel Foucault explained in a later interview. “It’s a fact that people’s everyday lives have changed from the early 1960s to now, and certainly within my own life. And surely, that is not due to political parties but is the result of many movements” (quoted in Gallagher and Wilson, 1987/2005, pp. 33–35). Foucault’s thinking about this helps us reimagine what organizing can be about, allowing us to hang out, think, feel, and even create new social relations that expand the way we approach organizing, sexuality, and social movements (Roach, 2012; Williams, 2009). Through such shared engagements, I have enjoyed this sort of multiplicity of relationships with a sundry cross section of people from multiple walks of life in New York City. I’ve been friends with performers such as Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping and organizers from various collectives and groups, from my football team to my childhood bike collective, the NOVA Team, to my affinity groups, including the Lower East Side Collective, Reclaim the Streets, ACT UP, Time’s Up!, Public Space Party, and Bike Bloc. Some are

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professionals, while others are dumpster divers who recycle leftovers from the city or are members of syringe exchanges. Most all of us share many of the boundary-blurring engagements Foucault describes. This opens a space for understanding not only social movements such as ACT UP but the engaged praxis of activism and the identity-bending battle against oblivion (Roach, 2012). ACTing UP In a fall 2013 conversation with writer Sarah Schulman, I mentioned that I often wonder what the majestic trees in the Lower East Side’s Tompkins Square Park would tell us if they could talk. What might they recall? Schulman nodded, recalling the July 16, 1993, funeral procession for Jon Greenberg, starting in Tompkins Square Park and meandering out into the streets of the Lower East Side. “I don’t want an angry political funeral,” he explained shortly before his death. “I just want people to burn me in the street and eat my flesh.” The funeral procession would have to do. Here friendship extended beyond sex, illness, pleasure, loss, memory, movements, and life itself. Entwined within the carnage of the AIDS crisis, it is a practice involving the totality of these experiences. Such approaches “transform friendship and shared estrangement into a mode of biopolitical resistance that breaches the boundaries of gender, race, class, and generation and that encourages radically democratic forms of citizenship and civic participation,” notes Roach (2012, p. 12). “The politicization of friendship . . . in AIDS care giving and activism offers a powerful model for biopolitical formations unwedded to the dialectic of identity and difference” (p. 12). Here friendship opened a way to see a stranger who would become a confidant. Roach notes, “The dialectical reversal of subject-object paves the way for future becomings—a beyond sexuality, a postliberationist politics—which may preeminently take the form of friendship as a way of life, yielding a culture, an ethics, and as yet unseen forms of relation” (p. 43). To survive, we looked to “the healing powers of friendship and (safe) sex in the early days of the crisis,” noted ACT UP veteran Jay Blotcher. Countless activists were inspired to join the movement, wherein a spirit of kinship, sensuality, and creativity propelled innovations in organizing (Shepard, 2009). As the AIDS crisis took hold, these networks of friendships and families of choice became particularly significant. On Gay Pride Day 1990, under the balcony of Larry Kramer’s apartment, where the iconic queer activist Vito Russo sat that day, five months before he succumbed to the virus, members of ACT UP cheered, “We Love You Vito!” Politics, friendship, and homosexuality were intimately enmeshed

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in the life and activism of Vito Russo (Schiavi, 2011). His life and activism were fueled by friendships, fights, and organizing (Kantrowitz, 1977/1996). These friendships, social eros, and care found their way into the meetings and the very organizational ethos of ACT UP and the resistance to the AIDS onslaught. “It was really democracy in action on the floor in ACT UP,” explained longtime activist Andy Velez, a quarter-century veteran of AIDS and queer activism. “And a democracy is a damn tough thing to run if you are doing it for real.” One night, AIDS activists would be in a meeting followed by a trip to a club or sleeping with someone from the group. The next day, they would be in the street being arrested, a wink connecting a moment between arrestees and lovers with the events of the night before. Here the practice of building relationships was grounded in a range of activities, from meetings to demonstrations to meals to experiences in jail to trips to the bathhouses. And these friendships came to include many of the essential components of friendship, including “enjoying one another’s company, remaining useful to one another, and sharing a commitment to larger social good” (Bellah et al., 1985, p. 115). These friendships helped those involved feel comfort and intimacy, allowing them to persevere through adversity and stay engaged. Andy Velez confessed he had thought of leaving AIDS activism. “I remember one night in those early weeks, I was sitting,” recalled Velez. We had benches. And I was sitting on a bench, and I was feeling totally overwhelmed. And I didn’t know a soul. When I went down to the Wall Street action, I didn’t know anyone. Later I learned that one of the people was Peter Staley. Pete and I have now been friends for over twenty years. We still work together to fight the epidemic. But we didn’t become friends right away. I don’t remember when it actually began to be that Peter very clearly began to be my friend. I knew Peter before he knew me. But on this particular night that I’m referring to, I was on the verge of getting up and leaving and thinking this is too much. I feel too much like an outsider here. And instead, I turned to this guy next to me and made some remark about the lunacy that was happening. I think he laughed. And that was Jay Blotcher. And that was the beginning of a friendship that still exists—two decades and counting.

The movement was a space where people depended on friendships, creating a culture of resistance to the epidemic’s onslaught. “When you talk about friendships, the interesting thing is how much work people could do with one another without knowing very much about their lives outside of the actual movement,” Velez continued. “So people could work together, make posters, do flyers, do all the kind of stuff.” Many of these relationships served as the basis for transformative AIDS work.

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Keith Cylar (2002) joined ACT UP when his networks of friends started becoming sick. 1984, and ’83, when I was in Boston and I had developed an incredible network of young black gay professionals that were my core group of friends. It was an awesome support group of people that were gifted and lovely. In 1983, the first of our group died from some rare blood disease—it was AIDS, only the world didn’t know it. As the epidemic began to show its true nature, we became increasingly uncomfortable. And at some point around then, we began to count the years of unprotected sex and drug use against the years of monastic life behavior, knowing all the time that any one of us could be the next. And one by one they died. Of that circle, I happen to be, I believe, one of the last ones still alive, and I’m infected and scared.

Jay Blotcher recalled his days working with Cylar with the ACT UP Housing Committee and later Housing Works. “I met Keith in ACT UP. And again, if you wanted anyone to cut through the bullshit, it was Keith Cylar,” recalled Blotcher. Being with Cylar allowed Blotcher to be as authentic as he could be: He would say anything. It was refreshing. If you were embarrassed by what he would say, that was probably your problem. I’m gonna say I was brazen because he was brazen. With anybody else, I would just be one thing, but with Keith, Keith gave you permission to be loud and fearless and sassy and bullshit free. And he would tease me, and he would poke at me and say, “Hmm, looking good honey.” And things like that. And we just had a really good rapport. And then when I joined Housing Works as their publicist, we were able to work together in a much more effective way. He wasn’t just a good time; he was a good time with a lesson. Like with Keith, it was never just a good time for the sake of a good time. There was always an agenda there. There was always nutritional value to the fun.

“I felt that Keith was part of my family, so I remember him like you remember a family member,” noted Ginny Schubert, who helped Cylar and Charles King found Housing Works. “I remember the fights, and I remember the really good times. He was incredibly supportive, always. And very obviously committed to the fight. He had a really good time; he liked to have a good time. And he could usually bring anyone along. Anyone that wasn’t having a good time, he could change that. So he showed that; he created that for others.” Each ACT UP meeting would begin with the list of the names of those who had died during the previous week, reminding everyone of the thanatos in the air, the sword of Damocles hanging over their heads. Keith Cylar,

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for one, died in 2004. AIDS activists the world over mourned and staged waves of civil disobedience in memorial. “Keith wore an ACT UP T-shirt to my wedding,” recalled Schubert. “It was hilarious, under his suit, and my Alabama family didn’t quite know what to do with that. That kind of summed up his playful nature,” explained Schubert, noting that while playful, the gesture was “also slightly confrontational—aggressive in a good way. So then I wore an ACT UP T-shirt under my suit to his funeral.” We all remember Cylar in different ways. Most of us remember that our friendships with him pushed us to do more, be better activists, take more risks, care more. Keith Cylar and Charles King of Housing Works used to say that their friendship helped each other find a new way of living, fighting, loving, and acting up against the silences that allowed the AIDS crisis to rage. They were there to push and love each other. These shared affinities are what inspire me, helping me move forward and stay involved. They push me to be more of the best part of myself, allowing me to take part in something so much larger than myself. For many involved, the friendships engendered by such movements are still some of the most important relationships they have. The friendships made along the way were everything for Donald Grove, a veteran of the ACT UP Syringe Exchange Committee and still an active member of the harm reduction movement today. After my first arrests in New York City, I used to meet Grove and other harm reduction activists, such as Cylar, at Dicks, a local gay bar, every Friday. Since then, we’ve participated in demonstrations, sung together, gone to funerals and harm reduction conferences, and so on. Over the years, Grove has built a world around his network of pro-choice, harm reduction–based AIDS activists. “It was all only friendships for me,” Grove confessed. “It was all only friendship in that I only got anything done through friendship.” Blurred Spaces The point, of course, is that these connections beat back alienated social relations as well as opening space for resistance. Rather than private ownership or marriage, which stigmatizes those on the margins, friendship opens a blurry space between desire and connection, experience and expression, self and other, individual and group, public and private spheres. Here queer spaces, bathhouses, underground parties, and public sexual culture function as means of resistance to a neoliberal politics of privatization and social control (Crimp, 1988). “In and around these locations,” Allan Bérubé confessed he found new worlds. Here, “erotic adventurers and

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non-conformists have created some of the most imaginative, creative, varied, unruly and long-lasting forms of gay sexual culture . . . ,” he followed. “These cracks in our anti-sexual society have offered me creative moments of intimate sexual adventure with strangers I never saw again. These erotic spaces have been little utopias of Whitmanesque camaraderie” (quoted in Wockner, 1997). Such “affective gestures . . . refuse alignment” along any one significant social or cultural axis, notes Leela Gandhi (2006, p. 10). Instead, they open spaces for play, blurring lines between space, sexuality, and ways of being and create a new world out of uneasy in-between spaces. This luminal feeling is only enhanced by the very real recognition of the loss of friends to AIDS, overdose, cancer, political violence, or any other crisis. Here, all that is solid melts into the air, as Shakespeare and Marx wrote and as Berman (1982) paraphrased before shuffling off. Everything is temporary. AIDS helped us witness the specter of death and loss in a raw, visceral way, fostering new forms of creative connection between self and other, friend and community experience. Those involved in fighting it shared a foxhole comradery via a loss exercise of the everyday, which helped living feel immediate, defiant, and sometimes delicious (Roach, 2012, p. 41). Coming out of these years, many would try to stay connected with those they endured it with. Phone Trees to Facebook “I stay in touch,” wrote Jay Blotcher (2009), in a story about social networks. People from my past—ex-boyfriends, ex-husbands and a fleet of tricksturned-friends—inhabit my current life. Some hover around the edges, others participate on a daily basis. They have become pals and confidantes due to the elastic nature of relationships in the gay male community. I’m still friendly with several kids who hark back to elementary school. And why not? . . . These men were never lovers, but we attained a level of intimacy that surpasses simplistic definition . . . They remain relevant to who I am today . . . Important life lessons are lost in the mandate to bury lovers in the deep past . . . Maintaining ties with these men today is a debt paid to the departed.

Critics rightly note that information shared via such networks is tracked by the NSA; others suggest that it is part of the ongoing process of supporting the social capital that expands networks and social movements (Nardi, 1999). Before Facebook, people used to organize with “phone trees,” sending out alerts with those receiving a call dialing up two more people until they formed a tree (Nardi, 1999). This practice has deep roots in the history of

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social movements. When Harry Hay, the founder of the Mattachine Society, the first US-based gay rights group, moved to Los Angeles in the 1940s, he knew no one. He had a list of telephone numbers of other gay people in the community that he had been given by friends in San Francisco. This list of friends functioned as an introduction to Los Angeles’s social network of gay men. Through it, he met a few like-minded thinkers and started to hold open meetings of the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles in November 1950 (Nardi, 1999). The goal of the group was to break down the isolation among gay men, foster social tolerance, and draw awareness to the daily mechanisms of oppression faced by gays and lesbians (D’Emilio, 1983). Here, friendships helped social actors build their lives around communities of choice rather than nonvoluntary, repressive communities. An early member of the group was Randolfe (Randy) Wicker, who became involved with the Mattachine Society in New York City in the late 1950s. “I joined Mattachine Society in New York in 1958, and we were setting up chapters,” Wicker explained in a personal interview. He took part in the first picket for gay rights at the induction center in 1965 with other colleagues, including Rene Cafiero and Craig Rodwell. Throughout these years, the friendships Wicker established with his colleagues from the Mattachine and Daughters of Bilitis chapters, helped him forge ahead. “They were my main supporters,” Wicker mused, recalling Kay Tobing and Barbara Gittings. “I have a letter from her [Gittings], where she says, ‘Fight for your place in gay history.’ They were always so wonderful. I was the first male to appear on the Ladder, albeit the back cover [laughs].” Buttressed by a small cadre of friends from the Mattachine Society committed to a similar goal, Wicker continued to do interviews and television appearances while the movement became increasingly visible to the public. What I didn’t realize in this instance was because of us, we had gotten radio and TV shows. There were articles in magazines. Homosexuality, as an issue, had become more and more legitimate . . . Rosa Parks wasn’t what she looked like, just a tired old lady on the bus. She was a movement organizer. And that was all skillfully planned and executed. But the fact of the matter is, for people to join, they have to have some sense of self-integrity. And we had had enough public discussion that homosexuals were feeling less and less like they were sinners, criminals. You can only abuse people when they don’t have enough self-respect to fight back, and what Stonewall did was . . . we had built the airplane and Stonewall girls flew off in it.

And the movement took off. When gay liberationist Cleve Jones sought to create the AIDS Quilt, the world’s largest piece of folk art, he looked to his friends to help him

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complete the project. They served as a profoundly personal and practical resource. In the years that followed, it was their collective memory that Jones sought to preserve (Shepard, 1997). This message immediately appealed to me. I saw this organizing as an extension of a very real, very deep political history. In 1831, Alexis De Tocqueville traveled around the United States with a friend. After the trip, he suggested that between the market and government, civil society pulsed within the organizing of democracy in America. While corporations tend to call the shots in the US Congress, today democracy takes shape through Twitter, connecting global social movements, mobilizing tens of thousands, and igniting movements from Ferguson to Zuccotti Park (Gerbaudo, 2012). These networks helped tap into the possibilities of social capital among social networks long thought dormant (Putnam, 2000). In a quarter-century of participation in movements, the friendships I have made in these movements comprise the bulwark of my social life. In 2011, my birthday overlapped with the end of a day of direct action to shut down Wall Street. After some 12 hours of riots, arrests, and blockades, followed by a labor rally attended by some thirty thousand people, my friends and I flooded into a pub five minutes from Zuccotti Park. People who had been arrested reconverged. We danced and celebrated the vitality of a pulsing movement. It was one of my best birthdays and was anything but an isolated event. Members of the Lower East Side Collective organized their meetings around friendship networks and affinity groups. This organic organizing ethos helped the movement thrive and engage nonactivists across the city (Shepard, 2011). Even before then, I can recall a moment at the University of Chicago when a few of us were organizing a group called the Community Development Club. One evening, no one wanted to gather for a meeting, but later that night, everyone in the group ran into each other at the campus pub anyway. After a couple of drinks, our conversation flowed to the subject of the Community Development Club. “People get their needs met or they throw in the book in organizing,” Eric Rofes used to say (quoted in Shepard, 2009, p. 184). That night, people did not want to do anything formal. They wanted to hang out with friends. So we did that and eventually covered everything we had planned to discuss in the meeting. The point was that the group wanted and needed an informal, collegial interaction, not a meeting. The lesson was not unique to the Lower East Side Collective or the Community Development Club. Throughout the years, most of the groups I have cared about organized in affinity groups: small groups of like-minded people who get together and work on projects independently. More often than not, the glue holding these projects together is affinity: a

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connection marked by an attraction both to each other and to a common goal. This link propels a closeness among bodies, groups, and projects. Finding Friends In 1970, community organizer Si Kahn wrote, “In some ways, the organizer’s main job in the community in the early stages of organizing is simply to make friends with the people there. That these friendships are also essential to the work of organizing the community does not mean that they are any less real” (1970, p. 26). After all, the history of social movements is full of stories of friendships propelling innovations in organizing: Bob Kohler and Sylvia Rivera in the years after Stonewall in New York City; Charles King and Keith Cylar of Housing Works; Panama Vicente Alba and Richie Perez with the Young Lords Party and the National Congress on Puerto Rican Rights; Randy Wicker and Barbara Gittings of the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis; Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru with the Indian Independence Movement; Donald Grove with his comrades from the syringe exchange groups; Andy Velez and Jay Blotcher with ACT UP; the Friends of Brad Will; and Occupy Wall Street. Social ties have long fueled social movements. Being a good “comrade” is an important part of the parlance of leftist movements. The Quakers, who played such a vital role in movements for civil rights and against nukes, built a society of friends (D’Emilio, 2004). “Sisterhood is powerful” was a slogan of the feminist movement. A consistent response to the question of how people got involved in organizing is “I heard about it from a friend” (O’Donnell et al., 1998, p. 143). Friendships make us feel more comfortable about leaving our individual worlds and connecting with something broader (Shepard, 2009). It is also a way to get things done. In her memoir Twenty Years at Hull House (2006), Jane Addams explains, “The depth and strength of his relation to the neighborhood must depend very largely upon himself and upon the genuine friendships he has been able to make.” She suggests that these friendships helped the movement’s work, transforming social relations among those living in the Hull House (Stebner, 1997). Anarchism and Friendship Over the years, countless movements, from queer and AIDS activism to anarchism, have organized themselves around similar kinship-based, less formal structures (Graeber, 2004). “Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free groupings of individuals for the purpose of producing

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real social wealth,” argues Emma Goldman (1969). Such anarchism is “an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires” (p. 62). This organization largely takes shape through the gathering of friends. “In the egalitarian beds of true lovers, in the democracy of true friendships, in the topless federations of playmates enjoying good parties and neighbors enjoying sewing circles, we are all queens and kings,” note the anonymous authors of the CrimethInc Pamphlet Fighting for Our Lives: An Anarchist Primer (2010). The literature on anarchism and friendship is extensive (CrimethInc, 2010; May, 2011; McBride, 2011). From social organizing to large scale struggles for autonomy from the state, much of anarchist organization takes shape through notions of affinity, opening spaces for new social relations, while animating social movements (Ince, 2010; May, 2011). The result is quite often an abundant approach to sexual selfdetermination and community building. As anarcha-feminist Jo Freeman (1972) put it, “Women should be building our movement the way we make love—gradually with sustained involvement, limitless endurance—and, of course, multiple orgasms.” This thinking has inspired countless movements. In 2004, organizer Adrienne Maree Brown described the links between pleasure activism and harm reduction: “Some people think I’ve spent the last several years of my life working with raising awareness about HIV/AIDS, destigmatizing drug use, and ending overdose, but really it’s about breaking down barriers to pleasure. So I’m a pleasure activist” (p. 20). For Brown, this way of looking at life helped her expand her way of living. She learned the experience from my friend, the late Keith Cylar. “I was young and doing sex education, and I learned from good teachers in the harm reduction network that safe sex is actually more pleasurable than high risk sex in the long run—it allows you to get to have more sex,” explained Brown (2010) a few years later. Yet this approach is not without its critics. Over the years, many people have criticized organizing based on friendship, subculture, and going to the pub, dubbing it “lifestyle anarchism.” Anarchist theorist Murray Bookchin grappled with this in the years before his death in 2006. Bookchin worried that anarchists had turned away from efforts aimed at revolution in favor of lifestyle choices involving spirituality and/or primitivism; for him, mysticism had become a substitute for social action challenging the workings of capitalism. While many agreed with his analysis of capital, others recoiled at his critique, pointing out that the world had experienced more than enough authoritarian models. Even Bookchin acknowledged

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that “human beings are social beings . . . We grow and evolve in relation to others. For that, we require the presence of other people” (quoted in Biehl, 2007). Under capitalism, these social connections remained tenuous: “Commodification severs all the ties created by feeling and community, decomposing them . . . capitalism turns the organic into the inorganic, so to speak. It fetishizes commodities as substitutes for genuine social ties” (quoted in Biehl, 2007). So he turned to antiauthoritarian organizing: “We must recover not only the socialist dimension of anarchism but its political dimension, democracy” (quoted in Biehl, 2007). From Subversive Communities to Social Networks Audre Lorde notes in “The Uses of the Erotic” that “the sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared and lessens the threat of their differences” (quoted in Williams, 2009, p. 32). Such connections propel mechanisms of social change, extending into means and motivations for actors to gather, interact, experiment, and build space for new models for living (see Halperin, 1997; Roach, 2012). As Audre Lorde suggests, these feelings of connection created through kinship, social bonds, and movement practices find their roots in decades of queer organizing (D’Emilio, 1983). Here, friendship served as a foundation. For gay men, friendships offer a new way of building families outside the restricting prerequisites of heteronormativity (Nardi, 1999). The same can be said for activists from a range of movement cultures. For the settlement houses, it was a way for a group of women to forge new relationships with themselves and their neighborhoods, independent of men or marriage. From the Mattachine Society to Occupy, it was a way of creating social solidarity among activists. It was also a way of staying the course and finding new meanings within an experiment in living. For anarchists and ACT UPpers, it was a way to create a new culture of resistance. Friendship was a way of creating authentic social bonds that supported liberating social relations, furthering movement gains. It made movement participation feel worthwhile. Eric Rofes confessed that his most important social ties were born out of his participation in social movements (Shepard, 2010). The same could be said of many listed here as they helped forge their own cities of friends. Bellah and company (1985) remind us that, at its best, friendship brings people together in an effort to fight for the larger social good. It helps support autonomous models of organizing driven by affinity

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and desire rather than institutional affiliation. With these friendships, new worlds take shape. At least, this has always been the experience for me. Watching friendships and taking part in friends’ lives helped bring me into social movements, inviting me into a shared engagement with another way of being and living, of reading poetry and growing across time.

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telling interaction took place between Studs Terkel and Tennessee Williams during a 1961 interview at Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel. “Think of Blanche for a minute,” Terkel chimed in. “I’m asking you, the creator, to think of Blanche . . . She represented so many good things too, despite the sham that she seemed to evoke.” “Well, as she said, ‘I don’t tell truth. I tell what ought to be truth.’ She had the courage to admit that she occasionally embellished upon the real facts. And when her back was to the wall, she had courage, truth, and eloquence, I thought,” noted Williams (quoted in Terkel, 1993). There is a panache to Blanche’s embellished of what “ought to be truth.” For Terkel, Blanche DuBois represented a fundamental point about the occasional incoherence of our lives and friendships. Growing up, everyone has her or his Blanche DuBois. Fred Mayer was my dad’s. Their rebel friendship—chock-full of tall tales of travels and poetry, of career shifts and inevitable stumbles, of failed marriages and challenges—inspired me. Their shared engagement over the decades invited me to look at the links between poetry, social movements, and storytelling. Yet was any of it true? I’m not really sure. But I loved hearing Dad tell stories about him; each retelling of their story offered its own DuBois-like embellishment as historic truth receded into the performance and memory. Nonetheless, somehow it maintains coherence (Borden, 1992; Cohler, 1982; Spence, 1982). Maybe it was a tragicomedy, or just a comedy? “If life really is a play, then it must be a comedy,” Fred insisted in a college paper. “If it has a plot then it must be a mistaken identity . . . a Fledermaus to which tragedy does not belong.” Or is it simply that of telling stories, plotting, planning revenge on your friends, playing around? Is this what friendship is all about? The cocreation of stories helps us fashion new worlds.

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And this is what happened with my dad and his college roommate, Fred. Fred was his best friend from his freshman year at Harvard in 1956 as the two created a mythology of friendship through their rebellions against 1950s conformity, participation in the Beat movement, journeys to the East in the 1960s, and struggles with academe in the 1970s, drink in the 1980s, and HIV/AIDS in the 1990s. In the years after Fred’s death, my father sat to tell me stories about his life, in this way extending his memory as he wove a yarn about the mythology of his best friend. In telling their story, he somehow kept it alive. My role as a listener was to act as witness, participant, and active agent in the narration. Fred’s story inspired me to struggle against HIV/AIDS for a quarter-century after his departure. I was an observing participant in this ethnography of friendship. Fred Mayer was much more comfortable within literature, myth, and ritual than within the constraints of “profane time” (Eliade, 1954; 1957). His myth was grander than his reality. Fred was more comfortable with stories and poems. These were his playground. He led a life of privilege, receiving multiple degrees from Harvard, all the while seeking to reject his background. He partook in the 1950s journey across continents to participate in the generational beatitudes with the Beat movement, pushing the limits of what one could do with one’s own body and eventually calling his parents to beg for a ticket home after hustling in the streets of West Hollywood. The heat of liminal space, between realities, intrigued him. In the 1960s, he would participate within the underground Boston and New York City leather scenes (History Project, 1998), all the while earning his PhD in literature from Harvard. Through sadomasochism (S&M) and poetry, Mayer sought another kind of experience. After abandoning an academic career and casting off the title of doctor, he spent two decades in Southwest Texas. Toward the end, Fred’s happiest times were during Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings, within the grittiest of meeting spaces, listening to others’ stories. Fred’s story, the ideas propelling his life of literature, travel, illness, and friendship, profoundly impacted me. “All ethnography is part philosophy, and a good deal of the rest is confession,” argues Clifford Geertz (1973, p. 346). This was a rebel friendship that changed lives—at least, it changed mine. It highlights themes of memory, boundary blurring, and mentorship that run throughout this volume. Emphasizing the position of the storyteller, my father, and his memory of Fred, this is an AIDS narrative about a twentieth-century struggle for meaning. Collecting the oral histories of people with AIDS for my first book, White Nights and Ascending Shadows, I first started seeing the AIDS era as having inherited the anxieties of the Weimar era with which Fred was fixated (at least that was the case in Fred’s AIDS narrative). In a 1929 review of Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Carl Zuckmayer suggests that uncertainty was a fate World War I

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forced upon the century, drawing those in its wake “into the fate of this generation.” He concludes, “We are the ones whose lives began with the knowledge of the ultimate and greatest thing of earthly existence—of the most terrible, the mortal abandonment of man, and the highest, comradeship” (pp. 23–24). Fred’s life was propelled by notions of comradeship. It meant everything to him, and this was all that was left. It is a story that opened up a world of memories of a grand friendship and a departure due to a disease that would consume cohorts of friends for a generation. Like many AIDS narratives, this one involves an interplay among body, memory, and desire. AIDS has a brutal way of reminding us that the body remembers—even when we shelve moments of desire deep in the unconscious recesses of the mind—to linger sometimes far longer than in conscious thought. Much of human experience is “radically determined by sexuality,” notes Peter Brooks in Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (1994). “Sexuality belongs not simply to the physical body, but to the complex of fantasies and symbolizations which largely determined identity” (p. 25). It is governed by laws; it is expressed, negotiated, and channeled through our stories. “What it thus creates,” Freud argues, “is a daydream or fantasy, which carries about it traces of its origin from the occasion which provoked it and from the memory.” These memories propel our narratives. “Thus past, present, and future are strung together, as it were, on the thread of the wish that runs through them” continues Freud (quoted in Brooks, 1994, p. 27–8). We were never sure where narratives began or ended with Fred. Throughout his life, Fred seemed to grapple with struggles that Freud and Homer described. Recall Odysseus and the Sirens in the twelfth book of the Odyssey. Like other sailors, Odysseus longed to hear their song, though he knew it would kill him. Death and pleasure, and the human instinct to ingest the thing that will destroy us, shape lives. Still, is swimming to the Sirens the right thing to do? Odysseus’s crew prevented him from getting near them (Grand and Hazel, 1979). Yet did Fred’s? Did he even want them to? Or did they know to try? When Fred lived with us in the late 1980s, he would sometimes leave for days on end without giving us a word of his whereabouts. Dad speculated that Fred had disappeared into an underground space, a subterranean world of leather and expression below the surface of the suburban Dallas, Texas. Friendship and abandonment, connection and separation, pulse through the story of Fred Mayer and his many disappearances and reappearances. Before he died, he wrote on a scrap of paper, Lost forever are we sitting here. Dreaming of ghosts.

Maybe he knew we would be?

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Winter 1991: Poughkeepsie, New York “Fred Died,” read the black-ink note the White Angel had written for me in Josselyn dorm during my junior year. The White Angels were the ladies who worked the front desks in all the Vassar College dorms. They took notes for all incoming phone calls. It had been five years since Fred had lived with my dad and me. And now a note—a little, three-by-threeinch, square piece of paper hanging on a rack with other notes for other students—announced in two words that it was over. Mom told me she would call if anything changed in his condition. The deathwatch hadn’t been that long. That’s the way it went in those days. Dad had only told me Fred was sick the previous summer. As the years passed, images of enigmatic components of Fred’s life and life story resonated from the time when he met Dad in 1956. For the next quarter-century, whenever I would see Dad, we would talk about his freshman roommate, and I would ask questions. The concept of the lost friend took a different shape with each retelling. This story opened up countless directions for thinking about social connection and regret. My second year in graduate school, two decades ago, I started writing a draft of this story for Bertram Cohler’s course on life narratives at the University of Chicago. Writing about Fred, I used to listen to Louie Armstrong’s solo in “Mack the Knife.” I would visualize a black-and-white photo of Marlene Dietrich performing in a cabaret. Listening to The Threepenny Opera, I reveled in the first words of Kurt Weil’s story: “You are about to hear an opera for beggars, since this opera was conceived with the splendor only a beggar could imagine and since it has to be so cheap, even a beggar could afford it. It is called The Threepenny Opera.” Fred gave me the soundtrack recording back in 1985 for my birthday. As a century removes us from the era in which Weil wrote the opera, it is easy for us to forget, but for some, the attempt to make meaning of an era without a worldview created a sense of duress that tore at their very lives. Listening to this story, over and over I am compelled to wonder, what happened? Cruising the Obits In December 1993, Mom took me to see Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. An early scene elaborated on the underlying messages of a 1980s AIDS diagnosis. “No, say it. I mean it. Say: ‘Roy Cohn, you are a homosexual.’ (Pause),” Cohn said to his doctor of some three decades. “And I will proceed, systematically, to destroy your reputation and your practice and your career in

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New York State,” Cohn explained to his doctor, who was notifying him that he had AIDS. Stopping his doctor midsentence, Cohn explained that the label “homosexual”’ signifies a lack of clout. “You have AIDS, Roy,” Henry replied. “No, Henry, no. AIDS is what homosexuals have. I have liver cancer” (Kushner, 1993, pp. 44, 46). Watching the scene, I thought of Fred. He had always loved theater. I wondered about the ways in which he responded to his diagnosis. I hated to think of the influence such forces had on him. He had spent twenty years concealing his sexuality, coping with a conduct under circumstances other than honorable discharge from the military, even participating in “reparative therapy” for homosexuality, which is now largely discredited. I wondered why Fred was not more forthcoming with me about it back in 1985 and 1986. Fred’s presence never really left, especially after I started to work in San Francisco after college. AIDS was the story in San Francisco, bringing everyone there into its historic trajectory. You could feel it in the street, in the subway signs, and most certainly in the obituaries, which lined the San Francisco newspapers. The story of the AIDS crisis largely took shape as a vast narrative, compiled inch by inch, line by line, page after page, in death notices filling the pages of the Bay Area Reporter (BAR), a community newspaper. The epidemic was running on ten-plus years without anything close to a cure. Reports from the previous summer’s 1993 Ninth International Conference on AIDS in Berlin confirmed that none of the treatment leads of the previous year, or decade, had proven worthwhile. It was almost impossible to live in San Francisco without knowing there was an AIDS epidemic going on. AIDS was on every billboard, in every newspaper. “I glance at the front page [of local gay newspaper the Bay Area Reporter] but the obits are the first thing I look at . . . it’s become a habit,” noted my roommate (Boyer, 1994, p. 7). In those days, the BAR published some thirty obits of people with AIDS a week. They had done this since 1984 and would continue to do so until either the government put a genuine effort into fighting the epidemic or there was a cure (p. 7). By 1994, the obituaries served as a device to settle scores, identify winners, report on the losers, and sensationalize the newsworthy. When The New York Times broke with its tradition and actually acknowledged that Roy Cohn had died of “AIDS,” not some code word for immune system complications (Bronski, 1988a, p. 136), people blamed the obfuscation of the disease for the inattention it had received. The “who,” “what,” “when,” and “why” of HIV had never been anything but problematic for a decade; AIDS was more of a clandestine affliction. BAR editor Al Ross explained, “The mainstream press would run standard, paid obits, but refused to list lovers and sexuality” (quoted in Boyer, 1994, p. 7).

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“Concealing an AIDS diagnosis in a death notice was nothing unusual in these times,” wrote San Francisco journalist Randy Shilts (1987, p. 178), who later died of it himself. “In the first years of AIDS, obituaries disguised the reality that an epidemic was stealing the lives of the renowned, not just the better publicized profligates. One had to read the obituaries closely. To look for the vague long illness or the odd reference to a pneumonia or skin cancer striking down someone in, say, their mid-thirties. People, especially in the plutocracy, didn’t die of some homosexual disease, according to the death notices, they just wasted away after a ‘long illness.’” The most depressing part of thinking about Fred was the feeling that he had internalized this message. He had viewed homosexuality as a sickness to rid himself of, although, as Dad would point out, he had known he was gay all his life. AIDS consciousness was not at its peak level in Lubbock, Texas, where Fred had spent his final years. He certainly hadn’t been “out” about his disease. I didn’t know if anyone had even written an obituary for Fred. What would it have said? The “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” and “why” for Fred could prove to be a great obituary. Early Impressions Sometime in the Early 1980s: Dallas, Texas I began sketching notes, reconstructing memories. Fred was always Dad’s drinking buddy. As a kid, I remember coming downstairs and finding Fred rolled up, asleep in a ball, under one of the side tables in the living room. At the time, Fred was living in Monahans, a town of not quite seven thousand inhabitants, just southwest of the Texas Panhandle, trying to get his foot in the oil business. We had just moved to Dallas after Dad walked away from another law job. It seemed mighty uncomfortable there under the table. Something about the previous night’s experience had helped him be at ease in contorted circumstances. I found the whole thing funny. I also thought this guy was a bit of a bum, but he was Mom and Dad’s friend. Later that night, he put on a tie. It was the first time I had ever seen him in a suit, and it shocked me. I could never recall him wearing anything but his Lee jeans, a plaid shirt, cowboy boots, and a jimmy cap. “Fred, what are you doing wearing a tie? I didn’t even know you owned one,” I told him. “Well there was a time in my life when I used to wear them all the time,” he told me with a tone suggesting that where he came from, kids my age did not speak to their elders like that. The role of Fred the arbiter of filial piety did not really become him. He just didn’t have the heart for it. There was so much about Fred that I didn’t know.

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We made family trips to visit Fred in Monahans throughout our Texas years. I would bet on horse races with him at the Ruidoso Downs in New Mexico. Fred took us to eat at Kermit’s Drive-In, where they sold tenpound burgers in wooden baskets. Kermit’s was the only real hangout in the desolate West Texas town. There, fresco-sized wall paintings featured images of Jesus, Marilyn Monroe, and Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry. Fred smiled when pointing them out. Fred had a great time showing us his Texas. That Christmas, we went to Matamoros, the Mexican border town just south of El Paso. As we sat in traffic over the Rio Grande, I commented on a Kentucky Fried Chicken billboard with Spanish wording. “It’s so good, you want to lick your fingers afterward,” Fred translated. “Not quite possible to translate ‘Finger-licking good,’” he noted, “but you can learn Spanish by paying attention to things like that. That’s how I learned it.” Fred had married a former student from his teaching days named Pam. She complained incessantly about people who drove under the requisite 10 miles per hour faster than the 55-mile-per-hour speed limit. “They think they are right,” she screamed, at which point I realized that the whole affair was not a joke and that she was very mad. “They are wrong. What they are doing is wrong.” Pam ran the marriage. Years later, Dad would recall, “He chose highly masculine women both times he chose to relate to women . . . Here you’ve got a horseback riding West Texas girl who enters the man’s world of the oil patch and succeeds on men’s terms. She’s an old-fashioned icon for feminists. For sure, she was a sexually voracious woman. Pam lived like that.” She was also Fred’s “in” with the South Texas oil crowd. Pam’s group always hustled and bustled throughout their house. Dad tried to keep up, but it wore at him. “Whenever we go out with them, it always turns to talking about oil—pronounced oaaal,” he would complain. I was never quite certain Fred was really part of that culture. During our visits, Dad and Fred always did what they did when they got together: get drunk and hang out. They were usually involved in activities that seemed adult. Danger accompanied life there. Fred had cable television that carried R-rated movies, which we could never see at home. I remember trying to fall asleep one night while listening to Dad and Fred watch the movie The Deer Hunter, about the Vietnam War and its cruelties. “You can make it,” one character kept on screaming as he watched his friend being whipped during what seemed like an especially long torture scene. I wondered how they could watch. Dad and Fred sat up late after the movie. The story about a group of men coming home ideologically shocked kept Dad and Fred up all night talking, fixated. Dad identified with the sadness of the death of a notion of country and Fred with the

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limits the body could endure, both transfixed with the macabre. In later years, I realized that the two of them had something between them that defied my own understanding. Movies, violence, theater—this was all part of their friendship. The interaction was something they shared. The postmortems on the trips back to Dallas from Monahans didn’t tend to be happy affairs. Fred seemed to be such a wreck and Mom and Dad were always a bit disappointed with him. Of course, there was always the subject of their own crumbling relationship, but it was easier to talk about Fred. A Winter Night in 1985 I came home from an evening out to find Dad and Fred sitting in the dining room, doing some drinking. Dad told me Fred was going to be staying with us for a while. Fred said we would talk the next morning about things. The next day, Dad told me Fred was breaking up with Pam. The crash in Texas oil prices wasn’t far off, and Fred seemed to know it. That era was over. Dad had a great deal of business and travel with which to occupy his time, and Mom had moved away to do her doctoral work at Bryn Mawr College. So for a few months there in 1985, a majority of my time at home, I spent with Fred. On Saturday mornings we would drive across town, through seedy, prostitute-ridden Harry Hines to Walnut Hill for the weekend Indian buffet at Kabab and Curry. We lived down the street from the Inwood Theater, a local art movie house. That fall, Shoah, the eight-hour Holocaust documentary; The Trip to Bountiful, Geraldine Page’s last movie; and RAN, Akira Kurosawa’s King Lear were all in previews. “I’ll definitely go see Shoah,” Fred planned. “You could stay that long?” I asked. “Don’t you ever go see two movies in a row?” “No,” I lied. “Oh, well I’ve gone to two and three movies in a row all my life,” he explained, somehow offering permission just to live and be alive without guilt in ways others rarely offered. Fred was not always around. He would leave for weekends and ten-day periods. When he was around, we saw a lot of movies. I had arthroscopic surgery on my knee that September, so I wasn’t able to play football. My older brother had taken me to the hospital and to the first couple of days of school before he went back for his sophomore year of college. Fred stayed in his old bedroom. I spent the rest of the football season inside, doing rehabilitation and exploring the worlds of pot smoking, music, and other cultural diversions. My younger brother was off to

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prep school. Dad spent a lot of time sitting in the dark in the living room, drinking by himself. Without the rest of the family, life at home wasn’t quite the same. One of the first movies Fred and I went to see was The Trip to Bountiful. In it, an aging Geraldine Page had planned to make a final trip to her old hometown. She had to find a bus route, buy a ticket, plan her day, make sure she had proper traveling shoes, and the like. She told everyone she was going back to Bountiful. And finally, late in the story, she actually looked back at what her childhood home had become. It would be her last trip to Bountiful. After the movie, I was a little down. Sitting around the old house, Fred just listened to me talk about missing living in Atlanta, when the whole family was together, sad to remember old homes and past lives that would really never come back together. Fred and Dad bought me records for my sixteenth birthday. Dad had always preferred Baroque-period music—Bach and Handel. Fred bought me two albums: Jerry Jeff Walker and James Taylor’s greatest hits and Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto with Van Cliburn playing. Fred told lots of stories about Van Cliburn, who had left international stardom to live with his mother in Fort Worth—another perspective on Texas. The presence of Romantic-period classical music brought a fresh perspective into the household. We listened to lots of Mendelssohn. Chopin’s “Nocturnes” were Fred’s favorite. Fred had just about gotten to play in Carnegie Hall with Leonard Bernstein, the story went, but it just didn’t work out. That seemed to be the story over and over again with Fred. We talked and talked and talked. Fred always attempted to explain his Texas, describing country music as the songs of a cowboy who has lost his land, separated from a part of himself. “If I can just get off of that LA freeway without getting killed or caught / Down the road in a cloud of smoke, for some land that I ain’t bought, bought, bought / If I can just get off of that LA freeway without getting killed or caught,” Jerry Jeff sang in the album Fred gave me. That December, everyone reconverged in Dallas. Mom and Dad’s marriage seemed to be even more strained. I was off getting high with my friends. In the midst of all this, word came from South Georgia that Granddad had died. Dad had left for Georgia a few days prior on a deathwatch. He had asked Fred to get the family to Georgia. The following day, Fred helped pack us into his long, tan 1977 Cadillac, which had an odd, pukelike odor. “What a stupid car,” my older brother would recall. Fred was his official godfather. During the trip from Dallas to Georgia, we would hang out and talk, and Fred would introduce us to another regional delight of his: Popeye’s Cajun Fried Chicken.

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“Late, one of those nights on the trip when everyone else was asleep, I asked Fred what had happened, how come he had ended up staying in South Texas for all those years,” my older brother remembered. “He got sick of trying to please his father . . . And after a while, it stopped mattering to him. He knew he could not please him, so he stopped trying.” We arrived in Thomasville late in the evening. “Oh, hi Fred,” greeted my worn-out grandmom with the familiarity of decades. At that point, she had known Fred for some thirty years. Dad thanked Fred for driving us, another monumental gesture in long friendship. The next day, we drove through winding country roads lined with trees and vines, Spanish moss hanging from their branches into the road. Finally, we were outside the majestic old home from what looked like another time, outside Thomasville. We were greeted by a family friend, though I did not remember her. Pieces of pasts I had never known passed in front of my eyes. “This will be difficult,” Mom warned us at the funeral home, with the experience of someone who had buried both her parents decades earlier. And she walked us into the parlor to see Granddad’s white, pasty body lying there in a suit. It was the first dead body I had ever seen. The next day we got back in Fred’s “stupid Cadillac,” as my brother described it, had some more Cajun fried chicken, and drove back to Dallas. I started getting depressed that winter. Ecstasy and Weimar On my request, Mom gave me a copy of Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel, Less Than Zero, for Christmas. I devoured the story about a college freshman’s stoned vacation, home for the holidays. Somehow it resonated. Fred borrowed the book and, as was his habit, finished the novel in a night. Still unemployed and with loose ends, Fred read a great deal of the pop trash I was bringing home. One of those evenings, he told me that he sensed glimmers of a new note of nihilism taking hold in the culture. I didn’t really understand his point. The following quarter, with my brothers off to college and prep school, Mom went back to Pennsylvania. Fred began disappearing more and more. And my medicinal career really took off. Amid revelries, I discovered my first tastes of MDMA (or, as was the variation of the day, sometimes even pure ecstasy). We could buy it over the counter at Big Daddy’s, one of the city’s gay bars. “Two tabs please,” I would ask, my heart pounding, as the bartender, who didn’t blink, leaned over behind the purple, glowing, fluorescent-lit bar, opened a money box, and put two pills in a three-inch-by-three-inch ziplock bag for me. Those

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were days when Dallas psychiatrists wrote their analyses and could break new ground in two or three sessions if they took ecstasy beforehand. There was a lot of experimentation going on in Dallas (Kelly, 2014; Alexandre, 2009; Simek, 2013). We just took it because it made running around the grocery store or going out for Chinese food in Cedar Springs all the more fun, but the intimacy of the experience—the vulnerability one experienced as the pill’s warm buzz moved down the spinal cord—was beyond delicious. On ecstasy, boys and boys, boys and girls, or girls and girls might end up at the Starck Club or spend the evening at The Wok, a Chinese restaurant next door to the renowned gay bar Big Daddy’s, sitting across from each other in a booth while holding hands, staring into each other’s bulging pupils, grinding their teeth away, munching ice cubes, and peaking their brains out (Kelly, 2014; Alexandre, 2009; Simek, 2013). By the end of the quarter, I had flunked English, and modern European history required additional effort. We were roaring through the revolutions of 1848, God being dead, and the like. Fred offered to guide me through the questions at hand. Twentieth-century pathos was his bread and butter. “This is where the real education begins,” he explained. Thus began Fred’s seminar in post–World War I cinema. We watched the movie Cabaret, and Fred pointed out the champagne drinking, the decadence. We listened to “Mack the Knife” over and over, Fred describing the violence, the underground. When we watched Fritz Lang’s M, with its sympathies for the criminal, a chill ran down my back. In the final scene, a vigilante crowd runs out to find a scapegoat to blame for their world gone mad. Peter Lorre screams, “At least I know I am an animal. What about you? There are times when I absolutely detest myself.” The film pointed to an ever-expanding sex panic from which we have yet to escape. We watched Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel, and Fred pointed out the wail of the schoolmaster, humbled by his young student: “I measure a movie’s quality by the way I remember a sound or an image. I never stop thinking about the sound of the cry of the schoolmaster,” who was broken by Marlene Dietrich as a world of order crumbled in front of his very eyes. Fred’s observations seemed to echo cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer’s (1930/1994) fixations on the anguish on the professor’s face: “the screeching . . . the sadism and the battle cries at the end: what a hopeless comparison between hullabaloo and meaning is set up here. But the hullabaloo is required to conceal the lack of meaning” (pp. 630–31). For Kracauer, The Blue Angel described a life in which “there is nothing left but a cloud of reality.” This was a world in which “all attempts to escape are in vain” (pp. 630–31).

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At some point after spring vacation, Fred and I got to sit down and talk shop. We listened to Pere Ubu and connected this punk band with the story of its presumed namesake, Ubu Roi, a play that inspired riots when performed in Paris in 1896, challenging cultural norms and inspiring revolutionary dreams among those in the audience, including William Butler Yeats. “So what do you guys do when you go out?” Fred asked in his curious yet respectful way. “We party,” I replied. “What’s going on when you go ‘partying’? In Monahans, when we say that, it means we are going out to get drunk.” “That’s pretty much what we do.” I was assigned Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1965) for class. Fred helped me take a closer look at what was in the novel. We talked about feeling let down by things, as the soldiers in the story had felt. “The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a manlier wisdom,” noted Remarque. Everything those soldiers had been brought up to believe disappeared the second the first bombs crashed: “The first death we saw shattered this belief. We had to recognize that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs. They surpassed us only in phrases and cleverness.” The first shells disabused them of any loyalty to that older ideal: “And under it the world as they taught it to us broke into pieces . . . And we saw that there was nothing of their world left. We were all at once terribly alone: and alone we must see it through” (p. 12). Never in my life had I so closely identified with a text or with the endeavor of reading a story with a friend. As Dad drank in the dark living room and Mom took on her graduate work, I was left to my own devices. My entire cohort was engaged in the same struggle/crusade: to make the best of those days after divorces, separations, diversion, substances, and self-medication, negotiating between desire and an impending set of responsibilities. As far as Fred was concerned, we were all children of that sensibility. This experience “draws everyone into the fate of this generation,” argued Carl Zuckmayer in a review of All Quiet in Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung in January 1929. We are born of the ashes of this war, I imagined, feeling my teenage angst. The experiments with boys, girls, ecstasy, and loneliness were all part-andparcel attempts to forge some sort of path in following this “singular new beginning.” They were all part of a struggle to create meaning in a world gone mad. In the movies, books, and music, Fred helped me connect my experiments in living with history, wanderlust, philosophy, and a generational longing for a new beginning, whatever that meant.

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Lubbock and Beyond School proceeded. My Weimar history report garnered a B-minus, much higher than my usual reports. It was a triumph, really. Those following years, I didn’t see as much of Fred. He moved out that spring, off to Texas Tech University in Lubbock to get his second advanced degree. And I drank, popped pills, smoked, and otherwise generally stumbled through the final two years of high school. Fred would drop by the house with a smile, wearing his cowboy hat. It was always great to see him. While in Lubbock, Fred met another woman at an AA meeting. They decided to marry after Fred was diagnosed with AIDS. He’d had the disease the whole time he lived at home, “but he made me promise to keep the secret,” Dad explained. It was only months after the tests came out anyway. “He’s got a sympathetic veterinarian prescribing him meds and writing that he has lots of pets.” The summer after my sophomore year in college, I flew to Lubbock to see him. He looked gaunt, the skin tight on his jaws, but it was Fred. He wore his jeans, a jimmy cap, and boots—same posture, same stance. We went to get Mexican food when he picked me up. I surveyed the bookshelves at his house. We talked about Latin American fiction. He advised me that if I were ever shooting up, putting syringes into bleach would kill the virus and prevent transmission. By then, AIDS had turned Fred into a harm reductionist. We all want to swim to the Sirens’ song, but it is good to have the crew and tools to keep us from rushing forward into the abyss. I left with the name of a new author in my pocket, written on Fred’s business card: Jorge Luis Borges. We agreed that it had been great to see each other, and that was it. That was the last time I ever talked with him. I didn’t know it at the time, but Fred was sending me off into the labyrinth. That fall, I changed course, driving east to Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, ninety minutes north of Manhattan. While there, I wrote an intellectual history paper on Latin American fiction, utilizing Borges’s ficciones as the cornerstone of the work. The following winter, I signed up for a class titled “German Culture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” I sent Fred a copy of the syllabus and asked if he had any suggestions as to what subject I should address for the seminar paper. Fred died before the letter got to Lubbock. Years later, I was given an envelope of his poems. Several seemed to speak to this moment. For one who, like some silver satellite Launched in prideful confidence Out into the fearful, tremendous swarm

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Of space, to keep for hard-eyed friends cold blue Galaxies of light—for such a one, whose place Is not on earth free among the stars, Who has already left Earth so far behind Sundering all sweet bonds of custom And of love, and so of heart and hope: How strange to note how strong the net earth casts Like gravity about me, holding me To her, mother to an impatient son: So I, in hating, hold her love more dear And know, the farther gone, the nearer hope. —Fred Mayer, “Sonnet without a Name,” no date.

Narrating a Life and a Friendship Remembering and letting go—these were huge parts of our lives then. These years around Fred’s departure had been trying for Dad. He had lost his mother and first wife in one summer, only to lose his best friend later that year and his brother a year later. Outside of work, I was conducting oral histories of people with HIV/AIDS throughout the city. The idea of writing a fitting obituary for Fred had gotten Dad’s attention. His life story would require more room than the usual fare. The multitudes of contradictions needed room and a place to sit in such a narrative (Cohler, 1982). I would need some information. At first, Dad was reticent. Finally, I got Dad to sit down with the tape recorder. “Tell me about meeting Fred Mayer,” I said. “Well, Fred was my freshman roommate,” Dad replied. “What did you think when you first met him? What was your take on your first couple of days?” Dad replied, “Um, Fred was a Yankee—a point against him. But his daddy, while we were moving in, bought a bottle of Canadian Club and was very generous with Fred’s roommates. We drank C&C, Canadian and Ginger—a vile drink. Fred and I got so disastrously drunk on Canadian Club and Ginger Ale and sick on that stuff. We all made friends in a hurry.” Stories didn’t last that long at first. He would clap his hands together and proclaim, “Well, that’s enough storytelling for now.” Over time, Dad would talk more and more, connecting Fred’s history with his father’s struggles after the First World War. “Fred, as you know, comes from a Prussian background,” he explained. As far as his dad’s concerned, the main Mayer is Prussian. His father was the member of Prussian nobility, counts. If Ernst Mayer had stayed in Prussia,

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he would have had the title of Count Von Feffer. Fred, I’m sure, has shown you his ring with the mount on it, the seal ring for the Count Von Feffer, which he would have been entitled to wear and use officially in Prussia. At any rate, Fred’s dad was a technical Prussian Junker coming out of the Hegelian tradition in which the government was considered the highest form of the intellect and the highest form that humanity had reached and probably the apex of civilization. Fred’s dad went to the German equivalent of Annapolis, in 1918 was graduated, entitled to be in the German navy, specifically trained as a U-boat officer. In 1918, the career opportunities in Germany for a highly trained U-boat officer were sunk as deep as most of the submarines. Germans were prohibited by the Versailles Conference from possessing submarines for obvious historical reasons. So Fred’s dad is now from impoverished aristocracy with no means to make a living. So he’s bumming around Berlin for a while and becomes a very good poker player. Through this, he made his living, which threw him nicely into the Berlin Weimar nightlife. He actually knew Lotte Lenya and all the Berlin scene, which you see in Christopher Isherwood’s I Am a Camera and subsequently put into the movie Cabaret. The early part of the pre-Nazi era was Fred’s father’s milieu.

There he rubbed shoulders with the “resplendent” lives of Lotte Lenya, Berlin, and others shaped within a sensibility that was shaped from the aftermath of the European meltdown (Mendez, 1997, p. 8). Between Weimar and a cataclysm, they were creating a new world of the cabaret and the thriving Berlin underground. Ernst’s story took him into the future with one foot planted in prewar values and another in a world being formed in front of his eyes. The years after World War I only succeeded in accelerating the pace of this process until, as Herman Hesse suggested, one “could without exaggeration, identify the death and dismantling of the culture into which the elder among us were raised as children.” Without it, a generation took part in a “yearning search” for another set of values and ways of living (Hesse, 1926/1994). This search took Ernst to America, where he had his first and only son, Fred. Dad continued: But that’s a tenuous way to make a living. Ernst Mayer began working with some kinfolk and got a start in the import/export business, which took him up to New Orleans. In New Orleans, he met Mary Belle. And he married into old New Orleans, Louisiana, wealth. So Mary Belle Mayer, as she became after she married Ernst, was half British and half Labare. She was a member of the New Orleans Labare family, with enormous holdings in sugarcane and, subsequently of course, oil. The family’s had a couple of genuinely historic, vintage 1820s mansions in Louisiana. So Ernst married a lot of wealth.

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You never knew that though, because the couple lived a very plain middleclass life, they always had a lot of money, and that money was Mary Belle’s. At any rate, probably to get out of Louisiana, they moved up to New York and settled down in Summit, New Jersey. Ernst worked for the Isbrandtsen Lines. Old Man Isbrandtsen had all the magnetism of a Viking; he had a lot of warrior energy and a lot of charisma. Ernst, coming from Prussian background and needing a strong leader, adored Old Man Isbrandtsen to the point of idolatry, and he moved up gradually in the company and became a vice president. Isbrandtsen, which later became the American Isbrandtsen Lines, is still around today. Anyway, while they were in Summit, they had two children, Fred and little Mary Bellee. I think Fred knew he was a homosexual from the time he first started having sex. I mean by the time 12 came along, and he started fantasizing about boys.

Freshman Year Dad made two of his best friends in the world, John Adams and Fred Mayer, during his first year at Harvard that fall in 1956. He recalled meeting Fred: He arrived at the drive at Harvard. I met him; we were roommates with John Adams from Birmingham, with whom I still keep in quite close contact and who is probably the best nonfamily friend I have. I became impatient with him, but then that’s the way it is with friends. And then there was Fred. It was remarkable—the two best friends I had in the world at the time before Fred’s death were (1) Fred and (2) John, both of whom I met during an incredible freshman year at Harvard. We lived in the Harvard Yard at Holworthy Hall. Holworthy 13 was our room number. It was in the middle entrance of the second floor. The room was genuinely luxurious by current collegiate standards. It had a big living room with a working fireplace and two small bedroom areas. We flipped [a coin], and John got one of the bedroom areas, and Fred and I bunked in the second one. We put John with his desk into his room, and Fred and I had our desks in the study out in the main room. [There was] a magnificent view of Harvard Yard out of two large windows and views out of our back windows back into Cambridge Common. [We] couldn’t have had better quarters. The place was built in 1812. It was wonderful. We shared another bathroom with a suite on the other side.

“None of us was focusing on the other two except in a few instances when events were particularly pleasant or particularly unpleasant,” noted John Adams, their third roommate. “We got along very well, and we treated each other well. Our first joint venture was to Harvard’s museum to rent

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a print to hang over our fireplace. It turned out to be Van Gogh’s Starry Night.” “At any rate, John and Fred and I had, as it turns out, an immense amount in common when it came to taste,” recalled Dad. Very few college freshmen will go out and spend money when they don’t have much and buy a good sisal grass rug for the living room. We could go over to the Busch-Reisinger Museum and rent pictures, which we hung up on the walls—big, framed reproductions. One was a couple of Albrecht Dürer engravings, one was of Melancholia, and the other was Knight, Death, and the Devil. I’ve subsequently bought a reproduction of Knight, Death, and the Devil, and you’ve lived with that someplace in the study of mine all of your life. That’s an important engraving to this day and is hanging in my study in Evanstan and will follow me wherever I go. But we spent money and effort to make the room extremely attractive. You will be interested to know there were no electronics. We didn’t have so much as a clock radio, much less a music box of any sort. And we studied long and hard and became fast friends on long winter evenings. We would light a fire in the fireplace in extremely pleasant surroundings. Towards the end of the evening, when we knew we weren’t going to study any more, we’d on occasion have a glass or two of port to finish things off with to go to sleep. It was almost like Oxford. I’ve told you I first met Fred when he and his parents showed up. Herr Mayer was the big man in the family. Mary Belle played very much of a backseat role. He was the extrovert man who knew sails. He brought a bottle of Canadian Club whisky, extremely good whisky by freshman standards, and we immediately doused it with ginger ale. We settled into our year’s work. John was from Birmingham, Alabama, had gone to Sewanee Military Academy, had been waitlisted at Harvard and accepted at Princeton, so when he finally got accepted at Harvard, he turned down Princeton, and the rest is history. Fred, I don’t think he applied at any place except Harvard. He went to the Pingry School, and I think he was a super genius there, and there was no question he could go anywhere he wanted in the country, and Harvard was the place he went. His parents were extremely proud of him, with high expectations. And Fred settled down in a sort of desultory fashion to keep those expectations.

“What did you guys talk about those first nights?” I asked. “We made friends in a hurry,” Dad replied. “Fred went out with a buddy of his. He was always going out with a fellow named Jim Breasted. Breasted was the namesake of his grandfather, the greatest of the American archaeologists at the University of Chicago. He explored the Fertile Crescent. Fred just thought Jim was wonderful.” “‘We’ve been reading Marx in German, and you can’t comprehend it any other way,’” Dad recalled Fred saying.

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“The Russians did a good job of it, Fred, I replied,” Dad said chuckling. It was real cold. The snow was so deep that it was up to the windows on the first floor. Jim had a room on the first floor. They got to playing the guitars and decided that they wanted to have a Finnish bath. Of course, there is no such thing as hot water running out in the central running system. So they went into the shower and turned on the shower of pure scalding hot and let that go for an hour. And then they would sprint naked and go, and they got into the shower, you know, and beat each other with towels until they were really, really, really overheated and then dive through the window into the snow and go rolling and come back in and towel off. Fred came back into the room and was just ju-ju-ju-just shaking and said, ‘I just had the m-m-most marvelous experience.’ John Adams and I got him huddled up and put him to bed, and he was shivering. The next morning, he had a cold. It was the most awful thing you ever saw. You couldn’t breathe. Just horrible. Fred was constantly doing such things.

“That year was very hard for me—especially the first half—for academic reasons,” recalled John Adams. I did nothing except study, but that barely got me to the second year. I suppose Jack and Fred studied, but I can’t really recall. Each of us had a desk, but the library was my thing. They got through without evident trouble. Fred would appear occasionally and announce with almost comic gravity his latest discovery or mania. At one point, it was Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, just then published [1956]. Later, it was Walt Whitman, which was the only occasion I remember on which Jack and I [the main offender] treated him less than earnestly. Well, when Fred was upset about something, he would take a stab at vulgarity and cursing, which we thought was hilarious. Jack and I were Southerners and products of Episcopal versions of yeshivas, and hence we could swear with grace. Fred would sound as if he were strangling with each word.

Boyish Fun and Games Vitality ran through the air of Cambridge in fall, 1956. Fred and Dad reveled in the moment. And their friendship grew. Fred delighted in reading his Marx, annoying Dad with his observations. Freud (1909/1955, p. 262) recalls that Rat Man, perhaps his most famous case, would masturbate at times of intellectual excitement: “It was provoked when he experienced especially fine moments or when he read fine passages.” Social eros filled the air, as did boyish fun as well as a few “overheated” moments.

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“One night, Fred went out and got to drinking C&C out of a beer bag, and he was the most Homerically drunk person I had ever seen,” recalled Dad. And I decided he needed to sober up or he’d die. I went in and got his clothes stripped off of him and turned on the cold water, unadulterated, in the middle of wintertime. And because it was running, I’d assumed the pipes hadn’t frozen, so it must have been 31 degrees Fahrenheit. It’d cut you in half. And that thing hit him in the chest. I thought his chest was going to implode. I threw him in the shower, turned on the water, and it hit him—foom!—right on the chest. And, huh-uuuuh-huuuh [laughing], and he crashed on the other side of the shower stall, and I kept steering the water at him until finally he came up to me on his knees, and it was just like a mad comic book. And he got off his knees and lurched up and grabbed me. Then he got both of his arms here, and I started hearing this: ‘Don’t do it anymore’ [laughing], ‘Don’t do it anymore.’ I thought it would sober him.

“Why’d you need to sober him?” I asked. “Because he was throwing up everywhere, and the room was swirling. ‘If it would just stop swirling,’ Fred repeated. I thought I was having pity on him. Oh, God, God, God, so I laid him out of the shower, and the last thing I saw was him sitting in the shower stall playing in his vomit saying, ‘Out of my mind . . . out of my mind.’ He just couldn’t get himself out of it.” The sadism in Dad’s treatment of Fred was hard to conceal. And Fred wrote about life as a “mistaken identity . . . a Fledermaus,” a drunken plot to take revenge among friends. Dad’s recollection of his best friend being thrown around within a shower and begging for relief offers a glimpse of something. He laughed when recalling the story. As we went over this transcript, I asked Dad about that interpretation, and he agreed, commenting, “Well, you have to remember, Fred and I slept together.” “The next morning when I got out of bed he was gone,” Dad recalled. He was up, he was dressed, shaven, showered, hair brushed, the shower completely cleaned as if it never happened. He wasn’t going to talk about it. It never happened. There was nothing to talk about. And John and I thought that if he could get up and get himself together, as sick unto death as he must have felt, and had the room and the shower smelling perfectly clean so we could go in, we thought we really ought to leave him alone because he had been superhuman to get this incident put behind him. So that was

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something that never happened. Until the day he died, he denied he had ever done that.

They never talked about it. The fall pressed on, as did the incidents. “I went with Fred on a couple of occasions to New Jersey, met the family,” noted Dad. “One time, Fred’s father, Ernst, was feeling very, very cordial towards Fred and laughing and teasing with German reasoning. Fred’s father had had a couple of martinis and was drinking and laughed and, with immense friendliness, leaned over and gave Fred a love pat with a formalized slap on the face, which actually swung Fred’s head back and left finger marks on it. I could see the anger kindle in Fred’s face, but it was all laughter. It was a love pat, a funny kind of love pat, a funny kind of Prussian culture.” In later years, Fred developed an interest in S&M as well as other dissociations of consciousness. In the late 1960s, Fred entered Greenwich Village’s pre-Stonewall leather S&M underground. Through bondage, sadism, and masochism, such acts of submission, pain, and chemical release could be considered “safe, sane, and consensual” ways of exploring other forms of being (Mains, 1984/2002; Rubin, 1991; 1997). Part S&M play, part disavowal, such practices would all be part of Fred’s search, connecting poetry and play. Schlesinger One of Dad’s first glimpses of Fred’s rejection of orthodox thinking and his intense, often highly articulate, yearning for another way of being occurred when the two took Arthur Schlesinger’s course Intellectual History of the United States. By the mid-1950s Schlesinger’s reputation had already been cemented as the nation’s premier American historian. Each had her or his own approach to Schlesinger’s course. Dad explained, [Schlesinger] didn’t have a textbook. He just gave us a suggested reading list, 22 pages long, which I faithfully attempted to read. And I faithfully attended the lectures. Fred thought after two lectures that Schlesinger was an utter fool. His lectures weren’t worth going to. [Fred] took a look at the reading list and decided that it was full of shit and proposed his own reading list in his study, which consisted of his own private reading of the intellectual history of the United States. He never went back to his class. He showed up at the final and got a B-minus. I read the whole goddamned reading list and didn’t understand a word of what Schlesinger was saying. I worked my ass off and got a B. It was the most unfair thing I had ever seen. There were some

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people who knew how to Harvard and some people who didn’t. That pretty well was the difference in the quality of our intellects.

Freshman Conflicts Dad could only recall one occasion in which he fought with Fred. He had made a homophobic joke, and Fred became very, very angry. “Fred said there was something I made a smart remark about,” explained Dad. “It was some stupid high school throwaway remark. Oh, it was about a queer. He got his fists curled up and said, ‘You take that back.’ Of course, I had just thought the joke had fallen flat. I had no idea Fred was queer. But after that, I had a pretty good idea he was because he had gotten too hostile about a dumb remark. Fred was quite a physical, tough guy even.” Dad knew he had crossed a line: I just knew that he protested too hard about the suggestion that he was queer. It was a friendly insult—you tell someone you are a queer or something. It was like the equivalent of calling someone a jerk-off or something. It meant nothing. But it was just really insulting to Fred and just a mindlesshead insult. We weren’t stupid. None of us were into getting violent with homosexuals. Fred was really seriously in the closet. Now mind you, I had never met anybody personally to be homosexual except for a couple of sad fellows in Thomasville, Georgia, one of whom ran the flower shop, the other of whom ran the clothing store. We’re talking the dark ages here. Fred was protecting his homosexuality deep in the closet. I once caught Fred praying over beads at three in the morning. Fred was writing a few poems freshman year. I think he finished them some time before he died. I’ve read them. I think they are extremely good. He never published them.

Many of the poems concerned metaphysics, play, romance, and losing himself to being a part of everything. One of his poems from August 17, 1956, begins, Oh but Christ was right, I am all things, life and death—heaven and earth, yea, even the very depths of hell. All things will pass away, the solidarity of the mountains, the steadfastness of the everlasting stars that gleam so softly, the emotion of a moment, the passion of a life or of an art, the belief, the faith of a man, nobility, Godhead itself—but my words, but I will not pass away—I am. Even the beginning: there is but a thought, and it is not. Even I, even thee, all the world— only time and the world are mortal. Heaven and earth will pass away— whether they exist or not. But my words, my being, my passions,

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my existence, hopes, dreams, and loves—my words shall never cease their echo. The infinity of the stars and of the night sky covers them and them in herself and repeats them in ceaseless marvel. Because I—my self—is not mortal, not is, it myself—rather is it the whole essence of being distilled, concentrated, focused upon a point of time and space. Non-being reflected upon Being.

Between poetry and theater, C&C, they were fast friends. “I have never had more interesting or more troubling friends,” recalled John Adams. “I did not really have a clear understanding of Jack and Fred but I loved them both.” “Fred and I would sit up long nights talking,” recalled Dad. “Fred was immensely interested in theater and got me interested, not enough to act in it or participate in it at the time, but enough to follow Fred’s career with it. Fred was over at the Harvard drama club really wasting a lot of time with it but of course making really super good grades. Where Fred was going in his nightlife, I didn’t know. Of course you and I both know what he was doing now, but I didn’t know that then.” “The spring was tumultuous,” recalled John Adams. “On a warm day, Jack destroyed with his fist the ancient brass mailbox we shared and disappeared for almost a week, leaving a trail of blood in the Harvard Yard. After a few days, Fred and I were worried enough to go to the Office of the Dean of Freshmen.” Dad eventually made his way back to Harvard. “I had enough problems of my own then,” he said. “To start it off with, I thought I was going crazy, and I really did think I was going crazy. It was a sexual neurosis stemming out of a repressed family background, and I sort of revolved around my dad prohibiting me from masturbating, saying he would send me off to some sort of a Siberia if I persisted in this disgusting habit.” Themes of eros, thanatos, and repression course through the narrative of Dad and Fred’s friendship. Freud’s Rat Man experienced some of the same problems our narrator had with masturbation. The Rat Man’s father “had forbidden it, using as a threat the phrase ‘it would be the death of you’ and perhaps also threatening to cut off his penis” (Freud, 1909/1955, p. 263). For many, masturbation was an act of free will, like creative thought (Laqueur, 2003). Even Freud saw this, suggesting that the Rat Man was “masturbating in connection with the release” from the torments of “his unconscious and for the threat of death which was not thrown back onto his father.” The break with the father’s controls would not be easy for Rat Man, lost during the First World War, or for Dad or Fred.

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“Jack and Fred had, it now seems, a similar problem: the father,” recalled John Adams. “Which one did I meet? The occasion was so full of stress that I can’t remember with certainty. I was plodding along to the three meals a day, class, the library, church, and bed, but from time to time, I felt I was living in a storm. Jack’s father sent telegrams spelling out a course of study, which did not go down well.” Dad found his own coping mechanisms: “I was going off, by myself, with enormous anxieties, getting drunk. I woke up shrieking one night— scared the hell out of Fred and John. But nevertheless, as I try to remember freshman year, it’s kind of what I remember.” Intellectuals As much as anything, Dad was inspired by the minds, the intellectuals he had met that first year. He explained, When I got on the train from New York to Cambridge, I met a fellow by the name of Steve Engelsing, a big leader of the iconoclasts at Harvard. Fred was impressed with Engelsing out of his mind, as the slang phrases went in those days. Engelsing had a black roommate. I asked him how he got settled with a black roommate. He told me he had requested one. I like Gregson a lot. He was a 15-year-old genius from Antigua. He used to soothe himself by playing Mozart, and whenever he wanted to get some extra money, he’d just look up whatever Latin prize was around and then do it. He subsequently became the chairman of the Department of Classics at Stanford. Steve was a German, a naturalized German. He grew up in Germany. His father was a crooked lawyer in the entertainment business who got stuff on high members of the German command, including members of the Gestapo, so he could get away with a lot of stuff, including having a wife who was Jewish and working in the underground in Berlin. He survived the war with a lot of money. The money he extracted from the well-placed Germans he translated into gold and stuck in Switzerland. He had a house right on Lake Constance. It was just a matter of going across the lake with gold to deposit it. But his mother was the same sort of intellectual as his father, and they realized they could come to the United States. They were the same absolute first people who could come from Europe to the United States after the war—people who had participated in the German underground. Steve was sophisticated beyond anyone that I certainly had ever met. But he was, in the point of fact, more sophisticated than anything Fred Mayer, from Summit, New Jersey, had ever encountered. Fred had traveled around the world and New Orleans. Steve was very, very smitten by Fred, and subsequently, sophomore year, became Fred and Gregson’s roommate.

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According to John Adams’s best recollection, Fred’s father, the Prussian married to the Southern belle, objected to Fred’s plan to room with Gregson Davis, a black who ended up as the chairman of the classics department at Duke. For one reason or the other—I think it was Fred’s situation—we ended up having lunch with his parents at the Ritz to sort the matter out. A luncheon or brunch in some toney place is the manner in which East Coast upper-crust deal with crisis. After first-semester exams, we went to Durgin Park for dinner after listening to a Beethoven symphony on my AM radio—a very happy memory. Why did we not room together after the first year? I don’t have a shred of an idea because I don’t think we ever discussed it. Jack and Fred moved among, shall we say, more diverse acquaintances.

Sophomore Year “Fred went off to room with Engelsing and Davis and Taylor,” recalled Dad. I was asked to room with a Serge McKhann. This was one of the more severe mistakes I made at Harvard. I came back the next year. Fred came over to my room to talk; I went over to Fred’s room to talk a lot. Fred and his friends were a far more sophisticated crowd. It didn’t make too much difference because I was going through a period in which I was going to see a shrink. Six sessions was all we were allowed or else we would have to pay for more, $25 a session, and that was certainly out of the question, and I certainly couldn’t ask Daddy to do it. But in the six sessions, why, he pretty well initiated the sexual anxiety by pointing out that the anxiety stemmed directly from Dad’s treatment in other ways. It was a violent hang-up and has, of course, left scars to the present day. I paid an awful high price to go to Harvard. I was a reasonably intelligent guy. I don’t think Harvard was worth it to me or anybody else to go through that. I was going through terrible troubles. I hadn’t had a high school career as such. I hadn’t had time to actually grow intellectually, for that matter, except to become awful good at the books that I had to study at Episcopal. So I was busy doing that, trying to figure out what was going on. So I was going off to find the only Bohemian House around Harvard Square. The guys there knew and liked me; I knew and liked them. I belonged to a club, the Iroquois Club; it was the first social acceptance that I had had for years. So I joined there, and I’d go in my tuxedo. I wore my tuxedo to formal dinners and always ended up at drinking parties. After the drinking parties, I’d go on over to the bohemian setting and listen to folks play the ten-string banjo. It was the folk instrument of choice in those days. Of course, Leadbelly didn’t play the banjo. The folkies were very big. I was spending a lot of time getting drunk at the club and hanging out in Bohemia.

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Not studying—fuck that shit—I had a lot more important things to do than study. I had to find out who I was, something that ten years ago I’d swear I was still trying to do. But I’d swear I kind of know who I am these days, which is not a bad place to be. When I came back for sophomore year in college, I came back in an old Studebaker, and Fred and I went on a number of outings. We went into New York City and hung around in Greenwich Village a little bit, drove up to Bennington, Vermont. Basically, the external scene with Fred was uneventful. What was eventful was going on in our minds. Fred was becoming more deeply involved with drama, more and more serious about trying to understand what reality was. I was going through polecat hell because I was still utterly under the control of the old man. He had decided the proper major for me was the history of science because that would be the best degree I could have to go and take over the family fertilizer business, because the families advanced by pyramiding over the work of previous generations. But I, I was on a pyramid—nothing except a bunch of bullshit—and I was going through serious efforts to try to resist this and resisting it nicely by getting drunk and staying up too late at the club playing bridge, learning what life was all about. By spring semester, and this is important for Fred, sophomore year, I’d had it. Furthermore, I was sure I wasn’t conceivably going to be able to pass my courses. Life like this couldn’t continue to go on, so I went with Fred to Greenwich Village one more time, went to a party one more time.

After the trip, Dad and Fred dropped out of college. “I went home, faced the old man, and headed for San Francisco,” Dad said. “A light jacket— actually it was an army fatigue jacket without a liner—a blanket roll, a knapsack, and $12 in the hip pocket” were all he brought with him as he moved west. Fred had turned him on to the Beats and Allan Ginsberg’s Howl. Full of references to the Old Testament, the sky, and illumination, Howl was a deadly attack on material culture and everything he had known at Harvard. “I dropped out of college and hitchhiked to San Francisco after I read it,” Dad recalled. It was an apocryphal poem about breaking out of the mold that they were trying to put us in. I trudged on the highway, stuck my thumb out, and caught a ride all the way out to the coast with a guy nursing a severe hangover getting a divorce. [I] got a job painting houses. It’s a story of a kid finding anything to do. I was gone and did not return to Harvard until spring semester, 1959, what would have been my spring semester my junior year, but I had been gone a year. And I found out that Fred had pulled the same stunt. He had been much under the influence of the On the Road scene. He was far more knowledgeable about the Beat generation than I was. Hell, all I knew was

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that Allen Ginsberg wrote “Howl” and these sons of bitches hung out in San Francisco.

Fred, on the other hand, was writing about being a part of the multitude and had been since before arriving at Harvard: I am the heavens and the earth. Yea, I am the depths of hell, the Bottomless overlasting pits of the sea, the raging living fires of the foundries. I am all hate and all love . . . . . . For I am life. I am lust, all Philosophy. In me is all hypocrisy, all perversion, I am damned and I am blessed above all creatures. I am. I am Agamemnon, Oedipus, and all legend, all tragedy—Hamlet, Othello, Lear I am. Man is in me. I am the zenith of the past, of the soul. And shall deny nothing— nothing! From the uttermost depths of being to its very topmost heights, I shall be. God—there is no God save what is in me—I shall decide. Good and evil is not—nay, only I. I shall live all things. Be all the things I am. —Fred Mayer, unnamed poem, Aug. 17, 1956

Beatitudes about being part of everything churn through Fred’s poems. “Knowing Fred, he probably studied all of it,” Dad confessed, referring to Howl and its lineage of thought dating back to Whitman, whom Fred adored. Dad recalled, He took off right on my heels. Having prudently finished sophomore year, he took off that summer, went down to Louisiana to do a little working-man stuff. He got a job as an oil-field roustabout. Fred didn’t like manual labor too much, didn’t get along too well. He romanticized them, but that was as far as that went. Any rate, Fred took off for parts unknown. Fred’s parents contacted my parents believing that we were in cahoots. Did I know where Fred had gone? No I didn’t. The one thing I had done when I left was not keep my parents informed as to where I was. Fred was not in communication with his parents either. The difference was that Fred got out to Los Angeles, where he had adventures. I arrived, finally, in San Francisco. Basically, Fred was unable to find work. Finding work was hard all right, but not as hard as that. Fred lived for a while as a hooker in Los Angeles, a pretty demeaning existence, and just holding body and soul together until finally he contacted his parents. They sent him ticket money to come home, and finally he returned to Harvard. You could take a year’s leave of absence just for asking for it and return without any questions asked. That was an encouraged sort of thing. So I arrived back at Harvard in the spring of 1959. Fred had been there a

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little while, but he was also a little behind in his course work—a semester behind. I was a year behind.

“But Fred had come out of the closet, and the expense of hooking had taught him the truisms of that,” recalled Dad. But he fell in love with Bryant Haliday. He was an old CIA type over at Janus Films. The Bergman films were all Janus Films. Knife in the Water was. All the foreign films that were being made in the fifties were all Janus Films. He put the make on me. To be acquainted slightly with Bryant was to be immediately engaged in a sexual underground. It was just what Bryant did. Fred became a plaything of Bryant. He really thought the world of Bryant for several years. They were friends for the rest of Fred’s life. He was the biggest homosexual in Boston, which was a big homosexual town. He had orgies at his place, had a rogue gallery of boys. Fred was wild about the theater. Haliday knew everybody in the theater and introduced Fred to the Cambridge Festival, which is an episode about as important as the Provincetown Players; it’s a chapter in the history of American drama. Fred got involved with the Cambridge Drama Festival and knew all the names of all the big league people. Bryant was introducing him to the elite in the homosexual underworld. So Fred got to be a bit of an outlaw. Being out of the closet, for openers, was fairly wild and daring in 1959.

“And I had achieved a new plateau in my own level of sophistication,” recalled Dad, mocking his younger self. I actually knew and was friends with a homosexual, but I had to clarify this and make sure it was regularized. So I immediately sought out Fred and went off to have beers at Cronin’s and told him I knew about his being out of the closet, and that was all right; I would still continue to be his friend, and I would not ostracize him. I thought I was being big and sophisticated, and Fred looked at me with a condescending grin and said, “Jack, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but frankly you are not my type.” I think that it was with “Frankly you are not my type” that an ordinary old college friendship tightened into a bond which lasted a lifetime. In a subsequent period of my life, I actively came on to Fred, and Fred definitely played the “femme” of any homosexual role. I was anxious to experiment with this, so I put the make on him in a hard sort of way, but it was a disaster. That’s where I learned not only that I was not Fred’s type, but Fred was not my type. But at any rate, we were real tight there that spring semester, 1959.

In this friendship, they all contained multitudes.

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Adventures at Keller’s Over the next decade, Fred’s adventures would take him into the deepest realms of the pre-Stonewall underground of Greenwich Village. For a while, he worked at Keller’s, a leather bar where bikers converged on West Street between Christopher and Barrow Streets, known as the first “gay leather bar in New York City pre-Stonewall” (CiscoRobco, 2011). “If he worked at Keller’s, he really had something to prove,” noted Bob Kohler when I told him about Fred. “It was real grimy.” Near the trucks, where men hung out and met others along the pier, Keller’s was a legendary space. For much of this time in the early 1960s, Dad was in the army, having been kicked out of Harvard. Dad recalled, When I was gone, Fred got to hanging out with Siobhan McKenna and José Quintero. Those are big Broadway names. Anyway, so there was Bryant Haliday, and then there was a Sally who was a homosexual lover of his in New York because Fred got into the S&M scene. Keller’s was the first rather blackand-blue, beat-you-up leather bar that was notorious in New York. They had boyish fun and games at Keller’s—you know, string people up and fist them while you are feeding them poppers. This is the sort of thing that is just dead common now but was sort of wild and woolly back in 1959. There was one guy who came to Boston from New York and announced that he was the worst M in New York and strutted his stuff, and some of the guys took him back and strung him up. He did not last long at Keller’s. He wrapped himself in a sheet and fled out of a window—wasn’t as tough as they were.

Risk and queer life would take many turns during those years. Eric Rofes (1996), another Bostonian who is the subject of the next chapter, notes, “Pre-Stonewall gay life had its dangers: electroshock, mental hospitals, suicide, scandal . . . Bars, discos, and sex clubs were located in highcrime neighborhoods and were often sites of queerbashings, muggings, and murders” (p. 71). Eros, as an expression, was fraught with uncertainty. “For many, the connections between death and being gay are very clear,” explains Michael Bronski (1988b, p. 138). “If you were ‘obvious,’ if you were ‘known,’ . . . you could be beaten and killed. Death, as it were, came with the territory.” The two forces—death and eros—somehow intermingled. “I think that the kind of pleasure I would consider as the real pleasure would be so deep, so intense, so overwhelming that I couldn’t survive,” Michel Foucault (1988, p. 12) confessed in an Advocate interview just months before his

Figures 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 The site of the old Keller’s Hotel at West and Barrow Streets as it stands today Source: Photos by the author

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death in 1984. Public sexual cultures, such as those that existed at Keller’s, could serve as means for a blurry loss of the self into a “limbo of nonidentity” (Millar, 1993). As the 1960s churned forward, such experimentation would take many forms in Fred’s life: S&M, poetry, theater, and Zen. They all served as routes beyond the self. Theory and Reality “Fred had not quite gotten the difference between theory and reality out of his head from having worked with the laborers down in Louisiana,” recalled Dad. He still romanticized the whole idea. He romanticized the tools. He and Jim Breasted bought an old Indian motorbike not in working order. So they dismantled it. They found themselves without ability to find all the places for all the parts to even put it back together again, much less repair it. That was a metaphysical exercise in itself; motorcycle maintenance carried to the ridiculous. I understand the impulse of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to the intellectual. Take this wonderful bike. Take it apart, become a part of it. Live with it. Understand it. Maintain it. Take it apart, and put it back together again. Kill yourself on it. The Indian is a major, incredibly powerful bike. It was a killer. It’s a good thing they never were able to get it to work. Fred decided to take a class in mechanical drawing, and he nearly flunked out of school. That class was the biggest torment that Fred had ever encountered in his entire life. It was the albatross. It was the thing that made him sleep all morning long, every morning, mornings when he had to go to mechanical drawing. It just hung over his head, and all the rest of his courses went to hell, and Fred really took to hanging out with the Cambridge Drama Festival to the point where he just about literally, no kidding, by God, flunked out of school. You can’t come back; you flunked out. Leave involuntarily. And his parents came down, and they were pretty interventionist. They got him a senior tutor at Kirkland House, where he was. And I’ll tell you that they scared the bejesus out of Fred. I think probably what they told him was that they were going to cut his wallet off if he flunked out, and he was going to go to have to work, which is one of the only intelligent things I’ve ever heard of the Mayers doing with Fred. So Fred, in pure, absolute desperation, dropped the mechanical drawing course and went back, and with his absolute brilliant best with the rest of them, and he stayed in school.

A Golden Period “My year away hadn’t done me nearly all the good that needed to be done. After a lost weekend that lasted the entire semester, I succeeded in flunking out of school for real,” Dad said. Vague on the details, Dad confessed he

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was expelled after an incident that involved hanging a moose head under an altar on campus. The story made it into the news, and Dad was asked to leave. Then, as now, few schools tolerated bad publicity from their students. The details are thin, but as Dad confessed, The moose head episode didn’t help matters at all. Well, then I went off to join the army, got commissioned out of officer’s candidate school after a couple of years and spent a couple of years as a lieutenant. I went from Fort Jackson to Fort Sill to Fort Benning. Everything I could do didn’t get me overseas. But it was at Benning that I met your mother, and we got married after I left the army, and went back up to Harvard. I had drummed up one and a half years’ credit and some summer school and had some heavy make up for me to do in order to get through with Harvard. Dorothy went up with me, and she found a job teaching in Beverly, Massachusetts, and we moved into a wonderful little New England “salt and pepper,” they called it. It was just an idyllic life. I was back at school. It was past Christmas—it had to have been. I was walking in six inches of snow, going to class, and I heard this howl: ‘Jack Shepard!’ Damned if it wasn’t Fred, a vision out of my past. I hadn’t seen Fred in four years. I’ve never been so glad to see anybody in my life. I guess I didn’t realize it then, but maybe it was when [in a mumble] I realized how much I loved the bastard. We blew off classes and went to a coffee shop all morning long, and we visited. It seemed Fred had gone to preflight school after graduation from Harvard. Preflight was the navy’s version of officer candidate school. And he’d gone through his six months of officer candidate school and tried to become a jet fighter pilot, and he took basic training. I think he won his wings. He learned how to fly a piston-engined trainer plane. But when he got into a jet body aircraft [laughing], Fred was no good with tools, ever! He just couldn’t make the son of a bitch do right. Any rate, Fred either quit or flunked out, or everybody, with a sigh of relief [laughing], agreed that he wasn’t really made out to be a carrier pilot. And what he did was he, by some coup found out there, was an opening on the staff of the naval war in Washington, DC, in the Pentagon. He mixed in the room with the big board that you saw in Dr. Strangelove, and Fred says that’s exactly the way it looks. He was one of the flunkies staffing all those generals and presidents, working on the staff of some admiral.

“He had class-Q clearance, the highest possible clearance,” Dad remembered in awe. The guy’s an out-of-the-closet homosexual, except he hadn’t been homosexual in the navy because you couldn’t be homosexual in the Navy. It wasn’t “don’t look, don’t tell”; they made a serious effort to find out about you. But

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Navy intelligence had talked to José Quintero, one of the more notorious homosexuals on Broadway. He’s a grand old man, a Eugene O’Neill specialist. And he gave that guy as a reference, and he gave Bryant Haliday, another notorious homosexual, as a reference, and navy intelligence never quite got it. And they gave him his clearance. Now here’s a guy who can be sent to prison, ’cause they had the ability to do that in the military in those days. The Uniform Code of Military Justice provided for jail for a homosexual in the military. But they could throw you in prison. They had created a blackmail system that wouldn’t quit. They really were security risks, given the way they were treated if they were caught. So Fred had made up his mind that if anybody had ever tried to blackmail him, why he’d just turn himself in if he ever got caught. Of course, it never worked out that way. At any rate he [laughing] got caught. He got caught, and they let him go with sexual state discharge, a general state discharge under circumstances other than honorable. I didn’t know about this until, oh, maybe a year ago. But you know, it eventually came out—what had happened to Fred in the navy. No question that he was sure screwing sailors from Norfolk, Virginia, or getting screwed. And he was humiliated by the episode. So there he was back at Harvard. He’d been busted sometime in July or August. How he’d gotten back in was he just went back to the English Department and said, ‘You’ve got to get me back in!’ And they let him in. As far as Fred’s academic life was concerned, he’d applied to two schools: Harvard undergraduate school, and he made application way after everybody else had been accepted to Harvard graduate school. And because he was such a fucking genius, why, they were glad to have him. That was his status when I saw him again at graduate school in the English PhD program. After we finished talking again—it was on a Friday—we went out, got Fred to spend the weekend at the house in Beverly. Shit, we had two guest bedrooms. Take your pick. And Fred got aged Gouda and bought a cheese mouse, this little mouse with a pointed tail. I had reached Fred finally. Dorothy and I had been married for, what, six months. But Fred met Dorothy. And from there on, until he died, it was me and Dorothy and Fred. We had a nice time that evening. The next morning I came down, and Fred was in the kitchen visiting with Dorothy and that connection had been made.

“Fred was such a charmer,” recalled Mom. “[He was] a mess, but a charmer. We had a great time.” “And from there on out, [it was] Dorothy, Fred, and me,” Dad continued. “And now they are both gone, my two dearest friends.” Mom and Dad divorced only five years prior to the telling of this story. The memories here hold images of perhaps the best time in his life. Shortly after the reunion, Dad met Fred at The Casablanca, a movie theater on Brattle Street in Harvard Square. There he told him about his plans to travel from London to Istanbul and across the Khyber Pass to India with

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a few friends from school. (Fred recalls the meeting at Cronin’s; regardless, their accounts converge on the meaning of the trip.) “And of course, Fred wanted to go,” explained Dad. If Fred had to lie, steal, or sell his body, he would come up with the money to go, explained Fred. He would do anything to go with them. And eventually, Herr Mayer gave Fred the money and held a party for Mom, Dad, Fred, and their buddy Tad before they left. And in 1965, while the president was sending troops across the world to fight in Vietnam, another cohort of merry pranksters were hitting the road to make friends, not war. Mom, Dad, Fred, and Tad journeyed to the East in a land rover through Europe and the Middle East—through Afghanistan and the Khyber Pass—to India. Along the way, they learn about life, the world, art, and other ways of being and living, making friends from Tehran to Kabul. Mom recalled the night the plans were hatched for the trip during a dinner party: “We were having dinner with Richard and Judy [de Neufville]. And Ricard says, ‘there are paved roads all the way from England to India.’” And that was it. “You can’t pick out the person who said it. But everyone at the table seemed to say, ‘We’ve got to do it.’ Jack and I just looked at each other.” And the plan was on. One night during our interviews, Dad would go on to read from a burgundy and black, hardback legal journal he owned, which Fred had carried through the entire trip. He read: Log—Summer 1965— 30 Tuesday—7:25 on board BA72—It’s astounding the way my attention flickers—for a few moments I am actually aware of what’s about to happen, of my obligation to record it all—the last bath, the last martini at what time I left Summit—and yet how much of all of this I neglect—I remember the time I left Summit better than I remember the time I left the Coop garage— the mind too busy with habit I guess, to note what is new and significant—or perhaps (perhaps more accurate too) significance is too irrelevant to the daily operation of the mind— as I began to say—how long it’s been (7:43 moving) (to Asia minor)— I’ve wanted for so long to record the prologue to all of this trip—the day last June in Cronin’s when I told Jack; I’ll go if you let me or will have me—I’ll beg, borrow or steal the money if necessary—but I will go—

“I can’t read any more,” Dad confessed as he broke down and cried—the only time he did so during the otherwise joyful interviews. I read further: To: 7:57—it’s begun and all I can do is cry—away from the west, from the setting sun & all that it means: movement, progression, grades ad mortem— back instead, back to the rising sun to birth in & origin—renounce the

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struggle & search—retreat instead to the condition of stillness—is this the direction of what is meant by OM?

Dad and Mom picked up the land rover in Solihull, England, and had it shipped to Rotterdam in the Netherlands. They then drove it to Paris, where they met Tad. The three drove through Germany, meeting Fred in Vienna, Austria. Fred had been in Berlin, hanging around. The four spent the next few weeks on an exotic trip through Eastern Europe, meandering from Yugoslavia to Istanbul, spending a few nights in Troy and further. They drove east to Mount Ararat. By way of Iran, they bought rugs and slept in people’s homes, making friends wherever they went. This was perhaps the highlight of the trip. “We were popular. People liked us, gave us vodka,” Dad recalled, remembering the friends they made with folks from Afghanistan, Iran, and other places along the way. “Fred was a helpless outdoorsman,” recalled Dad. In Ephesus, Turkey, the travelers went out for a picnic with a view of the Greek Temple of Diana, one of the great views. “We had bought bread, fruit, cheese, and got out the last bottle of French wine and drank it laying out in the field.” But there were also a few flies. “I thought Fred was going to crawl out of his skin,” Dad laughed. “Yet for Fred this was standard adventure. It was fun to recall such moments after a trip is over. Fred hated every second of the trip but loved to talk about it afterward.” “He left the trip at one time,” recalled Mom. “He said he was going to find some young Persian man but really was not one to be away from cities for too long. But he learned a lot about himself.” Fred rejoined the group, and these rebel friends enjoyed experiences in Afghanistan and Iran that few Americans have enjoyed in a generation. Outside of Kabul, they visited the Buddhas of Bamiyan, immense sixthcentury statues of Buddha literally carved into cliffs, which the Taliban destroyed in 2001. Most everyone they met was kind and friendly. They met a man named Mohammed Ali, who was on quasi-business, asking him for a translation, but they ended up becoming fast friends with him. He gave them food and let them stay the night. “Americans were so popular back then,” Dad recalled. “We hadn’t fucked them over quite yet.” Everyone seemed to be sharing. “We ran into world travelers, asking for a ride,” Dad said. And Fred always obliged. “You know how it is,” explained Fred. Together, they all crossed the Khyber Pass, a mountain road taking them into Pakistan from Afghanistan. “It was amazing.”

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“I always think about it in conjunction with Dad looking inside the hood,” recalled Mom. “Tad talked a good game, like he knew what to do with cars. He didn’t. Neither did Jack. Fred didn’t even pretend to.” By the time they got to India, the crew of friends was running out of luck. Instead of Tad or Mom doing the repairs on the car, as they had done, Fred tried to fix a flat in the land rover, finger-tightening the bolts instead of screwing them in. They ended up losing a couple of the bolts for the tires, disabling the car for the rest of the trip. “We kept stopping at every car or tire place we could find, trying to get new bolts,” recalled my mom. “The car would go a while and then fall apart.” By the end of the trip, Dad was suffering from amoebic dysentery. “I knew it was time to go home when we got to the Aurel Stein Museum and Jack could only walk about for a few minutes before he had to sit down,” noted Mom. “It was something I wanted to see. But by the time I got there, I wasn’t having fun at all,” recalled Dad. “That’s when I made the decision that we had to go,” Mom continued. They got the next flight out of New Delhi, flying via Cairo to London and then to New York City. “Jack’s father had made arrangements for him to stay at the tropical diseases hospital in Florida, where he recovered,” Mom said. Still in India, Fred and Tad drove the car to Calcutta, getting lost while trying to get there. They didn’t know where they were, and neither did anyone else. But they eventually made it to Calcutta, where they put the land rover on an Isbrantsen ship. Once back, Tad bought the car. While Dad spent the rest of the summer in bed recovering, Fred was a hero at Keller’s, tending bar. “He was the big hunter, regaling the bar with stories of his adventures,” noted Dad. “Fred survived the trip. I almost didn’t. He almost didn’t with his explosiveness with the wheel.” Mac Flecknoe and Decay At Harvard, Fred found perhaps the most esoteric of dissertation topics. “There is no more infuriating time in literature than the seventeenth century,” explained Dad, reflecting on Fred’s chosen area of specialty. For his dissertation topic, Fred decided to focus on Dryden’s satirical character called Mac Flecknoe. Dad explained, “Fred came to me with a smile and said he had a simple, easy topic for his thesis. He’d get out in a year, he boasted. But it took a decade. He found a single volume of this work and wrote a one-hundred-page introduction to the edited work. He chose an absolutely obscure person, who had no business being written about.” Yet this is what he did. When Fred lived with us in the 1980s, he recalled something about getting a phone call from Harvard announcing that they were publishing

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his study as one of the top one hundred dissertations completed at Harvard or something to that effect. Dad did not know what to think of it. But a quick Google search reveals the published edition of The Prose Characters of Richard Flecknoe: A Critical Edition by Fred Mayer, published in 1987 by Garland Press and based on that 1975 dissertation that he completed a decade after his return from the trip to the East, with thanks to “Jack and Dorothy Shepard for their help and many long nights’ discussions” (Mayer, 1987, p. viii) listed in the acknowledgments. He had a habit of arriving and disappearing. The poem’s opening speaks to something Fred might have appreciated about Dryden’s characterization of Mac Flecknoe: “All human things are subject to decay, And, when fate summons, monarchs must obey” (quoted in Nelson, 2006, p. 119). Humans are certainly subject to decay, Fred understood, his life demonstrating the point that we all are sometimes consumed within “the realms of nonsense, absolute” (p. 119). Before completing his work, Fred got kicked out of the Harvard English program for stealing a book, or as he recalled it, borrowing a book instead of waiting in line at the Coop. Yet he finally earned his PhD three years later and eventually found his way back out to the desert with a teaching job at Texas A&I University. After teaching and loving it for five years, he was fired when he refused to publish. The Garland book would not find its way into print for another decade, but Fred didn’t seem to care. One of his favorite films of the era was Lawrence of Arabia. The desert was always the hero. Texas’s deserts became his Arabia; they brought him a little closer to the “stillness” that he wrote about in his journal of the trip to the Middle East, which had eluded him his whole life. “When he got fired at Texas A&I, it was his nadir,” explained Dad. “There was nowhere else he would ever go. The only place he belonged was in academe. But he couldn’t, wouldn’t, do what he had to do. They begged him to write something, anything, a book review, but he wouldn’t.” By 1975, his dishonorable discharge from the military was changed to “honorable,” and it felt like he got his honor back. Through all the struggles, this still seemed to matter to him. “His life was a tragicomedy,” confessed Dad, “and I loved him.” And it seems that Fred loved Dad. Deep in a pile of Fred’s poems, I found a handwritten poem without a date:

Topping Out For Jack And did you really think, old friend, that you Could ever find me in this private land?

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See how the mesas tend toward North and South Below the pass and release to right The vast blue seabed vanishing into dust. Can you count the miles you see? I can. The Horsehead Crossing; there, Comanche Creek; The sandhills with the water no Anglo Knew to find. And you think to find me here? Forget the Iron, the Caspian and the Persian Gates—these are Gates of the Sun. From here, split rock and round and scrubby brush. From here, rattlesnakes, tarantula and Vinegaroon, from here, glare blurs rock and shade Into one eye shattering scream. You think You have followed me here? Old weathered men, Rough pioneer, took this road, bleached this road. And you from your shoft and cain blessed fields think That this is a road you too can pursue? —Fred Mayer, “Topping Out,” no date.

Dad and Fred had been pursuing each other for decades, dancing through years of synchronistic adventures from Harvard to Washington Square and out west with the Beat movement. Both had simultaneous sojourns through the military before lurching back to Harvard Square, and they shared a dynamic trip to the East and back, only to leave again and find their way back west, where they each spent their final decades, dancing through the years, staring at the mesas in the distance of the Southwestern skies, forever trying to find each other but never quite getting there. In many ways, Fred spent his life disappearing and reappearing like a mirage in the distance. When he lived with us, he was gone for days and weeks on end. Philosopher Michel Foucault (1988) described his experiments of the same years in terms of incandescence. This was one way to begin to think about the pieces of a life and body engaged in a web of comrades, rebel friends, sex, being, theater, and the desert. Over and over, through the years to come, Fred’s name came up in our conversations. Referring to Fred’s journal from their trip to the Middle East, Dad mused, “I think he spent the last 25 years looking for that stillness. When I would go down to Monahans, he would point to the desert and explain, ‘haunted lands.’ He was always trying to show me his Texas. I could never see it. I would go down to Monahans a lot.” But maybe he did see it.

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I can see it as I sit here, listening to “Mr. Bojangles” from the Jerry Jeff Walker’s greatest hits album Fred gave me for my sixteenth birthday back in 1985. I can see his Texas, the expansive desert of Lawrence of Arabia, his favorite movie. “The desert was the star,” he once told me. He wrote about it for decades: Now, I cannot sleep, not now. For I Have seen in this precise inexorable dawn Blue-white a naked acetylene star in the sky. Now, since I know I can no longer dream Of yellow lights shimmering in violet water (Those dreams of silken death are finished now, And long ago I prepared my face To face the wind,) it is time to hail at last. This star and turn to clast machine-tooled cold. —Fred Mayer, “At Dawn,” Oct. 19, 1958

I’ll never forget Fred. It was Fred who brought a dignity to not knowing and a smile to my father’s face some two decades after he shuffled off. These stories helped Dad’s life feel complete. By the time of Dad’s death in 2014, his best friends in this life had been those two freshman roommates from Harvard—Fred and John—who remained close with Dad until the end. “And so we were friends until life’s end,” recalled John Adams. “When we met after Cambridge, often in the case of Jack, we picked up right where we had left off . . . I have never had more interesting or more troubling friends. I did not really have a clear understanding of Jack and Fred, but I loved them both.” In the End Fred was the first of many friends I have lost to HIV/AIDS, among other losses, overdoses, oblivion, and eventually old age. Watching a generation of gay men get sick, Ann Northrop of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) realized she was watching Vietnam again. Kids were dying, and the government did not seem to care about the slaughter. Each war feels like that. Many said the same about World War I. “We are the ones whose lives began with the knowledge of the ultimate and greatest thing of earthly existence—of the most terrible, the mortal abandonment of man, and the highest, comradeship,” noted Carl Zuckmayer (1929) in a review of All Quiet on the Western Front. Abandonment and comradeship played out in countless forms during the AIDS era. Degradation became common, as

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the president failed to utter the word “AIDS” while people’s lives crumbled. Friendship and affinity groups came together to care for the sick, creating a safety net for the ill, for those on the frontlines and those who were left to die within their communities (Shepard, 1997). Dad and Mom were a part of Fred’s support group. Fred did not survive this era. His search took him from Berlin to Angkor Wat and back to Cambridge through eros, Manhattan, Monahans, Dallas, Lubbock, and personal decimation. On the road, he taught Dad to make friends, not war. Comradeship was what meant the most to Fred and Dad. Through it, eros and human connection replaced alienation, linking a love of poetry with a Beat movement pregnant with meanings, extending their lives far beyond the 1950s conformity of their youth. With the AIDS years, this realization found new expression. Dad watched these deaths with me, eventually passing himself in the spring of 2014 at the age of 78. Some of our last conversations were about Fred, reviewing this manuscript, going over the story anew, and connecting it with the larger stories of our time. His eyes still gleamed whenever we talked about old Fred close to a quarter-century after he left. After Fred died, I traveled to Weimar, Germany, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, seeing history as a living, breathing entity in which we all take a part. Back home, I bummed around San Francisco, working in a housing program for people with HIV/AIDS, collecting oral histories, connecting Fred’s story to the larger fabric of stories that are stitched together like Cleve Jones’s AIDS quilt, which includes Fred’s section along with others from West Texas. Listening to their stories of eros and anxiety in fin de siècle San Francisco, I saw a new world take shape in a community of friends who reveled in new forms of sexual morality as well as engagement. Here everyone was encouraged to come out as who they were, what kinds of people they really were. Writing about the era, I stumbled into Buzz Bense, who suggested to me that public sexual spaces in San Francisco are places to revel in human connections. Walking through Eros, a San Francisco sex club he managed, he explained, “Blanche DuBois says in A Streetcar Named Desire, ‘I am dependent upon the kindness of strangers.’ I think that kind of blessing happens here. There is no obligation for me to treat you particularly well in this environment. We might never see each other again. But in that context, there can be extraordinary moments where people have heartfelt connections, where people feel like they are the recipients of random acts of kindness, where the beauty and humanity of people is evident because they are treating each other so well.” Throughout those years, I reveled in Blanche’s disposition and its expression in friendship networks informing my life

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from San Francisco to Chicago to Texas to New York. I reveled in what Studs Terkel loved about her outrageous audacity as well as Buzz Bense’s understandings of his life story in relation to those of others. I told Fred’s story on my way to my first ACT UP demonstration two decades ago, connecting my life with a movement, telling it over and over. I would stay involved with the AIDS movement for the better part of the next two decades, during which friendships from movements became everything. The most important friendships in my life have taken shape through these movements, from ACT UP to Reclaim the Streets to the Lower East Side Collective to Time’s Up! to Occupy Wall Street, where we depended upon the kindness of strangers over and over. Through them, my narrative blurs with countless others within the multitude. Through all these years, I could never shake the memory of Fred and the worlds of friendships that grew as I recalled his story. I would find many more friends in these years. My first supervisor in San Francisco was Eric Rofes, the director of Shanti Project. His writing and philosophy of living very much informed what a new world of friendships could mean, helping shape what my world of activism would look like as it bended and twisted, meandering between communities and struggles. A supporter of rebel friendships as a means of social transformation, Rofes’s story follows.

3

Reviving the Tribe Friendship and Social Relations in the Work and Play of Eric Rofes

D

uring the summer of 1996, I worked the door at the pub at the University of Chicago. In between pints and checking people’s identification, I read Eric Rofes’s magnum opus, Reviving the Tribe, while I finished writing my book White Nights and Ascending Shadows: An Oral History of the San Francisco AIDS Epidemic. When my book finally came out, Rofes called me to have coffee at the Oscar Wilde bookshop on Christopher Street. Over the next decade, we became fast friends, sharing ideas about activism and writing, organizing and resilience, academe and research. And through that, he opened a world for me. Gone years before his time, activists, scholars, and gay liberationists around the world were shocked at the news of Eric Rofes’s untimely death a decade later in June 2006. Rofes had gone out to Provincetown to write, enjoy “Bear Week,” and hang out. The trip was just an extension of his thirty-plus-year effort as an author, educator, and activist to support and revel in a gay liberation movement dedicated to sexual freedom, democracy, and pleasure for everyone. The author of 12 books, including Reviving the Tribe: Regenerating Gay Men’s Sexuality and Culture in the Ongoing Epidemic (1996), at the time of his death, he was regarded as one of the most important LGBT organizers in the post-Stonewall period. His writing, workshops, conferences, and walking tours drew legions of fans and supporters, and questions. While Rofes’s skills as an author, academic, and cultural critic have long been recognized, this chapter addresses the ways in which Rofes cultivated friendships and what this meant to his work in queer politics. It explores the overlapping utility of these friendships in relation to organizing, teaching, writing, and community building. For Rofes, friendship offered the possibility of achieving a long-standing goal

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of gay liberation politics. Here, individuals and groups prefigured the image of convivial social relations, in which human care, freedom of the body, gender, sexuality, and imagination found support. And a queer politics of possibility was realized within the workings of everyday life. For Rofes, liberation was inextricably linked with a practice of friendships, as regular people created their own models of resistance and support through networks of care rather than formal organizations or institutional affiliation. And this made all the difference. The first section of this chapter considers the theme of friendships directly, while the latter considers its presence and absence in relation the legacies of the gay liberation movement in which Rofes first found his voice as a writer and activist. Throughout the chapters of his life, friendship provided a pulsing, pluralistic, engaged alternative to oppressive patriarchal family structures. For Rofes and many others, friendship offered a vital social resource (Gallagher and Wilson, 1987/2005). His life is a story of the complex interplay between friendship and the practice of organizing. Memories of Friendships Chris Bartlett, an organizer from Philadelphia who had worked with Rofes in the Gay Men’s Health Movement, was a speaker at his east coast memorial service, held at the LGBT Community Service Center in New York City’s Greenwich Village on August 1, 2006. “Eric gave many young men and women both an education about the history of the gay liberation movement and strong support in putting visionary ideas into practice,” explained Bartlett (quoted in Highleyman, 2006). This took shape via mentoring, collaboration, organizing, the practice of friendship, and stories about the ways in which queers build new worlds with their bodies, gatherings, and social ties. “Last Tuesday night I attended a workshop by Eric Rofes on gay men’s sexual culture in the ’70s,” Kirk Read (1998) wrote about a typical Rofes event in the late 1990s. “I heard dozens of stories told by men who enjoyed San Francisco bathhouses and sex spaces before they were shut down in 1985,” he recalled. “Remembering this history is essential for our elders; hearing this history is essential for our young. I caught a glimpse of the liberation that these brave pioneers envisioned. Sex was central to that liberation. Pleasure was a political act.” Bartlett and many others recognized Rofes’s capacity to support social movement activities and friendships simultaneously. Part of his organizing method was to foster ever-expanding social networks through movement building and mentoring. Each connection built upon others in ways that

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fostered still more networks of friends, lovers, and activists. Speaker after speaker at Rofes’s memorial echoed the theme to a packed house of his former colleagues, organizing comrades, and friends established through his engagement with generations of the LGBT, AIDS, and gay men’s movements. “He was an artist of friendship,” explained Richard Burns, a friend of Rofes dating back to the mid-1970s, when they worked for Boston’s Gay Community News (GCN). Amy Hoffman (2007), another friend from the GCN, recalled Rofes in a similar fashion in her memoir of those days. In the days and months after his death, colleagues such as Liz Highleyman suggested that Rofes actually mentored friendships. “I don’t remember when I met him,” explained Highleyman in 2007. She, along with Rofes, was part of the San Francisco Study Group on Sex and Politics dubbed “SexPols.” “What I liked about him was that if Amber [Hollibaugh] was in town, he would call,” she explained. “He cultivated friendships. He did that with me, with Chris Bartlett, and others in the Gay Men’s Health Movement. He took pains to reach out across generations, to reach out to women, to people who were not gay.” Highleyman remembers Rofes as “a hub that brought people together.” “One of my challenges as an activist, and as an activist who structures his life in an alternative way, has been about understanding when something is work and when something is community or family,” Rofes explained to me in a personal interview a year before his death. “And I think because I came right after the 1960s into organizing, I carry with me the belief that the people I did organizing with were going to be my friends and, in some ways, my family and my community.” Friendships and Organizing A few words on the intersection of friendships and social movement organizing are instructive. Much of organizing begins with recruiting through networks and relationships (O’Donnell et al., 1998, p. 143). Friendships make us feel more comfortable about leaving our individual lives and connecting with broader social forces (p. 143). Conversely, making friends can be a meaningful outcome of organizing efforts. Rofes specifically noted that building friendships was one of the goals for SexPols. For Rofes, friendships help social actors build their lives around communities of choice rather than nonvoluntary, repressive communities. By creating support for alternate forms of community and kinship, these friendships subvert social mores or restrictive patriarchal models. Rofes

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favored the notion of “family of choice” as a method to create relationships that transcended the work of organizations or projects. Such friendships include social and emotional support, networks that support mobilization, and the capacity to effect social change. In 1991, when California Governor Pete Wilson vetoed Assembly Bill 101, which would have included sexual orientation as a protected category in the Fair Employment and Housing Act, Los Angeles sociologist Peter Nardi remembers being notified by a friend who had called him within a phone tree (Nardi, 1999). Simultaneous rallies against the bill were held across the state. Of course Rofes, who by then was living in Los Angeles, was one of those who received a call from the phone tree. Gay activists organized simultaneous rallies against the bill across the state of California, many of which began with those simple phone calls. Through such friendship ties, people become invested in issues far larger than themselves. Much of the organizing of the liberationist era took place through such informal networks, from phone trees to bathhouse connections. Here a spirit of kinship, sensuality, creativity, and play propelled innovations in social organizing practices. Along the way, activists transformed the very contours of everyday life for queers across cohorts (Gallagher and Wilson, 1987/2005, pp. 33–35). Rofes came of age in this era. “For gay men, the 1970s was a time of bold exploration, thrilling adventure, and surprising discovery as they came out en masse and re-created themselves, their communities, and the nation in urban centers across America,” he recalled in an unpublished manuscript. With his colleagues at GCN in Boston in the mid-1970s, he joined in a conversation about social moments and change that continued for the next three decades. Some of those taking part included Rick Burns, one of Rofes’s colleagues from this era who helped manage New York City’s Gay Community Center in the years during which the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) peaked. Others included his GCN colleague Amy Hoffman. Here her “gay family” thrived as a part of social movement culture (Hoffman, 2007, p. xi). “We supported the most radical expressions of the gay liberation movement. We believed in upsetting the social order and in creating alternatives to traditional gender roles, definitions of sexuality, and hierarchical power structures of all kinds” (p. xiii). Over the years, many of these friendships endured, as did the work. For Rofes and those he was close to, this friendship was invaluable. Rofes and Burns, for example, worked closely on projects ranging from the 1979 March on Washington to any number of talks at the New York City Gay Community Center over the next three decades. Rofes put on a workshop in January 2006, introduced by Burns, just a few months before his death.

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Rofes’s Friendships In the years after the 1970s, it was nearly impossible to maintain the bond Rofes began in the 1970s with his GCN cohort. Rofes’s writings (1996; 1998) and interviews reflect an ambivalence about this. As he explained to me in 2005, By the 1980s, that was an idea that was pretty old for most people and one that wasn’t true. But what I had with me in my organizing are people from the 1970s who I had done organizing with in Boston and in the March on Washington in 1979. I feel towards those people an odd kind of loyalty and community and family that sometimes they don’t feel. And so what I’m saying about this is that so much organizing in college and right after, it was about having meals together and going to concerts and sharing Patti Smith albums together and going to bars together and going to sex clubs together and stuff like that.

Rofes’s commitment to those in his circle was profound and sometimes messy, he explains in his Reviving the Tribe (1996). Anything but simple, these friendships would endure and fade as the years progressed and the AIDS crisis set in. Early in Reviving the Tribe, he writes about the way his friends used to dance together. For Rofes, dancing was a collective expression of freedom, desire, and celebration. This feeling changed in the early AIDS years. “On the dance floor at Chaps, a Copley Square clone disco where my friend Tom and I would dance for hours on Sunday afternoons, I noticed a subtle but pronounced shift in the energy of the men I had danced with for years,” writes Rofes, recalling a Sunday afternoon in Boston in 1984 (1996, p. 21). By the mid-1980s, the mood on the dance floor had taken on a more manic dimension, more desperate than in previous years. “We were shifting gears, and the dance floor was one of the last venues where we could assume masks of denial and pretend the catastrophic world hadn’t overtaken us,” recalled Rofes. “By 1984, it was impossible to disavow the rising tide of death, although we’d certainly try.” The world was changing. While some danced to “I Will Survive,” for Rofes, “it became impossible to pretend that we were not all thinking the same hideous thoughts. One Sunday evening, as the powerful sound system throbbed with ‘What a Feeling’ from Flashdance, I looked from face to face of my fellow tea-dancers, and a knot of raw emotion tore at my gut as my eyes dampened. In my AIDS story, that was the day the music died” (p. 21). In the years that followed, Rofes’s entire social world changed as friend after friend died. Many who had come of age in the 1970s would watch their entire social networks become reduced to newspaper obituaries,

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memories, and photo albums (Shepard, 1997). Rofes spent the next decade consumed with the battle around the health crisis. Much of Reviving the Tribe traces the fate of the subculture that fostered and cultivated gay male friendships and community. “During a recent trip to New York City, I found myself in subfreezing temperature detouring a dozen blocks out of my way to walk through the Meat Packing District of the West Village,” wrote Rofes. “Without consciousness or planning, I needed to stroll by what had been the Mineshaft, the quintessential gay male sex club of the 1970s. As I stood and stared at the door, tears flowed as I remembered the individual men and the spirit of optimism of the times” (1996, p. 33). Rofes mourned the loss of space, networks, and “gay men’s sexual culture” (p. 33). Infused with memories and activism, Rofes fought to make sure the meanings of such practices were not lost to the sex-negative cultural narratives of the AIDS years. And he tended to have a good time along the way. “Most people who sustain themselves need to have fun and need to get social, cultural, and pleasure needs met through organizing,” Rofes explained during our 2005 interview. Yet in many circles this acknowledgement of the need for pleasure was rejected in favor of a dour model of LGBT advocacy, which preferred equality over affirmative battles for sexual freedom. By the late 1990s, many old-line activists worried that a vast cultural amnesia and whitewashing had robbed the memory and legacy of the contributions from queer artists and activists of the 1970s (Moore, 2004). In the face of this vast forgetting, Rofes hoped to highlight the stories and experiences of this network of queer activists, artists, liberationists, and innovators. He loved the stories of gay men who went to bathhouses, ran the bars, and functioned as “sexual and social pioneers” (Rofes and Derdula, n.d.), completing nearly one hundred interviews with activists who had been involved with queer organizing during the 1970s. Rofes hoped to describe what these practices looked like for his friends and a cohort of gay men. As the AIDS years continued, he worried queers would turn their backs on the lessons of the 1970s gay liberation, which called for queer worldmaking to involve a radical social critique of marriage, family, militarism, and any number of the restrictive tenets of US social life. In the face of a push for queers to act just like heterosexuals and turn their backs on the world-making possibilities of public sexuality, Rofes hoped for pleasure to be part of our democracy. He argued for this, screamed about it, yearned for it. When he was attacked, he fought back about it. When the divide between friendship, activism, and professional AIDS work, “AIDS Inc.,” became too wide, the authenticity of the experience dwindled (Shepard, 1997).

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Resiliency and Regeneration After leaving AIDS work, Rofes (1996; 1998) earned a PhD in Social and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and wrote two enormously influential books, both contextualizing the losses and challenges to community, pleasure, friendship, and social knowledge in the AIDS years. They also highlighted the links between public sexual space and community organizing, which had been so vital to Rofes. I remember reading Reviving the Tribe in the summer of 1996 with a profound sense of excitement, thinking of ways communities facing multiple losses could find new routes toward health and pleasure. Rofes was intensely aware of the need to think through what was going on in the face of multiple losses to AIDS. Facing a stark reality, Rofes managed to articulate a narrative for a new direction in queer life and activism. “Even a cursory look at the histories of our movement will show that sexual liberation has been inextricably bound together with gay liberation, the women’s movement, and the emancipation of youth,” he wrote in 1998 as a new round of sex wars heated up (Crimp et al., 1997; Moore, 2004). To make sense of it all, Rofes always looked to his friends. A primary inspiration for Rofes’s reading of sexuality was SexPols, a study group he helped organize in San Francisco. Founded in 1993 with the iconic queer writers Allan Bérubé and Gayle Rubin, the group was formed to help sex activists break down feelings of isolation, make sense of their experiences, and chart shifting political and cultural trends. “It’s a group of kind of egghead-type people who have formed a community of some kind,” said Rofes. “Some of us are new and some of us have been around for thirteen years just getting together once a month over food and a book and a reading or an article or a video we’ve seen to discuss it.” And along the way, the writers and friends from the group have helped produce a pulsing body of writing. The precedents for the group were many. Some were the 1970s queer study groups and the San Francisco History Project (Rofes, 2005). The other, of course, was Wilhelm Reich’s similarly named “Sex-Pol” group formed in 1927, a Viennese network of social clinics for social reform, sexual education, and street-based psychoanalysis (Reich, 1966). Through the group, Reich called for an authentic “politics of everyday life,” which focused on both broad social issues and the details of everyday living, including cravings for intimacy and care and a need for safe ways to connect with others (Danto, 2005, p. 116). The group railed against the social and political costs of repressed sexuality. Rofes pushed a similar argument throughout his career. And as it was in Reich’s day, not everyone agreed. “The conflicts that emerged during that period in the 1990s were not pleasant or fun for any of us,” Rofes (2004) recalled. “Gay men took sides

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in this debate and some long-time friendships were destroyed. This might also discourage people from diving into the wreck of AIDS writing.” In 1998, Rofes came to New York City to speak on a panel for the oneyear anniversary of SexPanic!, and contacted me about the book I had just finished on the San Francisco AIDS years, White Nights and Ascending Shadows: An Oral History of the San Francisco AIDS Epidemic. While organizing the session, we talked about survival, the capacity for resiliency, mentors, and the hope for a lusty pleasure in democracy. I told him about my work with SexPanic! as a sex-positive straight man, and he encouraged me to push forward and help forge a different kind of politics based in caring connection and social justice rather than identity. I had always had an image of him being an intense, highly ideological man, yet in person, he was a caring, thoughtful person willing to consider each of our unique contributions as well as our capacities to contradict ourselves. This was what Whitman talked about when he suggested we are all bountiful. Sadly, many rejected such a lusty politics during those years. Many of Rofes’s greatest critics were gay men who scorned him for integrating his personal sexual stories into his writings and analysis (Barrett, 2007). “Where are your sexual politics?” he wondered aloud during a talk at the Pacific Sociological Association meetings in 2006. Rofes felt everyone had a role in community regeneration, including those who were HIV positive, HIV negative, kinky queers, or wanting to get married. “Eric loved the community so deeply, couragely [sic], and even hopelessly,” mused Walter Armstrong in a 2014 note on Facebook. “I wonder if the conditions exist anymore for that kind of love. He showed this in his two books written in the 90’s.” For Armstrong, these stories, along with Walt Odets’s (1995) work were “the first expression of a post-crisis rebirth in gay culture and life. [Rofes] saw it before everyone else, and then worked for it.” To do so, Rofes and other organizers, such as Chris Bartlett and Steven Gendin, started organizing a new movement around gay men’s health. “They also dared to care about HIV negative men at a time when we were mainly seen as either support for our positive friends or a threat to the community because of our unprotected sex,” Armstrong continued. “These two San Franciscans took on the crisis-obsessed gay/AIDS establishment and took a lot of shit for their paradigm visions that were alive with true, not manufactured, hope. With pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), we seem to be entering another such shift. The ideas of Rofes and Odets remain the best map for finding our way out of the old wilderness.” A politics of friendship means everyone has a voice in such a community health movement. In the years that followed, Rofes organized a series of conferences aimed at supporting a movement for gay men’s health. Friendship was an integral

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part of the mix. “Our aim is to encourage socializing, friendliness, and caring, and downplay stardom, power plays, and community civil wars,” explained the call for the Gay Men’s Health Summit in July 2000 in Boulder, Colorado, which Rofes helped organize. He was keenly aware of the need for social movements to support broadbased struggles for social justice with multiple means, including friendship. When I interviewed Rofes for my dissertation in 2005, he helped tease out the relationship between embodied experience and the history of struggles for pleasure. Rofes saw that the role of the gay liberation movement was to reject notions that pleasure should be considered a peripheral component of social movement activity. He helped me think about pleasure and play as strategies for organizing. “Ultimately, does a sober form of organizing appeal to more than white people in a sustainable way?” he asked, echoing a critique of those who suggest activism should involve a calculated analysis of benefits and costs. Throughout our 2005 interview, and in the following months, we debated this politics of pleasure and play—comparing and contrasting our respective samples of activist narratives. We concluded that play was an integral part of expanding networks, social capital, and friendships extended around activism. Rofes also suggested that he was growing weary of AIDS organizations that seemed to have distanced themselves from their base communities and networks into a closer dance with business and nonprofit rules. At the end of our 2005 interview, Rofes reflected on the three decades of organizing and friendships that have accompanied his work: “For me, most of the meaning in community organizing has come from being part of a movement. I am someone who has been able to work it so that I find it meaningful to be part of movements that change the world or resist things—and to me that’s a very sixties notion. But that is where I’ve had to find satisfaction and where I could actually find it. So for me, there’s an identity piece that’s around being part of a movement.” In the end, Rofes’s life experiences of movement building through friendship belongs to a tradition dating back to even before the days of gay liberation. Friendship and Freedom was the name of the short-lived 1924 publication of the nation’s first gay rights group, Society for Human Rights. For Rofes, friendships were what made life’s struggles worthwhile. They offered spaces to celebrate when he won and to lick wounds when the movement suffered a setback. Without them, it would be hard to imagine three decades of Rofes’s writing and movement building taking shape in quite the same way. “My most meaningful kinships have emerged out of that movement,” Rofes explained toward the end of our conversation. And then, as we walked out into the sunny day of the West Village, Rofes smiled. “I feel like a creature from

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another time,” he explained as he looked around—a gesture of warmth, reflection, and relief as a survivor of a storm from a different era. Many of his friends had passed. AIDS was still around, and so was Rofes, who had recently become tenured at California State University, Humboldt, where he happily taught and wrote as he continued to participate in organizing efforts. The last time we saw each other was in the spring of 2006 during the Pacific Sociological Association meetings. I had flown out at Eric’s invitation to participate in one of his panels. After a tour of Slammer’s sex club in West Hollywood, we talked about other heroes of the movement who were facing their mortality. Rofes and I gossiped, and he gave me some advice about a teaching gig I had just accepted. He was always concerned about AIDS, but none of us know how we are going to go out. That summer, Rofes planned to write his “seventies book” and spend time with old friends in Provincetown in some of his old GCN romping grounds. He made it there. And he would never return. I think of him every year on our summer trips up to Cape Cod. Last summer, I even thought I saw a glimpse of him during Bear Week in Provincetown, strolling around during a break from editing this book. For me, he was always the person who saw friendship as a means of reviving the tribe.

4

Not Quite Queer

T

he first time I met Eric Rofes was over coffee at the Oscar Wilde Bookstore on Christopher Street. At some point, I communicated the point that I was a lot more on the heterosexual (het) side of the continuum: “queer in the streets, straight in the sheets,” as they used to say. Rofes laughed, suggesting he had seen more and more of his students, many of them straight lefties such as me, embracing a blurry, lusty queer politics, less invested in identity than caring and social justice. He said this was really what the future was about—a space where people really did not care or need to define or categorize their desires. And this was a good thing. In the years before Rofes died, we supported each other’s projects and books, met at conferences, and corresponded constantly. He even offered feedback for a draft of the essay that eventually became this chapter years after he first suggested that I write it in 1998. Delinked from identity, such friendships help expand approaches to living, thinking, and activism (Roach, 2012). It is a way of imagining new, alternate kinship networks as well as models of community and pleasure. Such experiments are often born of a search for more authentic approaches to being alive that take shape through escapades within a city of friends. Growing up, these engagements helped point to a more authentic, intriguing way of being. At least that was the feeling in the summer of 1986 in Dallas. That was the sense one got looking at the Christmas lights at Daddy’s, a tacky bar in the city’s gay ghetto. A song by Book of Love was playing on the radio: I wanna be where the boys are but I’m not allowed On the other side of the boys bar I want them to all come out But it’s not my fault that I’m not a boy It’s not my fault, I don’t have those toys I’m not a boy —Book of Love, “Boy,” 1986

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Some of my favorite memories of the period took place while hanging out at Daddy’s and dancing. Although ecstasy had been rendered illegal since “Black Monday” the previous July of 1985, Daddy’s still offered a generic alternative, “Eve,” over the counter at the bar in a shiny, fluorescent blue box (Pierce, 1985). The legions pouring into this corner of Dallas’s public sexual culture for their little pills would find a spirit of fun and kink, margaritas and lust, bulging pupils and knowing glances, which made the trip unique. On one occasion, I ran in still wearing a prom tuxedo as my friends waited double-parked outside. A laid-back African American gentleman wearing black sunglasses walked up, said hello, put his arm around my waist and gave me a little pinch—a gentle pinch—but it suggested there was more where that came from if I were interested. I did not really know, but it still gives me a pause. Those experiences in queer spaces completely altered my “straight” view of the world. Writer Amber Hollibaugh (Gomez, Hollibaugh, and Rubin, 1998) describes a similar experience with leather bars: “That was where I first learned that you didn’t have to be the person sitting next to you. You could be fascinated by it but it wasn’t a threat to your own sexual desires” (p. 113). Throughout high school, from 1984–88, teams of my friends and I all flocked to the Starck Club, Daddy’s, The Walk, JR’s, and the other venues within Dallas’s thriving queer ghetto to take part (Kelly, 2014; Alexandre, 2009). Over time, what started as a curiosity opened a new democracy of pleasure and politics for me. These queer spaces offered new forms of comradery, legions of friends, and urban vistas. When heterosexual class hierarchies offered little but stuffiness and exclusion, these spaces opened doors for alternate ways of living. They showed me more about community building than anything I had known. Rather than cliques, here the citizenry built community through pleasure and shared engagements in living and fighting for a better world, just as Aristotle suggested good friends do. As a het, I did not see a point in trying to pass as queer, yet I often did, sometimes to my advantage, sometimes in powerlessness. Through grade school, I played the cello in the string quartet, and accusations of sissydom followed. In Texas, you were either a ball player or queer. There wasn’t much room for nuance. My resentment (and insecurity) led me to conform, do high school “butch masculine,” and play football. Even there, towels snapped, boys were boys, and a Spartan level of queer desire/repulsion allowed for still more ball and bonding. Sometimes bonding occurred through the constant flow of antiqueer jokes; at other times it was through quasi-homoerotic rituals of passage. The guys at a rival school were known to have shoved Oscar Mayer wieners up their bums before they did sprints up and down the football field. A couple of the guys on our team had even taken the talk of jock straps, and so on, into play off the field. My friend

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Doug was known to enjoy his trysts with an older boy, Andy, who had been in and out of college, dressed like a new-wave preppy, and could always get people into the Starck Club, where even Grace Jones was known to cavort. I was intrigued. When I confessed to having an interest in Andy, a friend warned me, “Watch out if you approach him, or next thing you know, he’ll be knocking on your window at 3 a.m. with a martini in one hand and an ecstasy tab in the other.” That did not sound bad to me. I was fixated on the music, the clothes, the sensibility, the underground, the honest interest in pleasure, the connection to culture, and the dandiness of it all. In the summer of 1985, Rupert Everett appeared in the film Another Country; the following year, his movie Dance with a Stranger showed at the movie theater across from the restaurant where I worked. Dressed in khakis and a leather jacket, Everett was the perfect cad. As a British prep school boy doing what prep school boys did with other boys in Another Country, I was captivated. I adored his Merchant Ivory Oxford wardrobe, mannerisms, and inability to heed his roommate’s advice, “Discretion is the better part of valor.” When Everett set up a clandestine date with another boy and proposed, “Shall we get terribly, terribly drunk” over lunch, I was enthralled. That summer, I went to the movie two or three times with another boy. He had just been accepted at Brown University and looked and felt much like one of the boys in Another Country. He was attracted to the movie as much as I was. We exchanged mix tapes all summer. One of his tapes featured the Blancmange anthem, “Lose Your Love.” “No, no, no, no, no, no, I don’t want to see you go. I don’t want to lose your love,” the emotional chorus concluded with a dance-beat crescendo. It was all very dramatic; there was no word for the sensibility but excitement. We got fairly drunk ourselves the night before he left and shared a drunken make-out. I threw up—perhaps from repulsion or perhaps from too much vinegary, warm white wine in my bloated stomach. The next morning was summer football. I was glad to leave the realm of dandidom for the comradery of the locker room. While my experiments with guys never went anywhere, the appreciation for the spaces men created together endured. It was always refreshing to know such a space was out there when hetero mores grew too restrictive. Yet sometimes I did not have to retreat. Weeks before high school graduation, a bunch of the guys from the football team smoked a joint on my patio and joyously danced naked in a circle to the tune of “The Age of Aquarius.” Hibiscus (of the Cockettes) would have loved it. Still, the coolest places in Dallas were the gay bars where hipsters, dandies, drag queens, and outsiders could share space in a nonhomophobic culture organized around pleasure and aesthetics. While sharing sexual contact with guys was a little sleepy for me, I adored the ethos. Those years left a deep, abiding

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appreciation for an exploratory approach to churning pleasure out of one’s body. If it felt good, it was fair game. And I almost always passed for whatever people saw in me. “I know you are one of us, that you love men,” a buddy from the college rugby team proposed freshman year during one of our drunken postgame beer parties. It was a compliment—no need to recoil. By that point, I was pretty sure I was playing with the other team, but I was always glad to know there was a different kind of space to play. Amber Hollibaugh and Jewelle Gomez describe a similar feeling in Gomez, Hollibaugh, and Rubin’s story “Another Place to Breathe” in Opposite Sex: Gay Men on Lesbians, Lesbians on Gay Men (1998): “Some of the things I have always taken from gay male sexuality is the play and the danger . . . drag, and bars, mixed bars, and the leather community . . . I wanted their atmosphere of a kind of sexual . . . intensity” (p. 111). Over the following decade, many of my friends from the club days would encounter police interrogations, social exclusions, and positive test results. Trips from one clinic to another robbed much of the innocence of those early, lusty connections. Between alcohol, indiscretion, stigma, pills, HPV, warts, scars, swabs, doctors, health care payments, judgments, and scabies, sex was messier than we first imagined. And as a generation, we would go from ecstasy to the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and become a little queerer together. Yet even with repression and sexphobia, pleasure and friendship remained imperatives. Much of the lesson started for me in San Francisco, where sex and citizenship had long been interconnected. San Francisco In San Francisco, the very lines of the city are drawn around sexual struggles and stories. After failure at my chosen postcollege vocation of waiting tables, I worked late graveyard shifts at an AIDS housing facility on Market Street and Van Ness Avenue in 1993. Only a couple of years earlier, Fred Mayer had succumbed to HIV-related complications, including a descent into mania, hallucination, car wrecks, dissociation, and dementia in a desert in West Texas. Dad had known him since college. In the years that followed, they both joined the Beats, hitchhiked out to join the poets of San Francisco, and skipped back and forth between the east coast and the west. Fred would tell me story after story about his father, who had known Lotte Lenya during the decadent peak of Berlin’s Weimar culture after he lost his job as a U-boat conductor during World War I. Even with a Harvard PhD in hand, his queerness was never discussed as much as it remained

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a quiet, irrepressible defiance to bourgeois mores of ambition, career, or convention. “Why should I have to work?” he insisted defiantly in his bathrobe, regaling me with stories, rehearsing Chopin before the dementia set in again. I saw him in many of the guys who lived in the building where I worked in pre-protease San Francisco. The guys would come in late after being out at the sex clubs, cruising, or just walking. Here eros served as defiance to thanatos and illness. On their way in, many of the guys stopped to chat about where they had been, what they had done, and what their San Francisco stories had meant. Some lived for only a few months afterward. If ever there was a town where people sought to make sense of a sublime space between pleasure and infinity, it was San Francisco. I watched residents revel, swagger, lose themselves, find something else, and shuffle from this life to the next. One Saturday I arrived for the swing shift and asked about one of the tenants. “He died this morning. They just took his body away,” I was informed. That was during the first five minutes of my shift; the next eight hours were interminable. By midnight, I walked out to smell the air, talk, look, touch, and ponder the epiphany, the mystery, of a life in which some are lucky enough to hang around, while others disappear to God knows where, just as they are getting started. Never was I more fixated with the burlesque of street life. I wandered, watched the characters, dipped in and out of the spots along the way, chatted, grieved, sensed, and experienced, perfectly aware that so many were running out of time for such opportunities that spring. The fall before, on November 4, 1992, we had all danced in the Castro and sang, “Hi-Ho the Witch Is Dead,” thinking for the first time in a generation that we would have a Democrat in office. The joke was on us, of course. Business kept on being business. Our best and brightest kept on taking the great jobs at the expensive law firms, their famous last words, “only for a couple of years till I get my loans paid off.” War raged on in Sarajevo, and hopelessness grasped the air. Every day we saw one more picture of the carnage. Yet no one seemed to do anything about it. Sometime in the summer of 1993, Susan Sontag flew out to Sarajevo and put on a production of Waiting for Godot lit by candlelight because of the lack of electricity in a city of people the West had left behind. “Godot won’t be coming today,” the messenger announced to the audience, who were freezing to death waiting for aid. “Maybe he’ll come tomorrow.” I didn’t know a person who wasn’t waiting on something. Bright colors in perfect postcards faded. But there was still room for acting up. Standing in the parking lot outside of the Safeway on Market and Church Streets, at the center of the world where the Haight, Castro, downtown, and the Mission converged, I

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felt butterflies in my stomach. It was early in the morning before my first ACT UP demonstration. “New people, I need to talk to all the new people,” said a man named G’dali Braverman, a veteran of ACT UP New York and the demonstration’s organizer. He had a yellow armband, brown hair, jeans with ACT UP stickers on both legs, a leather jacket, and a sympathetic smile. He came over to talk. He wore tightly laced black boots, had a light beard, and had his hair slicked back. His earrings dangled as he talked to us. “It’s important to remember that if you are to be cuffed not to put one wrist on top of the other.” He demonstrated. You will be aching. If they use wire cuffs, this will hurt a lot. Put a thumb to the palm of the other hand instead. This will give you a lot more freedom of motion so you will be able to get out. If you are detained, remember not to touch any police. The slightest touch can be construed as an attack. In this situation, initiate a discourse. Tell the policeman that you have no intention of evading arrest. But remember to write down the police badge number. Under no circumstances should you run, or you will put us all in danger of the cops. Please fill out these forms, also, before you participate.

The form asked for the name of my Lawyer and “Have you ever had any training in civil disobedience?” No, I sure hadn’t. To be honest, I thought I was just going to take a bus ride and do some screaming. I had no interest in getting arrested as Braverman had warned us about. The form for the ACT UP rally immediately set a tone of seriousness. College rallies always seemed more of a social thing. This was the capitol, and we were planning on throwing the ashes of dead people on the steps. Before we marched, everyone gathered in the park and said the name of a few of the people they had lost to this scourge. “My lover Mark, my housemates Keith, Rob, and Mitch, and too many others to count,” a guy in front of me recalled. Everyone named just a couple of names and finished with that same line: “and too many others to count.” One man in a leopard-print leotard carried a sign announcing, “LOOKS DON’T KILL PETE WILSON’S VETOS DO!!!!!!” As our procession of drag queens, Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, people with faces painted like skeletons, activists, and a few newcomers like me marched through the main street to the state building, a man blew a horn once every seven minutes to symbolize the people who, at that time, died of complications due to AIDS once every seven minutes. A small group carried a casket, and the rest of us carried signs. Another group hit their drums in unison making a hollow blow through the air as the casket played an amorphous, electronic sound. We interrupted the traffic. A group of

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men in suits and walkie-talkies filmed the procession, and I wondered what I was doing there. A line of police on horses formed in front of the capitol building. Another group behind them stood on the steps in riot gear with batons. By the time we got to the building, G’dali grabbed a megaphone and announced that police had told him that stepping over their line would be grounds for arrest. Promptly, a group lay down on the line and others drew lines around them with chalk. They looked like the outlines of dead people that police draw for those who have been killed. Several people eulogized past loved ones lost. One man took the megaphone and gestured to the horsemen: “If these people could understand, could feel how much this hurts, they would open their line and escort me up to the entrance to the state capitol . . . and you know I really don’t care what happens to me. I will stand on the steps of the state capitol, knocking on Pete Wilson’s door. Arrest me if you must.” He rushed the police line and received the brunt of about five police batons, at which point the demonstration lost control. Another group rushed the police line. In the meantime, a group of several police had apprehended the man who had been speaking, kneeled on his back, and arrested him. Everyone was chanting, “Act up! Stop Aids! Act up! Stop Aids!” and then “Shame, Shame, Shame!” After arrests and legal support, we took our signs and headed home. It was the best part of the whole day. Just outside of Sacramento, we stopped for gas and food. Everyone poured out of the bus, this group of frothing activists reveling in the postdemonstration refreshments at the convenience emporium. Armed with extra-large Slurpies, Funyons, Ho-Hos, and so on, we hit the road. One woman was playing a radio. Some slept. Others talked excitedly. Postevent adrenaline oozing from my ears, I sat talking to the woman who had put on the skeleton makeup. As it turns out, she had grown up in Texas and had gone to a high school my football team used to play. It felt like a ride home from a high school football game, with the same sort of ambiance on the bus, all the way down to our stop for goodies. For a brief minute there, everyone was friends with one another. The togetherness didn’t last, however. Back in San Francisco, everyone parted ways, and most were not destined to unite again for a long time, if ever. As I sat in my room, I drank a beer and began to come down from the temporary euphoria, not knowing how much we had achieved beyond being a whole bunch of ranting AIDS activists, a spectacle of political theater. After a day of joy and fear, hollowness grasped at me; people were still sick and getting sicker, and we hadn’t changed that. I looked around my bedroom walls and sighed—the same familiar emptiness. “Here you are again feeling,” I said out loud with the lights off. “Here you are again.”

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The next day at work, we lost another client, Kerry. The deceased’s neighbor down the hall, Harry, was both frustrated and angry, as well as desperate and grief stricken, caught in the conflicting emotions after getting word of his death, not knowing quite what to think. Kerry had always been such a headache, always so depressed, but now he was gone. Dick, another resident, had posted a poem written in silver on a black sheet of paper with a red ribbon on Kerry’s door: I held you for a moment, heart to heart And then you ran to the light And turned back laughing at my tears Before you passed on from my sight, And blew a kiss to calm my childish tears I follow now with plodding my feet a different route And I know that time will one day bring me there To find you waiting at the gate of light To lead you to my release from pain and care Love, Dick

Kerry had taken a fast tailspin from health into quick decay in a matter of a week. Somehow someone should have documented the deterioration. Maybe I could have, I speculated with my boss. He replied, “You want a reality check, Ben: everyone is going to die here—probably this year—and there’s nothing you can do about it.” “Have you heard about Kerry?” asked the usually animated Sherry, another resident, with a very tired expression on her face. She had wanted to get out of the building for months exactly because of this sort of stuff. Her illness was enough to deal with, without having her neighbors dying around her. “I’m about the only one of us from the original people who moved in last winter,” Dick told me: Kerry and two others had died earlier that week. “I don’t know what to do,” I told Dick. “There’s nothing you can do,” he replied. “I copied down that poem you wrote for Kerry. Could you tell me what this word is?” I asked, pulling out my journal. “Heart to heart,” Dick confirmed while reading the poem again. “Oh, that’s sad,” he said to himself, putting his chin to his hand on the desk and looking down. “It’s true,” I thought, writing in my journal: Things were out of hand—are out of hand. Jeannie just went to the hospital. The doctors don’t know what is going on with her but that she remains constantly sick. The other day she tried to go to take a bike ride to the park but

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had to turn around early. “Riding my bike to the park on sunny days—that was one of my favorite things to do,” Jeannie told me. She did not make it through the end of the year. Juan passed out in the lobby today. It’s saddest of all to think of this place without him around smiling, causing problems for the program director, hobbling around feeding the plants, taking meals out to the homeless people out on Market, buying Henry packs of Kools, walking to the Safeway at all hours of the night, telling me about the graffiti artists outside, standing out on the corner just smoking, taking in the scene. He passed out on his way upstairs tonight. That corner outside may soon be empty. Everyone seems to be dying.

As I finished that sentence, the phone rang. A resident named Carlos called down to tell me that he needed an ambulance. He said he was in a lot of pain, so I dialed 9-1-1 and went up to see him. The ambulance was there for him in just a few minutes. Later I talked with another resident, Mark, who usually wears a black leather jacket who has survived with the disease for more than ten years. He seems to think whatever happens is going to happen, and worrying about it won’t change a thing; it might make things worse. That evening, I jotted down a few more notes in my journal, reflecting on the day: “I can’t take my mind off that surreal image of Kerry leaving Dick for good with that light, the parting of their ways, and Carlos trembling as he left for the hospital, his friends buzzing in and out of the facility to get him what he needed. Friends, nurses, and other associates always made their way to and from the building, ready to help out.” If you walked toward the bay from our building on Market Street and zagged left, you could stumble into the Tenderloin, one of San Francisco’s rawest, queerest neighborhoods. Public sexual culture in the Tenderloin felt immediately dangerous and edgy. Kids who had left the often desperate conditions of their lives, dropped off from the bus station and survived on tricks, speed, an informal network of fellow travelers, and the hazards of the underground, leaving one difficult set of conditions for another. Different venues catered to different interests. At the Mother Lode, guys from the East Bay who longed for male contact yet didn’t want to associate with Castro clones found easy access to guys in dresses who would be more than willing to please them (for a small fee; Shepard, 1993). This public sexual sphere of San Francisco’s Tenderloin was rife with sadness and hope, connection and separation, loneliness and pleasure. Writing, cruising, drinking, and hanging out there opened up an entirely different lens into urban experience. Here street hustlers drew new storylines for the performative necessities of gender, work, play, labor, release, friendship, and the ways

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in which lust overlaps with a queer approach to commerce and pleasure. People hung out on streets, forming a public sexual commons like it was Rome. While listening to the stories, I slowly started to reconcile the powerful desire and the cultural shame I associated with eros. Before returning home for the holidays in 1993, I picked up Pat Califia’s Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex (1980/1994). “Eros is arbitrary, bizarre, impeccably honest, bountiful and so powerful as to be cruel,” read one passage. Within this narrative, I found of new way of looking at so many feelings that had never had a right home and of reassessing the meanings of what was impossible to contain, messy, and intriguing about social eros. Within the San Francisco stories, I started to put a distance between my experience and the toxic elements of heteronormativity with which I grew up. And I saw there were other ways to build family, community, and democracy without having to pass for being what one is not, without having to divorce one’s self from one’s body and senses, from one’s connection with community. For the San Francisco sex radicals, the social and sexual imagination was to be seen not as a liability but rather as part of a lifelong excavation. Rather than degrading, a different way of being could be found in its expression. Here sex and social justice intermingled with struggles for self-determination. A few years later, I saw a gentleman in hot pants and high heels at a rally for sex workers and adult performers with a sign proclaiming, “Free your ass and your mind will follow.” Maybe he was onto something. New York City “Don’t move there. Rudy Giuliani is shutting down queer New York,” my mentor in graduate school had advised me in the spring of 1997. I was determined to prove him wrong. For me, public sexuality was part of the very pulse of New York City. And I was eager to get out of sex-negative Chicago, where I had been in graduate school. In between terms, I had dropped in and out of New York City. I felt a certain sexual contact high the second I got off the bus at the port authority on Forty-Second Street. The first stop of every trip into the city was to Show World, an emporium of sexual commerce at the corner of Eighth Avenue. Usually, I did not get past the transgender women on the second floor; Show World never failed to please. By the time I moved to the city in 1997, the club, like much of New York City’s public sexual culture, was under attack from the moralists, big real estate, and a Comstock-like mayor who sought to shut it all down. His aim seemed to be to make New York City as bland as the suburbs. Without sex, there was little room for culture—no jazz, no pleasure, no street life,

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no pulse. Yet there was still a little fight left in New York City’s queer public sphere. “Never pay attention to what straight people think,” Bob Kohler scolded me after one of the SexPanic! meetings in the winter of 1997. SexPanic! was formed to fight the temperance-era logic of the moralists. We had been discussing Larry Kramer’s predictably sexphobic rant, “Gay Culture, Redefined,” an op-ed article in the New York Times in which Kramer condemned gay men for building a culture around pleasure and public sexual culture. Kohler was probably right. Yet the exchange brought up a strange conundrum. After all, as a man who slept with women, one could consider me part of the camp Kohler suggested should be ignored; yet as a sex-positive person who abhorred Kramer’s attack on sexual self-determination and queer world-making and one who fought to spread a message of sexual liberation for all, I felt anything but “straight.” The word felt far too restricting for the bountiful sentiment I felt. Yet the exchange revealed a very real conflict between an old-school brand of gay politics of identity and a contemporary queer politics based in a vaguely defined rejection of sexual shame and regimes of the normal, as Michael Warner (1993) famously described it. Yet “queer” never seemed quite the right term for those who rejected prohibitive politics. When I tried telling a gay coworker I was “queer identified,” she thought I was a “closet case.” Many did. I was certainly not the first to encounter this. “Being straight in ACT UP was like knowing what it was like to be in the closet,” remembered Allan Clear, who worked with the ACT UP Syringe Exchange, in a 2006 interview. “I certainly pass in appearance of not being straight.” On some days, I did pass as queer simply by virtue of being a sexpositive man who was intrigued with the sex-positive narratives SexPanic! advanced as an alternative to the “Turdz” such as Kramer, who condemned queer sexuality, and Andrew Sullivan, who suggested that AIDS was over once it no longer disproportionately affected economically privileged gay men, and Rudy Giuliani, who wanted to shut down queer New York City. Their writing revealed a lack of a coherent argument about sexuality. The politics of coming out seemed lost. Being in the closet and coming out, after all, come in many forms. From what I had learned about gay liberation in San Francisco, “coming out” meant more than coming out sexually; it meant coming out as who you are. In my case, it meant rejecting a politics of shame and sameness in favor of a lusty politics of joy, justice, and rambunctiousness. Yet it was still hard to say participation in such a politics should constitute a level of authentic queer identification. For me this was simply a politics of freedom and authenticity.

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There had to be a way to reject a system that one abhorred without taking on an inauthentic shell or trying to pass for something one was not. The history of social movements is chock full of stories of antiracist Caucasian activists who rejected their old selves, took on new identities, and acted out of a sense of guilt that distorted their politics. Rather than being motivated by love and care, they acted out of personal ambivalence. And the results were often mixed. The examples of the German Red Army Faction, who killed out of shame over their parents’ apparent inaction during the era of the Third Reich, and of Kathy Boudin, who participated in the 1981 Brinks Robbery with the Black Liberation Army without feeling she had the right to know the details of the action, are but two examples of guilt motivating action that produced mixed results and long jail sentences (Lovett, 2003; Varon, 2004). Here obligation trumped friendship. The lesson of the gay liberation movement of the same era was that pleasure and friendship were valid aims for movement activists. And it could not be separated from struggles for justice. Here an authentic politics of antimilitarism and antiracism melded with a raw politics of personal freedom. I was drawn to SexPanic! because of just such an ethos. Here queer politics was linked with a pursuit of pleasure that rejected the notion that play had to wait until the revolution was complete. Joyful rejection of docile obedience was intimately linked with a politics that embraced and embodied experience over colonialism of the mind and body. Certainly the discussion of SexPanic! in the press suggested that the group was trying to create a different kind of queer politics rooted in pleasure rather than an essentialist identity politics, a universalizing rather than minoritizing discourse. To substantiate this ever expanding queer politics, writers such as Douglas Crimp suggested that AIDS and connection with its stigma had transformed a gay politics of identity into a queer politics that encompassed the experiences of social outsiders, including injection drug users and welfare moms. ACT UP brought together the most unlikely of coalition partners to queer the AIDS struggle. For sexual civil liberties activists such as me, notions of soli-fucking-darity among perverts, anarchists, and outsiders remained intriguing. “The people perverted will never be converted,” screamed queers, adult entertainers, and kinky hets in one of the rallies against Giuliani’s “Quality of Life Campaign.” Here a polymorphous politics of social and sexual freedom felt vital. From the streets, such an idea seemed possible. From the academy, the idea sounded contrived (Thomas, 2000). I asked Ann Pelligrini, who had been involved with SexPanic!, about the idea of “queer hets.” She thought the idea sounded dubious. It is easy for hip urbanites to claim a queer mantle as long as they do not have to do any of the gooey sex stuff or give anything up in rejecting heteronormativity. Some privilege would have to be left behind. Instead,

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the phenomena seemed to involve a new set of revolving doors between closets and social worlds. At some gatherings, hets could be queer; at others, it was best to put on the wedding bands and leave queerness in the closet. Yet perhaps this back and forth between performances in identity deconstruction, reinvention, and strategic essentialism was just what the new postmodern politics required. Further, there is little consensus about what being queer or having sexual freedom really mean for heterosexuals, queers, or the liberal left. Certainly, the Right has always known it hates sex for very specific reasons having to do with social control. On the other hand, the Left has rarely articulated or cohered around a position on sexuality as part of a broader politics of personal freedom. With the exceptions of the Women’s Movement, the politics of sexual self-determination has not been a priority. The historic contribution of the gay liberation movement was the view that ironclad social categories are best rejected in favor of an abundant polymorphous plurality. From there, ACT UP transformed the way activists experienced politics and political performance. The group reconnected gay politics with a queer sensibility and broad social critique of the system that sent soldiers to war, incarcerated the poor, and left illness to run rampant as long as it affected the junkies, homos, and communities of color. From ACT UP, queerness developed a new cultural currency that many wanted to be part of, including heterosexuals. While many viewed the phenomenon of ‘“straight queers” as a kind of identity politics nightmare, something was going on. Bend Over Boyfriend, a straight porn movie about men being penetrated by their girlfriends, was a top rental in San Francisco in 1999. It might have simply been that the hetero world was just realizing what ten zillion gay men already knew—the prostate is too good a secret for gay men alone to enjoy. Certainly, phone sex advertisements in straight porn offered ample indication that social mores were shifting. “I will fuck you in your tight ass,” a caption from a woman in leather proclaimed in one magazine. While the men to whom these ads catered might have been closet cases, these ads were most likely a reflection of a market demand for an ageless form of pleasure and gender-play, which was being openly acknowledged. Leo Bersani talks about “celebrating ‘the homo’ in all of us.” Yet such a proposition was anything but simple. As I continued with queer activism, the relationship between self and political identification remained messy. I was arrested with members of SexPanic!, ACT UP, Housing Works, and Fed UP Queers (FUQ) during the Matthew Shepard political funeral in 1998. I hoped my queer bona fides were in place. Yet the strange looks I was getting about saying I was straight while doing queer activism still inspired curious bewilderment. So I tried saying I was bisexual. But the identification

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felt awkward. It didn’t last. In a couple of cases, it even backfired. “You’re such a closet case,” another friend scolded me after a post on an electronic mailing list about my “partner” rather than my girlfriend. It didn’t sound or feel real. Even when a member of SexPanic! brought me a newspaper clip about a similar “straight” man who chose to play on the gay rugby team, offering me a bit of solidarity, or “courtesy stigma” as Irving Goffman (1963) would describe it, I was still on the outside. “The biggest influences of my life have been gay men,” I read one straight man proudly declare in Michael Musto’s 1998 Village Voice column that December, reveling in an appreciation for their lust and style and the mentoring they had given him since his earliest years. I wish I could have put it that way, recognizing the many queer men who had helped me along the way. Yet change was afoot. Inside and outside, the game was changing. More than anything, one cannot really say she or he is queer if she or he does not practice it. For many, queer implies playful, defiant, and unscripted forms of direct action. So when it came time for invitations to the first meetings of FUQ—a by-invitation-only group of New York City’s most daring queer activists, many of whom had split from SexPanic!—I rarely made the list. After the Matthew Shepard political funeral organizing bogged down into ridiculously long meetings and bickering, FUQ moved forward with a series of fiercely creative direct action spectacles, including the first of the hundreds of acts of civil disobedience in protest of the murder of the unarmed Amadou Diallo at the hands of the New York City Police Department, which captivated the city and drew national news headlines. For months afterward, waves of activists were arrested amid police brutality at One Police Plaza. For a few months there, FUQ was the hottest group in town. Yet they could not keep up the pace (no one could). And observers would come to call members of FUQ “adrenaline junkies.” A member of the old Weather Underground who had spent years in jail even warned one of the members to think through what she was doing or risk a similar fate (Flynn and Smith, 2004/2008). While the comparison between FUQ and the Weather Underground is tenuous, the similarities are instructive. Both groups were intensely aware of security culture and the threats to groups that utilize brash forms of direct action. Both weeded out those who sought to pass and infiltrate. FUQ simply had closed meetings and only invited those with long histories of direct action to participate; to throw FBI counterintelligence programs off its track, the Weather Underground required everyone sleep with each other. Inevitably, the cops who were unwilling to participate were found out and left.

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Even after failing to make the cut with FUQ, queer world-making remained alluring. In June 1999, at the behest of friends, I dressed up for my first “Drag March” with New York City’s Radical Fairies and Church Ladies for Choice. I had worked with them to support the theatrics of civil disobedience to save another public sphere—the community gardens— which had been under threat from development that spring. Marching from the East Village, where Jackie Smith’s flaming creatures distinguished themselves from the bland citizenry, toward the West Village, where gay liberation was nearly won, I spoke with another march participant in similar drag. When I told him I was “straight,” he seemed to laugh. “You’re marching in the Drag March,” he gestured, chuckling, before strolling away. Later in the weekend, FUQ blocked the parade route during the Pride festivities as Rudy Giuliani marched. Shortly after the disruption, SexPanic! cruised down the parade route in “Rudy’s sex mobile,” a blue 1970s hot-rod squad car, dressed as “Rudy’s sex police.” On top of the car, a paper-mache Rudy Giuliani puppet head leered below a sign reading, “Because he hates you.” Two lesbians made out on the hood. Go-go boys and hustlers danced and shot water guns from an accompanying float while we led the crowd in chants of “More booty, less Rudy! Keep New York sexy!” By the time we got to Christopher Street, police ordered the “sex mobile” off the parade route (Bookey, 1999; McGovern, 1999). After the march was over, I rode the subway with the paper-mache Rudy back to the Lower East Side. A woman who had watched the parade topless joined me. A couple of stops later, she walked with me back to my apartment. It was the first and last time I would ever hook up with someone on the subway. The play of joining the Radical Fairies, the Drag March, and the theater of Rudy’s sex mobile brought a different kind of joy and embodied experience to my politics. This playful feeling of exploration and wanderlust would continue to renew itself over and over again. So would the conversations with friends about what it all meant along the way. They always had. This was a feeling shared with an abundant community of friends who seemed to understand. I did not pass for long with Kohler from SexPanic!, who suspected something was amiss when he noticed I did not wax the hair on my back. Yet it wasn’t necessary. Something else was in order, and he appreciated what I had brought to the group. If anything, I live through public sexual culture. It makes me happy to know that it looms on the other side of the city and imagination. Yet I don’t need to attach my identity to it. Still, it makes this lusty city of friends a richer space for everyone—its streets and its people. In the spring of 2006, I joined a group of students and researchers on one of Eric Rofes’s trips to Slammers, a sex club in Hollywood, during the

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spring 2006 Pacific Sociological Association meetings, where we strolled about, looked around, and talked. “This is no doubt one of the strangest trips to a public sexual space I have ever participated in,” explained Ralph Bolton, an anthropologist from the Stonewall boomer cohort. “It seems strange to walk through our sacred temple with infidels of nongay people.” “I don’t really agree with you. I like being in the company of a room of fellow perverts,” Matt Brown, a younger researcher, followed. Maybe that was it? While it is never so easy to conceal privilege or identity, a politics based on fellow feeling, friendship, solidarity, and pleasure requires few such deceptions. Yet rather than call such a feeling queer, it may be better just to leave this space undefined. There are countless people across sexualities who aspire to be part of such a space without having to name it. Rather than pass or create a new word for it, a great many would just like to play with friends in such a space, where bodies clash together, dancing, shaking, and navigating the contested streets of the city. This is a space shared in rituals that transgress communities, from Folsom Street West to East, from Castro to New York City’s yearly Drag March. But that’s a story for Chapter 5. That trip was the last time I saw Rofes. But the conversations we had during it reverberate through relationships with cohorts of activists past and present.

5

Sylvia Rivera, Her Myth and Mentors On Support, Friendship, and Social Movements

M

y first arrest was with trans activist and Stonewall veteran Sylvia Rivera. It was obviously not hers. An old warrant from 1973 came up as we were being processed. Rivera was thrown into the cells with the guys, although she had spent a lifetime as a woman. She was a fierce, gentle soul, who made being arrested together more fun. As the stories recalled throughout this book remind us, activists such as Rivera have been occupying and resisting social controls for generations. Like Fred and many others in this book, she had a bit of Blanche Dubois in her. For example, Rivera claimed she was a part of the Stonewall uprising, although witnesses recall her sleeping on a bench in Times Square the first night. Yet a close reading of firsthand evidence suggested otherwise—or did it? “Sylvia opened a space for all us,” one observer from Fed Up Queers noted at her funeral, acknowledging the blurry, messy space for a different kind of queer politics offered by her life story. We all loved Sylvia for the spaces she opened for us. A subtext of Sylvia Rivera’s story is about friendship and the ways in which it helps participants in movements stay alive and involved. Here the care, support, and mentoring Rivera received from Bob Kohler and Randy Wicker helped buttress her efforts, and a younger cohort of activists, including myself, loved hearing about it. Rivera was everyone’s friend. Her decades-long friendship with Kohler was out there for all of us to see. Watching this, we were all moved by what this friendship could mean and achieve. The following considers some of friendship’s uses as a means of

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resistance to official history and as a support for social movements in the life story of Sylvia Rivera. New York Historical Society, June 2004 “If I had known that Judy [Garland] died that night, we wouldn’t have had the raid,” explained Seymour Pine, former deputy inspector of Manhattan’s First Division of Public Morals, to the somewhat awestruck crowd at the New York Historical Society on June 2, 2004. The room filled with laughter. It was the first time most of us had witnessed the man responsible for leading the June 1969 raid on the Stonewall Inn credited with sparking the modern gay liberation movement (although activists such as Harry Hay, Barbara Gittings, Randy Wicker, and others from the Mattachine Society had been at it for years prior). And few knew what to make of the scene. Pine was speaking on a panel for David Carter’s book Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution. Introduced by moderator Eric Marcus as a man “who holds a special place in gay history,” the short 84-year-old former cop won over much of the crowd. “I don’t know why they are clapping,” I whispered to Bob Kohler, another Stonewall veteran, sitting next to me. “I guess time heals old wounds,” Kohler responded. (He would later describe Pine’s performance as “borscht-belt shtick.”) While former Mattachine Society president Dick Leisch and Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, both of whom witnessed the raid, were also on hand with the author, David Carter, the audience was clearly fixated on Pine. “What did police think of homosexuals in 1969?” asked Eric Marcus, the evening’s moderator. “Prejudice,” Pine explained. “No idea, no knowledge. To this day, I have no idea how to identify a homosexual . . . When clubs opened and were controlled by the mafia; the mafia was the focus.” A core contention of Carter’s new work is that Stonewall was controlled by the mafia; thus homosexuals and the mafia fell into the same criminal swatch. “During my two years in Manhattan, raids were common,” Pine elaborated. For Pine, gay bars offered an easy route for police to meet their required quotas. “The people were easy and quiet,” Pine continued, laughing to himself. “Man was measured by his arrests. He earned his clothes by arrests.” “Why did the raid take place after midnight?” a skeptical audience member inquired. “That wasn’t late. You have to understand that the gay population doesn’t come out till after midnight,” the cosmopolitan inspector explained to roars of laughter. “I would have loved to have gone to bed by 10 p.m.”

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At the event’s apex, Pine was complimented for his role in inspiring gay liberation’s birth. “If what I did helped liberate gay people, then I am happy I did it,” Pine reflected, wiping his eyes. While some in the crowd could be tolerant of curiosity about the man, praise for him was an entirely different matter. “To hear you be praised when you hurt so many gay lives is very difficult,” exclaimed gay journalist Andy Humm, standing up and pointing to the inspector. Humm seemed to be speaking for those who felt the crowd was more obsequious than necessary with a vice cop who was bragging about raiding some of the few spaces where homosexuals could congregate in a world that outlawed queer identity. “What changed after Stonewall?” author and transgender activist Leslie Feinberg asked. “Nothing. We still proceeded to close after-hours bars . . . We did succeed in closing Stonewall but had no effect on other places.” * * * As the panel concluded, some wandered back for drinks at the reception, yet a significant number of people lined up to meet the inspector and have him sign their books. I started to do the same but had second thoughts. This was a man who had just explained that police successfully maintained their arrest quotas by busting gay bars, whose patrons were “were easy and quiet.” The opinions of those who remained were mixed. One local activist confessed he felt a cold chill when he shook the inspector’s hand. The arrests, such as those that took place at the Stonewall, ruined lives. They were enough for him not to forgive the man responsible. After all, the police practice of arresting people for public lewdness was enough to put one out of a job or destroy a family. * * * During the ten years between Stonewall’s twenty-fifth and thirty-fifth anniversaries, the meaning of Stonewall had shifted as the assimilationists in favor of a “we’re just like them” gay politics have struggled against the radical activists over the legacy of the riot and the broad, multi-issuebased activism that accompanied it. A case in point involves the record of who was involved with the riot. Throughout the reception for Carter’s book, many paged through the index for the new Stonewall book to find no reference to Stonewall legend Sylvia Rivera, the transgender activist said to have thrown the first brick during the riots. At the time of her death in 2002, Rivera was recognized as the “Grand Dame” of the gay liberation and international transgender rights movements. Having spent her final years

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dividing her time between working in a kitchen that provided food to the homeless and successfully fighting for the City of New York to recognize the rights of transgender people, Rivera was a local hero. Her activism can be traced back to the days of Stonewall. Rivera worked with the Gay Activists Alliance in the early 1970s to push New York City to pass an antidiscrimination bill for gay people through the city council. In the final years of her life, she focused on getting the same done for transgender people. New York City’s transgender rights bill was passed within weeks of her death in 2002. Rivera lobbied for it from her deathbed. Throughout her career, Rivera looked to the legacy of Stonewall. But was she there? Well, that’s the sticky part. Martin Duberman wrote that Rivera was there, as does a thirtieth anniversary New York Times Magazine article on the raid. David Carter told me he was not able to find a single person who actually saw Rivera at Stonewall. “Marsha [P. Johnson, Rivera’s longtime lover] told Randy Wicker that she found Sylvia passed out on a park bench and told her about the raid after the first night,” Carter explained. “Three times, Marsha said Rivera was not there.” Whether she made an appearance any of the other nights is open to debate. As far as Carter is concerned, “There were six thousand people there throughout the six days,” yet no witnesses locate Rivera at the scene. While Carter collated 52 pages of stories about Stonewall from 1969, the first reference he could find for Rivera was a fading copy of the newspaper Gay Power, volume 1, from May 4, 1970. “The first time we see Rivera is in this article,” Carter explained, showing me the headline “Gay and Proud and Busted on 42nd Street,” with photos and a story about Rivera by Arthur Bell (writing under the pseudonym Arthur Irving Penn). In it, Rivera says she first became an activist with the Gay Activists Alliance, not the Gay Liberation Front as is often reported. Even her best friend, Bob Kohler, does not suggest she was there. But that’s beside the point. Kohler, who was a key source for the new work, wrote to Carter shortly after the book release party: I am not interested in whether she was or was not at Stonewall. Sylvia left behind a tremendous legacy, one that cannot and must not be ignored, for whatever reason. That you chose to do so is, I’m afraid, an injustice and a terrible insult to someone whose life had already been over-burdened with both. You will say that you were telling the story of STONEWALL and you had deduced she was not there . . . I would point out that the Stonewall portion was book-ended and there were many opportunities to include her, had you chosen to honor one of gay liberation’s fallen warriors. That you didn’t is, most certainly, “on you.” Sylvia died good, she will forever be remembered by those who loved her and The Sylvia Rivera Law Project, The Sylvia Rivera

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Food Pantry, and The Sylvia Rivera Shelter will remain as testaments to the fact that she was “always there” even though you might not have had the sensitivity to realize it.

Kohler had known Rivera since 1969, maintaining a friendship with the trans activist. And he was not about to stop just because Rivera was gone. Part of what I, like so many others, came to admire about Rivera was her audacity. She was willing to do whatever it took, including participation in direct action, to make a point, either when she was squatting on Manhattan’s West Side Piers or when she was organizing for those lost to antitrans violence at the end of her life. When we got arrested together in 1998 during the Matthew Shepard political funeral in New York, a bust came up for Rivera from the early 1970s. Yet months later, when a group of activists spent the night in Union Square in solidarity with the homeless who were losing their right to shelter, Rivera was there spending the night on the street as she had done so many times before. She was neither a careerist nor a single-identity activist. More to the point, it was fun being her friend. I think of Rivera as a Blanche Dubois sort of activist. She did not always tell the truth so much as what should have been the truth, winding her narrative into the larger story of the riot and the movement it represented. During the 33 years between Stonewall and her death, her life became intricately linked with the stories of transgender youth of color, who are said to have first fought the police’s harassment during the raid. A case in point was that of a trans woman of color named Marsha P. Johnson. Carter explains, “Sylvia came to tell Marsha’s story when Marsha could not.” Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries and Decades of Friendship The 1969 Stonewall riots and the emergence of the radical gay liberation movement ushered in a decade of astounding social and sexual exploration, which amounted to nothing less than a cultural revolution. Much of this exploration took shape through the extension of friendship networks and models of kinship (Bell, 1971; Nardi, 1999). Bob Kohler was a veteran of this era. He took part in the civil rights movement through the Congress of Racial Equality, the Stonewall riots, and the Gay Liberation Front; he continued to organize well into the 2000s with queer direct action groups, including SexPanic! and FUQ. Bob’s best friend was Sylvia Rivera. “This is the revolution,” Rivera once declared. For her, that revolution meant fighting back against the police, who had harassed her since her days as an 11-year-old transvestite working as a child prostitute on the streets of Times Square. Rivera was on hand for the first

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gay pride parade, the Christopher Street Liberation Day March, in 1970. With no roadmap, Rivera worked with the founding members of the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance, straddling these competing streams of the gay liberation movement. A willingness to engage in direct action was her claim to fame. The complicated texture of her friendships with Bob Kohler, Randy Wicker, and even Arthur Bell is intrinsic to the story of how social-justice-minded queers would split with assimilationistminded gay advocates who seemed to disavow Rivera’s defiant and bountiful direct-action-inspired multi-issue activism. Shortly after her death, her best friend, Bob Kohler, and I sat down to talk about his years of friendship with the activist who had come to be known as the “Grand Dame” of trans activism. Kohler recalled meeting Rivera a week or so after the New York City riots of June 1969: Sylvia was about 18 years old. She worked the streets; she worked FortySecond Street I don’t think in those days there were too many places that were tougher to work than Forty-Second Street. To say that Sylvia was one tough cookie was in no way an exaggeration. She was tough and she came on mean, and she was not likable. She had to push her way into the park crowd, where there was already a Sylvia, Cross-Eyed Sylvia. So Sylvia Rivera became Spanish Sylvia to the few that acknowledged her. But she just held her ground. She showed up, and she sat there, and she slept there. And she became very friendly with Marsha P Johnson. I had something of a nodding acquaintance with Sylvia. And then the night we were going to do the sit-in [at Weinstein Hall on University Place at New York University], I was rushing past the park, and I said, “You bitch, come with me!”

Undeterred by the language, Rivera followed Kohler. “And that was, according to her, when our friendship was born,” Kohler said. Over the next week, Rivera slept in Weinstein Hall, turning the space into a community hub. Kohler, who had an apartment nearby, dropped in daily. For Rivera and Kohler, much of their relationship was built around this struggle for a queer commons. “We were all sitting around doing whatever. And there was a long, long, long hall. And there was a doorway at the end, which led out to the street, like a back door. And suddenly that back door opened and this clamor, 10–12 policemen, came stomping in,” explained Kohler, recalling their raid. And they all lined up in a row and one of them said, “You people have ten seconds to leave this hall and the count starts now: ten . . .” [laughs] And they got to seven, and they take their rifles, and they cock their rifles. And we’ve got ten rifles pointed at us. And I’m saying, let’s get the fuck out of here. And

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Sylvia is saying, “Gimme a G . . .” That’s as far as she got. I said, “Leave by this door.” “I thought . . . ,” Sylvia started to say. “Never mind that. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the police have their guns cocked and pointed at us.” And the police have their vans parked, and their wagon was there. And we started to walk past that, and they just let us into the streets. From there, we walked into NYU yelling, “We shall overcome.”

While the occupation only lasted a week, that was enough time for relationships to form between members of the Gay Liberation Front, the Gay Activists Alliance, and others in the radical community (Bell, 1971). “I kind of think we’d known each other before that. But that was the big cementing of our friendship,” recalled Kohler. “I can remember Sylvia screaming ‘gay power,’ which was her war cry, before that.” In the weeks and years to come, Kohler would see Rivera constantly. He recalled, “Coming out of the Depression, I grew up saying the underdog ruled. You could not ignore the underdog. Sylvia being so mean and so nasty, and nobody liking her, I think she stood out. She was always wherever I was.” Arthur Bell (1971) of Gay Activists Alliance got to know Rivera during this same period. He attended the first Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) dance. Kohler was also there. Rivera welcomed everyone from the various chapters of her life. “This dance is for the people of the streets who are a part of our gay community,” noted Rivera (quoted in Bell, 1971, p. 157). Rivera hoped to bring others, such as trans people, sex workers, and the homeless street youth who had fought in the riots, into the often class-bound movement. “Let’s give them a better chance than I had when I came out. I don’t know if any of you ever lived out in the streets. So do many of the transvestites who make up STAR . . . Winter is coming, and we need money for clothes and rent,” she concluded (pp. 157–58). Rivera and those in STAR eventually found their own space, the STAR house, a squat in the East Village of Manhattan. Bell viewed the space as “the most interesting and lively house in New York” (p. 189). Such opportunities to build relationships, friendships, and conversations and to live communally were all ingredients in “the never ending process toward self liberation,” mused Bell, who viewed Rivera as one of his closest friends in the movement (p. 191). “I saw Sylvia until GAA had that big thing in Washington Square Park and Sylvia left the movement [in 1973],” explained Kohler. “And then I would get phone calls from her, and she would come down [to New York City]. ‘Can I have ten dollars?’ ‘Can you put me up in a hotel room?’ ‘Can you do this?’ ‘Can you do that?’ That went on constantly. Well, not constantly because she didn’t come down that much. And I realized that I was never going to get away from her.” And over the years, Kohler never did. “I

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always said in retrospect that we were the oddest couple.” The two remained friends for the next three decades. Her relationship with Kohler was far smoother than her relationships with others in the movement, particularly Randy Wicker, a veteran of the Mattachine Society. Starting off as nemeses, Rivera and Wicker would gradually become the best of friends, but not without a few fights along the way. “Sylvia was hot,” recalled Wicker. She was on heroin at the time. I didn’t know that. She was loud, brash; she would come into GAA [Gay Activists Alliance]. She was always outspoken. But politically, she was way out left. I thought she was absolutely obnoxious. And I was transphobic. So I was a gay reporter. Sylvia was this unpleasant person from GAA I knew as disruptive. There was a conference at CUNY. And I referred to Sylvia as “Mr. Sylvia Rivera,” dripping with contempt. What I didn’t know was 15 years later, Sylvia read the article and absolutely went crazy. She hated it. I was on a program with her in 1988 at the Community Center, and she began screaming at me. And I was in my conservative drag. And I just stood there on the stage. And Marsha P. Johnson, who used to live with me, followed her out and said, “You should give Randy a chance. He’s not that bad a person. He’s given me a home for the last ten years.” And Rivera said, “That nasty, that fascist, that . . .” Oh she hated me, right.

Yet their relationship changed when Rivera moved back to the City: Marsha got murdered in 1992 [during Pride weekend]. Her body came up at the bottom of the river off Christopher Street. I went out to the church for her memorial. Marsha had a great little following. Four hundred people came out. The people who knew Marsha first would speak first—that was Marsha’s sisters and brothers. And the next was Bob Storm from WBAI. And Sylvia Rivera. Because when Sylvia was a ten- or twelve-year-old prostitute in Times Square, Marsha was about 18 years old and took her under her wing and would go and sit with her in the cafeteria. And she had a special bond with Marsha. Sylvia Rivera would be ahead of me. That was the way it was. So when Sylvia showed up for Marsha’s service, I went over and I said, “Sylvia, for Marsha we have to bury the hatchet.” And then I had put a little letter in the funeral packet from her dog saying, “Oh Marsha, I miss you coming home at four in the morning and taking me for a walk.” And Sylvia said, “I read that little leaflet from the dog writing her a letter, and it was the first time I could see that maybe I could like you.” And so the police gave us an escort, and we walked down to the river; there was four hundred people. We took half of Marsha’s ashes with the family, the sisters in either side and the brother carrying the banner; we went down and threw the ashes in the water. In the process of all this, Sylvia and I began talking civilly. And she told me that it was a gay homeless encampment [at the pier where they stood]. And then she started coming by the store. I always thought she was there to

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ask for money, but she never did. And Bob Kohler would help her out, but I never did. I said I would like to do a video about the encampment. And she gave me a tour of her homeless encampment. It was the best video I ever did. And they were drinking Green Lightning. And in the process of all this, she says to me, “If Mr. Wicker would give me a shot at working at the store.” I had these little gift dolls, which needed stringing, so I thought, I’ll give her a shot if she wants to help with this. And not only did she do this, she was a unique and very great employee. If she’d done what I had asked her to do, she’d look around and notice that the showcase was filthy, if the floor needed sweeping, if something needed to be put away over here or put back over here. And you didn’t have to say to her, “Do this.” To my amazement, she turned out to be a very good employee. Now, she smelled of liquor. She was a functional alcoholic. I never saw her take a drink. And she worked for me for a total of three, four, or five years. Initially, it was off the books. And then it was Giuliani and she was welfare, so she could not be on the books, except you had to work for your welfare check. So I put her on the books. In the process of this, she worked more and more regularly. She became the manager of my store. Some people asked questions about this person named Sylvia. She was always wonderful; the way she would go and talk, she would always mention the Mattachine People, mentioning there were people before the Stonewall, and she’d mention Barbara Gittings and Randy Wicker. And she was really gracious.

Rivera gradually re-engaged in activism in the late 1990s. “She met Julia, and she was not very active. And then she started working with Randy,” recalled Bob Kohler. “Then she said, ‘Let me know; I want to come back.’ ‘Tuesday night you come, and, you know, we’ll get you started again.’ And then she stopped the drinking, and she stopped the drugs ’cause Julia never did.” In September 1997, Rivera spoke at the SexPanic! rally at the Christopher Piers. Looking out at the water where Marsha P. Johnson had died, she wondered about the souls that were out there. She said she had mixed feelings about the space because it had been a safe harbor for the youth, and it was where Marsha was. “She did live down there in a cardboard box when she first came back,” explained Bob Kohler. Rivera helped organize a squat of homeless youth on the West Side Piers. “She didn’t have to be there,” noted Kohler. “Others did have to. She choose to be there as a political statement. And she did.” It was anything but a safe place to be. Terrible things happened down there. There were two factions that lived down there. One was the thugs, and one was where Sylvia was, the political people. But out on the peninsula, that’s where you had killers. They would try to move in, and Sylvia would just stand there and say, ‘Come on! Come on!’ So most of them were so heavily

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drugged, they just stayed on the peninsula. They didn’t know if it was zero below. It didn’t matter to that crowd. But the crowd along the highway, that was Sylvia’s group. And it was insane. They had the designated kitchen, the designated living room. And in the summer, they put out beach chairs and sat out on the veranda. Unbelievable.

Wicker’s video of the space shows the ingenious ways people utilized it, which included setting up electrical cords from the electric pole. “Sylvia had [the] TV going,” recalled Wicker. “Some of them were there for a long, long time.” The crumbling piers have been describing as symbols of a dying country. “Well, when your population, or a part of it, has to live in cardboard boxes. I don’t know,” mused Kohler. “A dying country or a dying caring. I have to be honest. Years ago when I was coming out, people were kinder. They really were. People are not kind today. I’m talking about gay people too. People would say, ‘how can you be friends with Sylvia?’” Still, being friends with Rivera transformed the lives of countless activists, particularly Kohler and Wicker. Wicker explained, After the homeless encampment, what brought us together was the storm of the century; 1996, I think it was, 36 inches of snow. Gay pier—they had a Christmas Tree down there. But Sylvia didn’t have any place to go, so I took in Sylvia, John Riley, and John Stewart. And Sylvia Rivera slept in a reclining chair in my living room. Sylvia ended up when my shop was closing down; she got a job at MCC [Metropolitan Community Church] working in a food pantry for $25.00 an hour. And do you know, she said she felt guilty. She said she felt like she was abandoning me. I said, “I am so glad you finally have a job, paying you what you deserve. You’re going to be able to get your own apartment with this.” She quit drinking. She got a relationship going. Working was what she wanted to do, feeding the homeless.

The story of Wicker’s relationship with Rivera was also a redemptive narrative. “And not only that,” mused Wicker. “What’s so great about it is how many people can say that in their life, their worst enemy became [one of] their best friends?” “Sylvia’s shining moments were the final three years of her life,” suggested Kohler, reflecting on Rivera’s comeback years in New York City from 1997 to 2002. Just as all the pieces of her life were coming together, Rivera was diagnosed with sclerosis of the liver. “Liver cancer just came up from her past,” explained Wicker, “and struck her down.”

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“She knew she had hepatitis, but when she stopped drinking, suddenly the liver went wild,” Bob Kohler explained. “But see, I contradict myself because perhaps if she hadn’t stopped, she wouldn’t have had those three or four productive years when she became idolized in the community. She was intelligent. She knew what she was talking about when she talked about the Defense of Marriage Act. She knew. People were talking with her. She looked like an old school teacher.” When Amanda Milan, a trans woman, was killed on Forty-Second Street in the summer of 2000, Rivera organized two summers’ worth of protests over her death. “I saw her work for months.” recalled Wicker. “All these people that were all isolated. And she brought together the first march for transgender people in the world. In the late 1990s in New York City, they marched down to Foley Square in Lower Manhattan. And she brought together about 100– 150 people. It was so impressive,” Wicker continued. “And she brought another constituency into it. And that would not have come out [without Rivera],” noted Kohler. Throughout the process, Rivera linked the violence Milan experienced with a system of antitrans oppression dating back to the Stonewall era. While she may have even embellished a little bit during interviews, Rivera never let the truth get between her and a good story. Along the way, she became an icon for transgender youth who could claim a few others of their own, as she highlighted the legacy of the street youth who fought during Stonewall and who continue to struggle to find their place in the popular culture. Influenced by enduring relationships with her girlfriend, Wicker, Reverend Pat from the Metropolitan Community Church, and the queer kids who idolized her, Rivera’s life took a turn. “What she accomplished, she couldn’t have accomplished had she stayed that way,” recalled Kohler, alluding to the years Rivera was an alcoholic. “There are no two ways about it. This was her payback for all the hardships.” Rivera was making sense of her life. “And she had so much to make up for, and she did,” Kohler continued. Whenever I saw Bob speak in public, he would introduce Rivera, saying, “Sylvia’s my best friend, and she’s stopped drinking.” “That made her feel animated,” Kohler elaborated. “She liked that a lot. She also liked saying, ‘I called him grandpa, and he called me bitch.’ She loved telling the story over and over of me yelling in the park: ‘Come on bitch, get out of the park’ [before the Weinstein Hall sit-in]. These things became like calling somebody else darling. We had an enormous affection for each other, and it just built over the years.” “On her deathbed, she summoned the Empire State Pride Agenda [ESPA],” recalled Wicker. “And Matt Foreman and these people, whatever

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they said to her, they made her happy. They probably lied to her and double-crossed her. But she was happy. She really, from her deathbed, politicked for inclusion of transgender people.” Kohler concurred: “One of the greatest things for her was when Matt Foreman and the new head of Empire State Pride Agenda came to the hospital and talked to her about the nondiscrimination bill (moving through Albany). Did he lie? I told him that she was dying. And he said they would do everything they could do.” Within three months of her death, the New York City Council passed, and the mayor signed, the transgender rights bill for which Rivera had spent three decades fighting. After her death, Rivera was remembered as perhaps the most significant trans activist of the gay liberation era, with Bob Kohler and Randy Wicker recalling her legacy as they pressed the movement forward. “To me, the saddest part was that it took Sylvia that long,” Kohler recalled. “She would talk about getting sober, and I said, ‘don’t.’ I was always scared because people I knew who had been street alcoholics, the minute they straightened out, their body just went crazy. And they were dead, not too many, a year or two later. And I really do think that all of the alcohol ingested, it almost preserves, or masks, something strange. It has happened too many times to people I have known.” Stonewall as History or Myth and Legacies The treatment of Rivera in the history of activism around Stonewall points to core questions about the historian’s craft (dating back to the days of Hesiod and Herodotus). There are those who suggest history should be written as a social science, while others suggest history should be written as a compelling narrative. “Myths have a life of their own,” Carter confessed to me. “It’s like the Gospels. I don’t think it will ever be settled . . . So much of the controversy you hear is this great unpunctuated oral history, with lots of inconsistencies.” For many of us, those inconsistencies are part of the essence of the Stonewall story and myth. By locating our lives and struggles within this narrative, we become part of it, and our struggles take on greater meaning. Within this context, no one is going to be completely happy when the myth is reduced to its inanimate historical details. Jim Fourrat, another Stonewall veteran referred to by Duberman but not Carter, is known to have said, “If you have the choice between a myth or fact, you go with the myth.” Yet in recent years, the story of Stonewall has taken on countless new meanings as the relationship between queers and the status quo shifts and evolves. My experience of knowing Bob Kohler and watching his friendship

Figures 5.1, 5.2 Scenes from the 2014 Drag March Top, activist carrying image of Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera; bottom, Randy Wicker Source: Photos by the author

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with Rivera reminds me that friendship blurs lines, opening spaces for us all. Rivera did just that, noted several observers at her funeral, pushing the story of gay liberation into a different kind of experience in living and being—between friends, blurred identities, and expanding movements. These friendships made an indelible mark on this city. Each year at the Drag March, activists carry pictures of Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, their abundant, Blanche DuBois–like narratives pointing to a more open, liberatory story in which all of us can take part. Chapter 6 of this story recalls a particularly eventful moment of this yearly ritual.

6

From Drag to Occupy Wall Street Street Protest, Gay Marriage, and Resistance to a Neoconservative City

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hat do riots, unpermitted parades, and street parties have to do with friendship? For many of us, the answer is simple: hooking up for a night or getting together for a march. Friendships can be fleeting and temporary but also important. They can function as temporary autonomous zones of relationships, supporting ways of being that expand beyond social controls. Here friends take to the streets and do what those with similar affinities do: celebrate being alive together while blurring lines between people, spaces, and movements in time. This was my experience of the Drag March of 2011. Bob Kohler and Sylvia Rivera were no longer taking part, but their memories remained in the streets. Kohler still seemed to be in the evening shadows, applauding the drag queens marching to Sheridan Square as he had done for years. Randy Wicker was still there, as were thousands of other drag queens. In a side note on its coverage of the gay marriage equality vote in Albany in June 2011, the New York Times reported, “A drag parade on Friday from Tompkins Square Park in the East Village to Stonewall in the West Village also went on as planned” (Harris and Quinlan, 2011). That parade in question, of course, was composed of my friends and I dancing in the streets in various states of burlesque, cross-dress, undress, and so on. More than an afterthought, the annual Drag March is a central event for many (Ariel, 2011). “This is my favorite celebration during the whole of LGBTQ Month,” noted Guncle (2011). It was mine too. Rather than a choreographed parade with corporate sponsors, crowd-controlling cops, and barricades separating spectators from participants, the annual Drag

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March intertwines carnival and spectacle, friend and stranger. Everything flows into itself, with few strict demarcations between participant and observer or street and sidewalk. This eighteenth Drag March was both a street party and a critical mass, opening public space for everyone as our cavalcade cascaded through the streets and made history at the Stonewall once again. “The Drag March started as a protest against the organizers of the Gay Pride Parade (officially the LGBT Pride Parade),” notes Guncle (2011), offering a little history. “During the 25th Anniversary of the Stonewall riots, this very white male-influenced and weirdly conservative group thought that drag and leather were no longer appropriate for the annual parade. [T]hey ignored the fact that it was trannies and drag queens who were the majority of rioters at Stonewall.” From here, people started planning, and the Drag March was born (Gallagher, 1994). Every year since 1994, queers in New York City have kicked off Pride weekend with this unpermitted neighborhood street procession. I first attended in 1999, when the rumblings of the nascent alter-globalization movement overlapped with some 12 years of queer ACTing Up in the city. The global justice movement would make its national debut during trade talks in Seattle later that fall, the burlesque of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP)’s rambunctious queer political tradition finding its way into much of the playful “tactical frivolity” of the ascendant movement (Shepard, 2009). The plan for the 2011 march was no different from the plans of other years. “Drag is what one makes it. Dress for success? Dress down? Undress? Under duress? Anyone can join in,” a flyer declared. “All it takes is a well spent dollar at your favorite second hand clothing store and a dream. Brought to us by the New York Radical Faeries and The Church Ladies for Choice.” Time’s Up!, a cycling group I worked with, promoted the event on its website: “Come ready to dance. Remember nothing says resistance like drag queens in high heels. Tonight we’ll have hundreds of them, plus a sound bike!” The group planned to bring a sound bike and iPod to ignite a dance party immediately following the march, contributing in its own way to the festive celebration of colors, streets, and New York City’s unique culture of resistance. As usual, the plan was to meet at Tompkins Square Park (Eighth Street entrance) at 7 p.m. and revel in the East Village summer sun before marching west to Stonewall Place/Christopher Street. That Friday night, I rode out from my house in Carroll Gardens, in South Brooklyn, up to Williamsburg to meet some others from Time’s Up! to gather up the sound system. In our interview years earlier, Eric Rofes had suggested that one can make friendships anywhere, but his most important friendships were from movements. When I showed up at the Time’s Up!

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space in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, just below the Williamsburg bridge, I was struck by the scene. I did not know Keegan Stephan well. But he walked down to let me in. Opening the door, he had a beer in his hand and was wearing a gold one-piece bathing suit he had cut in half with his long hair down. Looking at me, he scratched and tucked; he looked like a tough guy with his beard and long hair, ready to ride—very gender-fuck. Another volunteer with the group, Joe, was there to help set up the sound bike, a bike equipped with the equivalent of a car stereo on its back. He wore pink hose, a wig, and a T-shirt that declared, “Trans Power.” “I think I was working on bikes again when you and Joe showed up,” recalled Stephan. “What is great about that space is to be able to work in that space and have people like you and Joe show up and start talking with me about things. Joe came to hook up the sound bike, and he was in drag and looked great. And you showed up. And both of your energy was so inspiring that I . . . was brought into that movement that night because of my friendship with you guys.” “Come Sail Away” and “I Want to Be Free” blared out of the sound bike speakers as we rode through the fog across the Williamsburg Bridge into the city. Onlookers screamed with approval as they heard the sound bike. “It was joyous,” continued Stephan. “And then we rolled into the march, and everyone was thrilled to see us. And sort of the broader community was plugged in; people I had worked with in the Reverend Billy campaign, people that I know from Rainforest Relief, and other direct action groups were all there.” Harmonie Moore, also known as Brian Griffin, greeted us and offered us an iPod full of drag anthems for the dance party. I loved my first glance of the Faeries, drag queens, and village vagabonds in their colors, costumes, and glitter at the park; they were a mix that felt like a reunion of the Cockettes and the cast from Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Anarchists mugged with drag queens, trannies with hipsters, hippies with crusty punks, and Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and homeless people cavorted together, playing drums, dancing, blowing bubbles, and sharing space in the nether zone of the East Village. At around 7:45, the Faeries called for those in attendance to circle. Everyone gathered and held hands as various Radical Faeries welcomed the Witches of the East, West, South, and North, with Faeries strolling through the circle to remind everyone why we were there. Harmonie Moore passed out lyric sheets for “Under the Rainbow” for after the parade, with information on the back about New Alternatives, a social services program for homeless queer youth. Street youth were the ones who ignited the riot after all. And the bikers, Church Ladies, and Faeries meandered out of the park, west on St. Mark’s Place.

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“We were all bonded and one,” explained Stephan. “And as we marched, other people that I knew in my life were marching with other people that I knew who joined in.” People always cheer for the march. As they leaned out of their windows, a friend of mine said he felt more like he was at Mardi Gras than at the march. It certainly felt that way, particularly when the ride intersected with “Queerball,” a radical street party organized by members of the Rude Mechanical Orchestra (RMO), who joined the drummers in the march, playing “When the Saints Go Marching In.” More and more different groups converged, with the Time’s Up! Central Park Traffic Calming Ride intersecting with Critical Mass at Broadway—all headed West. At one point, a Japanese dance troupe joined the parade, dancing along with us. Harmonie Moore led everyone in a rendition of the Mary Tyler Moore theme song: “Love is all around, no need to waste it. You can have a town, why don’t you take it.” The sun was setting in the summer sky. Few knew all the lyrics, yet most everyone joined in for the chorus, “You’re gonna make it after . . . You’re gonna make it after all!” throwing their hands in the air. The Church Ladies for Choice sang “God Is a Lesbian” to the tune of “God Save the Queen.” Others chanted, “Arrest us. Just try it. Remember, Stonewall was a riot!” Some screamed, “We don’t want to marry; we just want to fuck!” When we arrived at the Stonewall, everyone sang the familiar words: Somewhere over the rainbow Way up high, There’s a land that I heard of Once in a lullaby.

Hokey, but many are still moved to connect with this piece of history (Ariel, 2011). There remains a utopian hope in the lyrics and their dream that there could be a different world out there. The riot being commemorated, after all, took place on the night of Judy Garland’s funeral (Weinstein, 2009). As everyone sang, for a little while, we were all friends, connected for a moment in time. Hanging out in the street at the Stonewall, the Radical Faeries and RMO played drums while the dancing crowd swelled. After the sun had gone down, some meandered into the bar for cocktails. I ran into one of the “Yes Men” covered in sparkles. We talked about how hot the march had been. “So much has been good this year,” he said nodding and looking around. After a couple of songs, Joe turned on the sound bike to play “Fly Robin Fly.” A few Faeries started a makeshift ballet performance in the streets. The crowd expanded when “Dancing Queen” came on. As the street party

Figures 6.1, 6.2 Throngs of people in drag march west from the East Village to the Stonewall, where they sang “Somewhere over the Rainbow” Source: Photos by the author and Eric McGregor

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started growing, the police moved in, first to get Joe to turn down the music and then to push the crowd out of the streets. The year before, we had scheduled the dance party for 10 p.m., after a brief bike ride, allowing the crowds to leave only to pump up the sound system on our return. The crowd reconverged. Joe and company danced on cars. At the 2011 march, there was no such pause in the action. Instead, Drag March participants collaborated to hold the space. Run-ins with police are not uncommon at the Drag March. In 2008, the unpermitted action was also just about shut down before it could begin (Shepard, 2010). In 2011, the police were in no mood to be killed with kindness. After the group sang “Somewhere over the Rainbow” at the Stonewall, they pushed forward. The crowd started to chant, “Whose streets? Our streets!” Joe pushed the sound system further into the crowd, and the police tried to arrest Yotom, an activist from Time’s Up! His friends separated them, getting in the way of the police crackdown as he stood on a police car. With a little help from the crowd, Yotom proceeded to literally unarrest himself, pulling away from the police and exiting the scene, only to return in a different outfit. Unable to detain him, the police attempted to confiscate his bicycle. “That is not your property,” said Bill, another organizer with Times Up!, to the police, who ignored him. He insisted, “That is not your bike. You cannot take it.” As he spoke, another bike supporter inserted the pedal of his bike into the wheel of Yotom’s bike and pulled backward. The scene became more and more chaotic as the push and pull between the police and activists escalated. Activists were eventually able to grab control of the bike. Meanwhile, a gentleman in a white wedding dress started talking with the police. Once again, the police were going on about us not having a permit. A few of us noted that the First Amendment is a permit for those wanting to “peaceably assemble” and enjoy a little of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” “You can’t do this tonight,” the man in the wedding dress implored as negotiations intensified. Another observer would note, “We did this last year without a permit. We let the cars through and kept on dancing.” The man in the wedding dress chimed in: “They are voting on gay marriage in Albany right now. And this is the anniversary of Stonewall. You don’t want a riot do you?” “The pushback was all very spontaneous,” noted Jessica Rechtschaffer of the Radical Homosexual Agenda, who also took part. “There was very little traffic, a great vibe in the air. Traffic could pass. And the cops started pushing. People realized this was stupid and unnecessary.” “We were on Christopher Street dancing in front of the Stonewall Inn when the law was passed legalizing gay marriage,” Stephan recalled. “We went nuts. The police came up and tried to get us to shut it down. Do

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you want a riot on your hands? This is the Drag March, and gay marriage was just passed. Let us revel. It was a crazy and glorious night. And all the stories of my friendships from that night—there was me, you, and Joe. Tim Doody was there. Our good friend Yotom had an epic, epic night that night. He came out in drag, and then he jumped on a cop car. That was a huge night for him,” Stephan gushed, full of wonder at what the evening became. By this point, the sound bike was booming. The policeman eventually left and went back to community affairs. “We were able to take the street while the police fell back,” Rechtschaffer continued. “It was a glorious night.” It was getting closer to 10 p.m., and Christopher Street was a full-blown street party. “Express Yourself,” “YMCA,” and “Macho Man” all boomed from the sound system. After 10 p.m., rumblings came from the bar that gay marriage had passed in Albany, and the crowd broke out in applause and cheers. People wanted a New York song, so Joe put on “New York State of Mind” by Jay Z, and all of Christopher Street sang along. Beyoncé’s “All the Single Ladies” drew roars from people in the crowd, who reveled in her reference to marriage in the campy song: “If you liked it, then you should have put a ring on it.” “I was honored to be there DJing on such a historic occasion,” Joe noted. “I feel like that night was historic,” recalled Stephan. “That was also a huge night for me in becoming a fuller activist and a fuller human being. And part of that was that first moment when I was being a bike mechanic, which was the role I had in the group, and then you guys, your positive energies and friendship, drawing me out and letting me access this other part of myself as an activist and human being, which is a big part of myself. I love it. I revel in it.” Several activists suggested that the coordination between everyone who pushed back against the police, who wanted to take control of the street, was instrumental in the activists taking it instead. This wasn’t always the case in other years. “But this year, there were more diehard queers from the street party not about to give in,” noted Rechtschaffer. And everyone supported each other. It was a feeling Rechtschaffer, an observer of many movements, had seen around the world. “Arab Spring, too, people were pushed and people were pushed, and then they said enough. Stonewall was organic. Tunisia was organic. These movements were not preplanned. They occurred very rapidly as people got fed up with the status quo. In Tunisia, the uprising began when a vegetable seller set himself on fire to protest corruption and oppression. In Egypt, a man was beaten to death for filming police brutality.” And the people there pushed back too. “I still believe

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in direct action,” noted Rechtschaffer. “But you must never let up until you have a victory.” Yet it takes a multitude. Across the city, people were enjoying a warm night in June. Upon hearing the news of the governor signing the bill, Visitors at the El Jardin del Paraiso Community Garden in the East Village burst into a roar of celebration. Confetti streamed through the streets. People opened windows and cheered. What a lovely city; it’ll break your heart and open your heart, I thought, looking into the night. Even the most cynical of the radicals reveled in the moment. While many of us have called for queer life to extend beyond calls for legalizing marriage and military service, we were still happy with the blow against homophobia (Serwer, 2010). This was a victory for a far more tolerant New York. Cultural anthropologist Victor Turner (1969) describes moments such as this as “liminal spaces.” That night opened up a new sort of energy for the city, an in-between space. Walking through New York City, it felt like everything had changed. “I felt that too,” confessed Stephan. “Things changed that night for me, and for the city, and the state, and for people who had wanted to marry their partners for years.” Leaving the Stonewall, I said good-bye to some of the RMO folks, noting the Church Ladies had clinic defense the following day. The RMO would be there as well. Throughout the night, many agreed that while the gay marriage victory was an important precedent, it also represented the most conventional element of the gay agenda, a conservative policy for a conservative age. A queer politics of friendship, of families, and of tribes of choice was preferable to many over emulating docile heterosexist models. Years before the decision, Ryan Conrad put together a Facebook page collecting critical essays on the politics of equality, which eventually appeared in an edited volume titled Against Equality: Queer Critiques of Marriage (2010). Conrad builds on a generation of queer activists—from the Gay Liberation Front to SexPanic!, Queer Fish to Queeruption RHA. The authors argue that marriage equality represents a privatized version of gay life, a turning away from public sexual cultures, outlaw status, and the creative alternatives to marriage once offered by gay liberation. Many favor gay life as a freedom not to marry, as John Waters famously quipped. They see marriage as a spectacle that dulls the queer imagination while excluding social outsiders, precluding the multiplicity of friendships Foucault describes. “Marriage equality . . . will end up being more marriage inequality,” argues Kate Bornstein (2010, p. 11). “There’s no reaching out beyond sexuality and gender expression to make room for people who aren’t just like us.” The spectacle limits political space for single parents, promiscuous queers, sadomasochists, outlaws, or social outsiders in much the same way

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that the ongoing raids on public sexual culture limit the physical spaces for those who build their lives with social networks alternate to marriage and family. “Make room for genderqueers, polyamorists, radical faeries, butches, femmes, drag queens, drag kings, and other dragfuck too fabulous to describe,” counsels Bornstein in an open letter to marriage advocates. “You cannot afford—politically, economically, or morally—to leave out a single person who bases a large part of their identity on being sex positive or is in any way a proponent of gender anarchy” (p. 14). Rather than cater to a model that has failed so many and created so much misery and abuse, those involved in Against Equality favor a politics of “our most fantastic queer histories.” “Marriage is a coercive state structure that perpetuates racism and sexism through forced family and gender norms,” argue Dean Spade and Craig Willse (2010, pp. 19–20). For these critics, queer life means something more bountiful than emulating tired heterosexual rituals. Throughout the evening of the marriage decision, some partied, and others posted updates on Facebook. My friend, ACT UP veteran Jay Blotcher, posted that he was “celebrating the legal victory with the man whose courage sparked the marriage equality movement in New York State: New Paltz Mayor Jason West.” Many activists such as Blotcher have spent years reconciling the converging and diverging dynamics of queer life through multiple forms of AIDS activism, harm reduction, and struggles for marriage equality. Such activism is not an “either-or” effort. “Three cheers for the trailblazers!” posted Andy Humm. “And let’s not forget that GAA [Gay Activists Alliance] invaded the NY marriage bureau and shut it down in 1971 . . . It has been a long fight and is far from over.” For Blotcher and Humm, gay marriage is just one part of a larger social struggle. Yet the goals of the GAA-focused agenda continue to conflict with those in favor of a Gay Liberation Front (GLF)–style multi-issue organizing approach (Teal, 1971). Reflecting on this decade-long divide, it is useful to recall that GLF imploded within a year of the riots, while GAA lasted almost a decade (Bell, 1971; Kantrowitz, 1977/1996). “The best combination was both,” notes Blotcher, who was friends with both GAA and GLF members during his years with ACT UP. Which one was better? GLF showed the full fury of what queers could do. GLF had a multifaceted agenda, got a begrudging acknowledgement from the Black Panthers. GAA was a bit more pragmatic and had some significant wins. You have to wonder which was right. I don’t know. It is a question that doesn’t have an answer really. ACT UP faced the same thing: stay pure or sit at the policy table as Treatment and Data was able to do. Sometimes sitting

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at the table is useful. Treatment and Data got a lot done by not being purist. But many felt they left people behind when they did so.

“I am fighting for marriage,” argued Blotcher, who is able to straddle both sides of this political divide, supporting both safer promiscuity and marriage equality. “But it is a rickety institution. There is something wrong in this country that someone who is married should get better treatment or benefits, whether gay or straight. This institution needs serious reform. And what is all this monogamy bullshit?” Aware of all these conflicts, I still felt like something had changed in people’s hearts and minds with this little moment, even with the limitations of legal precedents that so often fail to protect citizens when push comes to shove. The celebration that followed the passing of the 1986 antidiscrimination bill in New York City did little to protect people with HIV from eviction or defamation. Old problems would remain. And the complications of building community through social networks of friends and public space remained appealing and vexing. As I rode my bike back home across the bridge the night of the vote, the NYPD was busy raiding the Eagle on West Twenty-Eighth Street as a decades-old quality-of-life crusade churned forward. The raid was more than a show of force by the NYPD; it was a push by the mayor to steamroll visible signs of public sexual culture (Moss, 2011). The effort was part of a decade-long class cleansing, sanitizing the public commons, starting in Times Square and moving outward throughout the city. “The common focus of state intervention has been on eliminating visible manifestations of poverty and deviance (both racial and national) from urban spaces,” notes sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein (2007). The raid on the Eagle merely extends the process of pushing out signs of difference in favor of a blandified urbanism, a suburbanizing of the queer imagination. Marriage equality and state-sponsored harassment of kinky spaces amounts to a homogenization of urban space. “Mainstream gays have respect of the public at large, but only if they mimic those values,” notes Blotcher, acknowledging that the process divides good gays from bad. “You’re gonna see that dichotomy more and more.” Looking at a gay marriage post in the New York Times of two Republicans getting married, he would moan, “We fought so hard in gay liberation to open the suffocating closet doors. And yet look what fell out: conservative homos. And they end up marrying partners who look like themselves—queasy gay narcissism at its best. Blech!” Others would argue that the practice of friendship opened a more intriguing, messy space for everyone. The morning after the bill’s passage, I met Harmonie Moore, who had been out partying till 5 a.m. in Brooklyn for clinic defense. Several of the Church Ladies for Choice as well as the RMO and Brooklyn Pro Network

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were on hand for clinic defense at the Brooklyn Ambulatory Clinic on Forty-Third Street and Third Avenue. Members of a local Catholic church were also on hand, replete with rosaries and crucifixes, ready to harass those women seeking health care services, in some cases including abortion. Both the “antis” and Church Ladies vie for their space, singing songs, mocking each other, and entertaining the troops. My friend Steve, who volunteers as a clinic escort, remarked that these Saturdays are like Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner in the old Saturday morning cartoons: they punch their clock in the morning, greet each other, fight all day, and clock out. The spectacle is all too familiar. And by 10 a.m., the antis had filed out, having harassed the community enough, praying and snapping photos. I left to attend an antifracking rally, while members of the Church Ladies left to get lunch and recuperate before the Dyke March later that afternoon. Like the Drag March, the Dyke March tends to be an unpermitted affair, inviting the wrath of the NYPD, which follows its own parade permit rule that groups of fifty or more must apply for a permit to gather. “Three times during the march, NYPD police officers assaulted marshals by grabbing them and tearing them apart forcefully,” noted members of the NYC Dyke March Committee on Facebook after the action. “This is not OK. This is another example of the NYPD’s complete disrespect for NYC’s citizens especially women.” The following day, a Sunday, Reverend Billy and the Church of Earthalujah held a community service at Theatre 80 in the East Village. The theme of the event was “same-sex-a-lujah!” In previous years, the Church held “unmarriage until gay marriage” events in Central Park, in which unmarriage ceremonies took place for heterosexual couples to unmarry themselves until marriage was available for everyone. “I guess we don’t have to do another one this year,” declared the performance artist, dressed in his own brand of drag as a televangelist-turned-environmental-crusader. Many in the choir had participated in the Drag March, bringing that vibe to the show and looking as if they were auditioning for Hair. Their décor, the up-is-down quality of the carnival of the present, and the celebration of gender-play, of difference, only contributed to the liminal feeling in the air. “Life is not as determined as we would all like to think,” one of the choir members declared early in the show. “There is a lot more randomness out there. Sometimes that is the best way to do things.” The Reverend’s show also pointed to a larger need for social connection among bodies of friends and communities across the city. “They are trying to tell us we cannot afford human services,” the Reverend lamented, commenting on the Koch brothers and their assault on the public sector and public services. Reverend Billy’s shows challenge the idea of shopping as a form of citizenship. “With this mirth is a highly serious message,” explained

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Benjamin Barber, who was sainted at the 2011 show, pointing out the limits of such consumer-based models of citizenship and their inability to help people actually feel whole or connected with others. “Shopping is not a sin, it is a symptom. Spending billions on things we don’t want, on wars in Libya, Iraq, this is death shopping, part of a destructive interdependence. We need a constructive interdependence. Even I shop, I must confess. It’s part of pluralistic democracy. It just can’t be all we do. We must also play and prey and walk in the woods.” Today, much of our public life and politics is absorbed into buying and selling. “You are not doing it, it is doing you,” noted Barber in a thank-you speech at a public event. “We need a cathedral of constructive interdependence to challenge late-20th century capitalism, replacing shopping with interdependence.” Perhaps this cathedral of interdependence is what the politics of friendship is all about; it suggests we build communities through interconnected social ties rather than institutional channels, such as marriage or formalized institutional arrangements. But today, spaces to build such interconnections are under attack. And the public commons is being transformed into a shopping space. At various points during the show, the choir put on its own drag performance, with the ladies exchanging their choir robes for mustaches and bow ties, and the men, their robes for garter belts. Looking at this choir, I started to think the whole world had gone queer, including the movement still struggling for access to public space. The spectators were eventually invited onto the stage, blurring lines between spectator and performer. Many worried that the politics of marriage diminished such possibilities. In the days after the vote in Albany, the divide between “good gay” and “bad gay” expanded with praise for the charmed few who chose marriage and labels of “criminal” and “drug dealer” for street youth who built community in public space; “Chaos on Christopher: Iconic Village Stretch Overrun by Drug Dealers, Prostitutes, Violent Youths,” reported the Daily News only days later (Schapiro, 2011). Many of these are youth of color who have used the Christopher Street Pier for more than a generation. And every few years, the city whips up a panic over these youth, justifying more aggressive policing of social outsiders. Few of these youth look like the clones of the neighborhood’s past or of those getting married. As this class-based divide expands, observers argue that the politics of equality seems to equate “gay” with “white” (Allan Bérubé, 2001). It both divides and reinforces social hierarchies. Still, activists such as Blotcher argue that there is a rationale for moving forward with such issues: “I was working for gays in the military, even though I despise the militaryindustrial complex. But I thought it was a stepping stone.” Many queer activists, including Allan Bérubé, have taken a similar position. “It’s

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wonderful to be a purist. But you have a shorter expiration date,” noted Blotcher. And most certainly, the movement’s work is complete with the marriage milestone in New York. Certainly there are any number of inequalities still out there. And no doubt, they will continue along with gay marriage and the subsequent panorama of nuptials, parties, long-term romances, separations, adoptions, divorces, and so on. This is all part of the marriage game—“the full catastrophe,” as Alexis Zorba in the film Zorba the Greek famously laments. In it, she confesses that the whole affair has its limits: “Am I not a man? And is a man not stupid? I’m a man, so I married. Wife, children, house, everything. The full catastrophe” (Cacoyannis, 1964). It is all part of the experience that the ritual supports. Yet Zorba also had a tribe to support him. We all need such tribes. Years before the marriage vote in Albany, queer people around the world participated and recreated it on their own terms. “You have two elements of the relationship: private and public,” notes Blotcher. “People realize how unpractical those Christian morals are. People work it out so they remake it in their own way.” Today their gestures of freedom are recognized by the state of New York. Still, inequalities persist. Queer youth are kicked out of homophobic homes and find their way into the city, where they face inordinate harassment. The commons are still being cordoned off, as is the case with the piers off Christopher Street, which the NYPD and the Parks Department fenced off during the Pride Parade. But it is up to us to open them. And this is what shows, such as those by Reverend Billy and Drag March, still do: they expand a theater of the imagination from the stage into the streets. Through this participatory theater, we create the possibility for something better, something more colorful, as we march and reclaim public space. And a drag persona expands as up becomes down in a topsy-turvy moment in which the whole city becomes queer. “We’re right there at the heart of all this if we talk about tricksters,” noted Stephan. Gender fuck is one element of all that. It’s liberated me. Through this work, I have become more liberated. I feel comfortable wearing nail polish, wearing my hair down, being in drag, being flirtatious with everyone, despite their gender, race, appearance. I think gender is one of those dichotomies that we have to break down in this culture. We’re totally wedded to the dichotomy of male/female. And in my mind, it doesn’t really exist. It’s one of those issues where we can walk the lines, blur the lines, and make people realize that it’s bullshit. So we’re doing that.

Today, this abundant vision of a “right to the city,” clashes with a privatized view of citizenship and imagination (Lefebvre, 1996). Queer activism,

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on the other hand, opens space for outsiders. In this city of friends, queer youth find a place, public sexuality and sexual self-determination pulse, and the public commons thrives as a space for difference, not police crackdowns. The point of public space activism, such as the Drag March, is to break down such dichotomies between public and private space while expanding a social eros between bodies and movements. Throughout the summer of 2011, Stephan and the rest of his activist comrades from Time’s Up! and their overlapping public space movements would work on creating new kinds of stories, pushing counternarratives into the public sphere. Stephan continued, “We’re creating and expanding all the time with the work that we are doing: pushing the boundaries between public and private, male and female.” In the months to follow, more and more people would take part. September 17, 2001, they would pour into the city, occupying more and more public spaces, including fountains, streets, and privately owned public spaces. “Without those actions, Occupy would not have happened,” noted Stephan, referring to the movement that began in New York City that fall. Through such moments, the cathedral of interdependence that Benjamin Barber describes finds expression in this city of friends. Everyone is welcome here.

7

Do-It-Yourself Urbanism as an Environmental Justice Strategy The Case of Time’s Up!, 1987–2012

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s Keegan Stephan described in the previous chapter, Time’s Up! is a New York City environmental group that promotes nonpolluting transportation as a model of sustainable urbanism. Over the last 25 years, the group has taken a do-it-yourself approach to environmental activism, bridging neighborhood, global justice, and Occupy movements. With roots in the squatter movement in New York City, Time’s Up! has built its own distinct brand of do-it-yourself urbanism to fight for community gardens, support group bike rides, and create sustainable approaches to urban living. While the group makes use of a wide range of approaches to reclaim public space, direct action is its guiding principle. For nearly a decade, this was one of my favorite groups in New York City activism. We painted signs and decorated banners at every meeting. In my ten years with Time’s Up!, the group linked social networks with alternative approaches to community building, bridging affinities among an ever-expanding tribe of activism. Fueled by friendships rather than institutional ties, the group is part of a lineage of Lower East Side direct action groups that represent a sort of extended family. In my years with the group, from 2004–14, it functioned as a tribe of activists who worked best in the streets, using direct action to fashion a better city in the here and now. Yet were friendships enough to fuel such efforts? And what are the lessons about capacity, leadership, sustainability, betrayal, and alliances within the story of such a group? These are questions explored throughout this chapter. Stephan, who volunteered with Time’s Up! from 2010 to 2013, explained to me,

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We’re trying to liberate public space. We do that in every element of what we do with Time’s Up! We’re trying to break down the dichotomy between private and public space. Like what is this idea of private property? We have to make people’s minds expand beyond those dichotomies. That’s why I have been drawn to trickster mythology my whole life. That’s why Raven has been so important to me as an image or a figure. And it’s why Time’s Up! and activism actually appeal to me. It’s the group of people that wants to break down all these really stupid dichotomies that are limiting people from loving one another. These dichotomies, these are things that have been built that separate us from one another and make it so that we can’t fully express ourselves, which is a painfully tortuous thing if you’ve ever been through it. Which make it so that we can’t love each other, which is the most painful thing we can ever go through in life, if we can’t be close to another human being. And we’re actively working to break that down.

Between renegade bike rides and guerrilla gardening efforts, street graffiti and Halloween parties, Time’s Up! made such gestures of connection between communities a cornerstone of its work and play. “When we got in those fountains dancing, we had huge amounts of people watching us,” explains Stephan, describing the group’s efforts to make use of the public fountains inside of privately owned public spaces and parks throughout New York City. “We are using our bodies,” he said, “and we’re liberating space so that other people come out and change their minds. I have no doubt that us using our bodies the way we do inspires people and makes people joyous and want to revel with us.” To create its own commons, Time’s Up! filled the city streets with more and more bikes and its neighborhoods with more and more support for community gardens and, by extension, an overflowing community of friends. Faced with this multitude, the city responded by making room for more alternate, sustainable uses of urban spaces, expanding bike lanes and protecting gardens (Shepard and Smithsimon, 2011). Squatting and Do-It-Yourself Solutions I first became familiar with Time’s Up! in 1999, when the group was working with Reclaim the Streets, New York, a subcommittee of the Lower East Side Collective (Shepard, 2011). It seemed like all involved were friends, connecting both local organizing projects and global struggles around sustainability, corporate globalization, and anticapitalism (Notes from Nowhere, 2003). Meetings took place in community gardens and squats in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In the fall of 1999, we organized events in solidarity with the upcoming Seattle World Trade Organization

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meetings. After the action, a group of us spent all day and evening together doing jail support for those arrested, hanging out for hours, and later retreating to a house in the Lower East Side for drinks in a ritual that those friends who are still involved continue to this day through monthly salons. My first campaigns with the group involved supporting community gardens. Over the years, this group’s work extended into efforts organized around nonpolluting transportation and alternative sources of power. In the same ways members squatted in vacant spaces and repaired bikes left in the rubble, Time’s Up! members brought elements of direct action, media activism, and anarchism, as well as the insurrectionary possibilities of play, to their efforts to improve the urban environment, engaging regular people to become active players in their neighborhoods (Time’s Up!, 2012; Shepard, 2011). Ideas were hatched when friends spent time together on rides, at garden events, or in meetings. Take the Central Park Moonlight Ride, which began in 1994. Bill Di Paola explained, We tell people on the Moonlight Ride that this is an auto-free ride through the park, and you’re not just on this ride, you’re part of it. We need drops, we need sweeps, so come to the front and then drop and then mark that turn for the next person. It’s this flowing thing where everybody on the ride becomes part of the ride. And I think when you make things fun you make theater, and that’s kind of cool because in a real community, everybody is part of the fun. There are little tricks you can do to get people involved. You can give them pinwheels or whistles or give them a sheet where they can sing along to the song, where it’s a much lighter connection—but they’re still connected to the actual theater.

They are also connected to each other as a moving amoeba, whirling friends and strangers through an ever-expanding encounter with the city and the streets. Each ride would become a highly participatory event, driven by the body of the group, not the top—friends and strangers collaborating together. Unlike a rally in which those in attendance stand and listen to someone preach, group rides allowed people to actually take an active role. And those who joined the ride became leaders. One of the early riders was Barbara Ross. “A friend of mine was a messenger, and he got a flyer for the Moonlight Ride,” noted Ross. “And he said, ‘that sounds like a fun thing to do,’ so I went.” Laughing, she recalled arriving late with a flat tire: “They were all very nice though. They filled up our tires, and no one complained. It was really a lot of fun. We went all night. It was an amazing ride.”

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Ross started taking part in more rides. “I did the Central Park Traffic Calming Ride, and then I did the Critical Mass Ride. And then I just remember more and more just really liking the group.” She had been a part of the New York Public Interest Research Group in college. “But it was more like meetings and politics and stuff. This group is cool. They go out in Central Park and do stuff with cars. There’s no meeting. You just go out and do it.” She was immediately drawn to the group’s do-it-yourself ethic, with parents, kids, buddies, and strangers taking part in Critical Mass rides. A whole group of friends grew out of this space. She explained, “It was very community oriented, where the people in the group, even though they did activism together, would also go to dinner. We would watch out for each other. That was kind of a new concept for me. That also drew me to the group.” Gradually, many of those taking part became friends, and a network of riders with similar affinities extended throughout the streets of the city and its various activist networks (Crossley, 2002). Over time, the group added a monthly calendar of events, including bike repair workshops. Keegan Stephan joined Time’s Up! as a mechanic. Fixing bikes, Stephan built a network of friends through the group. In between the meetings, rides, and actions, friends clashed, fought, danced, and pushed the lines between public and private space within a burlesque of do-it-yourself street activism. “I wouldn’t have stuck around Time’s Up! if it weren’t for all the friends that I’ve made since I started working here,” confessed Stephan. Austin Horse was a good friend of mine from outside of Time’s Up! He asked me to help Time’s Up! with their bicycle recycling project, so I did. It was basically a lot of long hours on summer nights in the backyard with Bill. Aside from Austin, Bill was probably my first friend in Time’s Up! We became really good friends. I remember one night, I decided to go through all the wheels, throw away the ones that were unsalvageable, and organize and price the ones that were good. It was a huge job, but I got inspired, and I was gonna work until it was done. I didn’t expect Bill to stay with me, but he strapped on a headlamp, and we worked well past midnight. At one point, our landlord walked back there while Bill was hanging from the rafters screwing in more wheel hooks. The landlord asked what we were doing, and Bill shouted out, “Keegan’s burning the candle and I’m right here with him.” He said it with such earnest excitement, I was sold. I knew this was the type of person I wanted to be working with to save the world—someone who was having a blast rearranging bike wheels after midnight on a Friday night when other people were out partying, just so people could come in and fix their bikes for free the next day.

The group made participation fun and engaging.

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Gradually, Stephan extended his activism into more and more direct action with the group: One of the very first things that happened was the World Naked Bike Ride. And I don’t think I went the first year. But Joe and Anna brought a couple of bikes that they’d borrowed back the next day. And they came in the backyard, and they were hilarious. And we started joking around, and then we had lunch. And now Joe is one of my best friends in the world. I can get in fights with Joe Sharkey. We’ve made each other mad. But we’re both working towards the same cause. There is an element of work in these friendships with Time’s Up! We get our hands dirty, and we go through these crazy struggles, and every action we do takes so much hard work and planning and disagreements and fighting and making up and hugging and loving each other. And it’s impossible not to have these great friends while we are doing the work that we do. Like I said to start this monologue, I wouldn’t have stuck around Time’s Up! if it weren’t for the great friends that I have. The work is why we’ve bonded. But I’m not there for the work. I can work anywhere, and I do think I’m doing a really good thing, but I also feel loved.

Over time, these friendships continued to support a community of resistance as networks of cyclists, mechanics, public space advocates, anarchists, videographers, and street activists who all shared space within the group (Crossley, 2002). My kids refer to the group as “the Time’s Up! gang” because when we get together, we act more like friends than mere volunteers. They started using this term after we all sat around eating bagels and singing songs outside the bike valet at the Clearwater Festival a few years ago. Legendary folk musician Pete Seegar was about to play. The group had been camping all weekend and running a free bike valet. The group thrives in spaces where they hang out, organize, and build community. Over time, reclaiming public space became an abiding principle of the group and its larger movement (Segal, 2012). “A garden is a friend you can visit at any time!” noted group volunteers. And gradually, the group’s efforts helped support and even foster a far more bike-friendly city (Time’s Up!, 2012). In 2003, Time’s Up! helped organize “Bike Summer,” which consisted of diverse cycling events all summer long. The group held Earth Day rides to Central Park and marches down Fifth Avenue. Bike Summer, Critical Mass included a boisterous ride across the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge to Socrates Sculpture Park. Over time, cycling became part of many New Yorkers’ politics and communities. “I guess the Traffic Calming Ride made me feel like wanting to do something about the cars in the park,” explained Barbara Ross, who by this time was feeling very much a part of a body of cyclists joining the rides. They had come to feel more and more like a family. Yet the police began to take

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notice. Ross said, “We were confronted on the ride. And I think the major thing was on Earth Day when we were riding over and were stopped on the way.” Even with police following the ride, more people joined. “There were some chases,” Ross explained. “It wasn’t an orderly thing, but we would go through the police’s area and they would chase us. They would arrest a few people, but it was really rare. I was usually able to get away.” Yet there was still very little room for cyclists on the streets. “In the park, the cars think it’s their lane, so walkers and cyclists have to share the bike lane,” explained Ross. With each advance in cycling, the police seemed to crack down even more. In response, Time’s Up! supported a politics of fun. “To just ride around, having a good time seems like just an odd concept,” noted Barbara Ross. But that’s what this group sets out to do. Bill Di Paola concurred: I talked to Chris Carlson [the founder of Critical Mass] extensively about some of this stuff because I told him that I was having trouble keeping group rides going. He explained that I had to make them more fun. And then coming back from Seattle, I thought what would be fun is a moving circus, like fun on your bike with puppets. A circus would be fun. People like circuses, and they could be part of it. That’s the key: people just can’t be watching fun, they have to be part of the fun. I think corporate America looks at fun like it’s something you need to watch. It’s not something you need to participate in.

Friends help each other join such experiences. Ross recalled, I’ve been arrested twice at Critical Mass. Once during the RNC [Republican National Convention] at the Bike Bloc ride and once on August 29, 2004. Some ten thousand riders showed up for a ride a couple days before my first arrest, catching the NYPD off guard. On the ride at which I was arrested, there were actually very few cars out. We were providing support, but the NYPD was out to get us. I think that not only the NYPD but also the federal government did a lot to prepare for the RNC. I think they started to take note of activist groups like ours in the lead-up to the RNC. Whenever we’re in court, the NYPD bring up this ride. We rode up the FDR [Franklin D. Roosevelt East River Drive], through the Battery Park Tunnel, and across the car lanes of many bridges. It was the funnest ride.

Those in the community of friends were having the time of their lives. Ross explained, When I was arrested in August 2004, there were a lot of people, a lot of press, and a lot of arrests. All these people were biking, and then they ended up arresting them all, and it looked horrible in the press. We were just riding

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through midtown, and suddenly these motorcycles cut us off. We thought they were some sort of Republican motorcycle gang. They swerved in front of us really dangerously. It was pretty scary. They ran us down, and at least forty of us were arrested. We were all held together in a makeshift jail on the Hudson, later called “Guantanamo on the Hudson,” for thirty hours. It was so crowded, but they only put one bench in there. There was nowhere to sit other than on the ground, which was covered with grease. We were there for so long that I passed out. I woke up, and I was face down on concrete. It was disgusting. The police there were pretty nice. They realized this was pretty silly. But once we got to the Tombs, oh boy, were they nasty. One guy was on a major power trip. He made us walk around together like a chain gang.

“Besides being arrested those two times, I’ve also had my bike confiscated two other times,” noted Ross. Getting her bike back represented a Kafkaesque experience for her. “You have to go to the bike jail, which is in Brooklyn, and conveniently, not by any subways,” she laughed. Despite the setbacks, Ross and her friends keep coming back and defending the First Amendment “first of all, because it is fun and because the police really want to stop this ride,” explained Ross. “I felt like I have to keep going because they have no right to stop this ride.” This is a community extending from the streets throughout the city for Ross. Blondie of Arabia, Bikes, and Environmental Change From the Suffragettes to the Provos, from the Situationists to the do-ityourselfers, cycling has offered a way for women, and everyone, to escape the confines of the home and connect with others while transforming the norms of public space. In short, the bicycle was a symbol of independence (Furness, 2010). Over the years, this sentiment continued as cycling became connected to a do-it-yourself culture espoused by those involved in the “Riot Grrrl,” anarchist, and public space movements. “Put the Revolution Between Your Legs” read the paint on a woman’s body at the Time’s Up! 2013 World Naked Bike Ride in New York City. More and more cyclists embrace the notion of cycling as a metaphor for freedom as well as cultural transformation. Take Monica Hunken, a volunteer who worked with Time’s Up! from 2004 to 2013. In 2009, Hunken traveled to Saudi Arabia, riding around the country on her bicycle. Hunken was both ridiculed and embraced by locals. Some threw rocks at this American cyclist with blonde hair who had the audacity to challenge social mores. The contested nature of public space would become a theme that dominated Hunken’s subsequent one-person show about the trip, dubbed Blondie of Arabia. The play was born one winter after a cold Time’s Up! Valentine’s bike ride as we

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shared stories, tea, and coffee. Friends from the ride chatted, asked questions, and Hunken regaled us with stories of her travels. “That should be your next play,” I chimed in after she told us the story of her adventures. Time’s Up! and Its Allies By 2011 and 2012, members of Time’s Up! joined the burgeoning Occupy Wall Street movement. For years before Occupy, cyclists took part in bike blocks, defending gardens, scouting, and doing communication for countless movements and convergence actions. At the peak of Occupy, Time’s Up! members and their friends organized rides in support of the movement, spent the night in the park defending it, and helped push it forward. Time’s Up! also brought a spirit of levity that was often missing from the occupation. This was one of a long series of connections between Time’s Up! and the movements of the day. Over the years, Time’s Up! has worked with groups ranging from the More Gardens! Coalition to the Occupy Wall Street Sustainability Committee, as well as supported actions by the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), Rude Mechanical Orchestra, Radical Homosexual Agenda, and countless others. Some groups sit at the policy table, while others, such as Time’s Up!, are more effective at pushing their message from the outside. The network of friends in Time’s Up! was more comfortable in the streets and in the gardens. The case study of Time’s Up! highlights the utility of direct action to complement larger efforts aimed at social change with an inside-outside strategy. It suggests there is room for those in both the streets and the board rooms, pushing an agenda on the inside and from the outside, as Time’s Up! has done. Yet this does not suggest there is not more for a direct action group, such as Time’s Up!, to do in terms of expanding coalition partners. The group is composed mostly of networks of friends. Questions about capacity, leadership, sustainability, and alliances are still important for the group as it seeks to move forward, retain volunteers, and remain effective. Organizationally, it is still evolving from a grassroots structure to that of a nonprofit organization, powered by people’s energy, struggling to balance both while avoiding the pitfalls of the nonprofit industrial complex, which seems to consume community groups (Incite, 2007). For many in the group, Time’s Up! is a network of friends; for others, it is a nonprofit organization. Over time, this tension became more pronounced as the group navigated some core questions about the politics of friendship. William Rawlins (2009) suggests that the practice of political friendship

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Figures 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4 Time’s Up! Occu-Pies of March ride and pie fight, 2012. An abiding sprit of silliness propelled the group’s clown affinity group Source: Photos by Eric McGregor

requires members of a group to engage a few basic ethical principles that mediate public and private experience: 1. Political friendship is “negotiated voluntarily”; it is a voluntary, moral endeavor that can be suspended. 2. Friends “care about one another’s well being”; they hope for the best in each other. 3. Friends care about “each other as equals.” 4. Friends engage in an “ongoing learning about each other.” 5. Such practices help build trust among participants. 6. Friends talk to each other honestly and frankly. 7. “Friendship is a conscientiously interested relationship. We give special interest to our friends’ needs and desires” (pp. 183–84). Some of these things happened among the affinity groups of Time’s Up! And when they did, the groups thrived. But these feelings and beliefs were not universal. Many rejected them. When the group felt more like a nonprofit, membership seemed to drop. Conversely, when friendship networks were supported as part of the

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leadership of the group, more and more volunteers felt like there was room to lend a hand and participate. Still, the case of Time’s Up! suggests that direct action and a play-based strategy has an impact on urban space, success, and mobilization. For Time’s Up!, the friendships helped the group move forward. When the friendships waned, so did the efforts of the group, and volunteers left, sometimes as a group. When friendships remained strong, new cohorts found their way into the group and its community of friends. When the board and bylaws of the group limited the efforts of this group of friends, many decided to leave. Conclusion: Dancing at the Time’s Up! Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Party Over the last 25 years, Time’s Up! has helped us helped us see New York City as a malleable work of art, influenced by the gestures of artists, activists, creative urban planners, and guerilla gardeners. Despite ongoing attacks, cycling is on the upswing. Faced with multiple challenges to riding in a global city, activists with the group maintain a flexible disposition. Some rides fade, while others take new forms, creating new kinds of communities of care, fun, and resistance. In July 2012, Time’s Up! held a party for its twenty-fifth anniversary. The event included speakers as well as live music and lots of dancing. At its best, the group has helped make riding and engaging in street activism a joyous, highly participatory endeavor among friends. This makes participation intriguing and inviting. Time’s Up! lives up to Emma Goldman’s disposition that if there is not dancing, it is not our revolution. “There are people like Rev. Billy and other colorful community characters, a lot of artists,” explained Bill Di Paola. “We all worked together. This was great for theater, but a lot of the artists were unaware of the political aspects of what we were doing . . . In conjunction with all the erratic weather happening all over.” Throughout the years, Time’s Up! members have been able to celebrate the tragicomic theater of the modern metropolis. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, power was down for days in the Lower East Side, so the group brought out the energy bikes to help people charge their phones. With public transportation into Manhattan from Brooklyn at a standstill, including the essential L train, and gridlock in the streets, bicycles served as a solution to keep the city moving through the crisis. The group provided free bike repair as well as bikes, food, and a parade through the neighborhood. “It’s really waking people up,” noted Di Paola. “People are more likely to realize that we’re all one, which is really great. People are also coming in who don’t fully understand the message, but we don’t shove it down

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their throats. That’s something we pride ourselves on at Time’s Up! We don’t overspeak to people. We let them use their own mind to let them figure it out themselves.” If people were not enjoying themselves, they were not going to be able to stay involved. Instead, the group helped make the revolution fun, supporting a community of friends who build community together. Using the tools of the do-it-yourself movement, the group has helped create community gardens as well as a model of nonpolluting transportation seen as a solution to a myriad of problems. Over and over again, regular people involved in the movement felt they were a part of the leadership as active participants, influencing contests over access to public space. Time’s Up! has reminded supporters that success is not guaranteed with each action but that they have a much better chance of succeeding if they fight for what they want, which is much better than doing nothing at all. And if people enjoy themselves along the way with their friends, they may be willing to stick it out over the long term.

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on’t back away from what is political in friendship,” the authors of The Coming Insurrection (Invisible Committee, 2009, p. 98) remind us in their treatise on global organizing in the wake of the financial crisis. “Expect nothing from organizations,” the authors of the anonymous manifesto continue. “Beware of all social milieus, and above all, don’t become one . . . Form communes” (pp. 99, 101). There are deep roots in such thinking and organizational practices. Friendship societies have formed the basis for multiple horizontal movements dating back to the Quakers and nineteenth-century Russia. Just as networks of friends drew others into their engagement with Time’s Up!, activists have been organizing communities based on notions of affinity, rather than through parties or organizational development, for as long as there have been social movements. Much of this sentiment brought people to Occupy Wall Street. On December 2, 2011, musician Lou Reed, looking out at the police and the barricades surrounding a group of Occupy protestors at Lincoln Center, declared, “I was born in Brooklyn, and I’ve never been more ashamed than to see the barricades tonight. I want to be friends with them. And I wanna occupy Wall Street” (quoted in Signore, 2011). For much of Occupy, friendship offered a way to transform social relations within and outside the movement, challenging notions of inside and outside, supporting connection, and minimizing feelings of separation. As Naomi Klein explains, “Occupy Wall Street, for all its flaws, was such a transformative experience for so many people. Because it was that moment where it’s like, ‘Oh! We’re not who we were told we were!’ It was that feeling of surprise that there are so many other people in this city who

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just want to talk to strangers and connect in this way, unmediated” (quoted in Barrington-Bush, 2014). Here a group of idealistic street activists descended on Wall Street on Saturday, September 17, 2011. Dismayed with Obama, a new generation of activists turned back to the street to make their own solutions, creating a space, “Liberty Park,” off Broadway at Liberty Street and Trinity Place below Trinity Church. There they would rally, cook, create art, and participate in an open-ended experiment in democracy. Occupy Wall Street was a call of action heard around the globe, bringing people who built friendship through deeds as well as participation in the public commons created in the privately owned public space known as Zuccotti Park. The movement cultivated countless forms of friendship. Friends of friends, news stories, and Facebook posts brought us here. For Occupy, the politics and mechanics of friendship took place in a number of distinct ways. A few of these included “mediated friendships”—through email, social media, and YouTube—that allowed a movement to spread around the world. For many, Occupy was a site of community, a place of friendship, and mutual aid in the middle of atomistic Wall Street. Throughout this chapter, participants reflect on these qualities within the story of the movement. A subtext of this discussion involves an interplay between social connection and separation, between individuals and communities, across borders and ways of thinking. My network of cycling buddies brought me into Occupy Wall Street in the fall of 2011. On Friday, September 16, activists held a general assembly and Critical Mass bike ride that was announced on Facebook: “Join NYC cyclists in support of the #OccupyWallStreet movement. Ride is openended and self-organizing, with a focus on downtown Manhattan. Be prepared to participate as long as you like. Bring cargo bikes, sound bikes, walkie-talkies, chalk, flyers, and ideas for how we can support the occupation with scouting, food/water/supply transport, outreach and other actions. We will discuss in person to make some vague plans before we start this rolling occupation!” On Saturday, the event started with rallies, street actions, and general assemblies. No one really knew what to make of the action at the beginning. Youth had organized it, although looking around the space that Saturday afternoon, I saw many of the usual suspects: police, a few supporters of Lyndon LaRouche, and so on. Yet power and hope were taking to the streets. Those in the park held a general assembly and slept outside that night. Some would embrace this approach. Others worried there was too much of a focus on consensus and open-ended meetings attended by what looked like thousands of people.

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Yet the actions continued Sunday and so did the general assemblies, with more and more people converging on the space, meeting, and marching through Wall Street. That night, I turned to the live feed of the people’s assembly along with some five thousand others from around the world. The group discussed plans, logistics, and the connection between this movement and those of the Arab Spring; for some, this was a continuation of actions taking place from Egypt to Wisconsin and Albany, where waves of protests challenged the politics of austerity. On May 12, 2011, activists from around the country converged on Wall Street to protest budget austerity. With union people, students, teachers, and AIDS activists converging at Bowling Green at the lowermost tip of Manhattan. There, my friend Ron suggested this should be our Tahrir Square. It could be our place where the world meets. And meet there, the world did. Countless activists were drawn into the movement. Friends brought friends, who connected their concerns with a global movement. “I saw Occupy as a continuation and, in a lot of ways, a solidarity action for the uprisings throughout the world,” explained Luca Richardson (2012). For me, it really started back when I was sitting in my friend’s living room in Brooklyn, and another friend busted in and said, ‘Hey, hey hey, get on the Internet right now. Everyone in Tunisia is out in the streets, and their ruler is going to step down.’ So we got on and checked that out. Then we saw that spreading throughout the entire region . . . I first heard about OWS [Occupy Wall Street] through Facebook in August. I went to one of the earlier general assemblies in Tompkins Square Park, and a group of us tried to put together a community general assembly in August and September leading up to the actions, so that we could come down as a community.

On Monday, September 19, I rode down to the action once again, joining hundreds marching on Wall Street, where they were penned in, between barricades. Others remained at Liberty Plaza, where they painted cardboard signs about the economy and why they were there. “War is a racket,” one read. Another highlighted record-level inequalities in wealth. People were only getting to know each other. Nonetheless, everyone seemed to want something. Talking with young activists, I saw a picture of a new generation ready to engage and create their own solutions rather than to wait for a leader or a politician. News reports around the world were covering the actions. Friends from California to Germany posted to Facebook that all eyes were on Wall Street. Monday, I ran into artist and squatter Seth Tobocman painting a cardboard box on the sidewalk. We talked about the actions and the fact that

Figures 8.1, 8.2 Scenes from Spring Training and Occupy Mayday Source: Photos by Eric McGregor

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this was a different scene than the Giuliani approach, which would have involved more arrests, faster. Given the openness of the space, more and more people would come down to Zuccotti Park. It would not be uncommon to see friends there most every day. There were people I had known for years and people I was only just getting to know who were fast becoming friends. Later I would post on Facebook, “I went down today. It was looking good. The police allowed them to spend the night. They are giving them more room than in the Giuliani years, but six were arrested this morning when they pushed. Still, more people need to get down there.” I would spend weeks down at Occupy, eating meals, taking part in eviction defense, hanging out with friends, providing jail support, and even sleeping in the park. On September 28, I reveled in walking around Zuccotti Park, the public space where Occupy Wall Street was then in its twelfth day. Arriving, I was struck with how much life, how much of a pulse, was taking shape within the space. Marching bands played; Reverend Billy preached. There were fewer police and far more workers, conversations, busy workgroups, art, and even play. “Want a cigarette?” a young man offered. We talked about the pleasure in the air in the space. After I Finished talking to him, I ran into a man who had been furious about the police arrests the previous Tuesday. “Have you gotten the solidarity you were hoping for?” I asked. “Yes,” he noted, “but we need more.” He pointed to his friend who had been arrested earlier in the week. She had gotten the support she needed as well. Many of these arrests helped those who were engaged form a powerful bond with each other. For many in the movement, it was a way to establish esprit de corps, helping the movement grow, even in some very tricky moments. When seven hundred activists were arrested during a march on the Brooklyn Bridge in October 2011, many had begun the day as strangers making their way across the bridge, surrounded by police. Some walked through with the cars, while others stayed on the walking path, watching as police, who seemed to have been escorting participants, started arresting them. New York City activist Danny Valdes (2011) was arrested that day. By the time the activists were finally released from jail, they were the best of friends. “A group of us took the J train back to Liberty Plaza, laughing and recounting the whole way. Six hours earlier we had no idea each other existed, now we were the best of friends,” Valdes wrote. “This is what the NYPD doesn’t understand. The more they arrest us, the more solidarity they create between us. We built a community on that bridge and on that bus and in that cell. All of us went through this experience that was

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dehumanizing, but also jovial and absurd. All the arrests did was reinforce our resolve, commit us more to the occupation and make us even more connected.” In this way, rebel friendships become part of an expanding community of resistance. Valdes continued, “I remember during the intense moments on the bridge when we all knew arrest was imminent, someone yelled out and we repeated: ‘Mic check! It is an honor and a privilege to be arrested with you all today. Fifty years from now, when you tell your grandkids about this, you can say that you were a soldier in the Battle of the Brooklyn Bridge!’ And there among the tears and the worries and the panic, we found a place to cheer and stand together.” Those tears became the stuff of enduring friendship, which has propelled movements for decades. Another early participant, Brennan Cavanaugh, recalls a similar moment just outside of Union Square Park on the second Saturday of the nascent movement. Arrested in the afternoon of September 24, 2011, he would not be released until late that night: I got out around 3 a.m. I was one of the last people summoned. I was let out with three people from my arresting group. After that, I was down with this whole thing. This is amazing. I was arrested with the Grannies for Peace, like four of them, all in their late sixties to mid-seventies. When we were arrested, they were trying to put this woman into a kneeling position. And she was like, “I can’t. I can’t. If you want me to, you’re going to have to help me, and it’s going to have to be slow. And then you’re going to have to help me up. But you can’t just shove me on the ground; my body doesn’t do that.”

This jail experience transformed Cavanaugh’s relationship with the movement, connecting his life with an expanding network of friendships among others taking part. “It was amazing,” he said. “I know these people now. Now I talk to those people when I go down to the Occupation. We have this bond. We were there two or three hours.” On September 28, I ran into my friend and coauthor Greg Smithsimon, who noted that there had been people who asked him, “What do bonus plazas [such as Zuccotti Park] have to do with social movements?” Those arrivals reveled in the very nature of this space. It was a place, like the old Times Square, where conversations were born. Years after Union Square became our public commons, the center of New York City had moved further downtown in another experiment in democratic engagement among workers, politicians, students, movement types, and those for whom this was their first experience in activism. Walking around the space, one could not help but feel the pulse. Social movements need public spaces to thrive. This, of course, is part of why supporters of neoliberalism shut off spaces

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where the public meets to build community (Gautney, 2010). Neither a union hall nor a nonprofit office, this was a place for everyone to come and talk, agree, disagree, dialogue, and build something of a democratic conversation among friends. The point is that people build friendships through deeds and conviviality as well as through participation in the public commons. Keegan Stephan described how these networks supported each other: I was talking with everyone long before September 17. The general assemblies in Tompkins Square—I wasn’t necessarily taking a leadership role but fooling around to help formalize some ideas. As it happened, it was such an explosion of energy. It was chaos in the best sort of way, in a big bang sort of way, and standing back and just watching astrology. People broke off, and they immediately had these working groups that were very successful. And I, coming from Time’s Up!, was an environmentalist and a cyclist, so I plugged into the thing that was the most natural for me, and that was the sustainability working group because that’s what we do. We’re trying to make everything more sustainable. We’re trying to save the planet.

Certainly social networks helped propel the initial steps of those from around the world gathering into Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan to join the movement in the fall of 2011. It was live-streaming video pouring in, along with updates from a highly active media working group, that brought the message of the movement to the world, from Twitter to Facebook. But it was friendships that helped those in the movement find footing and that supported their “Occu-family” through cold nights, clashes with police, or the need for a hug or a cup of coffee from an “Occu-friend” after an arrest or a night in jail. These networks helped counterbalance the state-sponsored repression charged with controlling the movement. Here friends and organizers thrived within their proximity to public space. Monica Hunken (2013) cut short a trip through Europe to join the movement when she heard about the arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge. She explains, The spaces that we hold and the spaces that we share, that is the most vital thing for us to work on. It’s like a microcosm of the whole world right now. We share this really small planet that is escalating its heat and global warming at this rapid pace, and we’re growing and developing, and our population is bursting at this rapid pace. We don’t realize and we refuse to acknowledge that this is a shared space, that this is all public space and that the divisions in nations are all false ideas . . . What’s really real is that we’re sharing this small bit of land together, and how we choose to operate on this bit of land together in the small time that we have in life.

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We desperately need those spaces, explains Hunken: A lot of the work that I do is about public space and about reclaiming public space with Time’s Up! and Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. We try and celebrate public space together and really activate it, and bring awareness that all the spaces in between are not spaces to get to the shopping mall, to get to your work, or to get to whatever the next task is. These spaces in between are the spaces where we run into each other, the spaces where we have neighborhood, where that vitality rises up, where we interact with strangers. That’s when we have the opportunity to take care of each other and to see what surprises come up when you really grow a real neighborhood on a large scale. That’s what I saw in Zuccotti, a real neighborhood that is using real, true anarchical principles, and real direct democracy, not relying on the constructs of bureaucratic systems and government systems that are just bullshit and don’t give us any real democracy at all, any way of making change.

Rather than institutions or groups, friends connected here to organize this space together, explained Hunken: The only way I want to engage in change is to do it through direct action, and I want to do that with communities. I want to do that with communities in vibrant neighborhoods. That’s what I love about Liberty Square and everything that has come out of that since then . . . I really hope that people have learned more about process and about caring for each other and really listening to each other, really listening, and not working so much from personal agenda. I hope people are looking at a bigger picture, making sacrifices that you sometimes have to make. I know that people have taken risks this year that they have never taken in their lives. They’ve done it because they know that the world is in disarray and that corporations and money and politics have poisoned us. Those people who aren’t always active in the streets saw this and saw people making these sacrifices, and they saw people sleeping in the streets and risking their lives and putting their bodies on the lines against huge oppression, against all odds, against police violence . . . True change comes from being with people in the street.

But this was not easy or simple. When police started infiltrating the Occupy Wall Street Movement in New York City, anarchist Priya Warcry (2011) noted, “OUR PROTECTION IS OUR LOVE FOR EACH OTHER AND FOR LIFE ITSELF. AFFINITY IS NOT JUST A THEORY . . . affinity is love is the core and heart of relationships, groups, and movements . . . GENUINE AFFINITY ALLOWS US TO RESIST STATE TERROR! ‘To the daring belongs the future!’—Emma Goldman . . . We have come too far to turn back now! LET US REMEMBER THE HOPE WE HAVE FOUND!

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THERE IS JOY & LOVE & LIFE TO BE HAD!” For Warcry, social bonds serve as a means to resisting social control. Listening to Stephan and the others at Liberty Square, I thought of the expression “A good friend will come and bail you out of jail . . . but a true friend will be sitting next to you.” There was a sexiness to watching people put their bodies on the line as well as the friendships that were molded during jail support. When friends, such as Stephan or Hunken, were arrested, I loved seeing everyone from Occupy Broadway and Time’s Up! show up for jail support. Through the ebb and flow of Occupy, I made a point of attending court when friends in the movement were getting released from an unexpected arrest or were going to trial. We witnessed hundreds of friends come together to share stories, hang out while waiting for someone to get out, share a coffee in “the Tombs” (a nickname for the Central Booking jail in New York City), testify in support as witnesses, bring video evidence, and observe the sand in the slow wheels of justice. These gettogethers further cemented friendships; jail support expanded social solidarity from the courts to those still in jail, supported those taking risks, and provided exuberant hugs to friends who were released. “I’ve never felt more supported when I’ve come out of jail and there’s twenty Time’s Uppers waiting for me,” said Stephan. This last time, when Barbara and I got arrested and we came out, all of you were there, and there was a food truck you guys had brought there. You guys lifted us up on your shoulders, and we had a dance party right there. I remember when I got arrested that night, you weren’t there. You were at home with your family. And it was in the middle of the night. And I went to jail, and I sat down, and one of the first things I thought was “When I get out, Ben Shepard is gonna be there.” And that made me feel so happy. And I knew it. And it made me happy, and it’s true, and I wasn’t even surprised—of course, there is Ben Shepard. You gave me a huge hug and danced with me in the basement of ABC No Rio. It was a great night.

For many of us, there is a beauty in the defiance of saying “we’re still here,” even when oppressive mechanisms are still in place. And we are still pushing. They can push us off the sidewalk this one day, but there will be twenty of us the next day. “I wouldn’t stick around if it weren’t for the friendships,” noted Stephan. If I came out of jail and there was no one there, would I go put my body on the line again? Probably not. But all the support that we have—yeah, I’ll do that a hundred more times. It was a positive experience. It went from a horrible, negative experience, being in jail is not fun; it’s horrible. I don’t want to be in jail with anybody. Even after the raid and I was in there with fifty

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friends, I just sat there quietly. They are torturing you. They are trying to make it unbearable. But if you get out, and you have a support network, and you feel good about what you did, then hopefully you’ll get out, and you’ll process it and be mentally ready to do it again.

After someone would get out of jail, we would usually meet the arrestee with coffee and donuts or perhaps invite her or him to go dancing or to a local pub, where we would toast a movement growing and coping with very real state-sponsored repression. With each smile and hug, solidarity expands, and the state’s power recedes. Such care is part of what keeps movements and the ideas behind them churning forward. At its core, such moments cement friendships and movements. These are gestures of care tend to run contrary to more formalized institutional arrangements. As Claire Lebowitz (2013) explained, After college, I was a member of the Living Theater, which is this famous anarchist theater company from the ’50s and ’60s. That really radicalized me as well. Then, I was so sad and depressed because people wouldn’t just be nice to each other to make the revolution. This was in 2007. It just felt very isolating. When Occupy started, I was like, “Oh my god, the beautiful nonviolent revolution is here.” I had to be there and be a part of it. Ultimately, it made me more secure in my own voice and my own goals and my own life and the effect I want my life to have on the world. I want everything to change. I want the way that we relate to each other and all of power dynamics to shift completely. The non-hierarchical thing, I love. Everyone should be their own leader. Krishnamurti would say, “The truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever . . . Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or coerce people along a particular path . . . The moment you follow someone, you cease to follow the truth.” In some ways, Occupy was this incoherent signal of a rumbling of a new way of interacting with one another.

It was a way of seeing people come together. This was another way of imagining living. As Kim Fraczek, another Occupier, explained on the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, Let’s make sure we keep dreaming. Without dreams, we have nothing to work toward: imagination, community, love, and nonviolent resistance in the face of violence, apathy, and fear. Shine so others can find their way, no matter what others say about you. No matter if you slip up at times, your community will be there to shine for you to find your way back, and you for them. Global community. We are one on this tiny rock in space. Let’s work

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toward a better ride where life can be on a genuine harmonic path. We really shall overcome this.

To change things, the whole social situation has to be reimagined, notes Frank Morales, borrowing a page for the Situationist handbook. Occupier Molly Whop (2012) describes the way her friends brought her into the movement: I was in high school, and my friend brought me to New Haven’s occupation in October just to check it out one day. And we ended up never really leaving. I had never heard anything about Occupy or anything. I was still kind of in my sleep mode or Matrix mode. I had never met anyone there, but as soon as I walked in and sat down, they were just so friendly. They were like, “Oh, what’s your name, and what are you about?” They explained to me what Occupy was. It was crazy. I had never met people who were so open and welcoming. I was used to the high school type of people, so it was just crazy to me. I just kept going back, and I ended up wanting to sneak out of my house in the middle of the night and pick up my friend. Then, we’d just drive down to the occupation and just hang out until five in the morning. Then, we’d drive back and go to school and just repeat the process every day.

Eventually state powers moved in. Seeing her friends beaten by police changed her: “After waking up from Matrix mode, I realized how messed up everything was. Then, there’s police brutality where I see my friends getting beaten, and it’s just crazy to see that. That needs to be shown in a brighter light, so that other people can see. There’s still so much racism and segregation. It’s just really messed up. People need to see that and wake up and get out of their bubbles and become more comfortable with being able to stand up for what’s right.” Occupier Brenden Lydic (2012) tells a similar story: Through a friend, I saw an event for Occupy Warren, which is a neighboring town. They had a May Day march. I went to that with my friend, and that’s how it started . . . I hope it brings about a world where everyone is equal. The Civil Rights Movement brought about progression, but people are still not equal. There’s class warfare going on. I hope for a world where no one has to worry about getting evicted out of their home, where people don’t fear other people . . . We have to move forward as fast as possible, and that’s what Occupy is trying to do.

Much of the process starts with social ties connecting regular people and efforts to challenge the system. Organizer Mark Andersen of Positive Force DC noted in an interview in 2006 that “if you do it right, it is a

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place where you actually intersect with another person, and you can create space where you actually start to build friendships—and hopefully, reasonably equal friendships, ultimately, across these bonds—and that helps to advance the search for justice, the broader community empowerment, and transformation.” For Andersen, the revolution is intimately tied with everyday struggles and connections. “They’re both really important,” he said. “People have to survive day to day. Without that, they ain’t there for any revolution.” Such an ethos builds on the thinking from countless movements and trains of thought, from do-it-yourself culture to autonomous Marxism to AIDS activism to the Autonomen (Katsiaficas, 2001). “We believe in building supportive, transformational community, where friendship, fun, and mutual aid mix freely.” continues Andersen. “Above all, we believe in the power of people to change their world.” “Many of the friendships within the affinity groups allowed the groups to work,” explained New York City harm reduction activist and AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) veteran Donald Grove. The nonhierarchical nature of these groupings of friends helps movements achieve both short- and long-term goals as members take care of each other. Through this commons of shared affinity, countless activists engaged in the movement. “What Occupy did was create bonds of solidarity, and all of these people found each other, which is so strong and so powerful,” Claire Leibowitz (2013) explains. “Those bonds exist now. Something else will happen because it’s going to get worse before it gets better. The conditions of the world create the need for something to happen . . . We were onto something that I found very exciting about how power essentially operates. All of the power dynamics are shifting . . . You can see it in the movements around the world. There’s something about the connections that were made. It changed my life.” An underlying dynamic of this discussion involves an interplay between social connection and separation, between individuals and communities, across borders and ways of thinking. “So many horrible things in the world are enacted from insecurity and separation,” Leibowitz continues. “We’re separated from ourselves. We’re separated from the earth. We’re separated from our families. It’s psychotic. If there was an integration of the self first and then moving out, moving out, moving out, that would change everything because you wouldn’t have a need to take from others.” “I really do see this as the battle for the soul of humanity,” notes Luca Richardson (2012). “Maybe the language of battle isn’t quite appropriate. What’s enabling this exploitation that’s happening, that our society is really based on, is a real lack of connection between fellow human beings. From this point of view social change is realized through active social engagement; through social activism we connect with others to expand leadership

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networks, organize, advocate, generate ideas, foster social bonds, and create solutions. It begins with close social ties among social actors.” “Revolution means we need each other,” explains Mark Andersen. “We cannot allow ourselves to be kept apart, whether by the system at large or by our own ideology or personal failings. Another way to put it is the Chumbawumba phrase ‘Isolation is the biggest barrier to change.’” Over and over again, movements grapple with a tension between connection and separation. Through Occupy, many broke through this culture of isolation. While advocates favor open borders and social ties among bodies, those opposed to such thinking favor closed walls and jails separating people. If movements such as Occupy are about anything, they were about the rejection of calls for more separation, instead favoring social eros, as an awareness of the interconnection among differing movements, workers and immigrants, citizens and noncitizens. (Katsiaficas, 2000). This humanist ethos propels social movements. “I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham,” Martin Luther King (1963) wrote in “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” King recognized. In this way, we are all “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. This practice of connection buttressed by an ‘I-thou’ view of interconnection” (Buber, 1970). A politics of friendship and connection builds on the Industrial Workers of the World’s notion that an injury to one is an injury to all, while a politics of separation allows the affluent to leave the poor to fend for themselves. Such a politics of separation supports the view that we owe nothing to each other as human beings, while the politics of connection suggests that we are all part of one sprawling mass of workers, parents, students, and homeless people— everyone involved in the deeply human endeavor of living and trying to make something of this world. We are all part of a multitude in this city of friends. The forces of social and cultural repression constantly struggle against impulses aimed toward collective connection. In recent years, cities around the world—Genoa, Prague, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and, of course, Barcelona—have witnessed a collective encounter with a movement characterized by unbridled wanderlust as countless actors embraced the quirky alliances and pleasure of building a better world one prank at a time. Yet forces opposed to such connection were never far in the distance. Myles Horton of the Highlander Folk School experienced it when his school supported movements ranging from civil rights to the environment; authorities targeted the school for violation of miscegenation laws when Caucasian women square-danced with African

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Americans (Horton, 1989). The pattern is not new. The forces opposing episodes of collective ecstasy date back to the days of ancient Rome and attacks on the Dionysus cults (Ehrenreich, 2007). They are always lurking, ready to shut down the party (Shepard, 2011). The sentiment plays out again and again. Cultural and communal pleasure emerges, and the Savonarolas and Comstocks follow, especially when acts of “communitas” create conditions that threaten the status quo (Turner, 1969). Powers and principalities find ways to shut down such moments of collective connection. They rolled tanks into Tiananmen Square in 1989, just as “Bull” Conner pulled out fire hoses on civil rights organizers in Birmingham, Alabama. In between the fire hoses, children could be seen dancing (Zinn, 2002). And Zuccotti Park was eventually raided and raided again (Writers for the 99%, 2011). The arrests and state repression finally wore on the movement (although many would go on to support the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement). To the extent that social activism breaks down these forms of social isolation and alienation, such group formations are a threat to the status quo (Ollman, 1978). This is why social organizing among friends is so powerful. Revolts are often born of such activities. “Ecstatic rituals still build group cohesion, but when they build it among subordinates—peasants, slaves, women, colonized people—the elite calls out its troops” (Ehrenreich, 2007, p. 252). Recent examples of such repression include those occurring on May 1, 2007, in Los Angeles, when the LAPD cracked down on a peaceful rally and picnic; on May Day, 2001, in New York City, when the NYPD arrested immigrant workers and their supporters for staging a street performance in support of undocumented workers (Bogad, 2003); on October 19, 1998, when the NYPD attempted to shut down an unpermitted funeral march for Matthew Shepard (Feinberg, 2002); or during the raids on Occupy encampments from coast to coast (Writers for the 99%, 2011). In each of these examples, police moved in to crack down on collective actions among disenfranchised people. Yet there is more to this repression than fear of uprisings. The suppression of collective joy is also a distinct form of social control. “Festivity breaks the boundaries down” (Ehrenreich, 2007, p. 252). Hierarchies establish boundaries, while conviviality erases them. For this reason, the powers that be find it in their vested interests to maintain boundaries that establish social hierarchies. “At the height of festivity, we step out of our assigned roles and statuses—of gender, ethnicity, tribe and rank—and into a brief utopia defined by egalitarianism, creativity, and mutual love” (Ehrenreich, 2007, p. 253). After all, pleasure counts. “When people find pleasure in what they are doing, they are more apt to keep doing it,” notes Tim Doody. This was

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certainly the case for Occupy. Early in October 2011, Hunken and several friends in Time’s Up! organized an Occupy Fountains Ride. “That was one of the most beautiful rides,” noted Stephan. What happened was Monica and Ben were abroad when Occupy started, and I was communicating with them about what was going on in Zuccotti, and they were just so jealous, like, “Oh man, we want to be part of this.” And they came back, and they were just so raring to go that they had a meeting with Time’s Up! They planned an action as fast as possible. It was going to be an “Occupy Fountains Ride” ’cause these fountains are POPS, privately owned public spaces, just like Zuccotti, so we’re bringing even more attention to these spaces. These spaces are supposed to be used for the joyous sorts of things that were happening in Zuccotti Park. So we did a fountain ride. But now the scene was there. It was successful. People were talking about it, thinking about it. So we had a huge turnout. And then we had an incredibly good time. We danced in all these fountains. We got very little harassment from the police. The private security guards had their usual dialogue with us, but they were sort of into it. People were stopping in the streets. One tourist told me seeing us dance in the fountains made her trip to New York. It makes my life in New York, too, being able to dance in the fountains with you guys.

Without such festive interactions, movements often are limited. While critics reject such forms of social activism, seasoned organizers know that gratification cannot be deferred until after the “revolution” (Ehrenreich, p. 259). Yet beyond rational ends and movement strategies, the experience of collective joy associated with social connection allows social actors to find a way to share in the experience of being fully human. In a world of neoliberal economic policies that depend on walls, borders, hierarchies, and isolation, the impulse to connect remains. As separation recedes, social dichotomies disappear. Anyone who has seen the mariachi bands, flags, and intergenerational connections taking place at one of the recent immigrant rights rallies knows that such actions are a driving force bridging the wanderlust of the global justice and immigrant rights movements. Despite the obstacles, the collective joy that characterizes these movements feels irrepressible. Such practices break down barriers and alienation (Ollman, 1977). Social activism invites us all to participate in the game of democratic living. Bringing more and more people into a conversation about democracy. “I was doing immigrant rights activism before, mostly with the Dream Act,” noted Diego Ibanez (2012), another Occupy veteran.

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When the girls were pepper sprayed in Union Square it was the first time I thought that I needed to go there . . . I was actually in Salt Lake City doing organizing, and I had heard of Occupy Wall Street . . . I saw something on Facebook that said they needed some help and that anyone was welcome. I was like, “I don’t know anyone in New York,” so it didn’t seem plausible to me. I made plans to come here for a visit. I told my job I was going to take a vacation. I decided to come check it out for a week to help out as much as I could because I thought, “This needs to spread.” People were talking about starting up in Salt Lake City, and I had some friends in Los Angeles that were talking about Occupy LA, and I heard that all of these other cities were going to start right after Occupy Wall Street. I thought, “Well what better way to help people start out then actually being there and learning.” I came with a pair of jeans and a little backpack. I got off the airplane, and I didn’t know anybody. I asked people where Wall Street was. I got off the subway and was lost forever. My first march was the Brooklyn Bridge march . . . That was very inspiring.

“I made friends so fast,” explained Ibanez (2012). To help the cause, I did some media work, and to contribute to the park I did sanitation for a while. Then I started doing kitchen work, and the kitchen folks were the most radical folks ever. For me, Occupy represented an escalation of a radicalizing process that created a space where you could automatically engage with other people and the world. That was huge. People had never felt that impact before. There are a lot of things that Occupy has done, but for me, it was our relationship with the world that really brought me . . . We marched in early October, and the police beat the shit out of us. I went on this march, and it really changed how I felt. I was so mad. Three of my friends from the kitchen were arrested that night. A cop grabbed me and threw me. A police motorcycle hit my friend. I had never been that angry at a police officer before. After that, I made the decision that I had to stay longer. That next day, I called my job and quit. A lot of people were making that call at that time.

Friendships helped engage and extend a family of choice for many there. Athena Soules (2012) recalled, I had a friend in town from California, and he was interested in Occupy. He went on the march where everyone got arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge. I knew nothing of Occupy at the time. He came back home, and he was so excited about it. That made me very curious. I was ready to get involved. I came to find that my neighbor was a big part of Occupy, and we talked about the political puppetry “Bread and Puppet.” My mom and I went down to Washington Square Park around October 20th. The lady liberty puppet had

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just been made the night before. Since I had just talked to my neighbor about political puppetry, I felt like speaking with the maker of the liberty puppet. He told me about Occupy Halloween and that I could get involved and work on puppets and work on Occupy Halloween. That weekend, I started working a little bit on some puppets. A couple days later, I started getting involved in the Occupy Halloween brigade . . . We were working well together designing the banner. This is a story of romance also. We really hit it off. We worked very well together. Occupy Halloween was very, very wonderful for many, many reasons.

Social eros takes countless forms in movement organizing. “I’ve always been a part of political stuff and different marches and rallies,” noted Stacey Mazurek (2012). “So I had to see what it (Occupy) was . . . You can be so open with people. You don’t have to be so guarded. You know that it’s really just this acceptance and love and camaraderie. I was just really moved by the people, the level of openness, genuineness, people really just caring about their fellow man and not just mouthing it. That’s what drew me and kept me.” In the months after the raid, Mazurek started organizing an Occupy group in Queens, New York: “It was important to have it local. I feel that a lot can be done on the local level. It’s a lot more accessible for people when you can talk to them about things that touch their lives.” It was people and relationships that helped fuel this endeavor. “I like the idea of breaking down barriers,” she explained. “For me a lot of it is, ‘Let’s start a conversation. Let’s start a dialogue.’” This dialogue took shape through multiple conversations, stories, and gestures of direct action. At a Time’s Up! ride in the summer of 2011, Stephan found himself in a conflict with a security guard who told him he could not enter a privately owned public space. Stephan kept on moving and dancing, eluding the guard. His gesture reminded me of the story of the Greek god Hermes, who passed gas when his brother Apollo grasped him for taking his cows. Stephan said, The raven is the trickster god of native Alaskan mythology. What’s interesting and wonderful about tricksters is they find these gray areas to exploit to expand the possibilities. But they also put their foot down and shirk authority, as Hermes did with Apollo. But what was happening in that fountain was somebody was trying to enforce a law that didn’t exist and kick us out of a space that we were trying to liberate. I wasn’t having it. And at that moment, what he was saying was so oppressive. We’re trying to liberate a space; he is trying to oppress us. We needed to break free of it. I had my hair in the water, and so I flipped it back and maybe I got some water on his suit. He was really upset by that, but I don’t think that it damaged our cause or our fight. It might have upset him, but it also might have woken him up. He walked away,

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and we played in the fountain a little bit longer, and we took off and rode to another fountain. It was a successful evening.

Friends and their bodies connect through such experiences. Stephan concluded, “I love the way we in Time’s Up! use our bodies to liberate space, to make people feel good about it.” Through such rides, this network of cyclists helped fuel some of the ever-flowing tributaries between the global justice movement, Occupy, and their shifting stories. These friends help us build a cathedral of interdependence, care, and connection. Occupy helped New York City to really witness a city of friends. Of course, the critique of Occupy, and the open-ended philosophy propelling it, was that movements need a focus on community organization and politics, as well as direct action. They need some structure, or they fade away. And this conversation was largely absent from Occupy after the occupation. Instead, Occupy as a whole turned away from ongoing issue-based campaigns while some of its committees continued to function as independent affinity groups, taking on specific issues of debt and sustainability. Others, including the Revolutionary Games working group, looked to more ludic approaches to subvert the game of modern living and capitalism.

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uch of organizing is characterized by a cavalcade of often paradoxical feelings of both wanderlust and connection, righteous indignation and joyous abandon. It’s a high-octane release and a lusty craving for more of that freedom high that we sometimes feel when we elude social controls or create something better of our world for even a moment (McAdam, 1988). Many of these sensations are part of the feelings of play among friends described by Dutch historian Johan Huizinga in his landmark study, Homo Ludens (1938/1950). Taking part in Critical Mass rides on the last Friday of each month; the zaps of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) against pharmaceutical companies; and unpermitted Occupy Wall Street pots-and-pans marches against traffic, away from police, and in between cars all come to involve this feeling. Playing is just what friends do. From rallies and video games, they play with one another. And in doing so, they often rebel (reveling in the essential queerness of football, playing with gender at drag marches). We all game the game (or at least we try to). Yet sometimes, the further we move into the game, the murkier the distance between the interior of the cave and the outside world becomes (Wark, 2007). At least, that was the case for me. Growing up, my image of game play took two dimensions: the mall rat– like experience of video games at 7-Eleven convenience stores and high school football in Dallas, Texas. The former first helped me experience the public sphere that takes shape when we build community through game play among friends; the latter highlighted limits of the win-at-all-costs ethos of football. Here game play emulated many of the reified social relations of capitalism. And the game came to feel like a panopticon one could not elude. Yet friends were along for the ride for this shadowy experience, even if our game was not unlike that of the prisoners in Plato’s cave (Wark, 2007). We played with friends; it was just what we did. Here a cursory

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reflection of the games we play—video games, football, and ludic movement activity among communities of friends—offers a glimpse of a few of the possibilities and limits of game play as a mechanism of social change. While play has often been relegated to the sports field and associated with the behavior of children, there are other ways of opening spaces for ludic activity for civic purposes, political mobilization, and liberatory experience among tribes of friends. Between Defender, Football, and Civil Society In grade school, game play vacillated between video games in shopping malls and football in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas. Gamespaces at 7-Eleven convenience stores offered a glimpse of the innovation that can take shape when we build community and solve problems through collective play among friends, while football came to embody the colonization of work into play through competitive games. Games both held us together and tore at us. Friends helped us take part in and survive them. In the summer of 1980, my brother and I ran summer track in Dallas. A heat wave gripped the summer, with one-hundred-plus degree temperatures every day, all summer long. It was our first full summer there. After track practice, we would go to 7-Eleven to get Slurpies, frozen, sugary drinks. Video game consoles could be found in the periphery of the stores, ostensibly to bring in business. They kept the stores full of people buying beverages, sandwiches, cigarettes, and junk food. Gradually, we started playing the game Defender, an arcade video shooting game with two-dimensional graphics. The game was set on another planet, with the player flying through space, like one would in a science-fiction movie, while shooting off asteroids and other aliens taking aim at the ship (Kent, 2001). The machine was taller than I was. Over the summer, my brother and I played whenever we could, putting at least a dollar’s worth of quarters in the machine daily. The game was notoriously difficult, as one had to navigate the ship between flying asteroids careening toward it as it flew through space. It offered us a route into a science-fictional world somewhere between Tolkien and Star Wars. Yet instead of having a passive experience, one found agency here in navigating between fantasy and lived experience. At 7-Eleven, we also had to physically interface with people, talking, sharing strategies, and watching others as we waited to play. If someone wanted to get in on the next game, they just needed to put a quarter down on the board and they could take part. One day, my brother played all afternoon, chatting with a slightly older guy who seemed to know the game

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better than he could play it. “He knew the strategy. He just could not do it himself,” my brother explained. The two shared tips, with my brother winning extra game-play time for the first time. The stranger’s instructions opened up the game for us. Few public spaces could be found in this ever-expanding, horizontal geography of open skies and freeways in suburban Dallas. The closest thing I could find to a public commons was 7-Eleven. Far from ideal, it was still a place where people could meet, share ideas, drink, eat, play, and pass time skylarking. Over time, this gamespace came to reveal a community with rituals and an etiquette all its own (Ward, 2003; Wilonski, 2010; Wright, 2012). It was a place where my friends and I hung out after hockey or football games or before the movies; we killed time there, always looking for something. This game play offered not only pleasure but an emotional outlet, allowing for “shadow behavior,” in which players took part in otherwise unsanctioned experiences and fantasies through the game play (Crawford, 2012). It was better to play it than to act it out, as others had in real time. In Dallas, that shadow was what put the city on the map three decades prior, with the assassination of a young president. This memory still seemed to linger. Driving to punk shows downtown, we would pass the Texas School Book Depository and the grassy knoll of Dealey Plaza, where conspiracy theorists argued John F. Kennedy’s assassin fired the second fatal shot. By then, a different kind of shadow extended itself over the region, with a rash of teen suicides in the Dallas suburb of Plano (28 in 1982), drawing national attention to the problem of teens who felt isolated from the football-loving suburban culture. “Number of Teen-Age Suicides Alarms Parents in Texas City,” declared The New York Times on September 4, 1983. Responses to this isolation took multiple forms (Block, 2011). While some were consumed within the isolation and anomie, many found ways to break through it. On September 25, 1982, one of my brother’s friends, Ben Gold, walked into a video arcade in Dallas and plunked a quarter in to play a game of Stargate, the hypercomplicated follow-up to Defender. He would not leave for another forty hours. The first day he was there, my brother and I drove by to watch. A group was surrounding Gold. Yet he rarely acknowledged anyone. He seemed to see something no one else could see in the game. By day two, he had secured the world record. “I didn’t enjoy playing games for eight hours just for the fun of it. I always wondered: Is there some guy out there in Chicago who’s better than me?” confessed Gold, revealing the hypercompetitive nature of his gaming (Wilonski, 2010; Ward, 2003). For Gold, the game was also a space to reimagine social controls. “That’s where I learned to have a methodology of studying every game. You don’t study

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people. You study the program . . . Every game has a glitch. Centipede had a glitch that if you put three mushrooms next to each other, you can have the centipede trapped, and all you have to do is kill spiders. That’s why Millipede came along. It was the attempt of the programmer to say, ‘Ha, ha, ha, you beat me this time, now try to beat this’” (Wilonski, 2010). Indeed every game has a glitch. In later years, the question became how to subvert them. We loved playing Defender and Stargate. Yet over time, game play such as this would be blamed for all sorts of problematic behaviors. The media implied that the games lead to mass murder, violence, and any other ills of capitalism. Closer scrutiny revealed that few games were either 100 percent good or 100 percent bad. Media violence does not lead to real violence— quite the contrary (Crawford, 2012). While game play was a way to escape, it involved multiple meanings as well as a culture of its own (Wright, Boria, and Breidenbach, 2002). Through online games, the elderly are able to break isolation, laugh, stay engaged, extend friendships, and build community (Nimrod, 2011). At its peak, World of Warcraft counted more than 15 million registered accounts. “This is not just a game, but a world which has been created,” notes Talmadge Wright (2012). Through it, players build their own guilds and support each other in ways that extend beyond the game (Dougherty, 2011). Faced with a world of hypercapitalism, inequality, and alienation, many players have turned to the game as a means of breaking isolation; others help each other with job searches as well as other forms of mutual aid, cooperation, and exchange, engendering the pleasure of sharing and giving. It creates subcultures of people who get together with friends and drink beer together, multiplayers in synergy (Atchu!, 2012). While these games tend to create their own often subversive networks, they also come at a cost (Wright, 2012). This was certainly my experience. With the advent of home gaming technology, much of gamespace moved away from the bright lights of 7-Eleven, away from streets and shopping malls, and into a cave-like atmosphere of private spaces where players were physically isolated from others and socially disconnected from nongamers (Wark, 2007). (It’s not that 7-Eleven was any sort of civic ideal or even a public space, but it was more open to cross-class contact than one’s home.) Instead, the games became our bit of “soma,” the mind-numbing pleasure drug from Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World (1932). In this setting, gaming was even more of an extension of consumer culture than it was at 7-Eleven. Children can be seen playing with a ball in chapter 3 of the novel. “Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption,” explains the Director in the novel. “It’s madness. Nowadays the Controllers won’t approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus

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as the most complicated of existing games.” This gamespace blurs lines between militarism, education, involuntary entertainment, and social control. It was echoed in my experience in Dallas. With medicinal MDMA available over the counter until 1985 and a free-flowing supply of Ritalin and Dexedrine, life in Dallas felt like a new world of our own creation— with soma and designer drugs for play, work, attention deficits, and driving to clubs among bright lights, anestheticizing experience, medicating us, supporting ups, downs, and in between feelings (Kelly, 2014; Alexandre, 2009; Shepard, 2006; Shulgin, 1986). The pills added a technicolor blur and buzz to augment suburban life in a cavernous sea of identical details (Wark, 2007). I gradually lost interest in the latest editions of Atari and the other home video games. The end point came as I sat one afternoon playing Missile Command. The goal of the game was to defend against missile attacks dropping from the top of the screen. Moving up through the levels of the game, the missiles dropped down the screen faster than I could move. Realizing I could not beat the game I was playing, I unplugged it, picked it up, and threw it out the window. That was the last time I played a home video game. I was always troubled by the implications of playing a game I could not seem to win, playing by myself and away from friends, frustrated in the afternoon. This gamespace was a dystopia. Although I quit Missile Command, others I knew moved deeper into the gamespace, isolating themselves from others and experience outside of the game. Traveling to and from sporting events for Junior Olympics track meets and football games, games were a part of the core fabric of life in Texas. All my friends were there. Rarely did any of us question it. And play itself came to feel less and less like a liberatory experience (Stokes, 2007). We were trapped inside its conventions. Friends helped me cope, but too few of us asked why we were doing this. I first started playing football in third grade for the Peachtree Battle United Methodist Church Bulldogs, staying with the game through my first year in college. I remember running the ball with joyousness, reveling in the muddiness of rainy days. Here football was a rambunctious, free activity among friends. It was a way to participate in socially sanctioned violence as well as to step from this world into a mythic space in a time outside of time; playing linebacker, I used to imagine myself as a knight riding through the battlefield, losing myself in it all. By ninth grade, we started two-a-day practices. And gradually, play was replaced by competitive labor. The game extended throughout my life, colonizing child’s play as a commodified product that cost money, time, knees, and alternate ways of looking at the world. Women wore elegant fur coats to watch the Dallas

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Cowboys play at Texas Stadium in a spectacle broadcast around the world. Preachers prayed for the Cowboys at church. I remember seeing signs with the number and name of each player on my team adorning the trees and houses along my 45-minute drive to school before big games. We papered the houses of players on opposing teams, ridiculed them, told homophobic jokes, and made fun of the class position of those at opposing schools: “That’s all right, that’s OK; you’re gonna work for us some day!” we cheered from the stands. Sometimes obnoxious, occasionally funny, it was a fun, sometimes boorish, bullying system. Yet instead of speaking out, I played the game. Everyone did. And the often sexual, even abusive, antics continued across the country with few questions (Brunfield, 2014). Janis (1971) describes the “suppression of critical thoughts” and “internalization of the group’s norms” as a kind of groupthink, which was what it was (p. 44). Over and over again, the game reinforced group norms while stifling questions about why we were doing what we were doing (Wright, Embrick, and Lukacs, 2010). We all did it. All summer, we worked out together, hung out, played, drank after games, drove around looking for parties, spent the night together, and worked out in the morning—passing our youth. During summers, I took part in football camp at Pennsylvania State University, where now disgraced football coach Jerry Sandusky ran the drills. The program was seen as the moral corrective for all that was wrong with college football. Sandusky preached about the value of character, told us to stay off drugs. At games, players stood for the national anthem along with another one hundred thousand in the stands, with backs erect in a scene Leni Riefenstahl would have loved. This patriotism reinforced a football-loving status quo while marginalizing those opposed to it (Janis, 1971). Throughout this system, coaches seemed free to abuse players without recourse (O’Keefe, 2011; Red, 2012b). As Herbert Marcuse (1965) explains, people tolerate highly suspect behavior when it “serves the cohesion of the whole on the road to affluence.” This was certainly the case at Penn State as well as other programs where the schools covered up patterns of abuse (Carbone, 2012) while they profited from sports programs that sold out football stadiums and brought in revenue (Freeh, 2012). The 2011 football season alone brought in $116.1 million in operating revenue, with a $14.8 profit for Penn State. “This is not your standard infraction case, it’s a larger loss of morals, morals that have been degraded by the specter of money,” noted Jason Lanter of Pennsylvania’s Kutztown University (quoted in Novy-Williams and Eichelberger, 2012). The president of the university was eventually charged with obstruction of justice and perjury for his role in covering up the scandal (Red, 2012a). While gamers understand there can be very few ethics in capitalism, those at Penn State continued to push their moral brand.

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I ended up playing four years of high school football and another season in my freshman year of college, earning an NCAA division-three letter, while smoking a pack of Marlboros a day, before joining the Rugby team, where the esprit de corps was much higher, and we drank beer with opposing teams after every game. Here friendship seemed more important than the game. The football coaches always reminded us that once we quit the game, we would miss the feeling of the pads. A quarter-century later, I have not missed the pads a single day. But I did enjoy the embodied experience of the sport, the friendships, the sense of moral combat, and the occasional stillness. One of our coaches used to have us lie down face first on the ground and embrace the earth, noting that in order to be good players, we had to love the earth. It was part of us; we were part of it. He sounded crazy, but we adored him and the Zen point he was making. The lessons from the game were many. And years since leaving playing, I’ve continued watching and contemplating the drama of the game. Observing it now, the game seems to emulate the reified social relations of capitalism itself—both exploitive and competitive (Novy-Williams and Eichelberger, 2012; Wright, 2012). “We fully intend to put together the best defense we can,” declared my old coach, Jerry Sandusky, before being found guilty of 45 of 48 counts of child abuse. “We’re going to stay the course and fight for four quarters” (Carbone, 2012). There was no shame in his game. Here, more often than not, young people were regarded as pawns— “good enough to toss . . . ,” as Falstaff scoffs in Henry IV. “Cannon fodder” (Shakespeare, n.d.). No one wants to think of young people as pawns. Yet football had come to feel like this sort of repressive engagement, reflecting the social hierarchies of our culture (Embrick, Wright, and Lukacs, 2012). Sometimes it even led to rebellions large and small. “I may play ball next fall, but I will never sign that,” explains Pink, the quarterback in Richard Linklater’s film Dazed and Confused (1993), to his coaches who insist that he sign a no-drug pledge in this film about high school in Texas. “Now me and my loser friends are gonna head out to buy Aerosmith tickets—top priority of the summer.” Rebel friendships take countless shapes and sizes, popping up in the most unlikely of places. Other Games Over time, I came to see that there could be other games to play. After high school, I participated in movement organizing with Reclaim the Streets, Times UP!, and ACT UP. Each understood play as a route toward a different kind of participation, inspired by joy and bloom rather than guilt or labor. Here friendship and freedom kept us moving forward. There was

Figures 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 9.4 Scenes from the Occupy Wall Street Revolutionary Games working group Source: Photos by Eric McGregor

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a pleasure to checking in with the body, to pulling one’s head out of the murky cave and into the messy streets, to riots, and to speaking out—a joy to reimagining the playing field of modern living and, in this case, social protest. “I find the word ‘protest’ problematic,” David Graeber (2011) confessed. “With ‘protest’ . . . It’s as though it’s part of a game where the sides recognize each other in fixed positions. It becomes like the Foucauldian disciplinary game.” But there were other games, pranks, surrealist daydreams, and Situationist détournement and derive in which we could remap the very contours of our city, tracing a route outside the cave with every bike ride (Shepard and Smithsimon, 2011). In between street protests and meetings, before the Republican National Convention in 2004 in New York City, scholar-activists Steve Duncombe (2007) and David Graeber suggested I write about my experience with movements, which aimed to help us rethink the game of politics and movement participation (Shepard, 2009; 2011). Over the next few years, I selflessly dedicated myself to conversing, researching, interviewing, and participating with most all my favorite friends and scholars of the streets. Duncombe reminded me that movements could and should highjack even the most commodified games for revolutionary purposes. His point was that movements had a lot to learn from Las Vegas. “We need to rethink progressive politics in terms of our game play,” Duncombe explained (p. 65). Far too often, this game is not much fun to play. The rank-and-file organizers are left on the sidelines of institutionalized politics as spectators. The process demarcates the ends—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all citizens—from the means: an insider’s game of reports, briefs, and bills. “It has taken the game away from the very people for whom it is ostensibly being played,” Duncombe says (p. 65). After all, democracy needs players, hence Duncombe’s gaze on the increasingly popular arena of video games, where lessons about the politics of fantasy, agency, and entertainment are many. Through organizing with Duncombe and my community of friends in the Lower East Side collective, I saw that friendship and movement organizing could be synergistic (Shepard, 2011). Friends can do great things together. Looking back at the games of my childhood—of Ben Gold finding the glitches in Centipede, of not being able to beat Missile Command—I came to realize these games had real implications for social struggle. “If we play the game of Empire—of capital & state and banks and police—we will be playing a game whose rules were not designed by us and whose game play is absolutely rigged by them,” notes Atchu! of the Occupy Wall Street Revolutionary Games working group (2012).“After all, the fundamental law of power: power attracts more power. Capitalism fails because it— by design—defends mass expropriation.” My frustration playing Missile Command—that despite moving fast, the bombs still got me, and there

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was nothing I could do—was how many American middle-class citizens were feeling in 2011 before Occupy Wall Street. Up against the wall, many of us indeed decided to throw the game out the window. Just like the Centipede game, some of us came to see that the state had many cracks on its body politic that could be infiltrated and subverted. Direct action was a way of changing the game. This was a game in which everyone and anyone could participate. Take antiwar activist Jenny Heinz, who has worked with groups such as Granny’s Peace Brigade and Code Pink. We were arrested together along with Steve Duncombe in 2003. Today, we run into each other at demonstrations. “I’m very focused at this point about disruption,” explained Heinz in an interview I conducted with her in 2005. “The point for me, it’s you cannot do business as usual—that that is simply not OK. Democracy is not a spectator sport. You’ve got to be active, and you’ve got be on the front lines, and when your voices are not being heard in the media, or anywhere else, you’ve got to disrupt and say, ‘Hey guys.’” This means engaging those on the inside as well as those on the sidelines, reminding spectators they are also part of the game. “You go into bookstores,” explained Heinz. “You move 1984 from the fiction section to the nonfiction section, and you leave a mimeographed piece of paper that says this book has been moved from the fiction section to the nonfiction section. Those are fun . . . It’s a fun little thing to do.” While Heinz and company hope to entice spectators to join the game, those in power have different ideas. “The fact is they know they are not acting within the law. It doesn’t matter,” explained Heinz, standing in the middle of Zuccotti Square wearing a yellow Granny’s Peace Brigade shirt the day after seven hundred activists were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge. For many, Occupy seemed to be a strange sort of game. Occupy Wall Street as Class Struggle “We’re objects of contempt, an excuse for them to get paid overtime,” noted one OWS protester, “a safe live action game” (quoted in Greenberg, 2012, p. 58). After multiple clashes between the police and Occupiers, advertisements started appearing for online games that involved police and protestors as their subjects, lampooning the abuses that movement participants endured at the hands of the police. “Collect money, water and the Constitution. Dodge the tear gas, bean bags and flash grenades thrown by riot police. Don’t get arrested!” This was the object of Occupy Wall Street: The Game (Occupy the Game, 2011)—to illustrate the mechanisms of a system in which the police support capital, leaving lawyers to clean up the mess and leaving friends to spend hours doing jail support. The name of the game was class struggle.

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Occupy Wall Street: The Game was not unlike Bertrell Ollman’s Marxist board game, Class Struggle, designed “to prepare” players “for life in capitalist America.” Ollman developed Class Struggle in 1978 as a Marxist alternative to Monopoly. An instant cult classic, the game’s distributor soon canceled it. Copies are still available on eBay. That is where I found my copy. The cover shows a picture of Karl Marx in an arm-wrestling contest with a capitalist in a suit. “He looks like Mitt Romney,” noted my six-yearold daughter, looking at Marx’s competitor as we played the other night. A pink reader inside describes the object of the game: “Class Struggle reflects the real struggle between the classes in our society. THE OBJECT OF THE GAME IS TO WIN THE REVOLUTION . . . ULTIMATELY. Until then, the classes advance around the board, making and breaking alliances, and picking up strengths and weaknesses that determine the outcome of the elections and general strikes which occur along the way” (Ollman, 1978). Throughout the game, Workers and Capitalists vie to form alliances. A Workers’ card declares, “Students are beginning to recognize that when they finish school most of them will become Workers. Move directly to the next square that allows you to make an alliance with the Students.” Friends help friends survive in this game, which echoes a history of class struggle from the Industrial Workers of the World to Occupy. Conclusion There is certainly an “all the world’s a stage” quality to the games described throughout this chapter; from this lens, we really are all players as friends become actors capable of acting up together. But to what end? What connects Defender, football, and Occupy Wall Street: The Game? In a sense, these are gamespaces where players practice nonalienating humanity, yet the games they are playing are struggling with the same issues of recuperation that the players are. Still, they strike a resonating chord. Inclusive, they create a new sense of solidarity for participants, including new ways of experiencing social connection among bodies. Games and social media help us challenge systems of repressive tolerance (Duncombe, 2007; Marcuse, 1965). Paradoxically, they also reinforce them and this world where it is hard to move outside the panopticon of gamespace. Yet are there ways out? Games are part of the tools of this system; they are also a means of resistance. Our friends are players and sometimes pawns within this process. While they are anything but neutral, in the end, it is what we do with them as we play the game. There is nothing apolitical in games of power. Can we hijack them, remaking them for our own purposes, or will they lead us back into the cave where we bicker, break up, and recoil?

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eople quarrel for countless reasons. Sometimes fights involve passionate debate about the direction of a movement or group. Sometimes fights revolve around struggles over power, broken trust, or consensus versus more traditional hierarchical organizational models in settings such as nonprofits, unions, or corporations. What happens when trust disappears or differences become too great? What happens when former friends point fingers or betray each other? What of the movements in these cases? What happens when people get involved in civic life and find they fight more than they coalesce around issues? And how can we support each other along the way? The story of friendship usually involves steps in a dance of the dialectic, from meeting to fighting to transcending to splitting apart over conflicts. The question is, how can we coalesce and learn from each other as opposed to splitting apart? This chapter considers a few of these questions. Friendships Break Up Eat and drink together; Talk and laugh together; Enjoy life together; but never call it friendship Until you have wept together. —African saying (Millar, 1998, p. 5) Friendships “break up” . . . Often friends just move to other parts of the country or find some other excuse to start neglecting one other. But there are also friends who become enemies before they stop being friends. We know little about the events and their meaning and what draws friends apart . . .

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In between the beginning and the end, there is a story that badly needs to be told. Friendship is one of the little dramas of everyday life. (Suttles, 1970, pp. 128–29)

Under the Rainbow is Arnie Kantrowitz’s (1977/1996) memoir of his years with the Gay Activists Alliance. After a year of weekly meetings in the movement, he recalls an evening at the Firehouse, the group’s meeting hall, during a long, contentious meeting in the early 1970s. A fight takes place as the lovers Arthur Bell and Arthur Evens accuse each other of infidelities and divided loyalties. “The audience gasped as one. This was the sexual politics everyone had come to see!,” recalled Kantrowitz (1977/1996, p. 130), who was at the meeting. “Arthur accused Arthur of Machiavellian plots in a tirade of personal pain, and the rest of us sat captive audience to the list of grievances until it was publicly certified that Arthur and Arthur had reached an end. So had the childhood of Gay Activist Alliance, and so had my political naïvete” (pp. 130–31). Both a lover’s quarrel and a group skirmish, the clash speaks to the messy emotional contours of movement work, love, life, friendship, and organizing. Sometimes breakups among movement groups are tantamount to breakups with lovers. Sometimes they really are between lovers, as was the case with those in my beloved Lower East Side Collective; there, activists and lovers organized, and as their passions overlapped, they bubbled up in a messy, combustible brew of righteous indignation, lust, irreverence, joy, and justice. We all fight—sometimes over politics and wounded egos. Often it is about power. In movements, we clash over our ideas, our visions, who did not do what, or even minutia. “Friends ‘break up,’” Suttles (1970) reminds us, but we do not usually know why. There are usually telling reasons as well as compelling stories about our frailty, exposing a few lessons about the social world. The question is, when is a fight enough to end a relationship? It is hard to suggest that those who can’t endure a fight or cry together are truly friends. Sylvia Rivera’s years of friendship with Randy Wicker testify to this point. Rivera fought with Wicker for years. And the two still found reason and heart to forgive each other. The experience is not uncommon in social movements. Throughout campaigns, relationships move in any number of directions, between conflicts and radical forgiveness; along the way, some degree of catharsis often helps move a relationship into more authentic footing. There are any number of reasons people fight. Sometimes it is due to neglect or lack of support. Usually, it has something to do with power.

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Questions about Power “The non-hierarchical thing, I love,” explained Claire Leibowitz (2013). “Everyone should be their own leader.” This sentiment is felt by many in organizing. Most of us assume that friends should be equals. Yet when groups become more institutionalized, formalizing their structures or becoming nonprofits has consequences. Here, informal ties tend to clash with formalized structures, and the limits of friendship are exposed. At least this was the case with Time’s Up! Their friendship and formal structures came crashing apart. Sadly, this is not an isolated case: Friendship societies were consumed by formal party mechanisms in Russia. The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) affinity groups became nonprofits and commenced bickering. Over and over again, breakups and splits are part of movement work. Some friendships endure or transcend the fights. Others are never the same. Letter from a Friend Toward the end of December 2012, I got a letter from my friend Monica Hunken announcing a “Holiday/Good Bye 2012 Party!” “Hey there everybody!” the email invitation began. “I hope you are all happy and well in this time of holiday hubbub, end of world alarms and apocalyptic weather.” By the third line of the invitation, the author hinted there was more to this get-together than the usual holiday shindig. “This has been an intense year to say the least and as we close up shop and start over, I wanted to thank you all for braving it with me. All of you have either been there with me starting street parties, jumping in front of bulldozers, disrupting banks, singing, dancing, cleaning out homes, riding bikes, going to jail, making theater, celebrating, living life helping each other out the best we can as we traverse this strange, hot little planet.” The night of the party, we danced, played, went to a bar for more dancing, jumped on top of each other in a pile on the floor, screaming “safer spaces” in homage to the Time’s Up! safer spaces policy we nearly killed ourselves writing. Yet, in doing so, we were trying to build an ethical framework for the practice of politics, friendship, and organizing based on care, mutuality, and equality—heady ambitions (Rawlins, 2009, pp. 183–84). We hung out early into the next morning. Hunken and I talked about her trip to Puerto Rico and the ways in which activism both drains and sustains, especially in years such as this. Later she wrote on Facebook, “The whole last year and a half just hit me; the multiple arrests, the violence, the nonstop action, the infuriating injustice, the collective suffering and struggle

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of my friends and community, the loss, the oceans of adrenaline I’ve been living on and the enormous well of energy and power we’ve created in this world. I think I am grieving and trying to recollect my life, artistry, a sense of peace and somehow continue to fight the good fight as well. It might take my whole life to learn.” Later that night, I saw her at a Time’s Up! meeting. There we talked about ways in which to enjoy our lives, sustaining our activism with a gumbo of joy and justice, food and fun, sex and camaraderie so that we could survive for the long term. Between her call for balance and the loss of a few friends, I spent the last weeks of 2012 thinking about the tightrope between burnout and balance and the ways in which friendship helps us navigate the storm of our lives in between the ebb and flow of the movements in which we strive to succeed. Between the high-octane chase between police and activists, successes and arrests, advances and inevitable losses, what is it that keeps us going? And where do those little bits and pieces of memories go when we suffer? What happens when activism inflicts those wounds, causing or even exacerbating those traumas? What happens when we fight? Sometimes writing about activism while participating is allencompassing. In the midst of the worst disasters or battles, we are compelled to retreat into storied spaces where we give or take ideas and live in stories. This experience was on my mind as we sought to both contend with and escape the ravages of the storm. For Thanksgiving, just a few weeks after Superstorm Sandy, we set out for Garrison, New York, north of the city. Caught up in traffic, we listened to a recording of Pete Seeger recalling his friendship with Woody Guthrie. The two played labor and peace songs together before the war, raged against fascism during it, and fought the blacklist once it ended. Theirs was a rebel friendship like few others. Listening to Seeger recall Guthrie’s efforts to cope with losing his family to fires, with natural disaster, with McCarthyism, and with his own illness, it is hard not to be moved. Seeger accompanied Guthrie in playing early chords, collaborating on peace songs and antifascist melodies, journeying around the world, and struggling against the blacklist and ultimately illness, which would consume the author of “This Land Is Our Land.” Conversely, Guthrie showed Seeger how to jump freight trains and really see America. When Guthrie became sick, Seeger visited him at the hospital and played music for him. In short, they supported each other as they made majestic music. This is something all social movements need: mutual support. We eventually got to Garrison for the holiday. I ate, watched the Cowboys, and crashed early, waking with discombobulated thoughts later that night. Alone in those early hours, sometimes these in-between moments tell

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more than anything about who I am. Reading a printout of a friend’s paper, I discovered the back side of its recycled sheets included of an essay I wrote a decade prior. This story was about 2004 demonstrations and arrests when I was pulled over by plainclothes officers during the Republican National Convention as part of an affinity group that had long passed. It all seemed like so long ago. It was the first action in which I worked with Hunken and the last with the old Reclaim the Streets (RTS) affinity group (see Shepard, 2011). Those memories brought back the mixed feelings about the friends who accompanied me through that process, the colleagues who did not, the ways in which movements inspire me, those lost along the way, and the supports that were needed but not always there (Anonymous, 2008; Law and Martens, 2012). Images of those old street actions reverberated through my mind all night. In the months after my arrest, I went to court by myself until criminal charges were reduced to a violation. No one in the affinity group reached out to come to court in solidarity. With that, I knew the old RTS affinity group was dead. The friendships and networks had become too dispersed. Many had moved away; others walked away from activism or were becoming consultants, art stars, or founders of nonprofits with less time for jail support. There were still buddies, but the good deeds that connected our relationships with social action took place only on a sporadic basis. Some just came to our periodic salons. But the question of support and the lack thereof stuck with me. I would spend the rest of the night sleeping badly, if at all, mostly thinking about moments of support and conflicts that would become the basis for this chapter. In “The Importance of Support,” a pamphlet I stumbled across during Occupy Wall Street, Anonymous (2008) confesses, The instances when we have felt seriously let down by our friends and political allies for their failure to provide tangible support, or to show true compassion and understanding, have raised serious questions for us about movement sustainability, especially at moments of low power and energy. At times the disparities between what we’ve experienced and the potential of anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian communities has been maddening. We need to constantly ask ourselves: who are we and what do we really stand for as communities based in resistance, if we can’t support each other in times of need? . . . Our communities are more relevant, useful, and sustainable when we are collectively capable of providing support. Likewise, they are more inviting and inspiring when they model forms of mutual aid that are practical and consistent. Support work builds solidarity, strengthens our bonds, and deepens the integration of our politics into our lives in ways that are crucial to the struggles we engage in. Support over the long haul is particularly important. This means figuring out how to provide meaningful support throughout the duration of

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hardship—though the need for support, what it looks like, and how long it is needed will vary from situation to situation. In many experiences, it seems support is strongest immediately after a traumatic or tragic situation. We have experienced our communities to be impressively good at this: we throw benefits, we join our friends at their hospital beds or at their court hearings. But what happens six months or two years later? Are those support efforts maintained? Too often the answer is no. After the overt urgency of a situation subsides, it can become harder to determine what sort of support is needed, and the attention of people we need support from sometimes begins to drift elsewhere prematurely. This responsiveness to urgent situations is useful and even inspirational, but we need to build on this to be stronger in providing support more generally.

For Anonymous (2008), movements are diminished if support wanes. As RTS ended, I reached out to cyclists coping with their struggles with the police and connected with a new cohort of activist comrades. We brought Monica into cycling with us. Over the next decade, I became more and more involved with cycling, gardens, and public space activism, aiming to counter the darkening narrative of pain and domination of the neoliberal transformation of urban space with an activism of abundance and possibility (Shepard and Smithsimon, 2011). We organized, danced, planned actions, and sometimes clashed, while cohorts came and went through Time’s Up! As the years of organizing continued, many of which are chronicled in the previous chapters, the fights wore on us, sometimes becoming more pronounced. Watching friends depart, partnerships dissolve, and networks dissipate were worries that kept me up; they still keep me up. The late-night insomnia takes countless forms. Sometimes it is about where we are going or what has happened to us. Often it stems from those love quarrels or deeper-seeded arguments that tear at groups, such as Time’s Up! or ACT UP. Sometimes we worried about democracy, group process, or debates about reform versus revolutionary strategies. Who was too liberal or too radical? Who was sexist, insufficiently radical, or used language that we no longer felt was very funny. Which groups were male dominated, and which were insufficiently tolerant of those who did not speak in “movement speak”? Who were the cool kids, and who were too restrictive, rejecting the voices of the youth or those with more experience? How a group handles a fight says a lot about it. What becomes of it afterward? What happens when trust and solidarity breaks down and support recedes? Many of my friends had ideas about the topic.

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Struggles “To survive, we looked to ‘the healing powers of friendship and (safe) sex in the early days of the crisis,’” noted ACT UP veteran Jay Blotcher during a conversation on the topic. Yet “What happened to that solidarity that thrived under fire?” he wondered. The intricate relationship between friendship and social change leaves us with many questions. When activists break up, how does that affect organizing, especially among small groups? Affinity groups, including the Lower East Side Collective and the Fed Up Queers (FUQ), lost their capacity to move when relationship “drama” impeded the capacity of organizers to work together (Sycamore, 2004; Shepard, 2009; 2011). Betrayals among those once thought to be friends can be devastating. When Martin Luther King briefly purged queer organizer Bayard Rustin from the civil rights movement in the name of political expedience, friendship was rejected for political expediency. The movement regained its footing when Rustin was invited back to organize the March on Washington (D’Emilio, 2004). Yet when friendships are rocky, can organizing continue? When friendship networks break down, movements often slow. Ann Northrop, ACT UP’s longtime facilitator, has gone as far as to suggest that one of the reasons ACT UP slowed in recent years was because many of its social ties— the play, the flirting, and the friendships of the group—waned as the epidemic raged (Shepard, 2009). One barely has to scratch the surface to find fights among confidants throughout the history of social movements. Many date back decades. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee fought with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the civil rights movement as the more militant brand of activists associated with Black Power clashed with the mainstream civil rights groups. Activists in the women’s movement fought, as did those born at the end of the 1960s who joined the nascent gay liberation movement. Here the radical Gay Liberation Front (GLF) clashed with reform-minded organizers in the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) as well as among themselves (Kantrowitz, 1977/1996; Teal, 1971). “The personal was political,” explained Kohler, referring the early years in GLF. “Friendships were severed, too,” Kohler continued, describing the days after GLF split in 1970 (quoted in Blotcher, 1999). Other groups were infiltrated by police, leaving members to question who was a friend and who was a cop. Here, friendship was literally betrayed when one’s friend, lover, or the father of one’s children turned out to be a police infiltrator—as happened in the numerous cases recently exposed in the United Kingdom (e.g., Bob Lambert, Jim Sutton, Mark Kennedy) as well as cases like the G20 organizing groups in the United States and

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Canada. Such conflicts speak to the larger question of what happens when friendship and intimacy transform from trust-building mechanisms into mechanisms that destroy movements from within. How do movements contend with such challenges? Consider this story about friendship in the Young Lords Party. Young Lords and Social Transformations While Sylvia Rivera was famous for her work with Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, for a short period, she was also a member of the Young Lords Party. For much of its history, friendship provided the glue for this movement. The friendship between Richie Perez and Panama Alba dates back to the days when Perez was Alba’s teacher at Monroe High School in the late 1960s in the South Bronx. “He was the intellectual architect of our campaign,” recalled Alba, reflecting on Perez. The two organized communities, occupied Lincoln Hospital, and engaged in any number of other acts of civil disobedience (Shepard, 2011). From the late 1960s until Perez’s untimely death in 2004, they remained friends. Two years later, Alba sat and recalled his years of friendship with Perez. “Richie Perez’s life was my finest moment,” explained Young Lords veteran and longtime organizer Panama Alba in 2006 when I asked him what the highlight of his career was. But this was not always the case. I asked if the two of them had ever fought. Alba nodded. “He would always argue about me being too extreme.” For a short time, the lifelong friends separated, with Alba departing and Perez remaining with the Young Lords. “I didn’t understand it at the time,” Alba said. He was the only one in the Young Lords that had a real base of activism. He was a professor at Brooklyn College. He was involved in campus struggles. And he really believed the Young Lords could be corrected. I had given up on them. I walked away. Then Richie was kidnapped and tortured and escaped. He severed ties with everybody ’cause he didn’t know who to trust. The people who carried that out were the people within what had then become the growth of the Young Lords into this Marxist-Leninist shift. And as fate would have it, Mickey [Melendez] and I go to Puerto Rico for meetings with the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico. And this was, like, 1975. And we walked into a bar. We were in Isla Verde in the airport waiting to come back to New York. We had some hours to kill and we said “Fuck it. Let’s go to this bar, have some drinks.” We walk into this bar, and we run into Richie Perez. And we left him; he didn’t know nobody. And it was not any doing of mine. It was because he had developed a comradely relationship with people who had

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remained as Young Lords, and some of those people were the ones that were involved in this kidnapping and torture. Right after that happened, about a week and a half later, he called me. And so we hooked up and started talking. And it was like back to the good old days. I was involved in some Brooklyn College stuff and the Hostos College takeover. And we started bringing ideas together around the campaign to free the nationalist prisoners. And we just kept going until the day of his death in 2004. Richie was brilliant. I never met anyone who was so brilliant as he. Richie was an incredible human being. Now I will say this: nobody else could be a Richie Perez. All we can possibly be are the best Ben Shepards and Panamas and try to live the lessons we have learned.

Perez was also the product of his era, those who mentored him, and the legacies of Malcolm X and countless others. “Some people in the movement shine, and you know what?” ruminated Alba. “There are a lot of unsung heroes in our movement, as well, and we must not forget. Nobody liberates people. People liberate people.” But good friends help us stay the course. Time’s Up!, ACT UP, and Splits along the Way Many groups get along, but others split, with warring affinity groups dueling out where the group should go. “Some people don’t recognize how much they hurt their causes by turning their friends into their enemies,” noted Philip Paul after a spat on a Facebook page after Pride weekend in New York City (July 1, 2014). The fight was part and parcel of a long battle over an epidemic that did not seem to be going away. “I want to be around. I want to fight it,” explained gay liberationist and AIDS activist Hank Wilson in an interview with me almost two decades prior. He said, I think when I look at my ACT UP group, we’ve got these cycles too in our group. Sometimes you need to ride it through but sometimes it’s important for people to keep together. I guess I feel that people need to find one or two people they can work with, that they are respected by and they respect. If they can have those people in their lives they’ll have endurance. When I look back at some of my friends who aren’t here now, I have to consciously, right now, decide who those people are going to be because in the past I’ve always had those people. Even talking to you I am becoming aware of how important that is. There are good people everywhere. I think sometimes we spend too much time fighting with people we disagree with and never coalesce with people that you get off on. I think style wise, my thought personally has always been to pull together with people for something instead of trying to fight. (quoted in Shepard, 1997)

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Yet over the years, the fighting became more and more pronounced within AIDS activism. Some fought over whether affinity groups should work with drug companies. Others suggested that the group should challenge the whole system that allowed the AIDS epidemic to rage. AIDS prevention activists fought over harm reduction versus more punitive, abstinence-based approaches. “I broke with Signorile and others over APAL vs. sex panic and didn’t talk for years. Perhaps five or more” noted Jay Blotcher in a 2006 interview for this book. “But we got older and put it aside. I still think they were wrong, if anyone asks.” “It is one thing to fight or have a disagreement,” notes Jim Eigo, recalling some of the conflicts that wore on ACT UP. “It’s another thing to question each other’s motives. People questioned what the others were doing. ‘You’re not for people with HIV.’ ‘You’re not for people impacted.’ That’s what happened with ACT UP.” In response to all the waves of grief and the ongoing floor fights seemingly consuming the group and draining membership, Eigo drafted a two-page call: “FOR SIMPLE INTERNAL SUPPORT FOR ACT UP MEMBERS.” In it, he argued that unless the group could cope with the movement’s attrition, it would continue to erode. And the best way to do this was through support and “basic respect from all other AIDS activists.” It went on to say, “I think our most valuable self-criticism will only occur when this mutual respect infuses all our arguments. I know that such mutual respect is ultimately a matter of individual realization.” Eigo concluded that it would be useful to reach out to each other and offer support while fostering solidarity. It was only moderately successful, and at a certain point, trust seemed to break down. People left, some died, and others joined the movement. Of course, part of the pressure on the group involved the conflicts over police surveillance. “ACT UP resisted the infiltration of the Marxist socialists in our first year and also resisted being co-opted by Dana Beal and the Ibogaine crew,” Blotcher said. Over and over, direct action groups, such as ACT UP, FUQ, and others, organized with a passion while seeking to subvert the powers that be. Yet sometimes the only ones they damaged were themselves. Some of the fights seemed to repeat age-old scripts, echoing battles taking place between modernists and postmodernists. And dialogue broke down as certain topics moved off the table for discussion. Members of FUQ, for example, fought, rejected, and moved beyond ACT UP, SexPanic!, and the Matthew Shepard political funeral organizing groups to form their own core affinity group (Flynn and Smith, 2004/2008). “In my book, In a Queer Time and Place back in 2005, I actually wrote about the potential for emergent queer youth groups to pit old and young against each other in queer

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communities that were not actually organized along generational lines,” notes Jack Halberstam (2014). This kind of conflict, I said then, is organized within Oedipal structures that make one generation see the other as their rivals/replacement. Consequently, these Oedipal structures substitute for other more queer, fluid and entwined relations between young and old, relations moreover that were often intimate and that, in the past, allowed for knowledge (prior to the internet) to be passed on from one generation to another. I still think that some of the impact of queer youth groups comes in the form of Oedipal conflict and I am committed to thinking with others about how to communicate, exchange and theorize beyond that Oedipal frame.

Fueled by a similar ethos, much of FUQ’s work was about secrets, subversion, and aversion to those whom the group did not trust. “Fed Up Queers was an invite-only group that was supposed to trust one another and do really risky things. And I don’t think we did those things,” Matt Bernstein Sycamore noted. “We did particular things where you absolutely needed to know everyone in the group, and we were infiltrated anyways” (quoted in Shepard, 2009, p. 256). “We were trying to do two things at once,” continued Sycamore. “We were a totally covert group and we all had high public profiles, many of us. So the value in having the group be closed is lost. I don’t think we were ever that. I think also there was a lot of in-fighting” (p. 256). “I think we sort of assumed that we had more values in common than we really did,” Jennifer Flynn reflected. Conflicts over ideology, sex, and gender tore at the group (Flynn and Smith, 2004/2008, p. 228). “It was kind of like a dyke cult,” Matt Bernstein Sycamore explained when asked why the group stopped working together (quoted in Shepard, 2009, p. 256). “The whole model was based on us being a closed group. And then we could do riskier actions. But we did not do that, so it was kind of cliquish.” In addition, Sycamore notes, “People brought their personal drama, which might have nothing to do with what was happening in the group. And what people might have thought . . . we really did never trust each other.” In addition, “We were working on an activist burnout model, and not thinking of other ways of doing it until things finally ran out” (p. 256). After a final flare-up over sex, FUQ stopped working together (Flynn and Smith, 2004/2008). The obsession with police infiltration wears on groups. Newcomers are treated with suspicion. Starhawk has said, “More groups and social movements destroy themselves than any number of cops” (quoted in Shepard, 2011, p. 165). These fights reflect any number of challenges to what

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friendship can mean or not mean, especially when solidarity breaks down and ties are lost. In Time’s Up!, where I volunteered for more than a decade, responses to police varied. But when the New York City Police Department sued the group in 2005, enjoining them not to participate in Critical Mass bike rides, many in the group felt a great sense of solidarity among cyclists. Others, such as the group’s director, Bill Di Paola, took a vigilant approach to questioning the motives of those who criticized the group, accusing them of being undercover police. Over the years, accusations of “COINTELPRO” (Counter Intelligence Program) came to feel like a new McCarthyism when old friends of the group were accused of being undercover police influenced by COINTELPRO. This seemed like a way to explain away any conflict or criticism. When new details of police surveillance of the group and of the Occupy movement came out in 2013, activists found that undercover police had attended Occupy meetings, hung out, and even attended an activist birthday party for me at the Blarney Stone Bar, where activists hung out during much of the movement (Dwyer, 2013). Transcripts of police testimony at court hearings revealed conversations the police could only have gotten by hanging out with us there. I had two birthday parties at the Blarney Stone that were attended by many in Occupy. But still I suggested it was better for us to remain as open and democratic as possible, writing to the group mailing list, “So what if we were spied on or infiltrated? The police would find out we do rides, garden activities, bike repair, and parties.” Others followed the point, noting that there were other things to be concerned about. But our friendships still needed to be valued. According to George Pingeon (2013) in a note to the mailing list, it sucks to be infiltrated, i can think of two reasons, (1) you put your trust in people who are being dishonest and left feeling betrayed, (2) there is the potential of derailing or sidetracking initiatives, and indeed poison in the group. anyway, none of this should be news to us—the real story seems to be that bill, you lost the confidence of several core members and volunteers who were demanding more participation and transparency, not poison (the antidote to poison!). bill—your friends are some of the most dedicated and smart activists in NYC, they love you, and more importantly they love each other, they love the environment. the more this shakespearian act unfolds, the more vulnerable we are to police tactics, which aim at dividing and destroying us [uncorrected copy from original message].

Over time, the conflict between those who supported transparency and those who supported a closed, top-down approach wore on the group. Some wanted the group to become more top down and board driven.

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Others wanted Time’s Up! to function Occupy-style, with a consensusbased decision-making model. Here leadership was shared among the body of the group, not the head. They wanted the group to remain open to full input from the body of the group: the participants and members. Others, including the executive director, reminded everyone that it was a nonprofit—open to input but not shared leadership. We could participate but not influence the ways in which the organization was run. For those who saw the group as a network of equals, such a position became untenable. A politics of friendship requires that people care about each other’s well-being, listen to each other’s needs, and treat each other as partners on equal footing (Rawlins, 2009). Many of the group’s networks dissipated when the executive director rejected input from organizers doing the work, reminding the rank and file where decision making really took place. Trust was lost when the hierarchical structure of the organization seemed to be valued more than the egalitarian community of friends who all felt a sense of leadership and active engagement with the group. By 2013, a majority of the board quit as the schism between membership and leadership became a gulf. For many, the events stung. Keegan Stephan, who left the group at the time, noted, “In any friendship, trust is crucial. This is especially true in friendships between activists who are working together, where a breach of trust can result in failure instead of success, disappointments instead of great actions, or even a loss of personal freedom and jail time. At Time’s Up, trust broke down, so it became an untenable place to continue organizing direct action with friends.” We spent most of the summer of 2013 bickering and battling, gossiping and bantering over this. Frustrated with the lack of support from the top, many left the group to start other projects. Time’s Up! had had a good run, but for many, it was just time to leave. Friendships were severed. For many, the feeling was akin to losing a family member. And the lesson becomes that when friendships are not attended to, the effectiveness of movement work is minimized. Still the question remains: when do these friendships and networks help or hinder the process, especially as groups come together and fall apart? At a conversation at the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space in New York City, activist Sarah Schulman, a veteran of similar conflicts with ACT UP, argues that great things can be done together, even despite great differences: “In my experience, the periods when activism has been most effective here have been when there were both reform-minded groups and visionaries working alongside each other. They usually hate each other.” But they both get a lot done alongside each other. Examples include Occupy and unions,

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the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance, and so on. Rivera, Kohler, and Wicker were able to withstand the fights. The way one handles these conflicts—the approach to supporting as opposed to punishing or ostracizing those one disagrees with—tells a great deal. Schulman notes, “I remain as convinced as I have ever been that punishment is wrong. The best thing for human beings is to face the source of problems and work together to resolve them. The role of friends is to support positive change, i.e., the confrontation with the self required for resolution of conflict.” For Schulman, “punishment is an excuse not to listen.” Friendships offer spaces where activists ideally find care, support, and solace in a larger, more hostile world. To a great degree, this was Matt Bernstein Sycamore’s experience with ACT UP. Within the group, there were real feelings of “tenderness, us against the world.” Paradoxically, the feeling of “us against ACT UP” was frequently part of the experience of trying to create a new queer politics. “In order to actualize a politics of transformation, at some point or other, if you are going to do effective organizing, you have to have ways to take care of others in the group in a way that allows for members to support others and not be torn to shreds” (quoted in Shepard, 2009, p. 247). Fights are sadly part of activism. Sometimes the friendships survive, and sometimes they break apart. “We are passionate,” notes Jay Blotcher. “That’s why we are activists. Causes are most important and friendships come after that. I continue that vow, dropping friends who voted for Romney.” The process is very messy, as Blotcher and I discussed over and over. Still, it has to be accounted for. Certainly, everyone can use support, and most everyone deserves an ear, even if they disagree. That was always Pete Seeger’s point. An inability or unwillingness to listen is behind many of the fights discussed here. We all have to listen and try to really hear each other. Yet often we do not. Rethinking some of these conflicts, ruminating about these things, has been a reason for my sleeping badly for years. Fall 2012, AIDS Activism, and the Places It Takes Me Movements are about the totality of the images we create of the world, democratizing modernity, with love and conflicts inevitably accompanying the process. Rivera left the LGBT movement for two decades over a fight. That Thanksgiving night when I started thinking about this chapter, I did not get back to sleep for hours, mostly wondering about what had become of all these movements and groups I had seen or supported. Maybe Stanley Aronowitz was right, and we needed organization as well as friendships, otherwise everything would fade away. In between tossing and turning,

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I didn’t get back to sleep that Thanksgiving night until 5 a.m. The same thoughts meandered through my mind as we made our way back home through the lush fall afternoon after another day of hiking, skating, and enjoying the fall colors of the Catskills. World AIDS Day was coming up, which would bring its own set of memories. Over the quarter-century after Fred Mayer died, I participated in countless forms of AIDS activism. From 1993 to 2005, I worked in the AIDS “industry” as a social worker and left, recognizing I was more at home in a movement among peers than in the industry among hierarchies. So I went back to the movement, leaving AIDS Inc. behind. Today, I am more involved with environmental activism. I still go to ACT UP and Voices of Community Activists and Leaders actions, where I still see Jim Eigo and countless other friends, plugging in when I can. Yet the burden of history, illness, and mortality is heavy. All these years later, AIDS activism still takes me through cycles of emotional spaces—from joy in imagining all we can do to sadness about our greed and the limitations of science, from the connection that comes with taking care of each other in times of need to regret for the cruelty we sometimes inflict on each other when egos and anger, desperation and fear, get in our way. These are all some of the experiences of coping with living. They are a few of the emotions that have accompanied the last quarter-century. “AIDS is like the polishing on the soul,” John Calliau explained in San Francisco decades prior to this book (quoted in Shepard, 1997). It illuminates what we can be and so often what we are.

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uch of this story is about friendship, solidarity, and the way they sustain social movements. Before his death, Michel Foucault suggested that social movements serve as experiments in approaches to living. His writings on power informed the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), reminding members of the group to honor their own voices, needs, desires, and shared practices (Foucault, 2012; Halperin, 1997; Roach, 2012). Activists established new forms of engagement with drug users and gay men, which recognized that asking them to stop having sex or using drugs was futile. A more realistic approach involved ways to reduce harm while acknowledging human needs. The result was the harm reduction movement born of a generation of activists hoping to reduce the harms of HIV/ AIDS and prohibitive politics alike. This movement outlined new philosophies of sexuality and health, bridging activist practices and thinking about queer theory and harm reduction, eros, thanatos, and the prevention of illness, while engaging risk. Like all AIDS activism, it was complicated work. And some members did not last (Shepard, 2013). While much of this story started with the loss of Dad’s old roommate Fred Mayer, the feeling never quite left me. Two decades later, the premature loss of my colleague, Michael, from our syringe exchange program ignited feelings of loss that lingered from my earliest days of fighting the AIDS epidemic. For years, we had worked together in harm reduction work settings in the South Bronx. After it became too much, I left, while he chose to stay, continuing to build programs and push forward the terrain. Many who stayed engaged with AIDS and harm reduction work felt their own internal wounds. They coped in their own various ways, including using or neglecting their own health. Some stopped taking their medications; others overdosed. Rather than weakness or pathology, French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1897/1951) saw such behavior as a byproduct of social

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disorganization and isolation, as a way of contending with a breakdown of social bonds and alienation. There are any number of reasons why such behavior becomes part of battling the dueling epidemics of Hepatitis C, HIV, and related concerns. Forms of stress related to this work include secondary trauma, compassion fatigue, organizational conflict, burnout, complications of direct services, and lack of funding. For some, self-injury and self-medication are ways of responding. What happens when we see our friends and colleagues suffer? And how do we support them, even when they do not seem to embrace such efforts? How do we honor the heroes in our midst before they are gone? Chapter 11 considers a few of these questions. How to Survive a Plague A few weeks prior to the Thanksgiving drive from the previous chapter, my friend Jay Blotcher wrote to me, inviting me to take part in a panel he was organizing upstate on AIDS activism and the film How to Survive a Plague. Blotcher has helped with so many writing projects, queries, and stories over the years, so I was more than happy to try to return the favor. Every year, I try to honor World AIDS Day and the many people with AIDS I have seen shuffle in and out of this life. The panel represented a small way to remember and contribute. I would participate as long as I could speak my mind, I told Blotcher. So I planned to be there, reminiscing about comrades and a few of the affinity groups not recalled in the movie, such as the syringe exchange and women’s and majority rights groups, whose memories were also worth remembering. Driving up from the city, the GPS took me across Canal Street and through the Holland Tunnel to New Jersey; gradually, peaceful country roads brought me down Main Street to Rosendale, New York. Looking at the hills in the back of the Rosendale Theater, I wondered how I had found myself in this gorgeous place. Blotcher was there to greet me. Throughout How to Survive a Plague, we follow Peter Staley through his well-chronicled journey from Wall Street into AIDS activism, fighting to push the federal government—and later, drug companies—to research, approve, and distribute medications that would save both himself and a generation. Staley and his comrades from the Treatment and Data Committee had to contend with a struggle over red tape, barriers from the government, bitter infighting from within the movement, and ever-present losses as deaths continued and the group seemed to turn on itself. Through this fighting, we see what happens when solidarity breaks down, as some fight more than try to cohere with each other. This bitter quality enveloped much of

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AIDS activism for years during that time. We see the lows of AIDS activism, hearing Bill Dobbs’s shrill screams and the group’s descent into backfighting, which consumed AIDS activism for years. But we also see how people made sense of this experience, honoring those who disappeared as they kept fighting. Despite all the success of his push for parallel-track fast-tracking AIDS drug approvals, the medications did not come fast enough for Bob Rafsky, who we see chiding a drug company executive, noting that the black mark on his face is a Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS) lesion. We witness Rafsky deliver a eulogy for a friend carried out of Judson Memorial Church. Eric Sawyer holds him as he talks about the sword of Damocles hanging over everyone’s head and the ways in which everyone’s soul will contend with this, paraphrasing from Pericles’s funeral oration from the History of the Peloponnesian War. It was only a few short months into the Clinton Administration before Rafsky would shuffle off this mortal coil himself. We watch several of the heroes lose their minds before they are lost. Those years from 1992 to 1995 were when I first became involved with AIDS activism, just as movement fatigue was settling in. News from the International AIDS Conference in Berlin suggested that few of the approaches taken toward drug research were producing any results. The mood was as grim as ever, with AIDS death rates reaching their highest rates in 1995. Then in 1996, something remarkable happened—the treatment breakthrough that had long eluded activists and scientists was achieved. And those who had been sick and could access treatment became well again. You could see the KS lesions that had been on people’s skin disappear. I saw my clients who had been in wheel chairs start to walk the streets of San Francisco again in the summer of 1996. I looked at the work of ACT UP with awe, watching AIDS activist heroes, such as Jim Eigo, and their lesson that regular people really can make a difference in this world. Regular people can really impact change. During the postfilm panel, I noted that over the years, ACT UP helped train new cohorts of activists while supporting countless movements, from global justice to Occupy Wall Street. More than anything, the group lived up to Vito Russo’s famous promise that after he was done kicking the shit out of this disease, he wanted to be around so he could kick the shit out of this system so that this never happened again. ACT UP’s contribution to this trajectory of nonviolent civil disobedience was to remind the world that pleasure had to be part of the process. After I finished, Blotcher pointed out that Victor Mendolia was one of the prime organizers for ACT UP’s 1989 Stop the Church action.

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“There is another point I want to make that was not in the film,” Mendolia concluded. “ACT UP was a very supportive environment.” The group helped him feel OK about getting tested. They also helped him enjoy living life along the way. “It was really, really fun, supporting your whole being . . . even if people were dying . . . you could still dance.” Driving home, I listened to an old tape, Alphaville; on one side were the Fine Young Cannibals, on the other, dance hall anthems that inspired the bittersweet feeling of innocence of those days in which I gradually became aware of the epidemic. I recalled the scene from the film of someone reading from the AIDS Quilt the name “Freddie Mercury,” who passed in 1990. I put on “Don’t Stop Me Now” and “You’re My Best Friend” by Queen and played them over and over again—and loud. “You make me live, whatever this world can give to me. You’re the best friend that I’ve ever had,” Freddie sang. AIDS really taught me how important those friends would be, even if a few had to scream, “Let me out!” Looking into the night, thinking of those days—the lusty fun, the dancing, and so many gone whom I am glad to have known—it’s impossible not to both miss them and be glad to have felt the things they helped me feel. They showed me so much about friendship and fun, embodied connection with something bigger than ourselves. Remembering them is the debt I owe for all they have given me. The movement showed me we can do great things together; we can value each other and love each other, even after a fight or two. “We all can be heroes,” Bowie sang on the next song. ACT UP reminded us that we can all be heroes. I switched tapes closer to Brooklyn, turning on “Suzanne” by Leonard Cohen, with its homage to a long-ago muse and lover who reminded him to pay attention to the beauty around him: And she shows you where to look Among the garbage and the flowers There are heroes in the seaweed There are children in the morning They are leaning out for love And they will lean that way forever

Friends are part of this landscape. They are the heroes we can all become. It was an odd twist of fate that two weeks after the screening, one of the stars of the movie ended up shuffling off and out of this world. His passing represented a problem for us all. It also reminded us to honor a hero.

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Spencer Cox, HIV, and the Problem of Memory Weeks before his death, AIDS activist Spencer Cox (2012) posted a blog post about How to Survive a Plague, noting more than anything that it captured the sheer joy inherent in the whole thing. Some of the best people I have ever known I met in ACT UP: decent, courageous, strong, brilliant people committed to changing the world for the better even if they weren’t themselves going to be around to enjoy it. We laughed so very much—the group of activists dedicated to haranguing the New York City Health Commissioner, for instance, called themselves “Surrender Dorothy”—we sang, we made love . . . and we very consciously tried to make sure that, when the plague was over, there would be something left that would have been worth preserving. The first time I saw the movie, spotting the marvelous Garance Franke-Ruta at a massive demonstration at the National Institutes of Health wearing a hat in the shape of a medicinal molecule and trimmed for emphasis with dollar bills, made me laugh so loudly I thought I would lose it. If I have one piece of advice for young, aspiring activists, it is to always hold on to the joy, always make it fun. If you lose that, you have lost the whole battle.

Losing a Friend A few weeks after the World AIDS Day event, word started trickling in that Spencer Cox, one of the heroes from the Treatment and Data Committee, was on his last legs, finally passing on December 18, 2012. After hearing about Cox passing (France, 2012), several of us started chatting and dropping notes on Facebook. Eric Sawyer suggested that a few of us meet at the Stonewall to hang. Some said he stopped taking his HIV meds. Praying for the dead and fighting like hell for the living are one thing, but sometimes just living is hard. Primo Levy could survive Auschwitz, but living with the memories, the reality that he had survived but others had passed, was another story. He ended up throwing himself down an empty elevator shaft, a painfully long fall. Cox was one of the veterans of the famous Treatment and Data working group from ACT UP who helped push a parallel track and an effective research agenda to get drugs into bodies—the right drugs—which would help those who had survived the plague at that point have a fair chance of living (France, 2012). And then he stopped taking his own medications. At the Stonewall Inn, several of us in attendance talked about living, losses, trauma, friendships, and ACT UP. Some of the naked protesters who had taken over House Speaker John Boehner’s office, calling for him to

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support AIDS funding, were on hand for a fundraiser to pay for their still mounting legal costs. We talked about surviving. “All I do is work,” explained one activist. Another noted that the stress of coping with those years just had kept on. Cox had pointed out that those who survived AIDS would have to live with the memories of those who had fallen, even as they tried to live. Memories fade, but the pain still lingers. So we talked about living and friendship. Sawyer noted that many had worked so hard on living and fighting that they could no longer take care of themselves or move beyond the epidemic or the traumatic stress of the pent-up pain. We talked about a note Jon Winkleman posted a to Facebook commenting on a 2008 New York Magazine article, in which David France wrote, “Spencer Cox, an ACT UP veteran who founded a think tank called the Medius Institute for Gay Men’s Health, suggests that anybody who lived through the worst of the AIDS crisis has lasting trauma and tends to suffer elevated levels of drug problems, starting later in life. ‘These aren’t people who were ticking time bombs to begin with and then skidded off the road. They’re our best and brightest. I can’t tell you how many terrific, smart, hardworking, amazing people I know hit middle age and just lost it,’ [Cox] says.” In a very painful irony, France’s article is about the self-destruction of Dr. Gabriel Torres. “Between the twenty-fifth anniversary and the two documentaries, I’ve been hearing a lot of my ACT UP sisters and brothers talk about the catastrophic, long-term, serial grief; post-traumatic stress; and shell-shock from living through the worst years of the plague,” explained Winkleman. “For years, I thought I was alone. Now I know many of us have similar struggles. There seems to be barely any discussion of, and no support for, the emotional, psychic, and spiritual injuries many of us live with today. How can we come together, talk about it, and find a way to support and heal our survivors?” As the conversation continued at the Stonewall Inn, several mentioned the need for old-school support for people living with both HIV and the memories of those no longer here, as well as the psychic scars we still carry. I recalled the old HIV widower groups for survivors. “Aren’t those support groups, weekly meetings still going?” I asked. “Not really.” Well, maybe we need to get them back—those old mutual aid groups—as spaces where people practice care and nonalienating humanity with each other. Maybe we need a few more of those public spaces where people run into friends—those Zuccotti Parks and Charas Community Centers, those spaces that bring people together—and can practice being kind to each

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other We desperately need those spaces to meet, talk, and connect with new friends and old. Leaving the Stonewall, I started to unlock my bike. A friend from ACT UP asked where my light was. “Stolen,” I told him. He said that he hoped I would get a light for my bike so I could make it home OK. “We need you to be around for years and years,” he explained. Later, on my ride home, it was not a problem with a light that stopped me: I got a flat. “I would know that hat anywhere,” my friend Josh pointed out at the bottom of the bridge. He was going to Barbès but slowed to walk me home. Arriving at my house, I thought about the pain of surviving with the bittersweet reality that so many others have not, or are not, making it— whether they are on the Rockaways, on the streets, or long gone due to HIV. I thought of an article I wrote in late 1999 for POZ. It never ran at the time, but the issues it talks about, in terms of HIV and memory, seem as present today as they did back then, over a dozen years ago when we were first grappling with protease inhibitors and the reality that some of us would actually survive this thing physically. But then we would have to reconcile ourselves to the memories of what had come before, the decade or so of living with the reality that many of our friends had not survived or might not survive. And now we were going to have to. But how? “We’re very focused on living with AIDS,” noted Spencer Cox (2006) in another blog post. “And most of the time, that’s how it should be.” But he continued, “I wonder if the memories we’re carrying around haven’t, for some, become a burden that we feel obligated to carry because we survived.” He concluded, “Maybe once in a while, we need to stop and remember what happened to us. Maybe if we made some room for our sadness, we wouldn’t be so depressed.” In honor of Spencer and countless other activists struggling with their memories of what happened along the way, here are a few ideas about what those memories mean for the living, years later . . . The mind and its relation to the body, I will never understand. Today, as we face the dilemmas of HIV survival syndrome, pre- and postexposure prophylaxis, and the complexity of prevention strategies, HIV has become an epidemic facing a problem of memory. At this point, AIDS has become a sort of Vietnam: its grip on our culture, memory, and psyches still eludes explanation. The problem is that we are still walking in the midst of this conflict, so it’s difficult to step outside and fully observe it. The legacy of this war, to borrow the words of literary critic Paul Fussell (1975/2000), is one of “innocence savaged,” and if not destroyed, transformed. As Northrop Frye wrote after World War I, “The cultural form of our past is not only the memory of mankind, but of our buried life . . . Study of it leads to a recognition scene, a discovery in which

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we see, not our past lives, but the total cultural form of our present life” (quoted in Fussell, 1975/2000, p. 335). Below the surface, AIDS informs countless ways in which we have become what we are. Today it becomes another lingering fixture on the American political landscape. Forgetting Bruce Woods Patterson, a New York psychotherapist, has suggested that even if we found a cure today, it would take a generation to clean up the mess. Years ago, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation published its report on “the epidemic of grief ” taking hold of the psyche of the city. In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell addresses the persistence of grief on a culture. After the war, many thought they could just leave the war behind. Stanley Casseon recalled his years after World War I: “I was deep in my work again, and had, as I thought, put the war into the category of forgotten things” (quoted in Fussell, 1975/2000, p. 325). Life and memory tend to be a great deal more porous. “The war’s baneful influence controlled still all our thoughts and acts, directly and indirectly” (p. 325). Whether we say it or not, HIV still pervades a great many of our worlds. Today I worry we are facing a new epidemic: one of forgetting and the indirect ways this plays on people’s lives. There are powerful reasons why people would want to forget the epidemic. For 15 years, some people lost as many as a friend a week. Of course they would want to close the door on that ugly place and feeling. When I was conducting oral histories of long-term survivors, there was often a point when interviewees would glimpse out, their eyes leaving the room, recalling the strange silhouette in their minds of the scene, the feeling, of the first days in which HIV entered their lives (Shepard, 1997). Given the profound level of pain, it does not come as a surprise that people want to forget. The problem is that we may never get out of this if we do not learn how to remember. Quite obviously, our political culture has a huge stake in forgetting about HIV. HIV represents a series of cultural failures. Lack of a cure represents a failure of science. HIV represents a failure of policy. Its disproportionate effect on the poor and on people of color is a reminder of our continued failure to handle racism and poverty in America. Today, as HIV transforms, continuing to attack the most invisible, socially vulnerable populations—such as intravenous drug users and queers of color—we are now facing an epidemic of amnesia. The lesson “SILENCE = DEATH” taught the world that the inequalities of access to

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health care and the social injustice that outsiders face every day in our culture would only expand unless health care was made accessible to all. Today these lessons are blurred within the epidemic’s transformations. Trauma So many people have been burned by AIDS. A whole generation of activists is gone. Many fear getting back into the political arena after the difficulties of AIDS organizing, not the least of which is trauma. There is a profound anxiety about getting stung again. Powerful anxieties, defensiveness, even attacks on other activists that seem to come from nowhere—they all linger; people do not want to get burned again. Many of these past traumas stem from very real difficulties in facing the AIDS catastrophe. Fear plays on memory in strange ways. The motivation to avoid pain becomes powerful. Aspects of trauma lie below the surface of so many of the lives of those who have experienced the epidemic. Many never found a place to grieve; whenever they started, someone else would die, and that old grief was put on hold. The lingering result of the multiple losses is psychic numbing. Trauma grips at people in profound ways. People fear feeling that again, so they hold it together. The problem is that the grief never really goes away. It remains in the back of the mind, below the surface. But it still has an influence on the way people behave. I remember starting to cry when I opened a newspaper and saw a photo of the ruins of a Chimabue painting destroyed during earthquakes in Padua in 1997. I do not really think it was a painting I was grieving. Trauma and loss often have as much to do with the loss of self, order, or meaning as they do with the loss of people or things. When world views are decimated, which is often the case with those who experience trauma, the world appears to be a meaningless place. A state of disequilibrium may follow. The self is a life story. After trauma, the life story feels broken. Unsafe Worlds But for many, risk may be part of the disequilibrium or lack of coherence. Walt Odets (1995) suggests that unsafe sex may, in part, stem from a feeling of survival guilt. It’s a difficult feeling to be the last one in the room to turn out the lights. Some suggest the only way to recover from trauma is to find a space to slowly learn how to handle the feelings of remembering. This is particularly difficult because the epidemic is still among us. Many survivors of

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trauma may be coping with extreme forms of grief. I do not know if New York City has found a way to incorporate the experience of HIV into its history. Some simply do not want to talk about it. But others reflect. The New York City AIDS Memorial at West Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village is a 42-foot-long granite bench on a gravel path in Hudson River Park. It recalls lost connections in large words: “I can sail without wind. I can row without oars, but I cannot part from my friend without tears.” This memorial points to a way out. A primary component of the treatment of trauma involves integration of the event, changes in status, and feelings that were engendered by the loss into a new, coherent narrative. When the traumatic event, however painful it might be, can be incorporated into the individual’s story, it creates meaning and order, integrating aspects of the past into her or his current lived experience, moving forward into a larger story rather than moving backward. One’s life story may have components of a tragedy, but when they are realized as part of that story, this engenders agency and control. Remembering and Prevention Of course, there is a powerful longing inside us to forget about HIV, to put it behind us. It has always been unsafe, in my life, to forget (or to choose not to remember). Certainly, there is a powerful impulse to forget. Getting an HIV blood test at age 17 robbed me of a kind of innocence I was never going to get back. The subtext of such gestures is that sexuality is stigmatized; sex is bad was the message, desire dirty. Real HIV/AIDS education and prevention can help people incorporate risk reduction into a whole picture of critical decision making for their lives. If properly incorporated, then sex, disease, and trauma can be delinked. But we have got to stop treating sex, even kinky sex, like an unrealistic part of people’s lives. A holistic vision of health helps us feel more, be more, abundant. Remembering is prevention. All queers were once treated like outsiders. This is not a matter of “us and them.” If people are allowed to remember, this community can grow from the AIDS experience, and we can cope with it. Freud (1914) notes, “You’re not cured because of what you remember, you’re cured because you can remember.” The time has come for us to learn to remember. Rest in peace, Spencer Cox. Thanks for reminding us to remember. Reflecting on the treatment advances he helped bring about, Cox explained,

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What I learned from that is that miracles are possible, miracles happen, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything. I wouldn’t trade that information for anything. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know what’s going to happen day to day. I don’t know what’s going to happen next year. I just know, you keep going. You keep evolving and you keep progressing, you keep hoping until you die. Which is going to happen someday. You live your life as meaningful as you can make it. You live it and don’t be afraid of who is going to like you or are you being appropriate. You worry about being kind. You worry about being generous. And if it’s not about that what the hell’s it about? (quoted in France, 2012)

Thanks for reminding me to try to be not only an activist but a good person, a good friend. Much of December, activists around the city would talk about what had become of Spencer and why he had stopped taking his medications. What had happened to his connection with his friends or his sense of hope? Why was he out of contact with support? What had gone wrong? How do we really support our friends? This was a topic that had challenged activist communities across this city. It inspired this story.

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Notes toward a Conclusion Activist Rituals and an Homage to the Disappeared

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ocial changes, like conclusions for books, are rarely easy. Some suggest they come in waves; others, such as Zora Neale Hurston (1942), view the process as a slow plow sowed among friends who will hopefully meet at a barbeque when all is said and done. Such rituals help us bind our lives together, connecting our bodies in space and time as we seek to know each other and become friends. Here friendships help us find new ways of engaging the world. After all, every relationship takes a dialectical shape from formation to conflict to either a resolution and some sort of new awareness or a rupture. These transformations have been the subject of the rebel friendships, including my own, traced throughout this story. Within this spirit, I recall a few activist rituals—salons, Drag Marches, political funerals, homilies—and the ways in which these practices help us create an encounter between past practices and current projects, age-old struggles and our current efforts to create a city of friends and comrades based around interconnection rather than institutional affiliation. Much of this city comes together with the stories we share, the ways we provide the support everyone needs. Everyone benefits from support. This is where the city of friends takes shape. When we lend a hand, it becomes a monument. The third weekend in January 2013, I attended a political marriage, divorce, and funeral. “We were a real family . . . albeit with a lot of incest,” explained Peter Staley at the funeral of Spencer Cox at the Cutting Room on Sunday afternoon. The day before, Occupy Wall Street converged downtown for a street action on the anniversary of the Citizen’s United Supreme Court ruling, staging a mock divorce between democracy and corporate personhood. Friends from Occupy converged for the theatrics planned for Wall Street. The following day, we would reflect on the life of

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a beloved AIDS activist. Between the good-bye for Spencer Cox and the Occupy rebirth, the whole weekend felt like a family reunion, as did much of the end of the year. It was a season of activist rituals, marking endings and beginnings. These rituals—the yearly Drag March and salons—mark a connection among activist communities. They are driven by friends who share space to remember and imagine, drafting their own narratives of living. Memorial Riding to Spencer Cox’s funeral I greeted my friend Kevin by the Gandhi statue on the west corner of Union Square, where he was leading the Time’s Up! Peace Ride. Inside the funeral, I saw friends from the worlds of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and its spinoff affinity groups and organizations, including the Church Ladies for Choice, Housing Works, and the Treatment and Data Committee. Sitting at the bar, Charles King and Mark Harrington talked about Spencer. He had his meds, explained Harrington. He probably thought he could stop taking them and get through it. The conversation hit on the space between grief, pain, sanity, and a lack thereof. Hamlet entertained the idea of insanity in his soliloquies. Some suggest this is how he coped. He explored his crazy, talking it through. Yet can we really maintain our sanity by exploring insanity, letting its extremes dance off the perimeters of the mind as the gamers do, playing out fantasies? We need to be allowed to be crazy, to step off for a second. But what happens if we act instead of contemplate acting? What happens if we stop taking our meds? What if we can’t come back after we’ve floated out to sea where our friends can’t find us? HIV has always shown us how unforgiving our bodies are. Looking up, there was a screen with Liza, someone quite acquainted with the periphery of her own edges of sanity, singing “Cabaret.” “Just wanted you to know we were thinking of you Freddie,” she famously said at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert at London’s Wembley Stadium in 1992. She was a hero to so many. “It’s a great video montage,” I mentioned to Blotcher, looking up at the scenes of Liz Taylor and Bette Davis. The montage reminded me of what it must have been like to be at Vito Russo film nights at the Gay Activists Alliance firehouse in the early 1970s. Larry Kramer would confess that he had grown weary of these eulogies during his eulogy for Cox. And we were still passing on that collective memory and culture.

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“If there was ever a question that Spencer wanted to be the center of everything, this is it,” Ron Goldberg greeted everyone. “I’m Ron Goldberg. Welcome to ACT UP. Old habits die hard.” I sat with Karen Ramspacher, my buddy from the Church Ladies and New Alternatives for LGBT Youth. She had worked with Cox in her early ACT UP days. It was good to sit there chatting with her, hanging out. Sitting there, “seeing so many ACT UP friends, thinking of those who were missing and looking at pictures of Spencer,” Ramspacher was filled with memories of her old friends. She confessed to thinking of the old Fred Astaire song, “Just the Way You Look Tonight.” “Let’s not sit around and wait for the government. Let’s do it for ourselves,” Cox was remembered as saying in eulogy after eulogy from friends. Many were very funny. Carly Summerstein talked about his last days, reminding everyone that he was happy until the very end and hoped to leave the hospital. “He wasn’t too religious, but I am,” she explained, quoting Matthew 15:11: “What goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles.” She paused, screaming “King James, baby!” The room roared in laughter. “Take it to the bank.” It was one ridiculously irreverent story after another. “Do you believe in god?” he was asked on the admissions interview to a prep school. “No, but it’s totally OK if you do,” he responded putting his hand on the arm of the priest. “How can the dead be truly gone when they still live in the hearts of the souls left behind,” his brother quoted Carson McCullers. “I know Spencer hated sentimentality, so I wanted to get him one more time.” Laughter teemed through the room. Some quoted Tennessee Williams, others Spencer himself; the divide between humor and melancholy was omnipresent. “He was a funny guy,” I commented to Karen. “That’s why we are all here.” “There was always something fragile to him,” explained Laurie Garret. “He was the Blanche DuBois of the TAG gang.” One story after another was told of memories: “Don’t ever apologize for who you are,” Cox told a college buddy just coming out. Greg Gonzalves remembered Cox’s moral courage. But Cox was also scared, friends reported: “Whenever he was at a party and someone would say they were living with AIDS, he said he was dying of AIDS.” AIDS traumatized him, like many of his generation. There is laughter at such events, but tears are usually not far behind. Intermittent weeping remained a mild part of the backdrop.

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And then came the final two eulogies. John Voelcker recalled going to get tested with Cox: “In 1990, Spencer and I went together to get tested for HIV. He tested positive, and he broke down. It was the first time I’d seen Spencer cry.” But after going through the stages of grief and bargaining (and for him, voguing), pranking friends, playing games, and arranging divergent funeral plans given to multiple family members, the defiant humor grew more and more pronounced. Voelcker lost touch with Cox after his Medius Institute failed to gain support: “He stopped calling. I wish I’d known he was the case study for what he was framing to study.” “Last eulogy,” Peter Staley stated, as if he were the last one standing. He recalled the ten or so activists who formed a group to handle the service almost immediately after Cox died. “It was very early ACT UP. There were only a few small fights. We imagined this might be like the gym scene from Carrie, only I was the one who was cut in half . . . But it still could . . . He would have wanted it that way.” Everyone roared in laughter. Staley recalled the data-driven activism of the Treatment and Data Committee, Cox slamming the Federal Drug Administration (FDA), and the federal response as being inadequate when they churned out their third azidothymidine (AZT) spinoff. “It was a wonder watching him awe the FDA,” recalled Staley, “and then to watch him pivoting toward a larger, more data-driven process in support of health care for all. Eight million lives saved, but what of his relationship to crystal? Are there lessons we can learn? There are thousands of us going through a similar stress.” The debate between treatment activists and harm reductionists must find some common ground. “All of us have unprocessed grief from stigma from a community which turned away from us and said we were no longer its problem,” Staley said. “That was his call to action, and we should take it on.” In the months to come, members of the old Treatment and Data working group would live up to this call, collaborating with the Housing Works and Harm Reduction working groups’ members on a civil disobedience action on the second anniversary of Occupy. Staley finished with a quote from “3275” in Last Watch of the Night by Paul Monette: “We queers on Revelation hill, tucking our skirts about us so as not to touch our Mormon neighbours, died of the greed of power, because we were expendable . . . None of this had to happen . . . go make it stop, with whatever breath you have left. Grief is a sword, or it is nothing.” After the service, I talked with the woman behind me who had been crying. Her half-brother had been sick for years. And they thought he was on his last legs before protease inhibitors. Now he’s still at it. She credits Cox and company for that. As she told her story, she finished with a laugh—a little catharsis.

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It felt good to stare down that grief, to move through it and come out the other side. Hegel suggested that the magical power of our being involved looking at the pain of the world, facing it, and moving through it. We find a magic power in moving through it. Walking outside, I saw Jim Eigo. “It actually feels OK to think about this stuff,” I told him. “That was an amazing memorial.” He said he agreed. It felt good to know what people had done for themselves, I thought to myself on the ride home. A funeral is just one of any number of rituals in which activists stay connected, building a world of interconnection between bodies, friends, and social histories. Salons While some of my activist communities are more active than others, I try to keep these networks of friends connected as much as I can, if only for an evening or over a drink. Each year since 1999, we have had a salon. The salon has grown and evolved over the years. Some years it is a reunion of the Reclaim the Streets affinity group of the Lower East Side Collective. Other years, it is a conversation about activism, media, and ways to tell stories. And sometimes, it is just a bull session. It started in November 1999 when Christine, a fellow activist, invited us to her house to have beers after we waited outside of the police station on Pitt Street all day for our friends who were arrested during Reclaim the Streets’ Buy Nothing Day blockade earlier that day in Times Square. Some of us slept at Christine’s before going out the next day to make sure everyone was released so they could make it out to Seattle for the World Trade Organization demonstrations. After that, we kept going to Christine’s after meetings or street actions. I recall Brad Will playing his guitar for hours, singing about the police. Those memories were part of what we would remember him by seven years later when he was killed. I’ll never forget the salon after Brad died. Over the years, our monthly sessions have helped those who plug in and drop out of activism stay in touch as friends even when they did not want to attend a rally or meeting. Since that first salon, friends and colleagues have moved in and out of it during the 15-plus years of direct action—from global justice summit actions to community gardening to street parties to antiwar rallies to Critical Mass bike rides to zaps to Occupy encampments. Today it still keeps us in touch. We remained connected, even through those dark days after the war broke out in Iraq: Bush was reelected, and we all watched our world of activism become severely curtailed. The salon offered an island away from the storm and panic swirling around us.

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These days, members of the original salons drop by for the holiday get together in between jobs and vacation travels. Some years, the salon inspired us to take action. In 2010, for example, we were kvetching about a bike hearing at city hall attended by Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowotz, in which he barged in, sang a song at the testimony, and left. “What an ass!” I lamented. “What should we do about it?” Monica Hunken wondered. “We gotta do something.” So the next week, we brought the borough president a bicycle and a holiday card. I carried a sign declaring, “Marty is out of touch with Brooklyn.” Most of the time, the salon is just a conversation around the winter solstice. Over the years, we’ve met at Life Café and Kate’s Joint, both of which are now shuttered East Village haunts. For other salons, we’ve met on people’s roofs, at the Blarney Stone, or at Sophie’s on East Fifth Street after Wendy’s Green Map Party. In December 2012, fellow activists Beka, Jason, Emily, Ron, and Zack were all there. Beka and Jason had brought their child, born earlier that year, who charmed everyone. Emily made it early. “I sat for about 15 minutes on my own,” she said. “I’m a big person.” And gradually, more and more people rolled in. Andrew of the Billionaires dropped by, making the same jokes he makes every year about me being in four different places at once. It’s good that some things never change. Christine and Daniel showed up and bought everyone a pitcher, settling in on a side corner. The salon would not work without them. Bill Talen, also known as Reverend Billy, showed up toned down from his alter ego but still kvetching about publicity. Steve Duncombe from Reclaim the Streets sauntered in, looking cool as ever. Zack was hanging out, but the noise was a little much for him. Since we’ve been kicked out of the Life Café, there are very few convivial spaces to hang out in the Lower East Side, he points out. My union comrade Ron Hayduck was there, amicable as ever. Steve, Ron, Billy, and I have known each other since the days of the Lower East Side Collective in the late 1990s in New York City. Chuck showed up, smiling, buying everyone another pint. A former high school teacher, he’s helped keep the conviviality of the whole affair strong for years now, connecting our activism now with what he did in the 1960s and late 1990s. One night for the salon at the Blarney Stone, Chuck showed up with a sleeping bag from Zuccotti Park, where he had been sleeping for some ten days. This would be Chuck’s last salon. He shuffled off later in the year of a stroke. “You’re a good guy, Ben,” Chuck used to say to me. “I don’t care what anybody else says,” he would continue, laughing. Chuck came to me as a surprise—a funny high school teacher who looked like Jerry Garcia, who loved hanging out with anarchists, and who

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attended spokes council after spokes council in the peak years of the global justice movement. He brought stories of literally decades of activism, parenting, teaching history, and being a kind person. He was part of the Reclaim the Streets group, which met at the Charas El Bohio Community Services Center in the late 1990s. He had drifted to the group from Wetlands and decades of antiwar activism. Yet when Reclaim the Streets and its spinoffs, the Clandestine Rebel Clown Army and Absurd Response to Absurd War group, started to fade, Chuck stayed my friend. For a while there, Chuck was the only one who still came to the Wednesday meetings, so we would have a pint together and hang out. He was also a diehard at the Reclaim the Streets salons and holiday parties. Usually the first one there, he greeted me with a smile and a beer every time. At around 10:30 p.m. at the December salon, the Time’s Up! crew showed up, Barbara Ross making a grand entrance with her bike. She, Keegan Stephan, and Peter Shapiro stopped to chat, discuss, check out the juke box, and talk about what so-and-so said at the previous week’s ride. Leslie Kauffman was there talking about Occupy Sandy and the subway lights. Some years, friends dropped by after their arrests at Zuccotti. I remember leaving jail to meet Monica Hunken and the rest of the crowd after being in jail all day for an AIDS civil disobedience. In other ways, the last salon of the year is a review of what worked and did not work with activism. It is a time to remember those whom we lost, friends who have died, such as Spencer Cox and Michael Cardon in 2012, Chuck Reinhart the following year, and Brad Will a few years before. These are the friends who had been there while I was in between jobs, friends, unplanned pregnancies, breakups, and movement ebbs and flows; organizing fueled us through those years. In some ways, I’ve imagined it as something like Eric Rofes’s old SexPols salon, which he organized with Allan Bérubé and Gayle Rubin in the early 1990s in San Francisco. We have movement heroes moving into and out of the salon, discussions about what works and what doesn’t. The salon is more a convergence of friends and acquaintances, those who drop into activism and fade out but do not always want to lose touch. These ties are what keep so many of us going, coping with a big, nasty world as our dreams for movements are smashed by terrorist bombings and wars, bulldozers and burnout; we keep going, writing, telling stories, planning zaps, gossiping, organizing, and the like. It is a time to remember that we’ve enjoyed just trying, and what other choice do we have about living? It is also a time to lament what did not work and recount the obstacles we have encountered, the churches that were burned, the police arrests we have endured, and media coverage we have either enjoyed or seen neglecting our work. These are spaces where rebel friendships thrive, our fights gain

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steam, beers flow, and bike rides converge. And the solstice feels more real than ever. It is really a time in between one world, one piece of history, and another. None of any of this is easy. But it could not be more worthwhile. Most everyone left some time after midnight, when Stephan, Ross, Shapiro, and I stayed on dancing and chatting into the night. The familiar changes in our lives and the seasons force us to grapple with the constant flux of living. Change is life’s only constant. I didn’t ride home that morning until five. Rebel Friends Throughout the stories included here, we have considered a few of the ways in which friendship helps regular people challenge social controls and what happens when activists, or anyone else for that matter, lose connection to community. The point, of course, is that social movements are far better positioned when motivations include love, care, and connection with others, as opposed to guilt or anger. When affection and friendship are involved, we find new vocabularies of care and connection outside of institutional channels. This is what I took away from knowing Eric Rofes and everyone else discussed in this book, as well as the cavalcade of movements charging through its pages. The fait accompli of this thinking is the argument that pleasure must be part of our movement building. Such pleasure helps us resist social co-optation and institutionalization, hence the argument that harm reduction can be pleasure activism. Friendship helps support a culture of pleasure activism that serves as a countervailing force to a world of alienation, isolation, and despair. This is a world in which social eros expands and expands. Yet it can only happen within a culture of support. We need to support each other and those dipping in and out of movements along the way (Anonymous, 2008; Law and Martens, 2012). It also helps to stay organized, as Stanley Aronowitz reminds us over and over. Such activism overlaps with the hikes and salons. They are all part of the rituals of my life and of a changing world. They tell us who we are and what kind of a world we live in. I’m glad to have all of them in my life. Friends such as those described here help me keep on keeping on, while memories of Fred Mayer, Spencer Cox, and other friends remind me of how lovely, how inspiring, friends can be. The great minds push us forward, yet they need support. We all do. There has to be food, new ways of living, sustaining us with as much fun as we can have, some pleasure, food, sex—some gumbo that will keep us going.

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Homage to the Disappeared Much of this book has been an homage to a story of activism driven not by a calculation of resources to be mobilized but rather by networks of friends, affinity groups, and their very human needs, desires, and failings. Like many, part of what draws me are the friends I will see, the bodies connecting on the streets of the city. This is what the activist rituals described here are all about. From the salons to the Drag March, they mark the edges of the year. I usually walk around New York City on Pride weekend, taking in the Mardi Gras–like air of the city and its open celebration of public sexuality, freedom of bodies, imagination, and hopes. The Friday of Pride weekend is the Drag March, which is one of my favorite events of the year. Randy Wicker is usually there with a picture of his friends, trans icons Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, who disappeared in the water in 1992. People are out listening to music, strolling, liming, chilling, and just being outside together. Last year, I saw that a friend was going to be sitting shiva for his mother, who had passed. My plans had been to head out to the park to see one group of friends who were visiting from Finland and another group on its way out of town to Amsterdam. But I would ride uptown, seeing where the city would take me before going to sit shiva in homage of my friend’s mother. Riding up to his house, with the sun shining in my face, I just enjoyed being alive in that moment, even with some friends disappearing, others coming back, and everything in between. Downtown, I stopped by Judson Memorial for some of the 11 a.m. service. It’s hard to shake the communion of stories and songs, history and action, street preachers and social action, which is a Sunday at Judson. And Judson did not disappoint. Community Minister Micah Bucey (2013) led the service, recalling his recent trip to El Salvador. He preached about the ways in which we forget those who have disappeared, subject to political violence and oppression, here and there: Now, this word, “disappeared,” is a different kind of verb in El Salvador. It’s something that is done to a person. A person doesn’t simply disappear. A person is disappeared by another person or, in most cases, a death squad of persons. Many of these disappeared have never been found, alive or dead, and COMADRES [the Committee of the Mothers and Relatives of Prisoners, the Disappeared, and the Politically Assassinated of El Salvador] insists on its existence until every last one of them is found. We, as a queer community, even as we celebrate immense progress, are in danger of inactively disappearing our own people. Our Marriage Equality campaigns have embraced the institution and ignored the less easily

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assimilated members of our queer community. Our visibility is helping kids to come out at younger ages, but some are being kicked out of their homes, coming to New York City to find community and, in a terrible twist, being booted off of the piers by the very residents of the Village . . . Now, I realize that this brand of “disappearing” is different from a systematic and active disappearing, but it is our inactive participation in this disappearing that troubles me the most. One of my favorite authors, Steven Millhauser, has a short story called “The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman,” in which a woman literally dematerializes one day, much to the surprise of her inobservant neighbors. As the townspeople struggle to understand how Elaine has disappeared into thin air, they discover that it is the years of collective disinterest from those around her that has been her downfall. As this realization dawns on them, the narrator laments, [Elaine] is not alone. On street corners at dusk, in the corridors of dark movie theaters, behind the windows of cars in parking lots at melancholy shopping centers illuminated by pale orange lamps, you sometimes see them, the Elaine Colemans of the world. They lower their eyes, they turn away, they vanish into shadowy places . . . they are fading, fixed as they are in the long habit of not being noticed. And perhaps the police, who suspected foul play, were not in the end mistaken, for we are no longer innocent, we who do not see and do not remember, we incurious ones, we conspirators in disappearance.

Yet there are ways to remember and acknowledge the disappeared. We are still obliged to remember, to acknowledge the disappeared, even as their memories lurk in the shadows and murals, memories and mesas, in the distance. You walk down the street and think you see someone gone from your life, but it looks like that person for a moment. Remember these people, even if they are optical illusions or ghost-like passing memories of those no longer exactly here. And they are back, even if they are ghosts of friends long dead walking down Castro Street. We are still obliged to remember how much more work there is to do. Many of the street youth who first started the June 1969 riot are still living in the street, subject to the same transphobia, violence, and neglect they endured decades ago. There are so many who do not care to succumb to institutional arrangements or social pressures to marry. We are obliged to remember and support those still living on the streets, to remember the disappeared, the runaways, the neglected lurking in our midst and to fight like hell for the living. Leaving Judson, I rode north, up past Thirty-Ninth Street and Madison Avenue, where ACT UP and Queerocracy were getting ready to do

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the Sunday March. Countless heroes of mine from the AIDS struggle were there—Jim Eigo, Michael Tikili, Eric Sawyer, and so many other lovely people—speaking out about the need for both pleasure and safety, not one or the other. Today, ACT UP’s sex positivity is more necessary than ever. Jim Eigo and Eric Sawyer walked up to say hello. Someone else passed me an ACT UP “fuck smarter” sticker. It’s amazing to see ACT UP still leading as new members and veterans come together in the struggle. ACT UP always helps me celebrate those who are gone, or just about here, or almost, or used to be with us, who are still with us for the afternoon together. Saying hi to Eigo, I remembered a moment from a dozen years prior of him walking up to greet Stephen Gendin when we were here at a similar Pride moment back in 1999. Stephen could not hear Jim, and he seemed to understand. Gendin walked up and grabbed a big spray gun full of water to shoot at revelers along the parade route. He shuffled off the following spring. But for that moment, it was fun to be with him, splashing in the sun. And Eigo is still here, back with ACT UP. “In thirty-plus years of the AIDS epidemic, LGBT people have seen our communities ravaged by HIV. Today, we have prevention tools like pre- and postexposure prophylaxis [PrEP and PEP], but we have to take more responsibility for our sexual health as a community,” Eigo explained. “We cannot surrender half of a new generation to the virus that stole so many from the last.” Eigo reflected on the friendships engendered along the way. His experience with the discussion of Spencer Cox and the ongoing mental health needs of the AIDS generation brought him back into ACT UP after a 15year hiatus. Much of this engagement was supported by friendship. “My renewed activism with ACT UP has meant a whole new set of people who all fall somewhere on the scale of acquaintance-colleague-friend,” explained Eigo, and it has meant renewing relations with a whole number of people I had relations with a long time ago. Steve Helmke was an acquaintance twenty years ago, then nothing for two decades, now an extremely close colleague I consider a friend. Mark Milano was a friend and colleague in the T&D days, became an adversary during the sex wars of the 1990s (but we kept up talking with each other), and now is a colleague, friend, and editing a piece of mine for ACHIEVE. He’s a good man and a great activist; the actions he comes up with, particularly the flash actions, simple zaps, are often brilliant. I won’t even try to encapsulate in a sentence the complex trajectory of friendship, love, concern, and yes, even hurt, that my relationship with Mark Harrington has traveled over the 26.5 years we have known each other and worked together.

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Walking through the parade route, thousands and thousands lined the streets. At my friend’s shiva, we sat talking about his mother, who had suffered from Alzheimer’s disease at the end of a hard life. The human psyche can only endure so much pain before we check out. That is just part of this experience. Looking at old wedding photos, we told stories and reflected. It was his story now; her story was his to tell now. He sat just collecting it all, taking in the gravity of that. We talked about Allen Ginsberg and perhaps his finest poem. The first few lines of “Kaddish” are some of my favorites of his. “For Naomi Ginsberg, 1894–1956,” the poem begins. Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clean winter noon, and I’ve been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles

I had read a variation on this poem the spring following my father’s funeral. His recollections of Fred Mayer were some of our last conversations. They would serve as the basis for this story of cohorts of friends who teach each other to understand one another’s madness, to be great, to be heroes. Some of us are alive in the sunshine, and others are passing into other worlds, but their memories are still here. This in-between space, this is what weekends like this always remind me of. There is an epiphany in any of us coming together in time to share our lives, even as they converge and diverge in the distance. Riding downtown along the west side bike path, cyclists passed. Downtown, the police blocked the path south, so I rode east on Fourteenth Street. The crowds roared from blocks away. There were thousands and thousands of people there. I thought of Cleve Jones, who long ago described that feeling, wondering where all these thousands of people came from for these parades. He said, But when I think back on the ’70s, it was so new. It was just so new. We’d never done this before. We’d never had the courage to do it before. It seemed like it was just the other day when I was saying to myself, where did all these people come from? Can they really all be homosexuals? There was all this awareness growing up in the cities, in the small towns, all over the place. I was living in Tempe, Arizona, when I was first exposed to the notion of the gay community, a gay movement that was not just furtive meetings in bathrooms or parks or dark bars. That was brand-fucking new. Then there was this mass immigration, all of a sudden, right about ’75, flooding into the city and forming these communities. Then I think, there was one very important time, and that was Harvey Milk, at least in San Francisco. The time of Harvey

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Milk was where it all jelled. The riot was a declaration of existence. We are here; we have come this far and no, we will not ever allow you to turn back the clock. It’s such a weird little twist of fate that right at that point, as we got there then . . . I mean I thought when Harvey Milk got killed, what could happen next? What could possibly? Well, [chuckles] talk to me now, you know, Harvey Milk one dead, big deal, talk about a million dead. (quoted in Shepard, 1997)

That weekend, nearly twenty years after that interview, Cleve celebrated the Supreme Court win during what he explained was the happiest weekend of his life, posting a picture of Harvey Milk on his Facebook page. Looking at the parade, I saw an ambulance driving past, as so many do with lives zipping past us into somewhere else. Police were screaming for us to make way. For once, I agreed with them. We all paused, and then I started riding downtown again, with the voices of the crowd, the roar, still echoing through the streets. Riding over the Manhattan Bridge, I looked forward to seeing the kids and some friends leaving town. We played, romped about, and enjoyed a long evening eating sushi, chatting for hours and hours about stories before saying good-bye and riding home—another day in a life made all the better for the presence of those coming, going, and sometimes disappearing from this naked city. Such friends are always flying in and making their way out, though they were never quite gone from our minds. Micah Bucey (2013) reminded us of that earlier in the day, recalling walking down the streets in El Salvador: You can barely walk ten feet without being faced with the pensive smiles and suggestive silhouettes of those who have been murdered or disappeared in the country’s history. And the remembrance doesn’t stop with the mural. Salvadorans want to talk to you about each mural, each face, each life that has been lost. These murals make up the background of Salvadoran life, but they don’t simply sit, unnoticed. They are maintained, they are displayed, they are discussed . . . We have some of the most amazing ancestors in the world, we have some of the most miraculous martyrs, and, even if their faces don’t cover every wall of the city, we must keep the memories of them emblazoned on the walls of our minds, we must fill our conversations with talk of those who came before us, went before us, died in front of us, or died all alone . . . Because we are the ones who are surviving, we are the ones who now carry the candles and the signs, we are the ones who now embody the salt and the light of queerness.

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In the End We trace the interconnections between these stories and memories as friendship becomes a way of life and as participants look to the politics of affinity within a city of friends; here comrades transform each other’s lives, connect with movements, mentor each other, play games, fight, make up, support each other, perform rituals, and form families of choice. Lurking beneath these tales is the messy question, does friendship help support the workings of social movements and the efforts aimed at social justice, and if so, how? How does the dialectic of friendship take shape and resolve itself, if at all? These questions resound throughout these tales of comrades past, and the ways in which we remember them, as they help us stay engaged in movements that support social change. It is hard to say if there are any clear answers. Certainly friends help propel movement organizing. Civil rights organizer Ella Baker understands that organizing comes from the bottom, from the base of a group, not from the top—from the relationships with people, the care among those in the group, the interconnections and democracy of friendship and support (Payne, 2007). Still, the breaks between friends sometimes undermine the efforts of organizing groups, while the reconnections strengthen endeavors. As the tales of Sylvia Rivera and Randy Wicker, Panama Alba and Richie Perez, Jim Eigo and Mark Milano suggest, chasms between movement friends can be resolved opening new chapters for activist lives, stories, and movements. Over and over, these stories suggest that friendship helps support social movements and efforts aimed at social justice, connecting individual and community experience (Nardi, 1999). But such efforts and larger structures complement one another. After all, the nature of affinity groups is that they form, storm, norm, and disform, stretching through decades of time, ebbing to and from larger cultural tales. Breaks in trust hinder such efforts, disrupting the narrative, especially when a friendship ends in a rupture. In this way, friendship probably should not be seen as a substitute for larger organizing efforts. The show must go on. Nonetheless, these stories suggest that friendships, rather than institutional channels, offer entry points that get people involved, sustain people’s efforts, and propel movement organizing. Though there is nothing pure about human motives or desire, we still try. And this is what democratic living is all about. But what of democracy? Does friendship help or hinder democratic living and civil society? This question is a little messier. The stories highlighted in this book suggest that civil society is supported by the efforts of organizers to engage in social organizing, playing, hanging out, and collective problem solving. This is part of what Aristotle might have been thinking

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about when he suggested that true friends must enjoy more than mutual pleasure or benefit; they must also be engaged in efforts that support the larger society as well as democratic living (Bellah et al., 1985, p. 116; Doyle and Smith, 2002). Here friendship is understood as a social force extending beyond individual lives into questions about civic participation, trust, and justice. Such friendships reach beyond politics and institutional arrangements, beyond the past and the future, in our recognition of the concrete other, whom we can hopefully come to know as our neighbor in a city of friends (Rawlins, 2009). The stories traced throughout this book indicate that institutions without friendships leave people wanting. After all, when traditional pillars of community are lost to impersonal forms, we are all left on our own, trembling in a cold, lonely city (Tönnies, 1887/2001). This is a city where we bowl alone, as Robert Putnam (2000) famously put it. Institutional arrangements—unions, marriage, and nonprofit organizations—are certainly necessary, but all too often, they leave us isolated and alienated in the face of cold, impersonal authority (Selznick, 1992). Many crave something more authentic, flexible, and real as essential others. Through such social networks, regular people connect, pushing ideas and actions forward, nudging and pulling, supporting and cajoling their comrades, challenging their friends to be more than they ever had been alone. The stories of the Mattachine Society, gay liberation, Time’s Up!, ACT UP, and Occupy that are detailed throughout this book highlight this insight. They also point to some of the complicated ethical challenges of connecting individual lives with larger questions about how to live and be as the personal meets the political. For an organizing model based on friendship to sustain itself, those involved must support a number of mutual approaches, including voluntary engagement in the “exercise of moral will,” the commitment to honor difference simultaneously with practices of “articulated solidarity,” and openness to participate in extended conversation and dialogue, and listening to and hearing one another, even when they disagree (Rawlins, 2009, pp. 185, 188). Through such efforts, political friends make efforts to understand each other’s stories, to respect each other, and to connect such efforts with larger cultural tales of building a better world together (Rawlins, 2009). Most certainly, these stories suggest that those who engage in democratic living could benefit from a politics of friendship. After all, the image of today’s national politics, with government shutdowns and ad hominem attacks, seems to lack a feeling of conviviality or collegiality among peers. People do not listen to each other or compromise. This lack of friendship has a discernible impact on the gridlock in Congress. Roman orator Cicero suggested that real friendship only takes place among good people. In this

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way, friendships are mutually beneficial and fun; but this is not their sole aim. Rather, friends are those linked in a community of ideas, efforts, and shared values. Virtue is what propels and sustains such friendships; conversely, those who are friends “ask from friends, and do for friends, only what is good,” notes the orator (Doyle and Smith, 2002, p. 5). Still, there is more to the politics of friendship. The narratives that course through this text suggest we all depend on each other. Such connection becomes the bricks and mortar of the “cathedrals of interconnection” that Benjamin Barber argues our culture needs. Such cathedrals fill cities within the architecture of civil society, friendship, and connection. Here we actually look out for our neighbors, building a city of friends. This model of living propelled the writing of this book through conversations that took place throughout a quarter-century. Finishing a talk on gentrification at the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space in the East Village of New York City, I went for a beer with my longtime buddy Tim Doody. We first became friends in jail after the bulldozing of a community garden in the East Village. He scolded me for chastising the police, taunting them with the words “Big sticks, small pricks!” Today, we laugh about the incident, but at the time, he thought I was blurring the movement’s message. “Staying in that game for the long haul has so much to do with long-term relationships,” he commented as we gossiped. “Whether it’s you and a small, dedicated crew, a la Margaret Mead’s proverb, or something more institutional, though almost as fleeting, with the march of time—say, Ruckus Society and the multigenerational skills share and camaraderie and campaigning that resulted from the camps—these are the long-term relationships that fueled quantifiable social changes,” he continued. “So good to know you for so many years. And yeah, you were right: big sticks, little pricks!” These friendships help us laugh. They push us to be more than we could ever imagine being or doing or experiencing on our own. They also help us just persevere, survive, and move forward as we face life’s countless challenges. On the occasion of his fiftieth birthday in 2013, Greg Gonzalves posted a note on Facebook. “In 1996, when I seroconverted, I wasn’t sure I’d live this long,” he declared in his status update. I’ve watched lots of friends die and know I am lucky be alive. But survival alone isn’t a prize. I think of Spencer (Cox) and his struggle to live a life “after” the epidemic and his inability to make the leap from the past and into a future without an impending full stop. On my birthday, I am sitting in a hotel near the airport in Johannesburg, which could be a dreary and sad place to pass this day. But I am with Loon Gangte, Rose Kaberia, Alma De León Itpc-latca, Solange Baptiste Simon, Addie Guttag, Ben Plumley, Rolake

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Odetoyinbo, Lucy Chesire, Christine Stegling, Othman Mellouk, Shiba Phuralaitpam, Elizabeth Tejada, Louis Dorff, Bactrin Killingo, James Kayo thinking about how we keep up the fight for access to treatment in the era of austerity, where it is clear that the poor have to pay for the follies and the crimes of the rich.

So for Gonzalves, friendships also help him live to fight another day and take on often insurmountable challenges. They certainly have helped the activists discussed in this story. Throughout my life in New York City, the good days and organizing have begun and ended with different cohorts of activists, affinity groups that ebb and flow as the years move forward and as people move out of town, retire from activism, or stay involved. On a fall Sunday afternoon, we went to visit Elizabeth, also known as Sister Mary Cunnilingus of the Church Ladies for Choice, whom I have known since the late 1990s in New York City when we all met at the bar Dicks at Six after hours of AIDS activism and street antics. Welcoming us in, she showed us her Church Lady gear and memorabilia. We shared stories about activism, friendship, harm reduction, and a generation of reproductive rights activists. There is nothing simple about friendship, noted Elizabeth, acknowledging the fights and skirmishes that have worn on AIDS affinity groups such as the Church Ladies. “There are people I would walk across the street to avoid, but not until there is a cure,” she explained, paraphrasing ACT UP icon Andy Velez. “But until there is a cure, I am going to work with them.” Until there is a cure for living, we all are going to depend on each other. After all, none of us is going to get out of here alive. It is the image of a city of friends that still inspires me, I explained to Elizabeth as we gossiped. “That’s always been your approach,” she followed. Looking down, my daughter, who was with us, was drawing. She wrote, “The circle is round, it has no end, that’s how long I want to be your friend” on a small drawing of a circle. Looking at the picture, I was in awe. It seemed to hint at feelings I have long held about activism and my circles of friends, connecting it and each other into an ever-expanding circle of friends and engagement. I still love the Church Ladies, who connect their efforts with those of expanding movements—from women’s liberation to gay liberation to ACT UP to harm reduction—using parades, protests, bikes, and marching bands that help transform the city into a living, breathing work of art. This community and culture of resistance is a circle I feel honored to be a small part of. It is a space where we grow, where friendships endure, where losses are grieved, and where we feel part of everything. For me, this is a sketch of a city that connects friends and art, streets and stories, and gives life sparkle

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and color, tragedy and laughter. These are all the bricks and mortar of Benjamin Barber’s cathedral of interdependence. They lead us to a place where we depend on each other rather than institutions, bringing us together, inviting everyone into the cathedral rather than leaving anyone behind. Revolution means we need each other, explained Mark Andersen early in this story. What really connects this circle is that we need each other. May the circle be unbroken. Hopefully, we can all meet at a barbeque.

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Index

ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) fighting in, 179–80 How to Survive a Plague (2012) and, 188–89 importance of friendships in, 24–27 legacy of, 189–90 Sacramento protest, 90–91 transformation of gay politics and, 97 Treatment and Data Committee, 188, 191 waning of, 177 Adams, John, 50–53, 56–58, 72 Addams, Jane, 31 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The (1885), 5 Alba, Panama Vicente, 31, 178–79 See also Young Lords Party All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), 36–37, 46, 72 anarchism critique of “lifestyle anarchism,” 32 friendship vs. love, 20–21 and kinship-based organizing, 31–33 Andersen, Mark, 151–52, 153 Angels in America (1993), 38–39 Another Country (1984), 87 Arab Spring, 121, 143 Arendt, Hannah, 8 Argentina economic crisis, 18–19 Aristotle, 19 Armstrong, Walter, 82 Aronowitz, Stanley, 184–85 Barber, Benjamin, 125–26, 128 Bartlett, Chris, 76, 82

Bay Area Reporter, 39 Bell, Arthur, 107 Bend Over Boyfriend, 97 Bense, Buzz, 73–74 Bernstein Sycamore, Matt, 181, 184 Bérubé, Allan, 27–28 Blondie of Arabia. See Hunken, Monica Blotcher, Jay, 24, 25, 26, 28, 123–24, 126–27, 177, 180, 184, 188–89 Blue Angel, The (1930), 45 Bookchin, Murray, 32–33 Borges, Jorge Luis, 47 Bornstein, Kate, 122–23 Brave New World (1932), 162 Braverman, G’dali, 90 Brawer, Wendy, 1 Bronski, Michael, 62 Brooklyn Ambulatory Clinic, 124–25 Brown, Adrienne Maree, 32 Bucey, Micah, 207–8, 211 Calliau, John, 185 Casablanca (1942), 5 Cavanaugh, Brennan, 146 Church Ladies for Choice, 99, 118, 124 Cicero, 19 civic friendship, 22 Class Struggle (game), 169 Cohen, Leonard, 190 community gardens El Jardin del Paraiso Community Garden, 122 Siempre Verde, 1 Conrad, Ryan, 122 Cox, Spencer, 191–93, 196–97, 199–203

232

INDEX

Crimp, Douglas, 96 Cylar, Keith, 12, 26–27 Davis, N. Gregson G., 57–58 Dazed and Confused (1993), 165 Diallo, Amadou, 98 Dicks (bar), 12, 27 Di Paola, Bill, 131, 134, 138–39 Donne, John, 6 Doody, Tim, 155, 214 Drag March founding, 116 impact of, 127–28 police and, 120 2011 edition, 115–23 Duncombe, Steve, 167 Durkheim, Emile, 188 Dyke March, 125 Eagle, The (bar), 124 Eigo, Jim, 180, 185, 189, 202, 209 El Jardin del Paraiso Community Garden, 122 Empire State Pride Agenda (ESPA), 111–12 Engelsing, Steve, 57 Faggots and Their Friends between Revolutions (1977), 3 Fear of a Queer Planet (1992), 13 Fed UP Queers (FUQ), 97, 98–99, 177, 180–81 Feinberg, Leslie, 12 Fellowship of the Ring, The (1954), 5 Flynn, Jennifer, 181 Foucault, Michel, 3, 9, 11, 13, 21, 23–24, 62–64, 71, 187 Fraczek, Kim, 150–51 Frank, Anne, 21 Frankl, Viktor, 6 Freedom Summer, 11 Freeman, Jo, 32 Freud, Sigmund, 37, 53, 56 Frye, Northrop, 194–95

game play, 159–69 football, 164–65 in movement organizing, 165 as reinforcement of social norms, 164 Garner, Eric, 17 Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), 104–7, 123–24, 172, 177 Gay Community News (GCN), 77–78 See also Rofes, Eric Gay Liberation Front (GLF), 104–7, 123–24, 177 gay marriage critiques of push for, 122–24 passage of New York state law, 115, 120–24 Ginsberg, Allen, 16, 59–60, 210 Giuliani, Rudy, 94–96, 99 Gold, Ben, 161–62 Goldberg, Ron, 201 Gonzalves, Greg, 201, 214–15 Gordan, Uri, 19 Graeber, David, 167 Green Map System, 1 Grove, Donald, 8, 152 Guest, Austin, 13 Guthrie, Woody, 174 Halberstam, Jack, 180–81 Haliday, Bryant, 61, 62 harm reduction movement, 187 Hay, Harry, 29 Heinz, Jenny, 168 Hesse, Herman, 49 Highlander Folk School, 153–54 Highleyman, Liz, 77 HIV coping with trauma of, 192–97 dangers of amnesia about, 194 Hoffman, Amy, 77, 78 Homo Ludens (1938/1950), 159 Horton, Myles. See Highlander Folk School Housing Works, 26 Howl (1956). See Ginsberg, Allen

INDEX

How to Survive a Plague (2012), 188–89 Huizinga, Johan, 159 Hunken, Monica, 9, 135–36, 147–48, 173–74, 204 Hurston, Zora Neale, 199 Huxley, Aldous, 162 Ibanez, Diego, 155–56 Iliad (1951), 15 In a Queer Time and Place (2005), 180–81 Johnson, Marsha P., 104, 105, 108, 109 Jones, Cleve, 29–30, 210–11 Judson Memorial Church, 207 Kahn, Si, 31 Kantrowitz, Arnie, 172 Keller’s (bar), 62–64, 69 King, Charles, 12 King, Martin Luther, 153, 177 Klein, Naomi, 141–42 Kohler, Bob, 13, 15, 95, 99, 105–8, 109–12 criticism of David Carter, 104–5 Kramer, Larry, 95, 200 Lebowitz, Claire, 150, 152, 172 Lesbian Avengers, 22 Less Than Zero (1985), 44 Levine, Susanne Braun, 6 Lorde, Audre, 33 Lower East Side Collective, 30, 167, 172, 177 Lydic, Brenden, 151 Marcuse, Herbert, 164 Mattachine Society, 29, 102 May, Todd, 21 Mayer, Fred, 16, 35–74 Mazurek, Stacey, 157 Mendolia, Victor, 189–90 Mercury, Freddie, 190, 200 Milan, Amanda, 111

233

Mitchell, Larry, 3 Moore, Harmonie, 117–18, 124 Nardi, Peter, 21, 78 Northrop, Ann, 177 Occupy Wall Street, 141–58 beginnings of, 142–43 Brooklyn Bridge March, 145, 147 forms of friendship cultivated by, 142 jail support during, 149–50 Occupy Fountains Ride, 155 Occupy Wall Street: The Game, 168–69 Revolutionary Games working group, 167 significance of crackdown on, 154 Odets, Walt, 82, 195 Pelligrini, Ann, 96 Perez, Richie, 31, 178–79 See also Young Lords Party phone tree, 78 as early social network, 28–29 Pine, Seymour, 102–3 See also Stonewall Inn Pingeon, George, 182 Plato, 21 political friendship William Rawlins’s requirements for, 136–37 Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex (1980/1994), 94 Radical Faeries, 99 Drag March and, 116–18 Ramspacher, Karen, 201 Rawlins, William. See political friendship Read, Kirk, 76 Rechtschaffer, Jessica, 119–22 Reed, Lou, 141 Reich, Wilhelm, 81 Reverend Billy, 125–26, 127, 145

234

INDEX

Revolutionary Games working group. See Occupy Wall Street Richardson, Luca, 143, 152–53 Rivera, Sylvia, 12, 15 friendship with Bob Kohler, 101, 105–12 friendship with Randy Wicker, 108–12, 172 and passage of NYC antidiscrimination legislation, 104 protests over killing of Amanda Milan, 111 and Stonewall riot, 101, 103–4 Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), 107, 177 Rofes, Eric, 9, 33, 62, 73, 99–100 criticism of, 82 as cultivator of friendships, 76–77 death of, 75–77 “family of choice” and, 77–78 Gay Community News and, 78–79 gay men’s health movement and, 82–83 lessons of 1970s gay liberation, 80 pleasure as integral part of organizing, 80, 82 Ross, Barbara, 131–32, 133–35 Ross, Lillian, 9 Rude Mechanical Orchestra (RMO), 118 Rustin, Bayard, 177 salons, 203–6 Sandusky, Jerry, 164, 165 Sawyer, Eric, 7, 191–92, 209 Schlesinger, Arthur, 54 Schubert, Ginny, 26, 27 Schulman, Sarah, 183–84 Seeger, Pete, 174, 184 SexPanic!, 82, 95–99, 109 SexPols (San Francisco Study Group on Sex and Politics), 77 founding, 81 sexual self-determination

social movement consideration of, 97 Shepard, Matthew political funeral for, 12, 97, 105 Shilts, Randy, 40 Show World, 94 Siempre Verde Garden, 1 See also community gardens Sister Mary Cunnilingus, 215 Sitrin, Marina, 18–19 Smithsimon, Greg, 146 social movement scholarship focus on friendship vs. institutions, 3 Society for Human Rights, 83 Sontag, Susan, 89 Soules, Athena, 156–57 Staley, Peter, 188, 199, 202 Stephan, Keegan, 117–21, 122, 127, 128, 133, 157–58 departure from Time’s Up!, 183 introduction to Time’s Up!, 132 jail support, 149–50 motives of Time’s Up!, 129–30 Occupy Fountains Ride, 155 Occupy Wall Street, 147 Young Lords Party and, 177 Stonewall Inn Drag March and, 118–20 police raid on, 102–3 Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), 107 Subcomandante Marcos, 2 Sullivan, Andrew, 95 Summerstein, Carly, 201 Suttles, Gerald, 2, 172 Threepenny Opera, The, 38 Time’s Up! Bike Summer and, 133 conflicts in, 136–38, 173, 182–83 Drag March and, 116–21 Hurricane Sandy and, 138 Occupy Wall Street and, 136 sense of community in, 131–32

INDEX

Tobocman, Seth, 143–44 Trayvon Martin Organizing Committee NYC, 17–18 Trip to Bountiful, The, 43 Under the Rainbow (1977/1996). See Kantrowitz, Arnie Valdes, Danny, 145–46 Velez, Andy, 25 video games advent of home gaming, 162 social connection and, 160–62 Voelcker, John, 202

Warcry, Priya, 148–49 Whitman, Walt, 22, 52, 60, 82 Whop, Molly, 151 Wicker, Randolfe (Randy), 12, 29, 108–12 Will, Brad, 5–6 Wilson, Hank, 9–10, 179 Winkleman, Jon, 192 Wright, Talmadge, 162 Young Lords Party, 177–79 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), 64 Zorba the Greek (1964), 127

235