1993 - Not a Good Year for The Walk
The atmosphere was joyful in Washington that
spring, in 1993. The April 25th March on Washington attracted
one million people who demanded that they be recognized as a real
community. We insisted that we be accorded the same rights as
anybody else. We demanded to be included in society,
despite the fact that we are Gay. However, there was a subtext
to this gathering that darkened the party. The AIDS Quilt was
astonishingly large.
At the Washington Monument, the smooth, white
marble obelisk pointed straight up to the blue sky. From its massive
base, spreading out across the grass field lay the collection
of quilts in its entirety. It sprawled out creating a maze through
which thousands of people passed each other, stopping to look
down at the ground where the delicately stitched panels lay, and
read their poignant messages of loss and remembrance. Many fell
to their knees weeping. It was a scene of devastation.
The enormity of it, the hopelessness of the
knowledge that this
multitude of memorial shrouds would only grow exponentially, sucking
us in like some expanding black hole, here, on this earth, at
this cemetery, on this battlefield, littered with bodies you could
so easily imagine beneath each individual quilt, was heartbreaking.
And for those of us who were silently carrying
the fear of the knowledge of our own infections within us, for
those of us who were unable to utter the words to anyone, for
fear of rejection and classification as ‘one of them’,
for those of us who knew we were doomed to an unimaginable death
from any of the many opportunistic infections that destroyed our
generation, the scene was nearly unbearable. The sense of urgency
and grief and fear made the meeting all the more awful and wonderful.
The Berlin International Conference on AIDS
concluded in June of that year with no messages of hope. Protests
were vociferous and the shouting was desperate. People who had
survived with the virus for five years were demanding to be recognized
as Long Term Survivors. Pharmaceutical manufacturers were accused
of profiteering and murder.
Deaths were sweeping the continent like the
Tenth Plague. By autumn the death count was staggering. AIDS was
beginning to eliminate more and more people I knew. Obituaries
were occupying whole pages of the newspaper I worked for. Acquaintances
were one thing; it came to be expected, but the losses were drawing
nearer. AIDS was picking off friends who were ever closer to me.
And if AIDS didn’t finish them off, suicide began drawing
lines across the pages of my address book.
So there I was, working for Xtra, and it was
now August, 1993. The AIDS Walk was scheduled to take place Sunday,
October 17th .
On the thirty-first of August, before the September
3rd issue hit the stands, we had our Tuesday staff meeting - one
of several that turned my stomach. The publisher, Ken Popert announced
to us that he had written an editorial.
It appeared on page 9. It was titled, “Crawling
for Dollars”. In eleven paragraphs he vivisected the Toronto
Sun tabloid newspaper for its fifteen year history of homo-negativity,
and he accused the AIDS Walk organizers of stooping to any depth
to get money by accepting sponsorship from it. The last line of
his essay was a lightening bolt. “Xtra could not acquiesce
in this horror”, as he put it. “Regrettably, under the
circumstances, we cannot in good conscience support this year’s
Walk.” He signed it with his own name.
By pulling the paper from sponsoring the Walk,
he thrust us contributors and columnists, into the picture as
collaborators in his unilateral, personal decision.
Pink Triangle Press was touted as a collective.
None of us was asked our opinion. The matter was done, and we
were informed after the plates were sent to the printer.
There is a list of infected people who were
at that meeting and it
includes me, but I didn’t know the truth about the others
until I read their obituaries in the paper we all worked for.
Jake Peters
