Stonewall Was the Funeral, Mardi Gras the Wake
I met Glenn on a Tuesday. That’s not poetic, but it’s true. And in the years that followed, Tuesdays became significant in the way only grief can make them. A kind of weekly haunt. A wrinkle in time that would forever hold the weight of his arrival.
It was 1992, and Sydney was sweating through another early summer that smelled of bus exhaust, Tooheys, and sex. HIV had already torn through our communities like an uninvited prophecy, leaving behind eulogies instead of answers. Officially, the first Australian cases appeared in 1982, but unofficially, it had already made itself at home in too many of us. We were the statistical residue of systemic neglect. The government dragged its heels. The media sneered. The straight world clicked its tongue behind the veil of so-called concern. And us? We danced on the ruins, drugged and defiant.
Glenn had a reputation before I ever met him. Not the kind you earn. The kind the world sticks to you like a bloody label. “Youngest poz in the state,” someone whispered at a party in Darlinghurst. “Was on the gear by fourteen, turning tricks by fifteen.” He was a living ghost of the system’s failures. PLWHA knew him. The AIDS Council tolerated him. Bobby Goldsmith tried to help him. Glenn? He lit matches in their boardrooms and called it harm reduction. He was impossible, incandescent, and utterly alive.
I was nineteen. Still shaky in my skin. A high school dropout with a failed hetero relationship behind me, a stint living on the street, and a prodigal son return home that tasted more like surrender than triumph. I had stumbled back into my mother’s house with a garbage bag full of clothes and the kind of silence that makes people stop asking questions. Not that she would have either way.
I wasn’t proud. I wasn’t whole. But I was out — in the barest, bravest way I knew how.
We met at an ACON Young and Queer meeting on Albion Street, back when cis gay boys were experiencing the type of backlash our trans brothers and sisters face today. One of those awkward spaces with folding chairs, stale coffee, and good intentions. Glenn stood out immediately, which is saying something in a room full of queer kids running on crash diets of rage and hope. He screamed protest. He talked intentions. He stopped and gave his last five dollars to a homeless man. He told me that first night he was poz. Just like that. No hesitation. No ceremony.
I had already fallen.
I lit his cigarette. He stole my lighter. A week later, we moved in together. Not because it made sense, but because the world didn’t. The rest is history, or myth, or both.
The first march I joined was the Stonewall version in ’94, No, not Mardi Gras. Everyone knows Mardi Gras. Not many remember Stonewall - not the pub, not the protest, the march. I walked and I watched as Glenn stormed down Darlinghurst Rd, towards the El Alamein fountain in a leather vest that barely covered his ribs, screaming about blood donations and body bags. That march was holy. Angry. Electric. He didn’t march like it was a performance. He marched like it was a funeral procession for the future we were denied.
I remember he grabbed my hand. Not out of romance, but out of ritual. We were queers in formation. A ragtag communion of punk boys, trans femmes, leather dykes, and drag elders who had buried too many friends to be polite anymore. The signs we carried weren’t just placards. They were tombstones.
ACT UP, FIGHT BACK, FIGHT AIDS. WE DESERVE TO GROW OLD.
Glenn had this way of looking at you. Really looking. The kind of gaze that stripped shame straight off your bones. He didn’t believe in respectability. He believed in survival. And surviving, back then, meant burying people.
Ross was first. Quiet and kind, always rolled his cigarettes with care. Not long before he passed, he gifted me his watch on his passing. His sister reneged when we cleaned out his Roslyn Street flat. A MCC service, back when it was at Palmer Street followed. We buried him in winter, the sky the colour of bruised peaches. Then Grant, who once kissed me, who told me he loved me at Mardi Gras and cried the whole way through it. Then Matthew, Matt, Princess, sweet, lanky, with terrible taste in music and the best hugs I’ve ever had. And a week later, his partner Peter, who shot up speed to hide the pain, who couldn’t bear the space left behind.
I stopped counting the number of funerals. Started counting the number of friends still alive.
Grief became routine. Black suit, white gloves, another chapel, another mother who wouldn’t sit in the front row. I got so used to the rituals that I started working as a funeral attendant. Partly for money. Mostly because I didn’t know how to stop attending grief. It was muscle memory by then. I learned how to fold a flag. How to nail a coffin shut. How to sew a mouth closed. How to keep my face steady when someone wailed so loud the priest paused.
Death wasn’t abstract. It was scheduled.
We held services in backyards and beaches, squats and church halls that hadn’t hosted queers until they died. The eulogies were always half-political. You had to name the silence that killed them. We didn’t whisper ‘AIDS’. We shouted it. We held photos of our lovers like protest signs. We lit candles like accusations.
Grief didn’t soften us. It sharpened us.
Glenn had already overdosed twice. Already buried five friends. Together, already set up SOPY, Support Of Positive Youth, because the existing orgs were too busy branding their ribbon pins to hear the sound of teenage queer kids crying in alleyways.
SOPY was chaos in the best way. We ran meetings from squats and safe houses. Photocopied zines on stolen paper. Handed out clean needles and condoms in back lanes. Hosted grief circles with candles and mixtapes instead of therapists. It wasn’t sanctioned. It wasn’t safe. But it was sacred.
And it wasn’t all protest and vigils. There was glitter too. We built floats for Mardi Gras, year after year, often with duct tape, desperation, and dreams. Glenn loved it. Obsessively. One year we were rabbits. The next, croupiers in gold lamé. We even convinced Jeannie Little to join our float once — sequins for days, darling. My dad drove the truck most years. Awkward in his hi-vis vest, but smiling through it. My mum, brother, and even my little nephew marched beside us.
We won Best Small Float once. Glenn accepted the award in a thrift-store tux at the black-tie ceremony at Sydney Town Hall. Shaking with joy. Grinning like a schoolboy, barely older than one. Then promptly dropped the award and smashed the opera house-shaped trophy into three jagged pieces. They replaced it. But the image of him, sheepish and beaming, shards in hand, has stayed with me longer than the replacement ever could.
But Mardi Gras was celebration. Stonewall was something else. Stonewall was ritual. Political. Sombre. The ghosts marched with us there. The rage had weight. That wasn’t for cameras or confetti. That was sacred grief in motion. Just recently, I found myself at its namesake. The Stonewall Inn in New York. A quiet, strange kind of pilgrimage. I ordered a drink I didn’t want, just to raise it for Glenn. To toast the boy who never imagined he’d live long enough to leave Oxford Street. Let alone be remembered in a bar on the other side of the world. He couldn’t picture me there. But I carried him in.
The last march I did with Glenn was in late ’95. He was already skeletal. Coughing blood between chants. But he refused a wheelchair. “I want them to see what they did to me,” he rasped. “No edits. No fucking euphemisms.” We wrapped him in a silver emergency blanket and draped a SOPY banner over his shoulders. He looked like a dying angel. Or a pissed-off saint. When he collapsed halfway through the march, we didn’t panic. We sat with him. On the road. Surrounded by noise and sirens and the beating drums of protest. “Don’t let them make me a poster boy,” he whispered. “Tell them I was a brat. Tell them I loved too hard. Tell them I stole your lighter and never gave it back.”
I recall sitting in the driveway of St Vincent's Public emergency room. In tears. Broken. Informed he had too much fluid in his lungs. Informed he probably wouldn't make it. Asked if they should try, or simply let him go. Asked, because he had no other family, none that supported him. I was his family. We, our friends, were his family. He pulled through, despite it all.
We broke up not long after. A little too dramatically. His grief written in large unwavering letters on the sidewalk outside the place we both use to call home, for all to see. It had always been a little volatile. That was Glenn. And probably me back then as well. The kind of volatility that comes after too many vigils and not enough sleep. Glenn moved north. Central Coast, maybe. Somewhere quieter. He kept in touch with my mum. She adored him. Said he called her more than I did.
Years later, she rang me and said, simply: “Glenn’s gone.”
He’d stopped taking his meds. Chose his exit. Quietly. Defiantly. In full control. He was thirty-one. My mum went to his funeral. I didn’t. I lit a candle instead. And cried like I hadn’t in years.
I don’t march anymore. Not for years. The noise doesn’t feel holy now. It just echoes. I don’t remember people as much as I should. Grief has a way of warping memory. Folding names into static.
Glenn scarred me. That’s the truth, unvarnished. I offered hope; raw, clumsy, real, and he threw it back at me like it burned. He couldn’t escape his anger. It was the one constant in a world that kept betraying him. It wrapped around him like armour and poison both. And even though I knew where it came from, it still hurt. Sometimes love isn’t enough. Sometimes it just leaves smoke.
So if you ever find yourself on a Tuesday, standing outside an old meeting hall, wondering why your heart aches for people you never met, know that you’re part of this lineage. Of lovers and fighters and kids who wouldn’t stay quiet.
We didn’t survive the plague. We, unlike so many of our peers, our friends, our lovers, our family, sang through it.
And some of us are still singing.