Fire  

Hans Baldung Grien, Witches’ Orgy, 1514, drawing.

We burn with our passion for one another and we ignite forbidden desires. Fire is sexual energy: gigantic, transformative, consuming.

            Fire radiates warmth and light. It makes a home, a meal, and a habitat out of a pitiless world. And fire destroys all that, in an angry instant. Cremation brings even our bones to dust.

            Fire is hellfire – evil, sin, damnation, monstrous violence. Fire is torture, the awful martyrdom of Joan of Arc, the conflagration of witches and sodomites, the history of murder and mayhem that has devastated same-sex lovers around the world. Fire is danger – the awful danger we all still face, the pain and torment of contemporary queer martyrs who are bludgeoned to death in Vancouver, stabbed in Montreal, killed by a firebomb in Oregon, imprisoned and stoned in Iran, shot in Serbia, raped and tortured in Brazil.

            The AIDS holocaust consumes our community. We grieve until it seems we are ready to erupt in flames. When we are capable of spontaneous combustion, we become fire-breathing dragons, screeching prophesies. We see, as no one else can, clearly into our own times. ▼