Free Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone by David B. Feinberg

the ramp.
    The charge is loitering and obstructing passage. It’s ludicrous. We’re sitting on the side. There are around sixty policemen blocking the entrance, and we’re obstructing passage?
    Eventually the bus fills up and leaves and we ride to a police gymnasium a few miles away. The scenery is delightful. The cuffs are a little tight. One activist complains that the persistent swollen glands beneath his arms make it even more uncomfortable. A sympathetic policewoman loosens his cuffs. Another rebel manages to slip out of his cuffs. Come on, guys, we’re on the honor system here.
    The entire experience feels so punitive. The sympathetic policewoman whom we’ve identified as Sapphic-leaning says that it’s supposed to be that way.

In the Belly of the Beast
     
    I couldn’t sit down for a week, after the way the police brutalized me with their nightsticks and other similar large appendages. There I lay, making my one legal phone call to my dear friend Pussy in New York City to check up on gossip. “Hey, guys, I don’t care if you brutally gang-rape me. Just could you keep it quiet? I’m talking to my dear friend Pussy.” Okay, I’m lying again. We get processed. It’s quite straightforward: There’s no strip-search, no erections to hide. One cop gives me a satisfying pat on the stomach for reasons unknown. Yes, I realize I’m in shape.
    After an endless wait on the bus (first the protesters on the bus in front of us have to be processed, and then we are called, one at a time), I walk down the ramp, accompanied by two escorts (as if I were going to escape), and enter a glass hallway lined with desks.
    It’s not as bad as I thought it would be. Sitting on the bus, I muttered, “I hope there’s a salad bar.” I had heard horror stories about bologna sandwiches on white bread with mayonnaise! I hope they brought in some brie for us.
    At the desks, we are asked some basic questions to identify ourselves. The cops take another Polaroid of us. Then a policeman cuts off our handcuffs with wire clippers and we are ushered into the gymnasium.
    We quickly set up a Genetian system, even though we’re only in stir for about an hour. We figure out who the bosses are and who the punks are. I practice dropping the soap in the showers. I hope they requisition rubbers in the state of Delaware.
    Fat Michael stumbles in ten minutes later. He tells us that the police wanted him to remove his nipple rings because they could have been misconstrued as weapons, but when he challenged them to take them off themselves, they deferred. It was all too horrifying.
    I answer only to number 124, my plastic-handcuff arrest number (124 out of 175, like a limited-edition print). The terribly self-absorbed playwright does a Feiffer-like dance in the gym, ending in a balletic swoon. I adore him and his pipe: It’s so cute and pretentious to be under thirty with such freakish habits. I meet another gorgeous radical, an actor-slash-fashion-leader-slash-all-around-glamour-queen. I press my lips against him, hoping maybe to neck and pet above the waist at our next demo. I decide we will become lovers as septuagenarians, if we last that long.
    Jan shows up on the next busload of cons. The gym floor is freshly waxed and gleaming. My wrists are red. Radical faeries do their celebratory and healing dances. Include me out. Me, I’m the one with the poison blow-dart for Tinkerbelle at the Peter Pan matinee.
    We can drink all the water we want from paper cups by a cooler. Outside there are some Portosan toilets, behind a temporary chain-link fence set up for our benefit. We lie down on the gym mats. We’re tired. It’s around three in the afternoon and it feels like midnight. All I want to do is go to sleep.
    Eventually, we are called by number to the exit. There we are given a violation form, and our possessions in a plastic Baggie. Outside, support people have pizza for us. The police provide a bus back to the Metro station. We ride back to the