Former St. Louisan Steven Reigns (he graduated from Parkway South in 1994), now an LA-based poet and activist, is not afraid of spending time with life’s unavoidable finale – death.
He founded the Gay Rub Project in 2011, a collection of rubbings of LGBTQ+ historical markers and monuments, including many gravestones. The Gay Rub Project is international, highlighting the geographical as well as the historical-epochal diversity of LGBTQ+ people and the history they’ve made. Scores of rubbings have been widely exhibited, including in St. Louis, and are featured in a 2018 documentary about Reigns and his innovative art and history project.
This inaugural poet laureate of West Hollywood took on death again three years ago, publishing a profoundly moving book of “investigative poetry,” documenting the life and death of David Acer, who in 1990 was accused of recklessly practicing dentistry after a diagnosis of AIDS, resulting in patient infections, including that of Kimberly Bergalis, whose claims became a national sensation, including a cover story in People magazine.
Reigns’ book about Acer, A Quilt for David, doesn’t fully exonerate the dentist, but it does establish a fresh reality: AIDSphobia, homophobia, and hyped-up, sensationalized reporting in 1990 defamed Acer’s character, distorted his forty years of life, and left everyone believing falsehoods about the story and the dentist who may not have been the origin of HIV transmission to Ms. Bergalis or other patients making similar claims.
This month, Moon Tide Press (Whittier, California) published Reigns’ newest collection of poetry, Outliving Michael, in print and author-read audio. Recalling a friend who has been dead for 25 years, these poems, much like the book’s cover photo, reveal out-of-frame snapshots of Michael Church at the time of his death from AIDS in 2000. As with A Quilt for David, Reigns is not afraid to take himself and his readers to a well of grief in a genre he’s creating – “memorial memoir in poetry.”
Reigns was 19 years old when he met 36-year-old Michael, in drag as Blanche at a gay bar in Naples, Florida, in 1994. Michael’s “alter-ego,” Reigns writes, “was notorious in Naples”:
While the other queens were serving showgirl,
songstress, or streetwalker, Blanche strolled
in from the pages of Town and Country, a lady
of impeccable means, with delicate earrings
gold bracelets, a clutch.
Drag queen by night and travel agent by day, Michael became the younger Reigns’ friend, mentor, and sage. Reigns’ “young sapling” anxieties about relationships, educational pursuits, and career choices were brought to Michael, whose advice was “an un-refracted beam of light” and sometimes lovingly catty:
Michael told me my dancing
reminded him of Elaine from Seinfeld.
Six years into their friendship, when AIDS had “crept in” and “betrayed his body,” Michael needed help. Reigns became one of Michael’s caregivers, his appointment scheduler (always around Michael’s favorite daytime TV show, Judge Judy), and errand runner. Caregiving is hard and looking back at his 25-year-old self, Reigns is too harsh on his performance: “Those last few months were terrible,” he writes, and “I tried to take care of him and couldn’t….I, so young, wasn’t a good caregiver.”
While this book is about Michael Church, it’s also about the author – Reigns’ own difficult childhood, vulnerable youth, desire to find chosen family and faithful friends who would not betray him, and about inevitable twentysomething mistakes:
While Michel’s life was ending,
I was busy toppling mine
I read Outliving Michael, slowly, enjoying each perfectly-placed word, in a few hours one October afternoon. A few days later I was still thinking about Michael and pondering unanswerable questions: What would he think about his life being memorialized in poetry a quarter of a century after his death? (I suspect he’d love it!) What would he be doing now, at 67 – complaining about young people? (Probably.) Would the friendship he and Steven Reigns shared for six years have sustained itself across time and geography? (I suspect so.)
Kirkus Reviews summarizes Outliving Michael as a “heartbreaking and subtly humorous poetry collection.” Forbes describes it as “an elegy, a historical document and a meditation on tests of survival that gay men face.” I call it a living memorial to the 15,532 days (Reigns counted them) that Michael lived among his generation of gay men born in the 1950s and 1960s destined to die in the plague years:
Life is short
Death is long
Steven Reigns is a gentle storyteller who has made a place for himself among the vital voices of American poetry. His legacy also includes mental health, HIV, and LGBTQ activism. Reigns, who will be 50 next month, is deeply aware that he has long outlived Michael – and he is determined to use these bonus years to make the world a better place and to make sure the world remembers Michael.
Rodney Wilson is the founder of October’s LGBTQ+ History Month and is the subject of the 2019 documentary short Taboo Teaching.
CALENDAR: November 7, 6:00pm, Left Bank Books, 399 N. Euclid Avenue: Poet Steven Reigns (below) will be reading from and be in conversation about Outliving Michael.
