Posted by Queen Carlotta on March 17, 2002 at 23:50:43:
http://www.corpse.org/issue_10/letters/index.html
from Exquisite Corpse, Issue 10, letters
BURK PROCLAIMS END OF OLD AIDS POLITIKS
SCOUNDREL TIME! That is the phrase that came to me as I looked
out he window and watched the 2001 Candlelight Vigil go by. It was as
if we were all frozen inside some block of ice called AIDS. All of us
gripped
by a catastrophe that happened twenty years ago what is no longer
happening.
Why should I be forced to mourn those gone fifteen years ago? Why must
we re-enact this morbid minstrel show every year and be burdened by
something
that no longer weighs us down as it did then? Thanks to AIDS, San
Francisco
has been changed into an uptight, sex-repressed, crank-driven facsimile
of what it once was, a haven for artists and poets, a place for gay men
and women to come and find tolerance. Now gay men attack other gay men
for not "believing in AIDS" i.e. not believing that HIV causes AIDS.
Never
in my life did I think when I moved here in 1990 that I would leave
like
I left Texas with a lynch mob at my door lighting fires, dragged
through
court and cross examined for wearing an anarchist logo on a t-shirt,
questioned
over my allegiance to Pancho Villa, my art deemed dangerous and
threatening.
There were moments during court when I blinked my eyes to make sure I
was
not having a bad dream. The way I blinked my eyes in the first ensuing
years of AIDS as if I might be able to shake off the nightmare and
return
to what I remembered as a free loving world, but that is exactly what
has
happened. So when I saw those poor traumatized souls parade by for the
umpteenth time, a new Republican administration in office with a
Supreme
Court ruling hostile to pot smoking sick people hanging over our heads,
I realized it was what our friend Lillian Hellman spelled out in the
decade
of my birth, the fifties, come back to bite us in the neck like some
sexless
bloodless vampire. Yes! that's what it is, it's scoundrel time! And I
took
it as my cue to split and so I did.
Here I am! Incredible as it seems, I
left SF for NY to regain sanity and pursue a cheaper, more accepting
existence
and find a place less stressful than SF. Who would have believed NY
would
fit such a profile? No one in their right mind! All I want to do is
write
poems and make collages. And I'll be damned if I am going to let a cabal
of "mofo's" dissuade me from anything other than the creative! Fuck em!
Is what I say, may they rot in Hell! And may the love that will
transform
the world continue for ever and ever!
So mote it be!
Ronnie Burk.