For the month leading up to World AIDS Day on December 1, 2016, the HIV Here & Now project will resume the HIV Here & Now poem-a-day feature. A new poem every day by a different poet from November 1 to December 1, 2016. We know you will enjoy this brief return of the HIV Here & Now poem-a-day.

By Jameson Fitzpatrick
Poet and author of Morrisroe: Erasures

To have sex with a man of a certain age in 2016 is to fuck into a continuum of gay male experience that transcends your own. It’s not time travel—the century doesn’t unturn itself—but the act of sex does put you in touch, literally, with a history that is both yours and not yours as a young gay man.

I say “yours” and “not yours” (meaning “mine” and “not mine”) because being gay can be a communal identity but not strictly a generational one. The concept of a queer family is necessarily metaphorical, wherein the points and modes of connection challenge the rule of biology. Queerness, meaningfully, is not a birthright—but nor does it exist in a vacuum, outside of time.

The history into which one enters upon claiming a queer identity today is not only the history of HIV, but it is a history that has been profoundly shaped by AIDS in the last thirty-five years. In the fourteen since I came out in 2002—seven years after the introduction of the highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) credited with containing the epidemic in the United States—I have often had the feeling of showing up to a party at the exact moment after something awful has happened, the festivities awkwardly resuming following a heavy silence.

Sex is one way, maybe, to try to understand what happened. When you have sex with a man of a certain age, you are, quite likely, having sex with a man who has had sex with people who died of AIDS, and who, even more likely, has mourned friends who died of AIDS, some of whom he maybe slept with. More than that, you are connecting to him in precisely the same way that, very likely, the friends and lovers he might have lost contracted the virus in the first place. I’m not a very mystical person, but there must be some meaning to this, I think: a historical re-enactment of sorts, but with better technology and the advantage of hindsight.

I hadn’t thought much about this until I fell in love with a man of a certain age, an experience I have already written about ad nauseum. Here’s a day about which I haven’t:

We’re at the Brooklyn Museum to see the exhibition HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture. It’s Sunday, February 12, 2012 (which I only know because it is the day the exhibition closes, which is a Google-able detail in the future). It’s a historic show—the one in which David Wojnarowicz’s video “A Fire in My Belly” caused such a ruckus when it debuted at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery—so we couldn’t miss it. My boyfriend—a Man of a Certain Age—and I have been together for six months, though we have only been “official” for not-quite-three. I’m newly 22, a senior in college at the Large Private Downtown University where I will also begin grad school in the fall and later teach. I think this is the day I meet the poet Stephen Boyer for the first time, whom my boyfriend knows from Occupy and whom we run into leaving the elevator as we’re getting on. I like the exhibition, though it is more crowded than I’d prefer, being the day it closes and all, and also more white and more male in its representation than seems right. Towards the end of the exhibition, my boyfriend points to one of the works and says, “That’s Jerome!” He’s pointing to “Charles Devouring Himself,” Jerome Caja’s riff on Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son,” which Caja painted on an aluminum tray in 1991 using a mixture of resin, nail polish, and the ashes of his friend and fellow artist Charles Sexton. Caja died four years later, in 1995, the year HAART was developed, when I was five and probably hadn’t yet heard of HIV. He and my boyfriend had been friends in San Francisco, he tells me, in the queercore days—and so begins our first real conversation about his experience living through the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 80s and early 90s. While reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in grad school, he became convinced that if he finished it he’d die. To this day, he never has. After we make our way through the rest of the show, we go to the cafe for something to eat, where he tells me about other people he knew who died. The cafe is very cold and I grip my paper cup of coffee so tightly it is the detail of the day I will remember best.

After this, I started thinking about it a lot: men who lived through a certain age, men who didn’t and the art they made. Their work, like sex with older men, struck me as another way into this continuum of contemporary queerness. Can it be a coincidence that what would become some of my favorite art was made by people who died of AIDS-related illnesses—poets like Tim Dlugos and Melvin Dixon and Tory Dent, artists like Paul Thek and Mark Morrisroe?

I don’t know if I can answer that question. Maybe it’s just a historical accident of timing, or maybe this work is precious to me because it is finite, fixed. It will be what it will be. And I feel a sense of responsibility not to forget these people, my forebearers—people I might have known if I were thirty years older. And, since I’m a writer, to keep their voices in the room.

It was after going to HIDE/SEEK—the second time I’d seen Mark Morrisroe’s work—that I returned to the publication printed in conjunction with the retrospective of his work at Artists Space in 2011, photo-copied the image of ephemeral text printed on its last page, and began making erasures of it, moving around strips of white paper and obscuring different phrases to make visible the various possibilities still within the vocabulary Morrisroe determined at some unknown point in the past. (The work is untitled and undated.) My materials were cheap: printer paper and glue-stick; and my handiwork admittedly amateurish: gummy and grubby with inky fingerprints. Unsure what to do with them, I kept them in a shoebox until I returned to the project in 2014 to make a chapbook of 24 erasures—this time, the text retyped in Morrisroe’s original lay-out and then whited-out in the document.

The resulting poems, like the original text itself, are about sex and time, anonymity, pleasure, and the tug of pleasure’s eventual end—these phenomena that persist today more or less the same as when Morrisroe wrote of them.

History continues, of course. HIV is not only a historical event—it is a virus that continues to affect the lives of many people in this country, and many more around the world, even as it is no longer a proverbial death sentence for people who have access to treatment (a big caveat both in the United States and worldwide). In the two years since the chapbook was published, PrEP has entered the mainstream and at least one of my erasures—”Bare / back // goodbye / to / that”—is already outdated.

Time makes all of us mortal, regardless of HIV status. But we get to pretend otherwise sometimes—the length of a lay, or, standing before a painting.

The images below are manuscripts of three of the erasures for Fitzpatrick’s chapbook, Morrisroe: Erasures (89plus and LUMA Foundation, 2011).

Jameson Fitzpatrick is the author of the chapbook Morrisroe: Erasures (89plus and LUMA Foundation, 2011),, which comprises 24 versions of a single text by the artist Mark Morrisroe, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Awl, BuzzFeed Reader, The Offing, Poetry, Prelude and elsewhere. He lives in New York, where he teaches writing at NYU.

By Jacob Hardt
HIV Here & Now Poet and visual artist

I’m thinking about shit today. About what’s about to happen to me. About who I am. I want to be strong and I am afraid. I guess I’m looking for courage inside my self…outside my self…. And I remember certain things about my life. I remember times I’ve been sick. I remember my body torn up with AIDS, not being able to feed myself, not being able to walk. I remember hospices and shingles and morphine pumps…. Terrible pain. I remember being shot at and beat with guns, bad drug deals and overdoses. Lying in the streets waiting to die…. Wanting to die. I remember…. Being alone feeling lost and hopeless and being used by people. Rape. I’ve been in some hard places. I think about God at these times. Who is he what is he…. Why…. And when is it over. All these times being so close to my end…. Yes there is…sadness. Profound sadness. But with it a tremendous feeling of peace believing it’s going to finally end.

I guess I’m thinking about the bigger picture…who am I? Who I’ve been….How the fuck I got through.

It’s so easy to get caught up in everyday bullshit, things that really don’t matter in the end. Am I sexy? Am I this? Why don’t I have that? Is easy to be consumed with stupid selfish shit. I can say that when death is close none of that matters.

What dose matter are little moments, flashes of life that meant something special. People you love, first kisses, most important to me…. Kindness and moments of grace, when people did selfless things for me…. And I think…What have I done within my time? How many flashes will I be for somebody else?

I couldn’t be farther away from those dark times today. My life is…I am…Safe. I have no intention of giving up. I am sad but…I’m ok.

Let me tell you why.

Along my path there have always been kind people doing and saying kind things. People loving me…when I didn’t know what love was…. I usually didn’t see it but it was there. Good was there. Most of the time I was too broken or lost to understand how much it meant when guys didn’t expect me to fuck around and were still helpful. I thought they were stupid, who doesn’t expect or want something from me? There were counselors and nurses, sponsors and case managers….

Somehow I’ve always seen life as wondrous and have always found everything interesting, beautiful. For as long as I remember, the stars and moon were my best friends and kept me alive in scary places.

I’m probably rambling …

I guess I want to tell people how much I love them. How much those little kindnesses mean to me. How they saved me.

I feel lucky, like I’m on the advanced course of life and God thinks I can handle the hardest lessons. I can. Honestly I’d be so much less me if I hadn’t been through so much. I see people miss what’s important every day. And to me they sparkle like diamonds. I know every little act of love had the potential to change somebody’s life. Even saying hi to a stranger can change the tone of my day. I know that all people have the same feelings. I know people aren’t ever better or worse than anybody else. There is no evil…. But there is broken. Lost. Loneliness. Selfishness. People do and say awful things because they can’t see beyond themselves.

Most important I know there’s hope for everybody and if you spend time helping make it better for them…You will be free.

Kindness is the ultimate grace.

Grace…. There’s my answer.

I am so glad to be alive

EDITOR’S NOTE: My friend Jake is beginning a prison sentence this week. I do not want to go into details here (to protect both his privacy and his safety). but I can assure you that Jake is a man of good works. The picture above was taken at a going-away picnic for Jake in Central Park last week. Each of the men and women in this picture loves Jake and believes in Jake.

Jacob Hardt was born in Grand Junction, Colorado, but grew up on Santa Monica Boulevard  in LA and Polk Street in San Francisco. Working with the AIDS Office of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, Jacob spoke on behalf of the Wedge Program, the first HIV educational program in existence that brought people with AIDS into classrooms (the program ran form 1988 to 2002), and Health Initiatives for Youth (Hi-Fy), an agency that provides health workshops for at-risk youth throughout the San Francisco Bay Area (his poetry and photographs have appeared in Hi-Fy’s Reality Magazine). Jacob currently lives in New York City where he pursues writing, painting, and photography.