Recently someone
asked me what it was like here in the 1980s and I struggled to describe that
time. It was the time of AIDS when all my friends were dying, or so we all
thought. For me, it was like a dark tunnel and I couldn’t see the end. Behind
me, the other end of the tunnel was the tiny yellow sunlight of a lost world.
That sounds weird, even to me, so of course I didn’t answer the question that
way. In the end I babbled something about the economy being different and rents
being lower, yada, yada. I didn’t stop thinking about it, though, remembering
the good and the bad times. There were good times, in spite of everything.
Bringing the show ELEGIES FOR ANGELS, PUNKS AND RAGIN’ QUEENS to town was
certainly one of the good times, and CLOSE TO HOME was a major party every
February. Oh, and here’s something from those years:
Vanilla
was one of those Drag Queens I like to call “butterflies”. He was beautiful,
and crazy and delicate, and when he died we all lost a good friend. We planned
a bonfire at Herring
Cove Beach
for his memorial service, to take place at dusk on the day when the sun and the
moon are both looking down. I caught a ride out to the beach with Betty and our
friends Tony and Sandy. We parked in the lot and walked out to the beach to
join the small crowd around the fire. A couple of people recited prayers and
poems, and then we all sat quietly in the evening breeze, watching the fire.
Suddenly, our
friend Sandy said, “I have an idea. Why don’t we go around the circle and each
of us tell a story about Vanilla? I’ll start.”
She launched into
her tale while I noticed most of the people there were looking at each other
with puzzled expressions. Finally, the woman next to me leaned over and
whispered, “Who’s Vanilla?”
It was then I
noticed we were not the only bonfire on the beach that night. In fact, there
were five others, strung along the beach like signal fires, each with its own
contingent. We had attended the wrong one. Understandable, I guess. We had our
choice of six.
That’s pretty much
what it was like in the 1980s here in Provincetown.
