I have taught my class. Now I am reading stray overdue assignments, writing reports and doing the other bureaucratic things faculty members have to do at the end of a semester. Oh, and I have been exchanging emails with the students I mentioned in an earlier post.
The AIDS walk has just ended in Central Park. I don’t know whether this particular date was chosen for any reason. But it just so happens that yesterday was the anniversary of what some have argued was the beginning of AIDS in the US, even if no one—including the young doctors who treated the first patient—knew it at the time. Robert Rayford, a 16-year-old Black boy who had never been outside of his home town of St. Louis died. The ostensible cause was pneumonia, but the two-year-long downward spiral of his health, in which his immune system basically shut down, baffled the doctors so much that they saved samples of his tissue for nearly two decades.
I could say something about why Rayford, raised by a single mother, was not recognized as “Patient Zero” even after tests confirmed the presence of AIDs proteins during the late 1980s. As a poor Black boy who never left his a hometown of St. Louis, his story didn’t fit the narratives constructed by LG (we—T’s and B’s—weren’t included) organizations, which were dominated mainly by White affluent and middle-class gay men.
Anyway, I mentioned that episode because, in a way, it’s emblematic of this time of year, at least for me. We are in that part of Spring that’s a prelude to Summer and, perhaps, changes no one is anticipating. An early heat wave is beginning today. A week from tomorrow will be Memorial Day, the “unofficial” beginning of Summer, even if a cold spell, possibly accompanied by wind and rain, will strike before the “official” beginning of Summer.
That chronological and weather pattern transpired several times in my life, and each time was a prelude to changes in my life, or changes in the world that would affect me, whether or not I recognized, or even could recognize it at the time.
(To Be Continued )
