one of those mornings

I got up a couple of times to get a drink from the refrigerator and then, a half hour later, to pee, but I gave up at 5:00 am and decided to just start the day. That meant opening all of the windows to air out the apartment, changing my sheets, taking out the garbage, doing a load of laundry and then going for a walk around the neighborhood -- all before 6:30. I still need to vacuum the living room, but I decided not to torture the neighbors with my VERY LOUD vacuum cleaner.

At least not until after 7:00.

Anyway, last night I started to make a post about the Larry Kramer speech that I referenced yesterday, but gave up when I started to feel a little overwhelmed. No easy pithy statements to make. He's pointing fingers and he's pissed and that means he's being judgmental and, well, like a good liberal I'm not all that comfortable with finger-pointing, or comfortable when I think there might be some truth behind it.

Kramer's pissed. It's the kind of pissed that comes from watching people make the same mistakes that you made, from feeling like the shit that you went through was for nothing. I mean, that's LITERALLY where a large part of his current wave of anger seems to come from, but it's not something that's exclusive to an older generation of gay men who are watching younger gay men blow off the warnings about unprotected sex. It's probably something that parents feel toward their children from time to time (why my dad got mad at me when he thought I was dropping out of college, for example). Anyway, he's pissed. He's 69, his body is f*cked as a result of the ARV meds that he has been on for years and he's just plain sick and tired.

"I must allow at least one day out of every week or two to feel really shitty, to have no sleep, to be constipated, to have diarrhea, to require blood tests and monitoring at hospitals or in doctors' offices, and to have the shakes. The shakes, which come often, are not useful with a mouse or reading a newspaper or with a lover in your arms. And I don't enjoy eating anymore. Keeping on weight is a constant problem. I have dry mouth. I get up six or seven times a night to pee."

Larry wants the younger guys to know this. The ones that think that barebacking ain't that big a deal because they too can look like the buff guys in the ARV med ads and live forever. They can just take their "cocktail" (going down as easy as a shot of Stoli) and nothing can touch them. He's pissed at them because they are destroying themselves and he's pissed at them because they are "murdering" the men with whom they sleep.

Read it yourself.