Today is AIDS awareness day so I'm remembering even more than usual the friends and lovers lost to that earlier pandemic. The photo above is of my dear friend poet Tim Dlugos (in glasses holding the can of beer) around 1974 the year before we each left DC for NYC.
Tim and I were so close, many thought we were lovers, but we were just best friends (the opposite was true for other casualties of HIV AIDS that people thought were only friends but were my lovers, some of whom died while still trying to hide the cause of their demise in those days of shaming and affliction by association).
It's almost impossible for those who didn't live through it to understand the impact so much illness and death caused in the gay communities around this country. It's like each city with a concentration of gay men, particularly New York and San Francisco, were the equivalent of giant nursing homes afflicted by the latest pandemic. Only worse.
Here's another photo of Tim at my wedding at JS Vandam in NYC in February 1982, months before I moved to LA (with poet Ted Berrigan (bearded) as well). That smile of Tim's was even more radiant in person. I miss him and so many other casualties of the AIDS epidemic every day.
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