A memory surfaced Wednesday night while streaming Munich.
It was just another day, another john until it wasn’t. My pimp sent me to an apartment somewhere off the G train in Brooklyn. Second floor walk-up. The guy buzzed me in. When he opened the door, I froze for a second. He was beautiful. Tall, lean, curly dark hair, wearing only a Speedo. The apartment was completely empty. No furniture. No curtains. Wide open windows facing the street. A black rotary phone sitting alone on the kitchen counter and, in the middle of the room, a cardboard box the size of a refrigerator. I scanned the room. I scanned him. I wanted him instantly. At the same time, I could feel the panic moving underneath everything. The energy felt electric in the worst way, too quiet, too staged, like the room itself was holding its breath.
I asked him what was in the box. “A television,” he said. He never handed me money. I asked him if he was forgetting something. “No.” I asked him if he had anything for me. “No.” That’s when I knew I had walked into a setup. I called my pimp from his phone. He asked questions. I answered carefully. Then he said: “Get out of there. He’s a cop.” I slowly walked to the door, down the stairs, and out onto the street before disappearing back into the subway system.
This afternoon I went to see Keith Haring at the The Brant Foundation, an exhibition revisiting his formative years of 1980–1983. The spirit of Downtown and the East Village before the world changed. Seeing work from 1983, the year I ran away to New York, brought back memories. That summer I bought my first Keith Haring t-shirts at Patricia Field’s store on East 8th Street.
Walking from the subway, I passed buildings where friends once lived who died of AIDS. Block after block of shuttered storefronts. Closed businesses. It felt like walking through layers of history. Time folding into itself. I found myself thinking about this body I’m still inside of. The years that have passed. The years I may or may not have left. The work we leave behind. How memory becomes image. How survival becomes language.
142 11th Avenue. This was The Eagle Open Kitchen 1931–1969. It was a longshoremen's tavern serving dock workers from the Hudson River piers. A working-class bar. In 1970 it was purchased by Jack Modica and became The Eagle's Nest, a gay leather/Levi bar, one of the earliest and most influential in post-Stonewall NYC. Black paint on the walls. Bikers. It was part of the culture of open, anonymous sexual freedom. The AIDS crisis didn't shut it down, but it changed what it was. It operated here for 30 years, closing after its final weekend, March 3–5, 2000, due to gentrification.
In 1988, after Nell's, I would come here. High. Coked out. Moving through the dark, searching, cruising. The blocks were industrial, trucks lining the streets, groups of men having public sex, moving between and behind trailers. There was an older Italian man I met here. I don’t remember his name. The first time I met him, he looked at me and said he could see in my eyes that I was high. Maybe another time. The next time I saw him, he asked me to go home with him. We clicked. At the bar, jeans, boots, T-shirt. He worked at Barneys on Seventh Avenue and wore the most beautiful suits. He had an apartment in the Village, on West 12th Street near 5th Avenue. We would drink wine, sometimes draw in his sketchbook. I remember how he touched me, the cuddles before and after making love, the way he spoke, the way he kissed. I feel like I’ve become that man, longing for the intimacy and touch I shared with him underneath his linen sheets. I want that again.
Growing up, Easter was my favorite time of year, not for fictional biblical characters but for the colors, for spring, for the world coming alive. I was raised Southern Baptist and taught everything was a sin. I never believed any of it. How could such godly people treat people like me as less? My grandmothers called me “special,” “different.” I hated going to church. The only thing that held my attention was when the preacher spoke about Sodom and Gomorrah. I wanted the things he warned against.
Standing here at Sheridan Square, I’m thinking about May 2, 1983, 43 years ago, when hundreds gathered with candles and marched from here to a federal building. Over 1,400 people were infected and more than 500 were already dead, and the government did nothing because the dying were gay. I was still in the Bible Belt then, living inside an ideology I would eventually flee, evangelical Christianity.
I survived. I made it here. And now during Holy Week, when they speak of resurrection, I’m watching a government shaped by white Christian nationalists cut lifesaving aid while hundreds of thousands have already died and millions more are projected since USAID was dismantled, including children losing treatment and care across the world and here at home. They do this in the name of Jesus Christ. I know this feeling. The recognition that there are people in power who believe the world is better without you in it. I’m standing here alive in a way I was never supposed to be, remembering the candles, knowing exactly what happens when a government decides certain lives don’t matter.
We’re still fighting for our lives.
After my performance last Wednesday evening in Palm Springs, I walked out of the room. Minutes later, I stepped back into the space and everything had changed.
No one spoke.
Everyone stood in silence, holding their candles.
The pink glow, the candlelight, the memories of 1983 suspended in that moment.
The loss. The never ending love.
I had walked out of the performance.
But the performance did not end.
It never ends.
EMOTICON LOVER
Palm Springs Edition
Opening words by Jennifer Morton
Performance at 6:15
With work by Dirk Rowntree
Saturday, Feb. 28
5–7pm
PAUL MARLOW
68929 Perez Road
Last night at Hauser and Wirth, the room was packed, everyone waiting. When the dancer entered, I realized I had been expecting a man. Instead, a woman in a silver bikini stepped onto the light blue pedestal. The work didn’t change, but my perception did. Felix Gonzalez-Torres made his work during a time when AIDS was spoken of as a gay men’s disease, when bodies like his were disappearing while the world looked away. Standing there, I wondered what he would think now.
The body on the pedestal was different, but the vulnerability was the same. AIDS was never confined to one body, one gender. It never stayed inside the boundaries people tried to impose on it. This is what it means for work to live beyond its time. It changes as we change. And in that movement, it reminds us that survival is not fixed. It keeps unfolding.
On my way to the subway after protesting the removal of the Pride flag at Stonewall National Monument, I passed two armed soldiers patrolling the street.
Stonewall was a rebellion against police violence and state control. Seeing military presence here, on this ground, at this moment, feels like history folding in on itself. I didn’t speak. I thought about asking him to read the Constitution.
Visibility, resistance, and silence all collide in the same frame
