Warren was from the South. David and Warren moved together to San Francisco, shortly after David, as one of the “Three Anonymous Queers,” penned the broadside “I Hate Straights.” Warren and David were a discordant couple: Warren was positive and David was negative. After they moved to San Francisco, I heard only infrequent reports through thirdhand sources about them. Someone told me that Warren had flown to Switzerland for Dr. Roka’s herb-enema treatment. My friend Sarah told me it did wonders for her friend Bo. Bo died this spring.
As time passed, more people joined the Ashes Action. They, too, were committed to bringing the ashes of their loved ones to the White House. Shane Butler coordinated the action from New York. We had a series of pre-action meetings. We formed affinity groups to march in rows at the action. Our basic objective was to protect those carrying ashes from the police until they reached the White House. My affinity group was willing to risk arrest.
We felt it wasn’t our action, it was David’s action, and the action of those carrying ashes of friends and companions. We were merely functioning as support. We decided to have a large, silent, dignified procession to the White House.
That Sunday, we meet at the Capitol side of the Mall. We march down the Mall to the accompaniment of the saddest drums. At first it is just the few busloads of activists from New York and the small group of maybe ten people carrying ashes. As we march silently, people join in from the sidelines. The procession grows. We are silent, for once. SILENCE = DEATH is a metaphor, after all. This is no metaphor: We carry death itself.
Frank, an activist now living in the Midwest, had smeared his face with fake blood and was chanting loudly. “It’s not just their demo, it’s all of us,” he says when reprimanded to be quiet. David wails. Suddenly those carrying the ashes begin to chant. We all chant to the beat of the drums.
As the procession veers north from the Mall to the street, my affinity group functions as the front guard, risking arrest. We pass the pressure point unscathed.
It is impossible for me to assimilate this as it is happening. It is too immense. Our grief is literal. Does a man cease to become more than a symbol after he is dead? Yet somehow this is more than the usual “cheap theatrics,” more than our street theater with strong graphics and media savvy.
A woman hands a bag of ashes, her son‘s, to someone as we march by. She wanted someone to use it. The crowd continues to grow, until we are almost four hundred.
We march in strength and solidarity.
We march in anger and in grief.
We march against the murderous neglect of two presidential administrations.
We march in dignity and pride.
When there is no possibility of getting to the front of the White House, we march to the backyard. The police cluster around on horses. They are planning on stopping us at the end of the driveway, before the fence.
Every action has one mad moment of uncertainty, one delirious moment of fear. We break ranks and make a mad rush, surrounding those carrying the ashes. Mounted policemen move in, forming a wedge between the group at the fence and the group on the other side of the macadam. We sit down to hold our ground. I look down and see a puddle of blood. For a moment I am hysterical. Then I realize it is more of Frank’s fake blood.
Some scale the fences and start dumping their containers of ashes, to cheers. And then it is all over.
The police threaten to arrest all those on the fence side of their line. Another gauntlet is thrown. We confer and decide that we’ve accomplished what we came for and there is no sense in getting arrested after achieving our goal. We will disperse in groups.
We gather in the park behind the White House for a public speak-out. People tell what had happened. I learn of Alexis’s grief: She had carried her father’s ashes, her father who had died several years ago, and now she is finally experiencing a sense of closure. Eric Sawyer has Larry Kert’s celebrity ashes. Larry was disinvited from the White House after he came down with AIDS. Well, now he’s coming, invitation or not. David talks about Warren. He cries. And suddenly it rains in torrents, an intense downpour of grief. We rush to a covered grandstand at the side of the park, soaked. The ashes mix with the soil. Ten minutes earlier the Parks Service could have cleaned up our burnt offerings with ease. Now they are impossible to eradicate.
The last time I saw Mark Fisher alive was at Tim Powers’s memorial. He was much thinner than I remembered. Mark was an architect from Iowa and a member of The Marys affinity group. He silk-screened T-shirts for The Marys that said “ALL PEOPLE WITH AIDS ARE INNOCENT.” Mark was tall and lanky. If Eddie Haskell were gay, he would have grown up to be Mark Fisher.
For three years I sat next to Mark Bronnenberg at ACT UP meetings. He was the other Mark from Iowa. He moved to San Francisco a few years ago, as did Pam and Russell. Pam and Russell were Mark Fisher’s best friends. Pam’s brother died of AIDS. Pam was very hurt when the “I Hate Straights” broadsheet came out.
Mark Fisher wrote an anonymous piece published by
QW
a few weeks before his death titled “Bury Me Furiously.” I’ll quote the last section here:
I suspect—I know—my funeral will shock people when it happens. We Americans are terrified of death. Death takes place behind closed doors and is removed from reality, from the living. I want to show the reality of my death, to display my body in public; I want the public to bear witness. We are not just spiraling statistics; we are people who have lives, who have purpose, who have lovers, friends, and families. And we are dying of a disease maintained by a degree of criminal neglect so enormous that it amounts to genocide.
I want my death to be as strong a statement as my life continues to be.
I want my own funeral to be fierce and defiant, to make the public statement that my death from AIDS is a form of political assassination.
We are taking this action out of love and rage.
It is all so very terrible. Mark died of sepsis, caused by a catheter infection, on the plane coming back from Italy, less than a month after the Ashes Action. He went to Italy with Russell. During the last few days of their vacation, they were looking at hospitals. Mark was going crazy. He kept a diary. The last entry, on the morning of his death, in tiny, tiny writing, was: “Mind is clear. Feel like a complete whole.” The last thing he said to Russell was “Hello.” Why does dying on a plane freak me out so much?
Mark Fisher was so sweet. I tried calling Mark Bronnenberg in San Francisco three times to let him know. I found out he had died on Thursday, the day after Paul’s memorial, the afternoon I found out that Richard was dead.
On Friday there is a Take Back the Night march through the East Village, sponsored by Outwatch and the Anti-Violence Project. It starts at Cooper Union. The mood is grim: Everyone is finding out that Mark Fisher had died. The Marys pass out flyers with Mark’s picture on the front, and “Bury Me Furiously” on the back. There will be a political funeral next Monday, the day before the presidential election. Tom came to the demo late. He had to see Luis, who is dying of leukemia, and then his friend Chris had a hissy fit because Tom was a half hour late and Barry blurted out to Tom, “Did you hear that Mark died?” There are times when I cannot comprehend what is going on. There is too much sadness in the world. I suppose Pam knew. Russell must have told her.
I am living under a heavy sheet of sadness.
On Monday there is a ceremony at Judson Memorial Church at Washington Square. Pam has flown in from San Francisco. Russell is there in the front row, with Pam. Afterward, six people carry Mark’s open casket up Sixth Avenue to Republican National Headquarters in midtown. His pale and emaciated corpse is clearly visible in the plain-pine coffin. It is raining steadily. The street is a sea of black umbrellas. A car follows the procession. James, on crutches, rides in the car for several blocks. Four people carry burning torches. I am a marshal assigned to the back of the march. I have to make sure that nobody lags behind and is picked off by police.
How many more have to die?
There is some heckling from the sidelines. Police block traffic for us. Sixth Avenue becomes a huge traffic jam. To the passengers in the cars, the drivers, the people walking home in the rain, this is a minor annoyance, just one more aggravation for living in New York. To us, a life, a death. A man on the north side of Washington Square Park yells at us, thinking it is just another pro-Clinton demonstration. It doesn’t sink in. I am furious, screaming at passersby, “This is a fucking funeral, don’t you get it?”
We reach our destination and have a brief ceremony. The door to the building is double-locked. People are hiding from us. Michael Cunningham speaks eloquently and angrily at the end of the procession. The casket is loaded into the car. We leave our list of demands at Republican headquarters, the same list of demands we left at Kennebunkport a year ago. These are the same demands we keep on pressing: Open the borders to HIV-positives. Distribute condoms in the schools. Fund needle-exchange programs throughout the country. Have a massive research project to find a cure for AIDS. Double the NIH budget. Put someone in charge of the crisis.
We go home. What have we accomplished? Are we any closer to ending this crisis?
Tim Bailey wanted us to throw his body over the White House fence, but we couldn’t do that—“not because we didn’t share his fury but because we loved him too much to treat his mortal remains that way,” as Michael Cunningham said at his memorial. Instead, we chartered two buses and drove to D.C. at seven-thirty in the morning. Without a second thought, one hundred activists take off work Thursday to go to a political funeral to honor Tim Bailey. I can’t sleep the night before. I am up at six. On the way down to Washington, a video on AIDS activism plays on the monitor. I huddle next to my friend Brian and try to get some sleep.
Tim was a fashion designer for the house of Patricia Field. James Baggett and Joy were his best friends. Tim was a frail bleach-blond. He had been ill for more than a year. Last summer I saw him on Fire Island. He was there for a weekend with Joy and her girlfriend. He confessed to Michael Cunningham that Fire Island was the only place on earth he truly felt safe. He had grown up to the taunt “faggot.” Even in New York City, it was difficult to escape the homophobia of this culture.
We arrive in D.C. at noon. We mill around for an hour, trying not to look too conspicuous. We fail. One hundred activists with ACT UP T-shirts, stickers, and posters can’t exactly fade into the reflecting pool by the Capitol. Some of us have pinned Tim Bailey’s photo to our chests. Some have drums.
An hour later the van arrives with Tim’s body. Several police cars have appeared in the interim. We are told to gather away from the van to form the procession. A few minutes later we hear there is trouble.
The police won’t let us remove the casket from the van.
The police tell us to move away from the back of the van. We surge there and recapture our ground. Two lone police officers from the back of the van, feeling the crush of fifty activists, excuse themselves and make their exits.
This begins a three-hour standoff.
There are D.C. police, county police, federal police, and police from the Parks Service. We are simultaneously in several juris dictions and no one is in charge. No officer is able to explain why we are being forbidden to remove the casket. A policeman has the keys to the van. He had wrestled them away from Joy during the initial confrontation. A car is parked in front of the van, blocking it.
Then we are told we need a death certificate, and the body must be examined by a coroner, in order to have a procession. The police have to make sure that Tim’s death was not a homicide. Even then the police may not allow a procession. There is an arcane regulation that forbids unseemly displays.
Feeling we have made all the proper preparations, feeling we are on the right side of the law, feeling there is some respect for the sanctity of human life, we allow the police to perpetrate this humiliating charade of justice and procedure.
Joy makes the officer come to the coffin. She refuses to let the death certificate out of her hands. She demands and receives back the van keys.
The medical examiner from the coroner’s office, wearing rubber gloves, examines the body. Joy and others taunt him as he performs his task. He is close to tears by the time he leaves. “Are you satisfied? Is he dead enough? This is what AIDS looks like. Are you proud of yourself?”
After the police examine the death certificate and the body has been examined, they confer and decide they still will not allow the procession to take place, on the grounds that it is an unseemly and obscene display.
In a way, the police are right.
Death is unseemly.
Death is obscene.
Death is ugly.
A light rain is falling. We haven’t eaten since seven o‘clock in the morning.
For close to three hours we have stood, we have sat, we have guarded the van holding the body of our friend Tim Bailey as a solid wall of police lines the perimeter of our group. We are in a parking lot. A car blocks us at the front. The cops want us to leave, but there is no possible method of egress available, even if we wanted to go.