Post 94 - June 13, 2020

Day 94…

As I was walking through Central Park yesterday, I made my way up into Strawberry Fields and there, sitting on one of the benches near the Imagine mosaic, were two friends of mine.

I think that I can count, using the fingers of one hand, the number of times in the last three months that I have accidentally run into people I know out on the street. To the best of my recollection, over the course of the past 94 days, including yesterday, that number is three.

Certainly, I have had a sense of what these two had been doing via social media. They had been sheltering with one of their families. One of them had had a fairly prolonged bout of the virus. Their posts described what their quarantine was like, how they were dealing with it together and also clocked the recovery. Even knowing all of that, though, seeing them both sitting there in the flesh was a bit shocking and, frankly, a welcome relief.

For the last three months all of us have been isolated from each other. It doesn’t always feel that way because we’ve all started becoming experts on Zoom and Streamyard and Facetime. Michael and I have scheduled meals and chats. We’ve both had some business meetings. All of that, though, has been from the inside of our apartment. The people we’ve been interacting with weren’t really THERE.

New York is beginning to open back up. The plywood is starting to come down from some of the buildings that were covered to protect them from the vandalism of two weeks ago. More stores have opened up.  You can’t go inside, but if you are, say, looking for sheets, you can go to Laytner’s now and point to which ones you want from behind the barricade at the front door.

People are out and about. Some in masks and some not. I can walk several blocks and be encouraged by the fact that everybody is following health guidelines. But then, I come upon a restaurant or bar and see a crowd of people standing close together without masks and that sense of encouragement evaporates.

Four Michigan health experts have put together a list of activities and situations and compared the possible virus risks associated with each one. They have rated them on a scale of 1-10 with 10 being the riskiest and 1 being the safest.

Hanging out in a bar, they say, is a 9. Getting takeout from a restaurant is a 1.

Eating inside in a restaurant is a 6. Eating outside is a 4.

Gyms and Church are an 8.

Going for a walk, bike ride or run with others is a 2.

For the last few days, as I walked around New York, even as I marched with the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, there was something strange about the people I was seeing that I couldn’t put my finger on.

Yesterday, as I walked towards Times Square, it finally came to me. Of course! Duh. There are NO tourists.

Almost all of the people I am seeing walking around outside actually live in New York or very close by.

Last year, 67 million people visited New York City. We are the most visited city in the United States. For the last three months, we have had almost no visitors AT ALL. I knew that intellectually, of course, but yesterday it actually sank in. Once I realized that the tourists weren’t there, all I could see was their absence.

For those of us who live here, tourists are the bane of our existence. They fill the streets. They gather in confused groups on the sidewalk, blocking our way. You get behind a group of them not familiar with American food at a take-out place and you’re sunk.  In midtown, the lines to get onto tour busses block everything often forcing us into the street to get around them.

Well, they aren’t here now.

The sight-seeing busses are parked out of sight off the streets.

In the summer after my Freshman year in college, I got a job in the gift shop at the American Museum of Natural History. It was a really fun job.

I remember my co-workers, particularly a painter and a tall gay guy. I was still in the closet at that point, in fact I was living with my girlfriend. Working with people who were out in the world living their lives was fascinating.

I waited on Dustin Hoffman once.

I got in trouble one day for spending too much time showing an assortment of African carvings to Karen Black who was completely and delightfully bonkers.

When the museum closed, we had to work for an additional half hour to close up the shop. Afterwards, to leave, I had to walk through the darkened Hall of American Mammals. It was both creepy and fantastic to be inside the museum without anybody else in there. Without the bright lights on, the dioramas took on all sorts of menacing aspects. Sometimes the cleaning staff would be working and sometimes curators would be in the hallways, but there were no general visitors at all.

That’s what the streets of the city feel like these days. Like the museum, New York needs the tourists who come to visit every year.

Without them, our hotels are dark. Our restaurants are dark. Our attractions are dark.

Our theatres are dark.

Almost all the health professionals around the country feel that a second wave of the virus is coming. While our numbers in New York continue to go down, they continue to rise all around us. In some places they are dangerously spiking.

As much as we need visitors to come back and shore up our economy, until the rest of the country gets themselves under any sort of control, they all need to stay away. Our downward trajectory is a hard-won victory that we are not willing to give up. We lost too many people.

Yesterday, on the fourth anniversary of the horrific massacre of gay people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in the middle of Pride month, the President finalized an agreement that removed protections for transgendered people in health care.

Again. Message from the Administration very clearly received.

A trans-women of color’s life expectancy in the United States is currently at about 35 years old.

Even J.K. Rowling, the popular author of the Harry Potter series cannot find it within her heart to support the rights of transgendered women. Her hurtful tweets denying these women their gender have been criticized by Daniel Radcliffe and many of the other actors from the films of her books.

Before the tourists come back to New York City, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be any time soon, we are going to have a lot of time to sit by ourselves and think about what, and why, our biases are.

The Black Lives Matter movement is just the beginning. We all have much more soul-searching ahead of us.

I was so happy to see my friends yesterday. Strawberry Fields is just inside Central Park across from the Dakota where John Lennon was murdered. The circular mosaic containing the word IMAGINE inlaid at the center of it is by now a beloved and iconic city sight.

I hope that, someday, when the tourists start coming back to take pictures of it that they can also hear what it is saying.

Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
You

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one