 are ready to get started. So thank you all for joining us this evening as we celebrate the release of the new anthology between certain depth and a possible future. Queer writing on growing up with the AIDS crisis. Joining us this evening will be editor Matilda Bernstein-Sikamore and contributors Robert Birch, Keiko Lane, Erin Nielsen and Andrew R. Spieldiner. I'm Kevin, librarian from the LGBTQIA Center at the main library. And I will start us off with a land acknowledgement and a few brief library updates. And please check the chat box for all the links that you'll need for tonight's program, for all the information that I'm covering in my intro. The San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramya Tushaloni peoples, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that the Ramya Tushaloni understand the interconnectedness of all things and have maintained harmony with nature for millennia. We honor the Ramya Tushaloni peoples for their enduring commitment to war rep Mother Earth. As the indigenous protectors of this land and in accordance with their traditions, the Ramya Tushaloni have never receded, lost, nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place, as well as for all peoples who reside in their traditional territory. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. As uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramya Tushaloni community. We recognize that to respectfully honor Ramya Tushaloni peoples, we must embrace and collaborate meaningfully to record indigenous knowledge in how we care for San Francisco and its peoples. And just to let you know briefly about the LGBTQIA Center at the main, it consists of the reading room that you see in this slide, as well as archival collections held on the sixth floor in the SF History Center. We have approximately 10,000 books and 200 archival collections, including the archives of Matilda Bernstein-Sicklemore, as well as videos, magazines, newspapers, and journals, and more by and about LGBTQIA people with a special emphasis on the San Francisco Bay Area. And just to let you know briefly about a few upcoming virtual programs tomorrow, October 21 at 6.30 PM, Radar Productions Returns with the latest edition of Show Us Your Spines, a QT BIPOC artist residency showcase. Ryan Ortiz, Moira Katz, and Jessica Metzah will take us on a journey through the past, present, and future of Black queer feminism, zine culture, and to spirit poetry. Sunday, October 24 at 11 AM, join Muir Woods National Monument Ranger Stephanie for an LGBTQ plus History Month Nature Boost, the history of how many significant moments at Muir Woods were influenced by a network of influential women and LGBTQ plus leaders, learned about the conditions of the time period and how Pauli Murray, Jane Adams, Francis Perkins, and others affected change. And on November 10, at 7 PM, local author and musician Kevin Simmons will join us to celebrate his new book, The Monster I Am Today, Leontine Price and a Life in Verse. He'll be joined by poets Devorah Major and James Cagney and soprano Beleta Brinson, who will offer a special musical performance. Check the chat box for the registration links for all those programs. We would like to thank the Booksmith for cosponsoring tonight's event. You can buy the book online or in person at their store on H Street. And just to let you know, we will have an audience Q&A towards the end of the program. Please use the Q&A feature in Zoom to ask your question. If you're joining us on YouTube tonight, you can ask your question in the chat box there. This program will be recorded and made available on the library's YouTube channel. So you will be able to watch this again. And now it is my pleasure to introduce Matilda Bernstein-Sicklemore, who is the author most recently of The Freezer Door, a New York Times editor's choice, one of Oprah Magazine's best LGBTQ books of 2020, and a finalist for the pin Jean Stein Book Award. Her previous title, The End of San Francisco, won a Lambda Literary Award. And her novel, Sketch to See, was one of NPR's best books of 2018. Sicklemore is the author of two non-fiction titles and three novels, as well as the editor of five previous non-fiction anthologies, including Wire Faggots, So Afraid of Faggots, Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform, an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book. She lives in Seattle, and her next book, Touching the Art, will be published by Salt Skull in 2023. Between Certain Death and a Possible Future, is her sixth anthology. And I will turn it over to Matilda now. Thank you. Hi, everyone. It's so great to be here. I'm just adjusting my screen because I don't see myself. Ha ha ha! There's always that moment, right? We always have that little moment, let's see. Oh, here I am. Here I am. Hello! Well, welcome, everyone. It's great to be in San Francisco, the city that has formed me more than any other. And it's great to be at the San Francisco Public Library even virtually. Please, everyone, feel free to light up the chat during the whole event. There might be a technical glitch, but hopefully it'll all be ready. So we all love to know that you're here. Feel free to tell us what neighborhood you're joining us from, what city you're joining us from. Feel free to comment as we're going along. It's nice to keep it festive. So this book, Between Certain Death and a Possible Future, came about when I realized there was a missing generation in AIDS literature and cultural politics. Usually we hear about two generations. The first coming of age in the era of gay liberation and then watching entire circles of friends die of a mysterious illness as the government did nothing to intervene. And now we hear about younger people growing up with effective treatment and prevention available and unable to comprehend the magnitude of the loss. We're told that these two generations cannot possibly understand one another and thus remain alienated from both the past and the future. But there's another generation between these two, one that came of age in the midst of the epidemic with the belief that desire intrinsically led to death and internalized this trauma as part of becoming queer. I'm a part of this generation. We share experiences with both of the more commonly portrayed generations. Maybe we are a bridge between them. This is my sixth anthology and with every new project, I always start with an open call for submissions that I circulate as widely as possible. So I can bring together the broadest range of perspectives. When I was writing the call for submissions this time, I was careful not to impose specific dates on the generational frame because I knew this would vary depending on a wide variety of factors including race, class, gender, religion, ethnicity, rural or urban experience, regional or national origin, HIV status and access to treatment and prevention over time and in shifting contexts. I knew that any generational frame only offers a partial truth. And I didn't want to impose artificial boundaries. I wanted to put out the idea and see who responded. I originally thought of this anthology as including anyone who came of age sexually in the midst of the AIDS crisis before the advent of effective treatment. But one thing that happened as soon as I started reading submissions was that the scope of the book expanded to include some people growing up well after the emergence of Proteus inhibitors but still experiencing the feeling of growing up between certain death and a possible future. To me, an anthology is an intervention. My goal is not to create a definitive text but to inspire more stories from even more angles to facilitate even more conversations, to deepen the analysis, to complicate the narratives. As I was working on this anthology, I was flooded by my own memories. So many stories that I'd almost forgotten hovering at the edge of my awareness. Like when I was 19 and I drove cross-country to move to San Francisco. What I remember most from that drive was stopping at a rest area somewhere in the middle of the country where I'd never been. Getting out of the car to throw out my trash. And while I was stretching, the rest stop attendant came out wearing orange rubber gloves that went up to his elbows. And he pulled my trash out of the garbage can and put it in a giant blue plastic bag that he immediately tied to dispose of elsewhere. You need to leave, he said, or I'm gonna call the cops. To be a 19-year-old faggot at a rest area in so-called middle America in 1992 meant you were a threat. What if someone got AIDS from your trash in San Francisco? I found the dykes and fags and gender-bending weirdos and other outsider peers like myself. We needed one another to survive the world that told us we deserve to die. We broke down every day in every way, but we believed we were creating something else. We needed to believe in order to live. In San Francisco in the early 90s, AIDS was everywhere. And now I realize how much shutting off was required to exist in day-to-day experience. You couldn't express shock at everyone dying right in front of your eyes because shock felt like a form of cruelty. So you would act like everything might be okay, even when nothing was okay. You met some queen on the street and she was showing off her lesions in a campy way and then she was dead. You went to the beach with a group of people and some boy was flirting with you and then you were asking around about him. There was that look in his eyes and he wanted to see that look again, but he was dead. You slept with somebody you knew was positive and he wanted to make it romantic. So we lit candles around the bathtub before you got in together and a few weeks or months went by and you wondered what happened to him, but he was dead. I didn't go to memorials because I felt like I didn't have a right to be there. I felt like I would be stealing other people's grief. And this is a generational story too. We were coming of age in the midst of all this death but we felt like it was not ours to mourn. If there's one thing I want this anthology to do it's to open up the possibilities for feeling. For feeling everything. Grief is not something you can steal. You can silence it. Yes, and I think that's what our culture has done. Dominant culture, gay culture, queer and trans cultures. The grief has become internalized and the consequences have been devastating intimately, interpersonally, culturally and communally. In this anthology, there are 36 essays from an expansive range of contributors. I could have included many more. Every time I read through the book I find myself getting emotional in surprising places even after the work has become so familiar. I can't predict what you will feel but I can predict that you will feel. Maybe it will be grief or rage or loss or laughter or longing or curiosity or inspiration or empathy or craving, expansion or contraction, devastation or catharsis, connection or confusion, revelation or confirmation or all of this at once. Let's talk about everything so we can feel everything. Let's feel it all so our future remains possible. Thank you. Welcome everyone. It's great to be here. Welcome to the four contributors to everyone joining us. It looks like there is a technical glitch and the chat maybe is not working so people are locked out of the chat so we can't see your comments at the moment. Feel free to keep trying because maybe they will jump through that barrier, right? Someone's against us, but we love having you here and joining us in these virtual rooms. And I wanna remind everyone that you can put questions in the Q&A at any point to get them started. You can ask questions for me, for any of the contributors, anything you want, feel free to throw them into the Q&A. And without further ado, I wanna introduce our next contributor or our first contributor rather. So Keiko Lane is an Okinawan American poet, essayist, memoirist and psychotherapist, writing about the intersections of queer culture, oppression, resistance, liberation psychology, racial and gender justice, HIV criminalization and reproductive justice. Her writing has appeared most recently in Queering Sexual Violence, The Feminist Porn Book, The Remedy, Queer and Trans Voices on Health and Healthcare, The Rumpus, The Feminist Wire and The Body, the HIV AIDS resource. What survival means is an excerpt from her memoir, Blood, Loss, Tour to Queer Poetics of Embodied Memory, A Love Story. She's a long-term survivor of ACT UP and Queer Nation. Please welcome Keiko Lane. Thank you Matilda for gathering the conversations in this anthology and for gathering us tonight. And also for pairing us with the San Francisco Public Library. As a young queer kid, the Public Library was one of the first sources of information about other queer folks. And as the plague descended, it was a source of information about that. I'll be reading a few pages from my piece in the anthology about being a teenage queer in Los Angeles and finding queer family in ACT UP and Queer Nation. August 1991, a summer night, warm, even with the little bit of breeze coming through the open window on top of the hill. There's a sheet pulled halfway up our naked, post-sex bodies. We were rough with each other in the ways that usually work, the muscularity of struggle and strain, erotic as a reminder of aliveness, language-less precision and bodily attunement. When it doesn't work, we pull away, annoyed, without words. We're both irritable, trying to settle into sweetness. Cory is unbraiding and rebraiding my hair. He tugs the loose strands down, tucking them into the braid and I flip the braid back up away from my neck in the heat. We had stopped at the hospital on the way home. Robert has been admitted again. Wade was there, hanging out with Gabe, keeping him company, but when we walked in, Wade didn't look much better than Robert. Gabe eventually shoot us away, saying that he was going to spend the night and we should go home to rest. Cory and I walked out with Wade and kissed him goodnight before heading home. Now, here we were, in bed, talking about Wade and Robert. Will he get better? I asked Cory. Who, Robert or Wade? Well, I consider the question either, both. Yeah, they'll get better a little for a while, but you do know it will get worse. How much worse? I couldn't imagine it. We're nowhere near the end. I'm quiet, thinking about Robert already in pain, already getting confused. Wade looking too thin and pale, his brown hair falling limply around his eyes and Cory isn't feeling well. He won't talk about it, not really, but he's a little out of breath, a little tired and has had a headache for days. He skipped an act of committee meeting that he said he was coming to and snapped at me when I asked about it. Hey, Cory starts softly, tracing the side of my face with his fingers. What? I wanna show you something. I mean, I wanna tell you about something, but I don't know if you, he takes a slow breath, lets it out. If you wanna know, I turn and look at him. I have no idea what he's talking about. The pills, I wanna show you where they are. Pills, your meds? I know where your meds are. Do you need me to get something for you? Not those pills, the other pills. He looks at me, waiting for me to catch on. I feel a glimmer of recognition, then it slips away. I shake my head. You know, the pills, the ones, enough of them. Oh, I stare at him trying to find words. You don't know how bad it gets, can get, will get. You haven't seen it, he says, sitting up in bed. I don't want that. I don't wanna be stuck in the hospital. I don't wanna not have control over what happens. I wanna make my own decisions. And one of those decisions, yes, I nod slowly, and you want me to help me. Cory took my hand. How will I know? You won't have to, I'll know. Then what will you need me for? Not to be alone. You're not alone. What? You're not alone. I take a breath. I can feel my heart start to race. The edge of beginning panic, wanting to convince him of something. What do I have? Who do I have? He looks at me warily like he's tired and disappointed. What about the story you told me? You will borrow each other's T-cells whenever someone has something important to do and needs a little extra boost. That checking on each other, doesn't that account for something? Everyone loves you. And you have me. I'm talking faster in my panic. From a distance, I feel my body pulling farther back from his body. That's what I'm asking if I have you. He looks at me steadily. We're both quiet for a minute. I try to slow myself down. How will I know that you'll be right? How will you know? Cory looks away from me. I'll just know. But how, I insist, I can feel myself starting to panic again, starting to argue. I just will. You won't have to. I will. I let go of his hand and cross my arms so he won't feel me shaking. We argue a little more. You want me to decide, I say flatly. No, he's frustrated. How is it anything else? I want you to help me. I don't wanna be alone. I close my eyes. Not yet, I whisper. He takes my hand back. Not yet. He repeats my words back as though they should soothe me. When it's time, it isn't time yet. I take a shaky exhale. I can't imagine it being time. I can't imagine it feeling clear. You want to love me? This is what it means to love me. I hear him say it and I don't know how to reconcile it. I think I understand how it is love, but I can't imagine that it will feel like love. I feel my love for him. It's the desire to hold him close, always safe to never let go. I let go of his hand, then I get up and start pacing. Come sit, he says. I sit back on the bed, then pick up my clothes from the floor and stand to put them on. He sighs and gets up and pulls on his jeans and an infected faggot T-shirt. Come on, where are we going? Walking. I follow him down the long stairway back out onto Echo Park Avenue. We start walking toward the lake. As we approach the park, we hear the sound of water moving through the filter system of the man-made lake. We're silent, listening to the sounds of the urban park at night. I see silhouettes of ducks and geese in sleep poses on the steep lawned banks. I've never been in this park after dark. As a little kid, my parents used to bring me here. We'd bring any leftover bread uneaten from the week and feed the ducks at the lake's edge. I'd laugh as they swarmed around us, trying to steal bits of bread from my little hands. We walked toward the lotus and the moonlight, but moonlight is strange in Los Angeles. We want to think it's moonlight. That's the story we tell ourselves, but it isn't the moon. It's houses, the street lamps glaring down on us, catching us in the crossfire as they mean to illuminate the junkies and the sex workers to discourage nighttime cruising and sex in the bushes. We sit in silence by the path at the edge of the lake, behind us is a large patch of bushes, and beyond that, the bridge onto the small island at the northeastern side of the lake lined with tall reeds and trees. As we sit in our silence, I began to tune into the sounds around us to really listen to them, for them. In Urban Echo Park, when we hear rustling in the bushes near us, we don't think bear or cougar or even of the coyotes who come down from the dry hills late at night, searching for food for water. We think sex, we think cruising. We think of not having other places to go or wanting the internal feel of risk amplified or matched by the external risk of violence. If you don't want to, then say no, Corey says. Say it out loud. Don't just nod and hope it doesn't come to it. It will come to it. I turn my attention away from the tall reeds and back toward him. What if it doesn't? Don't do that. What? Make me take care of you. How am I making you take care of me? By making me pretend that it will be all right. There's nothing left for me to say. There's everything left to say, but no words come. I reach for his hand again and we sit together quietly. Gradually our stiff bodies soften toward each other again and we lean shoulder to shoulder. Finally, the breeze is starting to cool the air. We listen to the sounds of intimacies around us and feel closer in their wake. And in our closeness, I feel the impossible distance between his story and mine. It's the strangest of queer intimacies, this blurring of desire and death and negotiation of risk, not the cruising around us, but the risk of having to let go. Under the gritty yellowed light, the lotus blossoms glow. There's a moan and a quick hush from the darkness behind us. We listen to the kinds of joy that still remain possible. Even in what we grow up thinking are the darkest places. Thank you. Thank you so much, Keiko, for that beautiful reading. Let's add a round of applause for Keiko Lane. And I want to mention the chat is now working. So everyone feel free to light the chat up. I see there are people joining us from Malaysia, from Montreal, from Houston. So we've got a large range covered, which is amazing. Feel free to tell us where you're joining us from. Feel free to comment as we're reading. If you have questions, just throw them into that Q&A function. You can ask them at any point for any of us, for me, for any of the readers. Our next reader, Andrew R. Speildenner, PhD, is an associate professor in the departments of communication and women, gender and sexuality studies at California State University, San Marcos. Dr. Speildenner's writing is at the intersection of health and culture, particularly looking at HIV and the LGBTQ community. A long-term, a long-time HIV activist, Dr. Speildenner serves as vice chair of the US People Living with HIV Caucus and North American Delegate to UN AIDS. Please welcome Andrew R. Speildenner. Thank you, Matilda. To say goodbye. I do not like coming back to the Bay Area. This is where the ghosts are, where I came of age, where I started learning some truths about myself and where I told lies. Lies meant to show what I wanted to be and become. This is where I made my first faltering attempts to connect with others and where I failed and lost. I am haunted by the mistakes I've made and the people I've lost, even the ones forgotten over the years. Goodbye. Thank you. You made an impact. I wanna touch you again. We will miss you. I wish future generations would meet you. I wish I could remember what you sounded like. I met AIDS head on in the bars and bathhouses as lesions on the skin of men I slept with and lying under the sweet nothings whispered in bed. I was living in fast forward, trying desperately to have a life before I died. When I see the master narratives of AIDS history today, I cannot find my friends. We did not appear on the covers of gay media. History remains a mostly white endeavor, so I remember. Carmen and I came out to the Oakland Gay Bar, the white horse, when we were 20. Goofy, mixed race, holding fake IDs, we were sure we were cute or we tried to look that way. Through the years together, we dated near each other, sometimes overlapping, always friendly. After Carmen's transition, we spoke less as our identity settled in other places. We still kissed hello, would share a cocktail, but our paths diverged. I cheered Carmen on when she started performing at the Sunday show. I did not know how to cope with her death at 23 in 1994. She had a fierceness and beauty that attracted the sexiest men in the bar. She would walk fearlessly in the downtown mall, turning heads and marching through the whispers and catcalls. I wanted to be her, but she was larger than me. Her life was full of elaborate sets and melodramas. Carmen could have been her own opera. The ghosts come forward when I think about the 90s. They get more solid as I recall them. I promise to do more so that their lives and our moments together continue to exist. I tell the stories over and over. So many people I know, so many I had never met. I want to hold sacred, the spaces where we danced, where we found and even failed each other. A 2013 email from a peer who moved across country. I am so glad this is over. Ultimately, there was too much pain and baggage to extricate and try to fix and or ameliorate. I will miss all the fun and transcendent experiences we shared together. Please cherish those and keep them close to your heart as I will always. With love and admiration till we meet again. My partner and I considered him a friend. He was in fact the person who had introduced us. We phoned him immediately. He was loopy, obviously high. He talked about the clear sky and bright sun, the children playing in the background. It was enough, he said, life is enough. I soothed him and asked for confirmation. He said he was sure, this is it, goodbye. Then he hesitated. We spoke about the children playing in the park he was in. Help, he pleaded, changing his mind, even as he felt himself slipping from the drugs already in his system. I had my partner keep him on the phone while I worked on getting first responders to him. After the incident, my partner looked at me with anger, disgust and horror. You would have let him die. You're a monster. I was respecting his choice. This is the third time he's called me like this. I can't want him to live more than he does. No one can do his life for him. My partner, seven years younger, did not have the same experiences I had of weekly funerals and drag shows to raise money for them. Would you do that to me if I was dying? Just let it happen. If that was what you wanted. He took the dogs for a long walk, needing some space for me. I do not think he will ever forgive me for my honesty. Our relationship ended soon after. With love and admiration till we meet again. I can't hold on to everyone, none of us can. There are losses and damages that are beyond our arms. When our friend sent that email did he expect me to save him or hid him made peace with his ending? Does the way I responded make me a monster? For my partner was the beginning of a growing disgust with me. My sense of humor has a sinister edge. I find deaths interesting in ways that make others uncomfortable. There's a coldness in my crisis responses. I found this to be normal in my generation of gay men. Our experience of the HIV epidemic produced specific understandings of health, sex, loss, government neglect, stigma and community. Each era of HIV has particular characteristics that impact the ways we come to know our bodies and each other. For a decade when I returned to the Bay Area I was greeted on the streets and in bars with, girl, I thought you died. At some point this stopped because those familiar with me had either passed or moved away from the gentrified city, but the memory lingers. We are a generation of witnesses and this weight shapes how we love, how we fight and how we break away. I hold this personal version of an AIDS memorial within. It comes between me and other relationships. I know what loss means. I approach people knowing I will say goodbye. I do not know if I will ever be comfortable in the Bay Area. This city just comforts me. It is where the ghosts are for me. And until I find a way to make peace with those missing, I remain haunted. Thank you. Thank you for that gorgeous reading, Andrew. Everyone feel free to light up the chat. Let's have a round of virtual applause for Andrew R. Steele-Denner. Our next contributor, born as a white cisgender faggot on the unceded territory of the Anishinaabe people, Robert Birch, was raised by the shores of the Otanabe River, which in Ojibwe means river that beats like a heart. In the past four decades, he's participated in more than 10,000 hours of educational, community, and ceremonial circles, co-directed one of Canada's most culturally diverse theater companies, and continues to explore the intersections of personal narrative, spontaneous ritual, and social activism. He co-facilitates week-long workshops on sex and intimacy at ferracexmagic.org and co-leads a community food security farming initiative on Coast Salish lands in Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, alongside neighbors and his playmate husband, Mark. Please welcome Robert Birch. Hi, thank you, Matilda. Hello, everybody. It's an honor to be here with you on this flood moon tonight, this full moon. 1996, we meet in a coin-operated jizz house in downtown Vancouver. Hungry for every inch of each other, we hail the cab, making out all the way to his dimly lit gas town apartment. I jump naked into his bed as he sets the mood, lining up his fuck utensils. He turns on a lava lamp that projects plate the light red blobs floating on the ceiling. I'm thinking some collective conscience has just lubed up my ethics. For the first time, I share my HIV status with a sexual partner. He drops his beautiful ass to the bed and sits there, does nothing, says nothing. A full 10 minutes pass. He never moves, never says a word. With only a tad of my integrity intact, I dress and leave. Immediately occurs to me that this is my own initiation into the viral divide. I've been positive for less than five months. On the day of my HIV diagnosis, I happened to be leading a gorilla performance ritual called Happy Virus Day. A team of close friends and lovers spills onto the streets of Victoria, British Columbia. Our grassroots theater company, Generation Studio, stops traffic on Government Street as the actors spiral through a spontaneous viral dance. I don fishnet stockings over my face, voice to film camera over my shoulder with microphone in hand, I interview passers by. We're raising awareness about AIDS in our community. Do you know anyone with HIV? No? Hi, I'm Robert. You do now. 2010. Jasper is 29 and relatively new to the radical fairies eyes full of stardust. We meet in the old wooden hippy sauna. I offer to scrub them down with exfoliating gloves. We're soon panting for air. We move out into the sunshine to dry off and calm down. A bearded Portlander closer to my age shows up and joins us in a playful Jasper sandwich. I caress him from behind as the other man kisses his gorgeous mouth. We frittage in what feels like a blissful moment of erotic liberation. 2011. Six months later, Jasper must have heard me talk about my HIV status in a heart circle yesterday. He stands up in the middle of our circle of 75 other sissy brothers and announces that last summer, someone tried to infect him with HIV, not here, not in this spiritual community, he declares. I sit directly across from him. He's clearly talking about me. A well-known respected elder enters the circle to pick up the rant. It's only a fucking condom. Shaking. I frantically try to recall if the tip of my cock brushed Jasper's asshole, I step inside the circle. I hug the elder as he places the threadbare, story soaked shawl over my shoulders. I say my name before choking out an apology. Then I hear my terrified voice cry out, I need help. Sobbing takes over. The one community space that welcomes me home over and over again as a gay man begins to evaporate. Afterwards, Mark and my closest friends come over to walk alongside me. Their efforts soothe my heart, but my mind rails. I'm taking the hit for our community. What compels me to hold myself accountable when in years of sitting in circles, I've yet to hear anyone else take a similar risk. I realize the burden of disclosure has fallen, mostly fallen on the shoulders of those of us living with HIV. I grew up with the pervading belief that AIDS has infected us all and as such wrestled daily with the burden of accountability. I continue to define myself with the virus whereas Jasper seems to define himself against it. If we cannot acknowledge this bio-cultural rift, how will we ever undo inherited patterns of vicarious trauma and its impact on our lives? How is it that these precious, fragile moments of community making can still implode over how directly we experienced HIV? My hope is that someday Jasper and I can sit across from one another in another heart circle and tell the parts of our stories that acknowledge us all as survivors of this generation of trauma. 2012, I've been the Game Ends Health Coordinator for a regional AIDS service organization for three months. It's pride season. I head north to open events, raise the rainbow flag at Nanaimo City Hall. On my way home, I check grinder and meet an emerging tattoo artist in his early 30s. Despite being wary of younger men, I quickly discover our bodies fit very well together. This time, my raw cock nuzzles into his sandy hair to ask before I rapidly pull out. Shane immobilizes me. He cuddles into my arms. Mmm, daddy. I arrive home, terrified I'm gonna lose my job and put the agency at risk. I confess to my roommate what happened. I'm reminded to set aside fear and focus on caring for the guy I met. I phone him and apologize for not immediately disclosing my status. I explain I've been undetectable for years and as if to reassure him with science, tell him studies suggest the risk is minimal. I recommend that if he's still worried, he could get pep, post-exposure prophylaxis. It's a version of our version of the morning after pit. I point him towards what I'm told are the right directions. He spends the next 36 hours in a panic knocking on pharmacy and doctor's doors, facing homophobic sex shaming from every counter. He never gets the meds. His test comes back negative weeks later. He tells me he's in love with me. We have sex again. It's some of the most pleasurable sex of my life. A sensation of bodies belonging together. I just can't do it. I can't see him anymore. The shock, the risk, exhaustion overwhelms any desire to continue. Thank you for that amazing reading, Robert. Let's have a round of applause for Robert Burch. I have a feeling the chat has frozen again. Oh, wait, here it comes. Maybe just the panelists can chat. Well, anyway, I want to remind people that you can ask any question you have in the Q&A and we'll be ready to respond. And it's so great to be with you here tonight. And our final contributor, Aaron Nielsen's fiction has appeared in scab, mythum, user lands, new fiction writers from a blogging underground edited by Dennis Cooper, Instant City, Freshman 2, New Voices in Gay Fiction, and Mirage number four, Periodical, edited by Dodie Bellamy and the late Kevin Killian. Aaron has been featured on KQED's podcast, The Writer's Block, and he was the editor of the short-lived, but critically acclaimed, Zine Jouissance. Additionally, Aaron has reviewed books for fanzine and maximum rock and roll. He holds a bachelor's in English literature and a master's of fine arts and creative writing, both awarded by San Francisco State University. He lives in San Francisco. Please welcome Aaron Nielsen. Hey, hopefully everyone can hear me. Thanks Matilda and everyone else who's read and the library. This has been really great so far. So I'll just jump into it. So the piece is called Got AIDS Yet, which I'll explain where that comes from in a minute. As a kid, every news report about AIDS, every magazine cover, every made-for-TV movie, televised AIDS benefit, red ribbon, et cetera seemed to be screaming at me, this is your future. My first memory of making the connection between myself and all those men I saw dying on 60 Minutes in Nightly News and wherever was in an airport bathroom in the late 80s. I was eight or nine years old and on the wall of the stall I found the following. And there's a little, the book was a little too small. So we've got a visual aid, but of course it's backwards. So hopefully, yeah, I'm sure those of us of a certain age remember seeing this graffiti like fucking everywhere. So yeah, eight-year-old kids seeing that on a bathroom wall, wonderful. I remember being frozen in horror. I was old enough to know what gay meant, old enough to know that the label applied to me and of course I knew about AIDS. It didn't take me very long to connect the dots and understand the implications. Fast forward a couple of years and the older I grew, the more the anxiety increased. The panic began to set in, the closer to sexual maturity I became, the closer to this disease I got, it became less abstract. Not just something I watched on TV, but something I would in fact have to navigate in my life. It didn't help my anxiety any that when I came out at 15 or 16, the first thing my father said to me was, well, don't get AIDS. Starting in my teens and continuing into my early adulthood, AIDS was such a constant worry that I had nightmares about contracting it. I finally went to get tested when I was 23 or maybe even 24. I put it off for so long because it was too terrifying. My mindset growing up was that I would rather just not know. But my boyfriend at the time and I decided to go because after having been in a monogamous relationship for more than a year, we let our guard down and our condom usage became, well, intermittent at best. Even though our risk was relatively low, neither of us had many sexual partners and we'd been exclusive for a while, we still felt some anxiety. And so we decided to get tested just to put our minds at ease. When we went in for the results, the clinician who knew we were a couple called us back together and told us both at the same time that we were negative, it was a relief, but it was just the start of a cycle that would play out again and again over the years. After we broke up, there were new boyfriends, dates, occasional one night stands, and every time I went to get tested, the fear was just as acute as the first time. Actually, it might've been worse because I didn't always have someone to go with me. But I went dutifully every few months once the anxiety became too much to bear. I usually went through a spell of abstinence after getting tested because I wanted to be able to enjoy the relief that I didn't have anything to worry about. Another tactic I tried to help myself cope with the anxiety was volunteering at an HIV STI clinic. I figured if I regularly was in a setting where HIV was the main focus, I'd become a bit desensitized to it, it would become less terrifying. It worked sort of. I started off filing test results and scheduling appointments. I didn't think I would progress beyond that because the idea of actually testing someone was just too much. I didn't think I could handle it. Well, filing and reception work became very boring, very fast. So I asked to go through the HIV test counselor training. I still wasn't entirely sure it was something I could handle, but I felt compelled to directly engage with a frightened me the most. Besides, I had been tested numerous times for free. So I figured it was my time to start giving back. There are a couple of tense and upsetting moments in the five years I was volunteer, but the majority of the time it really wasn't terrifying and I learned a lot as a test counselor. Most notably, I found out that HIV positive people with an undetectable viral load cannot transmit the virus, which was frankly difficult to believe that drugs could suppress the virus to such a degree the body no longer detects it, no longer makes antibodies against it. So treatment provides HIV positive people with a life expectancy on par with those who are negative. And oh yeah, as a bonus on these meds, the virus can't be transmitted. In tandem with the discovery that undetectable meant untransmissible, came PrEP, another not quite miracle, but compared to where we were when I was growing up, pretty fucking amazing development. But when PrEP debuted in 2012, there was a lot of misinformation about it, in particular how effective it really was and about the potential side effects. So I was dismissive of it. But in 2014, the clinic where I volunteered hosted a panel discussion with a group of researchers from the University of San Francisco who were responsible for the IPREX study that resulted in PrEP. The researchers presented their findings and discussed how effective it really was and how minimal the side effects usually were. I called my doctor the next day and was on PrEP by the end of the week. Suddenly, I didn't have to be afraid of sex anymore, but decades of fear don't just immediately dissipate once you start taking a pill. Smash cut to three years later when I started dating someone who was HIV positive. I had an inkling before he met that he was positive because he didn't have his HIV status listed on his dating profile. He told me on our second date, he became pretty choked up, told me that he liked me, but that he needed to tell me something and I went cold, I knew. I knew what he was going to say. And yes, I do remember feeling afraid and I remember sitting on his couch while he struggled to find the words and I just kept thinking to myself, hurry up and say it, let's just get this over with already. And when he finally got the words out, I hugged him and told him that it wasn't a deal breaker. I told him that I know that people who are undetectable are fine, healthy, that it can't be transmitted and besides, I'm on drugs, so we're good. Three days after that, I broke down sobbing my therapist's office. It all came gushing out. The years of generalized fear and anxiety as well as the guilt over the specific fear and anxiety around dating someone who was HIV positive. I say guilt because I fucking knew better yet I was still scared, scared and ashamed because in spite of all I had learned and all volunteering it wasn't enough to completely unfurl the layers of terror that it slithered around me over the last 30 plus years because even though he was undetectable when I was on PrEP and there was zero chance of transmission, I was still afraid to sleep with him. I liked him though. He was cute and kind and a sweet guy and so I found a way to push past it. Dating is hard, no one is perfect and I wasn't going to let my anxiety over his status dissolve our relationship before it really even began. After about a week or so of dating we fucked, we decided to forego condoms because both of us had been screening for STIs recently and hadn't had any sexual partner since being tested. The longer we dated the more my anxiety waned until I didn't even notice it anymore or so I thought. When I went to my regular PrEP follow-up a couple months into our relationship I was pretty much at ease. I discussed the situation with my doctor and he told me it should be fine. He also added that if my boyfriend was undetectable I didn't need to be on PrEP. When my doctor said that the ease I thought I felt just completely evaporated. Even though I thought I was okay with dating someone positive the thought of fucking him without being on PrEP brought the terror roaring back. I told my doctor we hadn't been together for that long but if things continued I would for sure consider it. A blatant lie but I was too embarrassed to tell him the truth that despite all I knew I needed to cling to the safety blanket of PrEP in order to be comfortable with this relationship. As it turns out though I wasn't the only one a bit tense about the situation. I don't recall exactly how long into our relationship this happened but we had been together for a while which is why I was rattled. We were sitting on his couch searching for something on his iPad and I'm pretty sure we were looking for the menu of a nearby takeout place. When a previous search he had done popped up how to bear back safely in a sero-discordinate relationship. I immediately felt embarrassed. I didn't know how to react. I had never once stopped to think that he might have anxiety over sleeping with me. It never crossed my mind. In hindsight I feel like I fumbled in the moment handled the situation badly. I asked if we could look at the page he had browsed and he agreed. On the page were the three options one would expect condoms PrEP and the HIV positive partner having an undetectable viral load. I remember pointing to the section about PrEP and saying that's me. Then pointing to the section about being undetectable and saying that's you so we're fine. I added we're doing everything right and then I kissed him and that was the end of it but I think I should have tried to actually have some kind of dialogue about it instead of just pointing at a website and saying all as well when clearly it wasn't because even though the meds work the fear remains. Wow, thank you Aaron for that beautiful reading. Thank you everyone for these incredible readings and for all of the vulnerability here in the room. Thank you everyone for joining us. I see there are some questions and I'm gonna invite all the contributors to come on the screen with me and I invite all of you to light up that shot. I see that it's lighting up right now. So yeah, everyone come back. Kiko, Aaron, Robert and Andrew will be up here together to talk during the Q&A. All right, let's see. I think maybe Aaron, we don't see you here yet. There you are, hooray. Well, welcome back everyone. I really do wanna thank you all for your vulnerability and I will say for myself, I found myself crying a little bit in every single piece and I also wanted to note that each of you shows, I think some of the most vulnerable parts of the pieces you wrote. And I wondered if any of you wanted to speak to that, to speak to that question of the value of being vulnerable about all these issues that were supposed to be silent about or were supposed to have these easy answers whereas I think all of your pieces speak to those complications. I wonder if anyone wanted to talk a little bit about that. Does that jump out to anyone? I mean, I could kind of answer some of that to be totally candid. And not to sound like Hummeldrag bragged but I really honestly didn't think that I would get into the anthology. So I wrote like, this would never be read. And the irony is here I am in a public venue reading, reading things that I never thought that would ever see the light of day. So jokes on me on that one. But yeah, that's how I had to do it. I really, I mean, it was, I don't normally write nonfiction. I don't usually write about myself. And it was, I saw the prompt and it was sort of like, there was resistance. Honestly, like I didn't want to, but then it was like, okay, maybe you should. And then I was like, this isn't gonna get in. So just write it, write, write. And it actually was a lot. Thinking about it, it wasn't as nearly as difficult as it was to actually sit down and write it. So yeah, it was a challenge, but I'm glad I, you know, push through. Oh, I love that. That's the perfect story. Does anyone else wanna add something about that question of public vulnerability? Anything that came up tonight or anything you wanna speak to in general? Sure. Please Kiko. Sure, I can jump in a little bit. You know, I saw that there was also a question in the Q and A about relationship, any of our relationship to the title and so I'm sort of gonna fold those questions together because when I saw the call for submissions, what I saw first was the title. And before I even sort of read the full call, what I thought was, oh, that sounds like this memoir I'm working on. Oh, if Matilda's gonna do this, maybe I don't have to do this. Maybe I don't have to write this book that I'm working on, right? You know, there have been incredible films and books about the history and the politics and the organizing of the act up era and of act up and another couple of books have just dropped and I'll ask you a few months. But what I was always interested in was, and this may sort of foreshadow the fact that I came out of the act of years and ended up a psychotherapist, but I was interested in the intimacies that we had and the relationships that we had with each other and the vulnerabilities and what we did to survive those years and come out of it still with our capacity to love each other. So that's sort of where I went. And I remember I said, Matilda, a couple of different sections and like Matilda, it's your fault. Like you grabbed this section and said, okay, I want this. So, you know, I trusted you with it. Well, thank you for trusting me. It's a beautiful piece and I can't wait for the rest of the book to be out in the world. Robert, did you have something you wanted to add about that? Yeah, I've been noticing since receiving a copy of the book that I've only been able to read a chapter maybe every few nights or maybe once a week. It's just so much to digest. Each of the chapters are so incredibly rich but I noticed as this evening was percolating, I was actually tracking a PTSD style response. Like all these feelings and memories were more pouring up. So that actually helped me dive further in the book to just keep looking for more resonance. I'm going, oh my God, that, we all actually lived through this. And the question was, how did those who'd survived? How did we all do it? And so to have so many different voices, it gave me a sense of courage to read some more, the essay is called Disclosure. So to be able to sit in the center of profound moments of shame, whether that was for anonymous sex or then going through the whole process of disclosing or not disclosing or how disclosure happened. And then only to find out years later that so much of our choices were harm reduction based. So much of the science did show that we were actually safer than not, but just the trauma of holding all of that in and knowing so few people were actually having the conversations about it. Now this deep desire to connect and move through, move through, it's like when somebody dies and nobody talks about it, but when we've got so many multiple traumas and we're all in this state of shock and all we can hope for is to make eye contact with somebody who actually, and so reading these, I think sharing some of these vulnerable moments is a form of making that eye contact through time and space. Like who else gets some of this? And if we're not willing to show what risks we took then, it begs the question, what kind of risks are we not taking today and might be needing to do, well, obviously are needing to do so. That's a beautiful question. I'm gonna piggyback that question that Keiko just pointed to in case anyone wants to speak to people's responses. Did any of you have a particular response to the title? Here's the question. I love the title of the anthology and clearly all your pieces speak to the theme, but I'd like to hear more from all of you about how you personally connect to the title. I think several of you have already spoken to that, but if anyone else has anything they wanna say about the title, which is, of course, between certain death and a possible future, who you're writing on growing up with the AIDS crisis. And if no one has anything to add to that, then I'm gonna jump into the next question. Let's see, we have a question. It's Matilda, it's so wonderful to be in another San Francisco Public Library reading with you. Of course, I'm thinking a lot about San Francisco tonight and all of your writing while we lived there. I'm wondering how you feel your novels, memoirs and anthologies are connected. Okay, yeah, I can speak to that. So for me, I write in order to stay alive. And I mean that literally, writing is the way that I process the world. It is the way I find connection. It is the way that I express myself and connect to others. And so far, it is a strategy that has worked. I am still alive. So I'm continuing as much as possible. And I think when I write a book, a novel or a memoir or a Lyric essay, a book that I'm writing on my own, it really is all for me. And I'm writing it on my own terms and only on those terms. And I really cut out anything that goes into the realm of explication or of trying to explain this dark, integrated and desperate world. It's like, hello, here it is, right? It's on my terms. And so I think when I, and also I think the themes of my, both my individual books and man anthologies always intersect, right? And so for example, with this book between certain death and a possible future, the idea really came out of my last novel, which was called Sketch to See. And Sketch to See takes place in Boston in 1995 in gay club culture, with all of its pageantry and hypocrisy. And when I started to write that novel, I had no idea actually that it would be about AIDS. But of course, if I'm writing about 1995, you know, how could it not, right? And so once I'd written the book and when I started talking about it, I realized, oh, this is actually a generational novel about AIDS. And it's not that first generation that grew up and experienced sexual liberation and then watched, you know, entire circles of friends die of a mysterious disease. It's the generation that grew up in the midst of the AIDS crisis and internalized that trauma as part of becoming queer, right? And so I realized that from writing Sketch to See, you know, because this was the only generational experience I had. And I also realized, so for an anthology, for me, I'm always wanna have an intervention, a conversation that I think is not taking place. And I think that our generation, this generation between is really not so much in the conversation, even with Sketch to See, but people read it as a book about the previous generation because they have no way of thinking, they're like, oh, people are dying of AIDS. People are existing with the trauma. People are getting, you know, on the subway and someone's saying, you know, you die, you deserve to die, I wanna kill you, you faggot. And of course, all those things are still going on now, but this book is very specifically set in 1995. And so I think people, if they had that generational experience, they understood it, but otherwise it was collapsed into a previous one. And so for me, an anthology is a way to combine my skills as a writer and editor and also as an organizer in bringing together a group of people and voices and perspectives and dissonant styles of writing and people coming from different, you know, places and spaces and having different conversations and putting it all together. And so I think that's a little bit about that relationship. I don't wanna talk too much about that. So I'm gonna go on to the next question. Okay, here's another question for me. I can answer this one actually really easily. Any difficulty finding a publisher? Now that is actually a really interesting question because I always have, you know, this is my sixth anthology. I have three novels. I have two nonfiction titles. I have another nonfiction title that's coming out in 2023. So, you know, it's 11 books that are published, another one on the road. Every single time I have a really hard time finding a publisher, generally speaking. Now, in this particular case, I put the idea out on social media just when I was thinking about it, right? When it was percolating and the publisher of Sketch to See, Brian Lamb and Arsenal Paul Press actually wrote to me and said, I wanna publish this book. And so there were actually a few other publishers that were also interested. But they wanted me to do this thing which I never believe in doing but sometimes I have to justify my entire existence. And I was like, I don't wanna do that. And Brian, who is of this generation and I already know, understand this really deeply and I already know I love working with. And so that's how it ended up happening. It's, you know, a rare story when the publishing, the finding the right publisher actually just happened from the idea itself. But I don't, I'm not saying that that's very, very rare. So, but in this case, it worked out amazingly. Okay, let's see. Rory wants to tell me I look fabulous, I'll take it. Okay, someone's telling us they're joining us from Victoria, Andrew Beckerman, thanks to Robert Burch's invitation. Okay, there has been a lot of writing and drama influenced by the AIDS epidemic. Thanks to Matilda for adding to this rich, oops, okay, someone typed in something. Okay, thanks to Matilda for adding to this rich vein of experiences. Do you think COVID-19 will have a similar impact and what would it look like? Okay, good question. Anyone wanna speak? I'm gonna take one tiny thing about that is that the call for submissions, the deadline for the call for submissions was March of 2020. So if anyone remembers what happened in March of 2020. So there are actually a few of the pieces in the book do speak to that because they're written exactly in that moment. So for example, Baron Mackenzie is on a plane going back to Vancouver while there are all these headlines about COVID and everyone has their hand sanitizer out and people are talking like, is this or is this? So it is interesting. It does come into the book a little bit but do other people have any thoughts on that? Writing about COVID-19 and what will that look like or what does that already look like? I'm kind of dreading it. Like I thought about it myself. I'm like, what is in a year or two or whenever we're like passes the wave of just like the Netflix limited edition series of COVID, like I just, I don't know. I think we're still too in it right now and I just am not looking forward to having to relive it when we're out of it. But that's just me. But yeah, I'm sure there's gonna be a ton of COVID. COVID books and movies and it's gonna be in every, even in every novel, I'm sure that set in present time there's gonna be some mention of COVID somewhere. It's inescapable. What do other people think about writing about COVID and yeah, anything else? Anything else come up for people? It's a huge question and we're all surrounded by it all the time. I think Robert, yes. I was just thinking, reflecting back to through the eighties and nineties, kind of wondering why I didn't record more of what was going on and kind of the echo chamber that was happening and it was all spinning. But I noticed the beginning of this pandemic that for the first few months, I just would record one thing that happened, something that was so out of the context of what we knew to be the day to day. And I lost that, just that practice. But I'm thinking, you know, like with the strangeness that keeps coming through, it's all worth just capturing a line because so many things happened in the first with the AIDS epidemic that were somebody, I think it was Keiko, talked about the transcendence. There were so many transcendent moments. There was in all the pain and outrage and the weirdness of it all, there was also moments of exquisite beauty and tenderness and connection. And I think it would be as we move through this and however long this takes and whatever this particular virus is doing to the world, we all know it's more than just a biological age and it's changing us socially, it's our sense of identities are changing or sense of reality is changing at the same time. This profound breakdown. So how do we capture a breakdown? It's one of the great artistic endeavors to be in it and to be able to share it at the same time. So I'm sure people who are sharp of pen are capturing the moments. What's hard is it's not, for me, it's not an easy equation because HIV happened to us in a very specific way. Like the story that you had about being told that your garbage will infect people, the cost of queer life, I've been thinking a lot about like these Build Back Better plans that all these countries are putting forward and queer lives aren't part of these plans. Our communities have been devastated in this pandemic. The spaces that we met shut down globally. Many of us were put in danger. Many people had to move home, interrupting their prep, their HIV treatment because they went back in the closet and the violence against us has just escalated. In Peru, they did this weird thing where you could go out and one day, one day if you were male and one day if you were female, go out in public during COVID. And what that meant was that the police harassed gender non-conforming and trans people in these really horrible, vicious, violent ways. And the ways in which we got targeted under COVID are very different, but also like the HIV was just a swath across our community. Like, you know, lesbians stood up and provided services because no one else would touch us and no one else would be there for us, even our families and lovers. And so I think, you know, I do think there's a difference in the way that it's being mapped out. And I think kind of the, you know, Matilda knows this, I moved to Mexico during the pandemic because I felt like the U.S. had kind of lost its mind. And so I missed Trump's election and now I live in Canada. So, you know, I'm just avoiding the U.S. But I do think that that's also, that there's something very different happening around even the vaccine distribution and all that. Anyways, that's just some thoughts on it. Those are amazing thoughts. Yeah, did I see you add something to add, Keika? Oh, kind of. I mean, what I've, yeah, I appreciate what everybody is saying about it. And what I've been sort of thinking about, talking about, starting to write about a little bit is the ways in which sort of early AIDS ghost, plague ghosts sort of came back and the ways some of the traumas around separation came back because all of a sudden we were forced to confront another question about how does a virus sort of wedge in between people and in between communities and all of the ways in the early plague years that we were told that sort of longings for queer touch or queer desire were what we're going to kill us. Now, once again, we got faced with the question of how is granted not only queer desire, but certainly the echoes and the trauma was there for queer folks of how, what does it mean if especially pre-vaccine and we're still globally pre-vaccine? You know, what does it mean if our desires for closeness are still the thing that we are also being told will kill us? That's what's the same for me. Let's see, we're getting a bit close to time, but I see that let me take this other question from here. I feel that in mainstream culture, you rarely hear about HIV AIDS anymore. The only time it gets coverage is when you see a commercial about HIV meds. As a teacher, I wonder what your opinions are about what you think young people should know about risks and whether or not you think social media is providing them with the resources they need. Sorry, I was just laughed at the end of it about social media providing the resources which we all know social media never provides the resources we need. That's my short answer for that. But do other people have something they want to speak to? I see that there's a question in the chat too. Let me just bring this up. Well, let's see, no, this is more of a comment. Okay, great. So yes, does anyone have anything they want to speak to that particular question about, I'm going to expand it actually, not just about risks for young people, but also just about the disappearance of talking about HIV AIDS in any way that isn't medicalized. Yeah, so I work as a professor, one of my jobs, and I'm always out about my HIV status. I come out the first day, tell them I got it the old fashioned way. And no matter what I'm teaching, I have that discussion with the students, partially because so many of them, I mean, it's very odd, but there's a generation of students that have never met anybody with HIV that they know of. And being able to talk to them about viral suppression, some of the things that Aaron spoke about in his stories come up in class, no matter what I'm teaching. I haven't teach queer stuff and health stuff, so it maps pretty easily. But people don't know stuff about viral suppression, they don't know about PrEP. So no matter what I'm teaching, I bring those up in discussion and the fact that they should be able to access PrEP through the student health services. But people aren't talking about sex at all anymore, much less HIV. So that's actually, people are real, we have a generation relying on porn for their sex education, and that's not very realistic. I wish it were more realistic, but it's not. Anyone else? Oh, yes, Robert. Just one of the perennial lessons through the AIDS epidemic is that we just had to keep doing HIV 101. And then we started noticing that it wasn't getting done and we had to revamp it up every couple of years, just to keep doing the basics. And as the more and more complexities were being loaded down in our communities or intersecting communities, a number of people who were working in the field were just like, oh my God, we just gotta do this basic as we got a whole new generation of nurses that never met anybody with HIV, right? Or healthcare workers. I met some brilliant master's students who just never had heard the stories that came out of the 80s and 90s. Brilliant person and then turned around with some of that community-based knowledge and put it into her work around today's homeless issue and just like was able to scaffold a movement, our movement and see the capacity building that happened and start that grassroots kitchen table wisdom again. So I think that's one of the pieces that we just have to keep going back to. I think that is troubled by trouble. I don't know if it's trouble. I don't know how social media is gonna evolve into its own capacity for caring. It will, it has to. I don't necessity I'd say that's my wishful thinking, but people will have to form community-based responses. Yeah, and one thing I'll add actually just about the book in general is that there are several pieces that speak to this exact question and also speak to the continuation of the AIDS crisis in the current day moment, based on like South Supras Lowry for example, has this piece talking about working, doing outreach to homeless queers in New York City and how queer and trans kids are dealing now with Kaposi's sarcoma and wasting syndrome in the exact same neighborhood, the West Village, where people are told that HIV is a manageable condition. You either take your pill to prevent it or you take your pill to treat it. And still in the US, there are queer kids who are dying of AIDS right now. And so this is a continuing issue. And I think a lot of the pieces in particular really speak to that. And also I think speak to the ways in which there is no clear divide between generations. And that's one of the things that immediately happened when I was working on the book was that a lot of people who were born way later than what I was thinking in my mind, even though I didn't impose a specific date, like for example, Cody Monkaster is writing about being 15 in 2010 and their mother finds out that they're queer in rural Canada and thinks that she can get AIDS from the towels. So a lot of these issues are still continuing today. And that story, that could have happened in 1985. So I think this generational conversation and this issue of not just access to treatment and prevention, but access to basic needs. The need to take care of one another, housing, healthcare, just basics. And it's still lacking in so many ways, even in places where it should exist, obviously. But I wonder if anyone else wants to speak to any of those questions before we come to a close. And actually another, I'm just gonna add one more broad question to the mix. This will be the final, the final melange. But one thing I was thinking as people were talking about these themes of disclosure and negotiation and risk and fear and anxiety that I think take place in all of your essays and the ways in which sometimes they align in the expected ways and sometimes they don't align. So I wonder if anyone wants to talk about that connection or disconnection in this broader context of both education, access, community possibilities and perils and lacks and losses? Anyone wanna speak to any of that small question? Oh, and I did wanna invoke a few things as well. The coin operated jizz house, the infected faggot t-shirt, moonlight, the ghosts, sinister humor. All of these things I wanna bring in the room with us tonight, does anyone, oh, and I wanna remind people you can get the book from Book Smith locally in San Francisco, the Public Library, San Francisco Public Library also has it of course. The more you request it, the more copies they get. Anyone else wanna add anything? I think we're at the end. I think Andrew wants to say one last thing. I was just gonna say like, I think one of the things, I really appreciated being included in the book. And I really appreciate being included in the reading and part of it was because I just missed so many people that weren't recorded. And when Robert, when you talked about recording people, it's like, that's what my piece, I really, I think all of us share that. Like we all just miss people and they're people that are the people we meet now will never know. And so I'm always looking for ways that we can bring them back into the rooms. So I appreciate being with you all. Thank you. Oh, thank you so much. I feel it's hard to like match the intimacy of having these readings in an actual space, right? But I do feel all of that intimacy and presence with you here. And also the chat is lighting up. So if anyone wants to take a look at that, please feel free to light up the chat. Someone's reminding me that this is a book tour event and there will be an event two days from now, a virtual event in Chicago. That'll be at Women and Children First. And then there are four more events after that. You can find all of the events on my website, MatildaBurnsteinCycamore.com. So this is being recorded. Someone is asking that. And yeah, so I just wanna thank everyone. I wanna thank all of you, Kako, Robert, Andrew, Aaron. I wanna thank the whole audience. And let's just blow a kiss to each other to say goodbye. Maybe the library wants to come on. Maybe they don't, but we'll kiss one another goodbye first. Here comes the library to say goodbye. That was wonderful. Thank you, Matilda, Kako, Robert, Andrew and Aaron. And thanks to our audience as well for all your participation. Have a wonderful night.