It’s challenging to talk about temporality, meaning one’s relationship to time, space, and history, in regard to HIV/AIDS. The time periods of the 80s and 90s has defined and created a schism of understanding among different generations of LGBTQIA communities around sex, intimacy, and futurity. As a queer millennial of color and a child of Filipino immigrants, I struggle to understand my queer identity in relationship to the early history of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the U.S.

I was born and raised in the East Village in the height of the pandemic, yet I didn’t live or experience what elders called “the war.”  I was a child more interested in Power Rangers and buying phone cards so that I can call relatives 8,000 miles away. I was not aware of the deaths and the battles at St. Vincent’s, on the streets, and in my neighborhood, yet I was there. Only snapshots from my childhood come to mind: the Radical Faeries congregating in Tompkins Square Park praying for the safety of future queers, protests in Union Square for recognition of the humanity of HIV positive patients, and a moment I locked eyes with a man with Kaposi Sarcoma. The gentrification of my neighborhood and the Disney-fication of Times Square further perpetuated that HIV/AIDS was in “the past'' until when I moved to Memphis, TN, in my early 20s, close friends, mostly Black and Brown folx, began being diagnosed. Though they weren’t facing certain death, they had to navigate how to affirm their humanity and sexuality without the guidance from an older generation still suffering from PTSD. Then came PrEP, which I started taking, and the medication in some ways has silenced mainstream recognition of the war still happening. I find myself in the middle of this generational gap, a void filled with silence created by those of the missing generation. I and many others exist in a place where time has been suspended.

Discussions around the concepts of a queer time, futurity, and our personal relationships to HIV/AIDS dominated our conversations and shaped the approach of how we supported playwright Yilong Liu to further develop PrEP Play, or Blue Parachute. The creative team, cast, and crew, comprising of queer, white, Black and Brown, Asian, non-binary, millennials living in this in-between queer time, leaned into the idea that as queer artists we live in the past, present, and future of HIV/AIDS. In many Black, POC, queer and feminist thinking, history is not a linear progression, but rather something more fluid in which we live with the ghosts of the past and the possibilities of the future simultaneously. We believe our existence and active search of our relationship to space and time is radical and queer because our bodies aren’t understood within the confines of a white hetero mainstream understanding of time. We immersed ourselves in writing, scholarship, interviews, and photographs left by our elders. We talked about the joys of the legendary Christopher Street piers, the house cultures that erupted in Harlem, sexual liberation, and queer rituals created during that time of horror and fear. We were actively connecting the past with our present. Earlier in this process, Yilong interviewed members of the older LGBTQIA generation, and Adam Odsess-Rubin, the artistic director of National Queer Theatre, invited HIV positive artists to read the play as it was being written, continuously building the bridges of conversation needed to fully flesh out the play and its politics.

Unlike other contemporary HIV/AIDS plays, Yilong is also explicitly writing as a Chinese playwright, genuinely providing a global perspective on these issues not often seen on the American Stage. The play’s protagonist Erik is a Chinese citizen, whose understanding of sex, race, sexuality, queerness, and HIV and their complex intersections are shaped by a childhood in China and a young adulthood in the U.S. The PrEP Play family took this opportunity to more fully shape the play by lending their whole selves to more fully flesh out each character and their relationships.

In the time of COVID-19, which in some ways has mirrored moments of “the war” in the 80s and 90s, we have pivoted to meeting and creating theatre online – similar to how queer ancestors of the past had to invent new ways of congregating, celebrating, and mourning. Knowing how precious it is to connect as a community during this time, I hope that we enter this virtual space  with intentionality, leaning in with joy and excitement. I hope we allow ourselves to be fully present & better cherish this time with one another despite being physically dispersed. We invite you to connect with us and begin to build larger bridges of discourse between generations so we can build beyond the present suspension of time. As José Esteban Muñoz writes about futurity in his book Cruising Utopias: the Then and There of Queer Futurity: “Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality… The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there.”