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— How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee
==WHEN I FELL IN love with Peter, I fell in love with what I wanted to be next.== Peter was a member of what was jokingly known at first as the BART 9, a group of nine activists who had handcuffed themselves to the pole at the center of a BART train when the doors were open, stopping the train in the station.
This same group had also disrupted opening night at the San Francisco Opera and blockaded the Golden Gate Bridge.
They’d done a lot of protests like these over the years, and while many of them were in ACT UP, for most this was simply another in a series of protests designed to draw attention to the AIDS pandemic and the various ways in which companies were looking to exploit the dying.
The BART 9 protest had ended quickly, with the group arrested and taken away.
The train was delayed but still left the station.
==Peter missed his medication that day as a result of his arrest, Laura recalls.
“It was a nightmare.” Missing their medication was a constant risk for AIDS activists who had the illness.
The police who denied them their pills, out of whatever rules the jail followed, were murderous.
Peter felt the risk was worthy.
We have nothing to lose, the HIV-positive contingent of ACT UP would say in those days.
We have nothing to lose, having lost everything.== Understand that in 1989 there was AZT and that was basically it.
Understand that those of us in my generation who lived in San Francisco had to overcome the false impression that no one like us had ever existed before, because the ones who might have greeted us when we arrived were already dead.
We lacked models for bravery and were trying to invent them, as we likewise invented models for loving and for activism.
==While writing an article about love and HIV, I interviewed many young gay people who would say, I can’t imagine getting older.
Most of the people who might have shown them what it would be like to be gay and alive even at age forty or forty-five are dead.== What happened to me is happening again, ten years later.
In The Odyssey, Homer describes Poseidon Earthshaker as having blue hair.
He is alternately “blue-maned Poseidon” and “Poseidon of the blue brows.” Peter, now returned to the sea, makes me think of that, his blue hair a mark across his brow from the ancient god.
Peter D.
Kelloran, resident of San Francisco, a town ruled by earthquakes and inhabited by people who understood some of the value of what the Greeks left for us.
Peter the blue-maned, now in the arms of Poseidon Earthshaker—he belongs to a time that already we can’t imagine even though we lived through it, when there was one drug, and hope was hidden so it wouldn’t die.
I like to imagine him as one of the science-fiction characters he favored, in flight through the sky, roaming the night in a nimbus of blue light, a smiling rogue punk-rock angel, his wings dyed blue to match, from a heaven where everyone dresses well and mercy means love and a man you don’t know will hold your hand for you when you die.
A heaven where, when there’s injustice, you chain yourself to a train because you know that somewhere someone feels it.
Somewhere along the spirit-chain world-mind oversoul.
==Someone somewhere who maybe thought there wasn’t a thing called strength feels how you care enough to stand in front of the passage of a train.
As children, we thought Superman was brave to stand in front of a train.
That’s not brave, though.
Superman never stood before anything that could destroy him.
Peter did.==