Unicorn Lit

Do unicorns poop rainbows?

Isn’t that a Philip K. Dick novel?

I don’t think so.

What “Blade Runner” is based on?

It’s based on “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”

Then why is there a unicorn in the movie?

An ingredient to make replicants more human. To dream is human. To dream of mythic creatures even more so. 

Hmm. But are those implanted memories? Or things he has seen? “A moment that will be lost in time, like tears in the rain?” 

A scene I had never seen until recently.

You’ve never seen “Blade Runner”?!

No. But I did see “Blade Runner 2049.”

And you call yourself a film buff?

Exactly what my brother said.

It’s a very famous scene. 

Number 42 on AFI’s “100 Years … 100 Movie Quotes.” I admit to some lacunae in my cinephilia. I have thought a lot about that quote and why it’s moving.

Tell me why it’s moving to you.

I wasn’t thinking much about Rutger Hauer’s Roy Blatty as a replicant nearing human qualities … but as a repository of knowledge. 

Are memories the same as knowledge? What he witnessed, stored in memory, is the same as books or footage, I think … For him to die and lose all that is like the burning of the library in Alexandria.

It’s just like losing a server.

Which really pissed you off when it happened because you lost all the photos you saved in it.

You mean all the porn you saved in it …

That, too.

Then it made me think of dementia. Every day losing moments like tears in the rain. Then it made me think of Cartesian duality. How we say they are not the same person as they were anymore after dementia. Same body, different mind? Or was it the mind all along, so the body becomes different when the mind becomes demented?

Do demented people dream of unicorns?

I don’t know. Probably not. I think demented people try to hang on to as much reality as possible - to demonstrate what’s real as much as possible so they can prove to others that they are not demented.

They don’t want to speak of unicorns because they don’t want to be deemed as kooks. But we’re surrounded by unicorns now.

Kind of trippy to watch “Blade Runner” in 2020 since it is set in 2019. 

Very little of its technology came true but it predicted we will be dreaming of unicorns.

A steep rise in the use of the word unicorn since 2000.

Unicorn startups. Swingers looking for unicorns. Unicorns everywhere. A unicorn selling Squatty Potty. Unicorn poop cookies. 

The unicorn as queer icon. Tattooed on Amrou Al-Kadhi’s chest.

AKA Glamrou!

I found them nakedly honest in “Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between.” 

A product of good therapy.

So soul baring. They would need a therapist to piece themselves after that.

Tell me a moment in your life when you were a unicorn.

I felt like a unicorn as a 16 year old freshman in college. I was that rare thing among my friends. Being young. My queerness was not what made me a unicorn. But the paradox of being a unicorn is that what makes you special is what makes you feel acutely different from others. I don’t think the longing to be treated as someone ordinary ever goes away.

How many unicorns will it take to not be a unicorn anymore?

If I go to Therapy, all of us cease to be unicorns because we are in the company of unicorns?

Exactly. Gays in a gay bar cease to be unicorns.

So true. They turn into narwhals when the work lights are turned on at 3 a.m.

Or white rhinoceroses.

Rhinoceri.

Probably what Ctesias mistook as unicorns. 

Or Unibulls.

Like the pens?

No. More real than unicorns. This biologist from Maine, Franklin Dove, surgically experimented on a calf to make two horns into one.  

That’s messed up.

Unibulls or more real than unicorns.

Stop messing with my head. I feel like Susannah York in “Images.”

Well, she got messed up by unicorns.

That’s a messed up children’s book.

Like what age group is that book supposed to be for?

“In Search of Unicorns.” That’s the title of the book.

Her inspiration are the “The Lady and Unicorn” tapestries from the Musee de Cluny. So it feels like she’s leaning into the sexual symbolism associated with unicorns. Like Tracy Chevalier did in “The Lady and the Unicorn.”

“In Search of Unicorns.” Well, search no more - she could go to Therapy. 

More like medieval Christianity symbolism. Purity, virginity-

Yes. Phallic. So she could still go to Therapy.

Do you think her head was messed up because she kept wanting to ride the unicorn? Even though it wasn’t her husband’s unicorn?

So her psyche was fractured by being horny? And she has to kill the slutty self. Possibly. 

I admired it more this time. I appreciated the music more and how effective the lo-fi tricks were. Simply achieved by doors and lighting.

And creepy narration of that children’s book.

I’m sure you can find that in a bookstore in Brooklyn.

It should be in a gift shop at the Musee de Cluny.

Yes, next to an origami unicorn.

Pride 2020: Episode 1 - The Gay Plague

The following is a transcript of a podcast that aired only inside my head.

June is bustin' out all over!

She's not the only one bustin' out. Protesters all over the too are bustin' out of quarantine.

In celebration of June, the month of pride, we'll discuss movies of the LGBT persuasion.

For the first entry, we’ll cover the following movies: “5B,” “We Were Here,” and “How to Survive a Plague.” We traveled back in time to the early days of the AIDS epidemic.

Way to go, picking a depressing theme. AIDS? Really?

Thought of Larry Kramer since he died last month.

Rest in peace. We hava a lot to thank him for.

I think it’s only appropriate. With Larry Kramer's death and the COVID-19 pandemic, it feels like that time of the AIDS crisis speaks to now. 

We started with “5B.”

Nurses as healthcare heroes!

See? It’s relevant already.

We stayed in San Francisco again with “We Were Here.”

San Francisco was the place to go then. And they had a lot of sex. You know that book, “The Immortalists”? The four siblings are told how and when they will die. I didn’t know how the other three would die, but once the gay one runs away to 1970s San Francisco, I knew how he would die.

This doctor I know told me that if he had stayed in San Francisco he would be dead by now. A lot of his friends are dead.

“How to Survive a Plague” takes us back to 1980s New York.

Larry Kramer was mad!

See them protest, chanting “The whole world is watching!”

Just like now. Black Lives Matter!

AIDS defined our gay generation.

Speak for yourself. Not my generation. 

I went to see “Rent” when the movie came out in 2005 with my friends who were born a generation after me. They didn’t know what AZT was. They asked, “Did everyone have AIDS in the 90s?” These were future nurses, mind you. How quickly the country forgets.

What’s “Rent”?

It’s what “Team America: World Police” called “Lease.”

The AIDS song!

This year’s Pride should rightfully honor Larry Kramer.

All three movies are documentaries. 

Watching them does feel like bearing witness. Listening to those who were there. “We Were Here” is definitely like that. Talking heads. 

To tell the stories of those who are not here.

But “5B” and “How to Survive a Plague” are crafted well. “5B” has genuine narrative surprises, right up to the end. Did you think that doctor was married to that man? Of course, some things made sense after you knew that. It casts nurses as both heroes and villains in one subplot. 

Why does the Filipina nurse have to be a villain? I think she’s Bisaya.

Let’s face it. There are homophobic nurses.

Is it because she was married to that fat bigot?

That’s part of the mystery.

For a documentary, “How to Survive a Plague” feels like a thriller. It plunges you in the middle of an ACT UP meeting and never lets up. Like “Man on a Wire” or those Matt Damon Bourne movies. Makes you feel the thrill of protest and resistance.

Dr. Anthony Fauci looked so young. He links both plagues. Our link to then and now.

The same fears arise.  In “5B,” there were nurses in San Francisco General who sued to fight for wearing more PPE when caring for AIDS patients. However, this had the hint of homophobia, not just plain contagion.

Nurses as frontline workers!

Then and now. But those healthcare professionals didn’t get “clappy hour” for their services.

An argument for these movies, I suppose. These movies exist so you can’t forget.

So much of that time echoes to now. So much of that time changed medical practice: patient confidentiality, needle safety, re-defining what “family” at the bedside means.

And so many deaths.

Never forget a number is a life.

Numbers can be so sterile.

That’s why that front page of the Sunday New York Times during Memorial Day weekend featuring the names of those who died from COVID-19 is so moving. There’s a certain power to reading names.

A kind of bearing witness.

That front page is like that book of name in “5B.” The ward’s retired nurse manager opens a book where the staff wrote down names of the patients who died in the ward. The book is now fragile and seems to be preserved by a library. She has to use gloves to turn the pages. White gloves. The Mickey Mouse kind.

Ironic because the ward tried not to use gloves as much as possible.

She notes the increasing number of deaths per year. When she reads the names out loud, the numbers gain more meaning. “We Were Here” shows pages and pages of the Bay Area Reporter when it ran the pictures and names of those who died of AIDS in one year. I don’t know any of those people, but seeing those names made the toll overwhelming.

The same way Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial gets you. 

You could argue that some deaths were avoidable. 

I thought the COVID-19 virus would be an equal opportunity infector. Instead, it highlights health disparities. Minorities take on a bigger burden. Blacks and hispanics are disproportionately affected by COVID-19 because the government acted slowly.

The gay community were disproportionately affected by AIDS because the government acted slowly. 

Part of me was looking for a sense of how this pandemic will end. And none of the movies really offer the kind of reassurance I was hoping to find. It took approximately 15 years for HIV medications to be tolerable AND effective. There’s no HIV vaccine yet. We’ve only managed to control it well.

And two cures. The Berlin patient and the London patient.

Those treatments are high risk. I said the same thing when it was used for sickle cell. When the benefit outweighs the risk, go for it.

Can’t be as bad as those early AIDS clinical trials. That man from “We Were Here” was the only survivor of that clinical trial because he wimped out from the side effects.  

That’s a lasting effect of ACT UP. Their protests changed the FDA and NIH. “How to Survive a Plague” showed how they teamed up with breast cancer patients. Protests can bring meaningful change. 

Pride began with a riot. Watching these movies offers some hope that ALL of this too shall pass.

At a cost. There’ll be burn out and survivor’s guilt. The next crisis will be a mental health crisis among healthcare workers post-pandemic. Like the caregivers in “5B” and “We Were Here” burning out. Survivor’s guilt among patients are apparent in all three movies. In a grotesque way, part of the suspense of watching “How to Survive a Plague” is seeing who does survive. And there’s a cost to those who do.

As mentioned before, depressing.

My tear ducts got a workout. A lot, especially from “5B.” I felt nostalgic for old New York watching “How to Survive a Plague.” So bittersweet to see St. Vincent’s Hospital and St. Clare’s Hospital.

Spoiler alert: they didn’t survive.

I’ve been missing theatre since the lockdown. I didn’t see it before, but it’s clear now that ACT UP protests were forms of theatre. I mean, Larry Kramer was a playwright! They knew how to put on a show. So many of the activists were artists. Probably what made them effective was the art. The propaganda used then has since become iconic: Silence = Death with the pink triangle, Keith Haring’s drawings.

The red ribbon!

Millenials won't know what it means. I was handing it out in nursing school to raise awareness and this young woman thought that if you wear it that means you have it.

That's what the politicians in "5B" wanted. An easy mark for them to know you have the virus.

And what about that giant condom over Senator Jesse Helms' house? It's like a Christo artwork.

He just died. Undisclosed causes. 

We won’t speculate. Not like the old days.

Those activists were tastemakers.

But I was most moved by the sense of community that formed during the AIDS crisis. You also see that now with an uptick in volunteerism during the pandemic. You saw that in 5B’s staff and volunteers. In ACT UP members. “We Were Here” especially reminded you about the lesbians who were there for the gays. There’s one thing I plan to do: thank the lesbians for being there.

Thank you, lesbians!

"It Gets Better"

Good sentiment, Broadway babies. But, it wouldn't convince me to step off the ledge. However, Tim Gunn's appeal works. So do the other "talks" by cast members of Broadway shows. For more, check out other stars' PSAs at www.thetrevorproject.org.