How do we survive a pandemic? We have, I have, lost nearly an entire generation of queer elders to HIV/AIDS. The magnitude of loss sits heavy in my body, creating enough pressure behind my eyes to make my eyelid twitch and my vision get a little cloudy. I was young in the 1980s, too young perhaps to know what I was losing. I was not self-aware enough to know that the strangeness I felt was queerness, getting ready to bloom. Or maybe it was preparing to explode, larger than life itself, into a rainbow cloud of struggle and survival and brilliance. Rita Brown is the service coordinator.