Nine Things I Wish Some Old Queer Had Told Me Before I F@#ked It All Up
Including the boring ones about paperwork, which are the ones that will actually save you.
A note from Lawrence
My generation came up without elders. They didn’t refuse the job. They died before they could do it. By 1994, AIDS was the leading cause of death for every American aged twenty-five to forty-four, and the men who should have taught me how to be forty never got to be thirty-five. So nobody wrote me this letter. I’ve been reverse-engineering it for thirty years.
Here are nine things for whoever is twenty-two right now and doing this without a map. Find old queers in person, on purpose. Come out on your own schedule. Get a doctor who doesn’t flinch. And do the paperwork: the will, the proxy, the beneficiary lines. It’s the least romantic advice on the list, and my generation paid for it in hospital hallways.
