Queer Passages
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What is the premise of the Queer Passages episode and who are the hosts?
Welcome to Breaking Form, a podcast of poetry and culture, where we get real about queer life and art. We're your host, I'm Aaron Smith. And I'm James Allen Hall. If you're listening for the first time, we play spicy literary games. We revisit poems that we love, we serve.
Hot takes on poetry and pobiz.
We read you to filth, we gossip, we shade, we laugh, and we are not for everyone.
Happy Pride Month, Aaron Smith. You know what? From a what is it? Bold, beautiful, and damned girl. I am happy to be here.
I don't remember seeing that soap opera. I remember the bold and the beautiful. I don't remember the damned.
I bring the damned to it, sweetie.
How are you? I'm doing good, Susan Luci. Or Lu lipssies. Um you're
gonna call me Susan Lup. Like that's almost a trap name, isn't it? So wacky. Oh my god.
Yeah, I'm really glad that you proposed this show. Um, which is about like we're calling it Passages, which is a very soap opera kind of name. No? Yes. Yeah, like James and Aaron in Passages. Well, in my head, it's also queer passages. It's exactly what it is. And it's sort of like the passage of time, but it's also like these passages that stuck with us and like made us recognize something or think about queerness in a way that just connected us to something else.
Yeah, and it's not necessarily like our first encounter with queerness. It could be something we found later, just something where you're reading it, you have your own sort of, you know, queer passage to somewhere or queer awakening. So
Gonna start us off with a passage from an essay in this book that we both know really well, Wrestling with the Angel, Faith and Religion in the Lives of Gay Men, edited by Brian Bouldry, um, who once interviewed me for a job and any minute now is gonna get back to me. I think for sure.
Is that one of those places that didn't even follow up and tell you?
Oh, it was such a lovely interview that I don't really give a shit, but yeah. This is Felice Picano from the start of his essay, which is called Um AIDS, the New Crucible of Faith. And there was just a lot of writing about AIDS and time and gay men's relationship to time and how it altered with AIDS. I will I will read the beginning of this essay. It's almost three years since I stood in the intensive care ward of Cabrini Medical Center on Manhattan's east side, my hands wrapped around the feverish, limp, familiar hand of my friend and companion of the past sixteen years, as he lay, twisted in sheets, encircled by tubes and apparatus, barely alive, barely conscious, hearing myself say these words.
I promise if there is another life. I'll find you if I have to spend my entire life looking. I promise. Sensing some tiny response from him, real or imagined, voluntary or perhaps strictly autonomic and instinctual, I stopped speaking. Spoiler alert. His his um his lover dies and uh and Picano writes, This is just before the break the first break in the essay. In the months and now years after my friend's death, he capitalized as friend, it was a really common usage? It still is, actually. In the months and now years after my friend's death, I still have no answer. I also no longer profess even what little and loose belief in Buddhism I used to have. People have given me books, people have sent me to psychics and spiritualists.
None has helped, although each has said things, written things, that may or may not be right. Lam Maggie Garfield in How the Universe Works, a book given to another dying friend, writes, Death came first, then life. Death is the pre-existent state. We come into life. It's Buddhist and New Age at the same time, and whatever it really means, it certainly is the only thing that makes sense in my own experience, now that 80% of the people I've ever known are dead. And I just turned fifty. Not eighty. Not ninety.
Don't you feel like the people in all of those wonderful anthologies fucking brought it? Like they they wrote fire bottom of their like hearts. Like they just dragged it up. All of 'em.
There was such urgency, no wasted words. The silences spoke and resounded.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the premise of the Queer Passages episode and who are the hosts?
0:00–8:52
2
How does the essay from *Wrestling with the Angel* frame queer experiences with AIDS?
8:52–10:05
3
What does Felice Picano’s opening passage reveal about grief and faith during the AIDS crisis?
10:05–20:10
4
How does the *Member of the Family* anthology passage explore queer family dynamics?
20:10–37:25
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast
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