I want to be an elder but I don’t know how

(a poem and a prayer in two breaths)

I would like to write a grand poem filled with wisdom and insight since I’m queer and over sixty and have lived much of my life directly in the path of a deadly epidemic which led to experiences I’d rather have skipped like when a friend was so miserably sick with aids that he wanted to die and this seemed completely reasonable given his physical state and we got a lethal dose of barbiturates and dissolved them in a glass of coke because he couldn’t swallow anything else and while that was going on in his bedroom his southern baptist mother was losing her shit in the living room thinking her son was about to condemn himself to hell and I told her that if she wanted  to say anything to him she’d better say it quick which is exactly what she did and they got into a fight which was hard to watch because he was so sick and ruined and refused to change his mind and she was so distraught and angry and stormed out of the room and it didn’t matter anyway because he could only manage little sips at a time and the drugs made him fall asleep before he could swallow enough to stop his heart so he didn’t die that night and everyone felt like they’d been gutted but maybe his not dying wasn’t the worst thing in the world because the next morning a hospice nurse put him on morphine and a day later he died peacefully and in a way his mother could accept and things like this happened all the time in the eighties and my husband was a hero through that whole era because he was a founder of the san diego aids project which helped sick people find health care and food and housing during those dark and hopeless years but he was not actually my husband because the idea of same sex marriage was so far out of the realm of possibility that people like me didn’t give it a thought while other people worked hard to make it real which riled folks who felt that queer marriage somehow demeaned the institution and some of those people really should have known better like senator hillary clinton who voted for the defense of marriage act or her husband president bill clinton who signed it into law or the californians who passed proposition 8 so on the same day obama became president an amendment was added to the state constitution banning same sex marriage and the even worse part is my italian catholic father voted for it although he did soften his stance after same sex marriage became a right in all fifty states and my husband and I asked my father to say a blessing over the meal at our wonderful wedding which he did only he couldn’t bring himself to call it a wedding so instead he called it a party as in “DEAR GOD THANK YOU FOR BRINGING TOGETHER this beautiful party” and I didn’t correct him because I’m reflexively ready to allow feathers to remain unruffled which is a remnant of the impulse to try and pass for straight and in this way I am now and have always been complicit in my own invisibility and I want young QUEERS EVERYWHERE to realize this is not just my history but theirs SO THEY MIGHT UNDERSTAND THAT the road to who they are is paved with the sweat and blood and bodies of UNCANNONIZED GAY SAINTS and maybe they’d SEE THEMSELVES AS PART OF A QUEER CONTINUUM and wouldn’t it be a lovely thing for an over-sixty queer man with lots of gray hair to act as A KIND OF LIVING BRIDGE that’s sturdy and tested and might be able to ease their passage over tossing waters. 

And of course there are always
                                                         always
                                                                      always                                                                                                tossing waters.