Harvey Milk Died For Anal Sex

Foreword 

Newly sober, I was asked to find a higher power. I never cared about anything more than the gay men of history paving the way for my fagishness today. Despite my separation from the contemporary gay cis male community, I feel have always felt connected to the men of the 60s and 70s. In many ways Harvey Milk is the patron saint of these men, thus becoming the icon for my worship of queer ancestors. 

I wrote this poem during the summer of 2021 within my first few months of sobriety trying to find a way to connect to my higher power. Seeing all he had done for me.

Harvey Milk Died For Anal Sex

2021

1970, A man’s life began on his 40th birthday when he picked up some fairy on the New York subway.

I regard myself arrogant enough to believe that one day my life will begin when I am promiscuous enough to seduce men on the street.

The unwavering confidence of the male animal and the tender love only known by homosexuals will be my parents and I will be born out of a chance encounter with some tight jeans.

With every boy I lay my eyes on, I wonder if now is the moment I'll regard as the beginning of my life.

Will later generations write of him as my lover and my muse.

Will his death leave me widowed and alone with whatever piece of him I can recreate from photo clippings until the day I die, at which point I will be buried in his unearthed grave, embracing forever in our masculine love.

And after all this only a second has passed and so has he, without so much as a nod to acknowledge our shared admiration of cock.

I envy a dead man who lived to celebrate his victory, but not to see 500,000 of his lovers, brothers, and comrades die, and the lucky ones left alive are widowed and treated as plagued rats.

Fairies dropping in the streets like flies, 

An entire generation afflicted with the same grief that killed the Great Alexander, but no time to mourn Hephaestion because 100 more will die tomorrow and they too will leave behind sickly lovers.

I give thanks to the martyr and find peace in one less man having to watch sexual liberation become a death sentence. 

When sex = death, men still meet anonymously for a quick fuck in a bathroom stall

When sex = death, a boy who wants to die must first learn to love

When sex = death, all past freedoms are revoked

When sex = death, every faggot is tried, convicted and sent to the chair before he’s even hard

When sex = death, cock is a lethal weapon

Women whom with we would never lay, come to our bedside while we withered and comforted our lovers until they too would wilt, and these sapphic women not angels of death, but angels of mercy, caring for the dying moments of plagued boys,

And these achelian men with their last breath seeking forgiveness for their manhood, praying to be spared from the sentence of endless storms and spiraling winds, 

And all this never known by the man who came home 4 times to 4 different lovers, hanging, lifeless, simply because death was the only way they did not have to live in secret,

And his final love, the street of 2000 fairies, now a self parody of the former years run by little boys in rainbow thongs, because all those who knew better died along with the forgotten language of secrets.

Afterword

I wrote this poem over three years ago now. It's not long, but in that time a lot of these words have been reinforced in significant ways.

I have now felt and lost the type of love I wrote about. I went to the Street and stood where he lived. I traveled with my lover to the Golden City and sucked their cock on the historical streets of sexual liberation. I stood at Hal Fischers bus stop and they asked me if I wanted a photo alone. I couldn’t imagine why. It doesn’t take an epidemic to strip me from a great love. 

Parts of this poem were based on assumptions that the way of my ancestors was dead. And it did die. It died with every man whose plagued possessions were burned due to contamination. 

But I've had that chance encounter, I've begun my life. I’ve been loved tenderly the way only queers can and I’ve been fucked in the way only Fags can. 

With this I've learned it was also saved with every piece of leather gifted to chosen family before they came to take the body. I've seen it hidden in special places, and on the right day in the right city, it's alive. 

Men still fuck each other in bathroom stalls. Desires are still  displayed from back pockets. I still fuck in public bathrooms and I wear my hankies. It’s alive within me, the way I fuck and the intensity in which I love. 

I feel disillusioned by the hopeful parts of this poem, but newly hopeful for that which I mourned.