MAY 16, 1997 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 13

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COMMUNITY GROUPS

You've met Mr. All Wrong. Where the hell is Mr. Right?

by Earl Pike Cleveland-Wanna share a candlelight dinner? A sweaty romp in the sheets? A house mortgage?

One of the biggest challenges of the Age of AIDS is living amidst seemingly irresolvable contradictions.

Friends die; we go on picnics. We get sick; we fall in love. Our bodies feel toxic; our bodies are hot with desire. We're alone; we're together; we're separate. And as the epidemic rages, we're at home on a Saturday night, primping for a first date, feeling nervous, excited, curious, eager, scared, cocky, all merged into a single sensation that feels warm, airy, and good. Nice.

Dating all the rituals of searching for Mr. Rights and meeting, talking, not talking, laughing, kissing, negotiating the skin and flesh-dating in

on dating have been few and far between. And when AIDS came along, and spread, and stayed, the rules-whatever tenuous rules there were-got messier, even more confusing, and mined, it felt, with dangerous consequences.

Love and danger, it seemed, became one

AIDS

TASKFORCE

OF GREATER CLEVELAND

the Age of AIDS is an exercise in old anticipation, and new anxiety. For gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, there have never been clear rules for dating, rules that could make it all easier (and perhaps also more restraining, repressive) by outlining how we approach someone, what we talk about, how we build intimacy, how we express passion, whether we bring him home to meet Mom and Dad or our family of friends. Heterosexuals learn all this just by watching television; gay and lesbian guidebooks

and the same. So many of us swallowed our terror, rented videos, and spent Saturday nights home alone with the cats.

A number of writersLarry Kramer is a prime example-have made compelling comparisons between the Nazi Holocaust and the current realities of AIDS. Others have objected to such comparison. They say it trivializes the Holocaust, that it obscures the difference between deliberate, planned genocide and the not-so-benign neglect and outright discrimination, that has occurred

within this epidemic.

This much is true: When love and passion become corrupted, poisoned by the dominant culture; when we are alone, driven away from each other; when we stay at home in isolation and what we really want is closeness, touch; when we're living in fear-then we're living in the way that this holocaust, or any holocaust, wants us to live. When the people are all terrified, and so stop loving, the first assault has already been successful. What we end up with is a kind of viral

Wranglers raise $2,500 for PRYSM youth group

by Linda Malicki

Cleveland-A grand ol' country thank you goes out to the Rainbow Wranglers and the Spring Round-Up Committee. The Cleveland Lesbian-Gay Center is the beneficiary from the Round-Up, an annual country dancing event held every April.

These fine folks raised $2,500 this year for the Center's PRYSM youth_program! We greatly appreciate all the hard work (and hard play) that went into putting this event together and are honored to be the beneficiary of such a

land Dinner Committee for the fine showing we made and for raising a great deal of money for a great cause.

Kudos to Cleveland's Gay, Lesbian and Straight Teachers' Network for putting together an incredible conference in April. Through the tremendous effort of many local people, the conference successfully reached hundreds of people working towards safer schools for our youth. The GLSTN members are to be congratulated for their efforts. Thanks and keep up the great work!

LESBIAN GAY Community Service Center

fine group. The Wranglers are a warm, welcoming, wonderful group of men and women that our community has good reason to be proud of. If you haven't attended one of their events you are missing one of the best groups in our city. Thanks to all!

Congratulations go out to Human Rights Campaign Cleveland dinner co-chairs Elizabeth Berrey and Gregg Levine. They, with the admirable help of their committee members and table captains, put on a very enjoyable and incredibly successful dinner and auction.

HRC is to be commended for their terrific work in D.C. and the excellent ad that ran during the Ellen coming-out show. I was very proud of Cleveland and the HRC Cleve-

OF GREATER CLEVELAND

Please join us at these upcoming Center events: On May 17 the Living Room will hold an Open

House Anniversary Barbecue from 3 to 7 pm. We will honor Living Room co-founder Aubrey Wertheim. All are welcome to stop in. On June 1 the Center will sponsor "A Celebration of Our Families" at the Beck Center in Lakewood, featuring the nationally acclaimed photo-text exhibit “Love Makes a Family." The event will include an old-fashioned ice cream social and will run from 4 to 6 pm.

The 1997 Garden Party, “Out in the Country," will be held on July 20 in beautiful, historic Peninsula. Save the date!

Linda Malicki is executive director of the Cleveland Lesbian-Gay Center.

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apartheid, the degradation of loving interaction, the pathologizing of desire.

And we deserve better, far better. We deserve Mr. or Ms. Right-whether that's embodied in a largely sexual embrace, an intellectual connection, someone to hug or massage or someone with whom we can laugh so hard we cry. We all deserve that, and in the age of AIDS, it becomes even more essential to celebrate and honor that need. We should have a chance to learn about the rules for finding Mr. or Ms. Right, to get support in playing by the rules--or to make up our own, changing them as we see fit, so that we can map, navigate, and search our

own landscapes of longing, intimacy, pleasure, health, trust, friendship, community.

All that will take a while, to be sure. The AIDS Taskforce of Cleveland is taking a small step by offering “Finding Mr. Right: Dating in the '90s Made Easy." Finding Mr. Right is a three-hour, fun new workshop for gay and bisexual men on romance, love and dating. We'll learn together, get nervous together, celebrate ourselves and each other.

The workshop will be held at Artemis Coffee and T on Saturday, June 10, from 11 am to 2 pm. To register call Shawn at the AIDS Taskforce, 216-621-0766, ext. 230. See you then!

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