I'm closing out the Fire Island Pines series with a photo that's playful and a bit serious at the
same time. Before you move on and tackle your day, remember that according to Tom Bianchi
himself, fully half or more of the beautiful men on these pages were lost to the AIDS epidemic.
The images should remind us all to take nothing for granted in the present and to hold close our
loved ones and our memories of the past. At some point they may be all you have left.
If you went to New York in Summer, you also went to Fire Island and for us, on our cold, wet island, you earned a huge amount of kudos if you were able to say you had made the trip. I remember two friends of mine who did just that. By the following year, they were both taken by the plague. By the time the worst was over, I had lost 21 of my closest friends. As I grow older, I remember those days all the clearer.
ReplyDeleteI know. I can still see their faces and hear their voices . . . and after all this time, that's a good thing.
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