TIL THE WORLD FEELS RIGHT

You know you’ve lived an interesting life when a pandemic fills you with post-traumatic stress, when the threat of a global medical catastrophe fills you with a certain knowing nostalgia.

If you were a gay man of a certain age living through the arrival of COVID-19 in 2020, you would have been taken back to another time, to the advent of AIDS in the ’80s, and to the following decade of the ’90s when treatments improved and it ceased to be a deadly disease. As the world entered isolation in effort to slow the Corona virus, I imagine ageing queens the world over couldn’t help but have a dreadful sense of déjà vu, wondering if we were about to experience a catastrophe we never thought we would see again.

For years now, since surviving those terrible times, I’ve been asking people a question. It goes something like this:

“Can you think of an equivalent experience to an epidemic like HIV/AIDS, to being a gay man in the ‘80s and ‘90s and watching a generation of your peers die during peacetime? Have you seen or experienced anything like that in your lifetime?”

I’ve asked this because I am legitimately curious: I went through an experience that feels unique, yet it can’t be. Surely not. I’m not that special, the circumstances were not that rare, this must be a privileged perspective, a blind spot to the suffering of others.

But still after all these years I have struggled to find a situation similar to that which gay men encountered during the AIDS crisis, and what it was like to live and die in a place like Sydney, Australia in the 80s and 90s.

I never got an answer to that question, by the way. Not until a lifetime after the fact. Well 20 or 30 years which, in the old days, for some of us was a lifetime. Not until now.

One morning in April 2020, as the virus was making its inexorable journey around the globe, something happened that brought it all home.

I flipped on the phone that day to see a story that was shocking in its familiarity. It was about a small Italian village, where a local newspaper had published a double page spread of the townsfolk who had died that week from COVID-19.

It wasn’t the story that stopped me in my tracks. It was the image, the thumbnail of the broadsheet::. the columns of death notices, organised and orderly, belying the chaos of their content, but the form of which I could recognise instantly at a glance. The pic might have been small, the text faint, but I would recognise those grim hieroglyphics anywhere. I had spent my young years doing something a young man should not need to do: reading the obituaries.

To my eye, that village gazette could have been the Sydney Star Observer, a gay community newspaper from 25 years before. And I could have been mourning the loss of my partner, who passed away from AIDS-related cancer in August 1994. Indeed when he died, that issue of the Star carried a two-page tabloid sized spread of the gay men who had succumbed to the fatal virus in the neighbourhood just that week.

But how could it be that misfortunes of a small rural town in Southern Europe resonate with experiences I had living as a young gay man in Sydney decades before? Could this experience I had considered without equal soon have a sequel? Was what I thought once in a lifetime now about to repeat and reprise on a scale far grander than I could have imagined?

From the start of the COVID crisis, I had been slow to make comparisons with the height of HIV/AIDS. Social media seems to exist for the purpose of promoting false equivalences and I was not about to create another one.

Besides the feeling was familiar, yet strange; the similarities were stark, but the differences were also dramatic.

HIV/AIDS relied on bloodborne transmission, COVID-19 iswas airborne. AIDS was not a common virus, but back then it was in most cases deadly. COVID iswas rarely deadly but highly infectious. One targeted specific behaviours in certain people, the other comescame in the very air that we all breathebreathed.

Despite these differences, one thing is as clear today as it was then: if you want to survive this, listen to expert advice, but , regardless some of us may not see the other side of this.

But for those left breathing, the air itself will seem as it has been altered. There will be another normal, we will live a life that feels altogether average, unremarkable, as to be expected. We will surpass this. We will surprise this. We will survive this. But we will never be quite the same. Survivors never are.

For years since the AIDS crisis, I have been trading off that rather dubious accolade, that of the survivor.

I survived long enough to feel shame at the very act of survival. Survivor’s guilt, I believe they call it. It’s a strange thing. You feel guilty for feeling guilty. And you feel guilty for that as well. It’s like Impostor Syndrome, except it’s experienced after the fact. You feel fake, you feel like a fraud, a charlatan, insufficient and inauthentic. The imposter asks themselves, “Why am I here?” The survivor asks, “Why am I still here?”

Why am I still here? I have no fucking idea.

Sure, I listened to the advice and practiced it. Usually. Sure, I did my best to stay safe. Mostly. Certainly if there’s one piece of advice I can share as a survivor of great sickness it’s to listen to the experts.

And somehow I survived.

Although to say I survived is something of an exaggeration. I didn’t survive the dreaded immuno-suppressant disease, because I never acquired it in the first place. I didn’t survive the dreaded disease, I survived the ensuing drama. I stood while others dropped. I walked on while others around me fell.

In essence when I asked that question earlier, can you think of a situation similar to surviving the AIDS crisis, what I was trying to do was, to place myself at the centre of the frame, to steal focus and borrow integrity. It was a morbid attempt at self-aggrandisement. Survival makes me feel special, makes my experience seem important, like an old soldier polishing up his medals and parading around because he was once in proximity of a well-known battle.

I can only bear witness because, in my mind, that’s all I was, a witness. But I am that special kind of witness. I am a survivor. Which means in the end I get to own the story, even if it isn’t really mine. But in the end, after this over, this will not be about sickness. This will be about survival. This is about how the world will look once it was over. This is about how you will look once it’s done.

Certainly that survival has shaped my life butever since and it is only in the current timeact of isolation that I truly had time for to contemplate mysuch issues asmy survivor’s guilt., how I have survived and the thing about which I feel the greatest guilt. It took this plague for me to sort out the issues left over from the last one.

It was a night not unlike the night I write this in the cold morning hours of August , 1994. My partner was in bed, after a busy day sorting through his affairs. He was in the terminal stages of cancer, after years of fighting HIV and AIDS. I was exhausted, and expected, at least hoped, we could get a good night’s sleep to steady us for the demands of the following day.

Suddenly he seemed restless. By this stage, it was nothing surprising or new. This happened every night. I jumped to action, trying to sort out what was wrong, trying to help him through another hardship, ease another agony. As I fussed around the bed, rearranged the pillows and covers, I finally stopped and gave him what he really needed.

I was trying as always to help him when all he needed was for me to hold him. I was trying to make him feel comfortable when all he needed was comfort.

I finally took him in my arms and held him tight, just long enough to feel him slip away. I looked down and he was gone.

This is that thing that I survived and that thing about which I feel the greatest guilt. That in those final moments, I could not make it better, that I could not stop trying to save him long enough to make him feel safe.

All I can say in my defence is this: my darling, I didn’t know you were dying.

Imagine that. After all that, after so much rehearsal, I didn’t know what was happening. After all those years together, living in the shadow of terminal illness, and being told these were yourhis last days, I didn’t understand these were our final moments. Despite always anticipating the end, I didn’t see it coming and arrived just in time to embrace it. But in all this time, I have failed to understand what I was I was holding so close to my heart.

It is only in the period of this pandemic that I have come to appreciate what really happened that night and how it has affected me ever since. Ever since my partner passed in the early ’90s, I have been acting out that death scene in one way or another. It’s a ghoulish admission, to be sure, and it was a gruelling realisation, I can tell you. What I mean is I think I’m still trying to save him, just as I have tried to rescue practically every partner since, whether they needed it or not or whether they wanted it or not. For 25 years, I have been living out a moment which I thought was a memory but has in fact become my metier, my entire reason for being. I have been trying to save the partner I lost a quarter of a century ago and it’s time for me to stop.

And what would I do if I had that moment again?. Well, I would have held him longer and harder perhaps, and told him what I had told him so many times, that I loved him and he had made such a difference to my life. You see, he saved me. He rescued me. It’s just a shame that in the end, I was powerless to return the favour.

I need to understand, there is nothing I could have said, or indeed sung, that would have made a difference to my partner’s death. Nothing I could have done in all my dreamings and imaginings since then.

For the longest time I imagined I would tell him a story or sing him a song, something we both loved, a kind of lullaby. But lullabies are the song of survivors. They have nothing to offer the dying. They are meant to reassure children to rest so they are strong enough to face the following day. They are meantmean to offer comfort for those who can carry on.

So I will save my song for you dear listener, for anyone listening, but mostly for the man asleep in the next room, who I want so much to love and protect.

I don’t want him to be troubled by any of this, by these memories I’ve shared;, it all happened at another time. He was not even alive when my late partner lived. Hell, he wasn’t even alive at the height ofduring the AIDS crisis. He’s not responsible for anything I have remembered here. That’s for historians and the storytellers and survivors like me, eager to steal the spotlight.

I want him to have his own story to tell, one that is free of shame or guilt or grief.

I don’t want him to honour the dead, I want him to lead an honourable life. I don’t want him to remember their passing as much as I want him to do something worth remembering.

I want him to have his own story to tell, one that is free of shame or guilt or grief.

And most of all, I don’t want to save him nor feel the need to rescue him. If you hear him tell it, I rescued him on arrival, I saved him just by the showing up, and anyway, there’s nothing the boy needs by way of wisdom that he can’t acquire just by breathing a bit more, living a little longer, simply by surviving.

I’m happy to be here to help him on his way. It’s a privilege to be at the start of the story, I’ve found, just as it is a privilege to be there at the end.

This is his lullaby. This is a song for the survivor and I hope and pray that will be him and in some distant decade, he will be called upon like me to describe what it was like during that time when the world felt so wrong. I sing this for him, and also for you.

Stay safe. Stay strong. Stay alive. Survive.

There will be another morning

There will be a day made new

There will be another dawn in

which your dreams come into view

There will be another moment

There will be another time

There will be a chance to hold the

ones you love and left behind

(So)

Hold tight 'til the world feels right

In the dark of night

Remember the light

Stay strong

Though the fight feels long

Though your heart was wronged

You're home where you belong

There will be a new tomorrow

So much brighter than before

Where we shake of all of our sorrow

And love won't hurt us any more

There will be a celebration

with the ones we missed the most

It took our hearts in isolation

For us to never feel so close