kiya

(Title is a riff on Black Tie by Grace Petrie, who is younger than me but not so much so that that's not a gutpunch of a song.)


Specifically, about the specific brain damage that comes of having been in high school in the 90s. Because there's a lot of what's going on in my brain right now that I recognize as having roots set there, even though at the time I didn't have any sense that those were things that were personal to me.

But nobody was out. The one person who I knew as queer prior to graduation came out to me on the last day of senior year exams. (This is one of my 'things that radicalized you' stories and has been for a long time.) When I met up with friend-B and her partner in Edinburgh one of the topics over our dinner out was, basically, all the people in our extended social group who had come out after high school.

I can't speak to what it was like to be gay at the time, because I wasn't, but I can extrapolate a whole fucking lot from that coming out, from the fact that what he said was, "I'm gay. ... is that okay?" Broke my heart into pieces and I had to put it back together into something fiercer. I know that it was deeply, deeply unsafe to be known as gay; further, I know - and knew at the time - that gayness (in men, which was all that anyone I knew seemed to care about noticing) was treated as contagion and contamination, because we were the kids who grew up with AIDS from childhood.

There's this weird interstitial space there. I feel like queer people just a couple years older than me were more often interlaced with the communities that were facing the devastation directly, knew people involved, had personal losses. (I hear a lot of this from people, but also have a sense that there was also a good odds of deep isolation, and I don't know how to make a sensical pattern of it.) Some people had pre-web internet like BBSes, but that was kind of a Wonk Thing rather than a normal one, so there wasn't the span of ability to Find Your People that opened up later.

So we were for the most part alone, and we knew to be afraid.

(I had one friend have a sobbing meltdown when she found out that I had had sex - heterosexually - because I was going to catch HIV and die. Like, that was ... a larger value of fear than standard? But it wasn't shocking to me that someone might react that way at all, it wasn't more than a single standard deviation off. Not that any of us talked about it, there was just this subliminal layer of it everywhere, and you know, I bet we'd have done a whole lot better in IB English aka "As I Lay Dying In Venice Foretold" aka "sex, death, and angst 101" if any of us had been mature enough to ... ... frame the cross-linkages that way. Goddamn, I've got a whole literary analysis trying to unfold in my brain now. Goddamn, what.)

La petit mort, ha ha.

And in the 90s I was basically more or less straight and cis, but that's still stuff that marinated me. Like, trying to write about it, trying to articulate it, I can feel adrenaline spikes about it, because it's like looking at the monster in the horror movie, it's there. And it's not, like, an active trauma, it's been thirty goddamn years and my serious damage is in other places, but...

... well, it informs a lot of my feelings about the world right now.

But it was long ago, and it was far away
Oh God, it seems so very far
And if life is just a highway, then the soul is just a car
And objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are.