ARE YOU KIDDING? by Bob May

Author:Bob May
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Porto Place Publishing
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The 2000s: My 50s Conversions

On New Year’s Day 2000, the Auto Club’s computer system did not crash, nor did planes fall out of the sky as had been predicted. The computers learned to count past 1999. Mystery Café, however, had its worst New Year’s Eve ever: an almost empty house. That’s how frightened people were.

In 2000, I would learn that my great love, David, was dead. He had died somewhere on the road in Northern California in November 1996. Why he was there I would never know. Not having heard from him for several years, I’d done an internet search where I found via social security records that he was deceased, and that they had stopped paying his SSI.

He’d been dead for four years when I found out. I looked back through my daybook for November 5, 1996 and realized that on the day he died, a Tuesday, I’d worked and had meetings, a perfectly normal and ordinary business day. Not even “a ripple in the Force.” I could only guess his cause of death. I knew he was addicted to serious drugs. Had he OD’d? He was always open about his sexuality. Had he been queer-bashed? Or, had he developed HIV/AIDS like me? I had no way of knowing.

I myself had now lived fifteen years with HIV. As early as 2003, the popular media began reporting another dismaying development: incidents of “bug-chasers,” mostly younger guys, deliberately seeking out and exposing themselves to “the gift” of HIV infection. Some did it out of a kind of survivor guilt. Some in order to belong to the fraternity of infected brothers, a sort of Stockholm syndrome. Some wanted to end the Hitchcockian suspense of waiting to get sick and get it over with. Some wanted to be able to have sex without protection, or to have sex with a positive partner. And some found it sexy: the “fuck of death,” like the pre-Stonewall need to hide made gay sex seem taboo and more exciting. We would see something like this again early in the COVID-19 pandemic.

In November 2000, Mystery Café, now rebranded The Gourmet Detective (GD), premiered Darling, You Slay Me, an original 1920s musical theater afterparty mystery, which I also directed. During the run I would play the gourmet detective character, based on Nero Woolfe, named Anthony Badger and an arrogant director character named Dick March. Bob May? Dick March? Hmmm. Darling was very popular, and became GD’s new perennial and goto, mostly because of the economy of its sets and staging.

The Dick March character, an egotistical old ladies’ man, does a lot of kissing in the show. Even though there was never much of a chance of transmitting HIV via kissing, I decided not to share my status with fellow actors who I had to kiss (closed-mouthed) in the show. Once again, back in the closet. A few of my co-stars, who apparently suspected, avoided my mouth and landed kisses on my cheek or nose.

New York, Post-9/11/01

Gary, my director friend,

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