While the early days of the coronavirus pandemic in New York City were all terrible, March 30, 2020, was particularly difficult. As all days did around then, it began for me with the sound of sirens in the distance waking me up from another night of restless slumber. Then, on social media, I learned that Lorena Borjas had died of COVID-19.
If Michael Johnson’s getting out of prison a few months earlier had given a boost to a circle of gay and Black people I cared about in the viral underclass, I could tell that Lorena’s death had dealt a blow to another circle of transgender and immigrant folx.
My heart hurt for them.
Lorena had died between five and six that morning. By seven that evening, Chase Strangio and Cecilia Gentili had organized an online memorial. It was the first-ever “Zoom funeral” I attended, the first of many I’d watch and organize in the year that followed.
As with a number of memorials for transgender women of color and Black queer people in New York City over the years, I attended this one not because I knew the deceased well. Rather, I went because I wanted to be in community with and support others who were mourning.
With just a few hours’ notice, more than two hundred people joined that Zoom call to celebrate Lorena’s life. And while it was touching to hear stories (delivered in English and Spanish), it was still wretched to see friends I couldn’t hug or console. At least we could see who was there, so we could follow up with one another with a phone call later. But as the Zoom screen shifted awkwardly, highlighting the wailing sobs of people in the visible agony of grief, my sense of estrangement selfishly turned to one of resentment.
I hated juggling these multiple streams of compounded abstraction, as each and every one of us was reduced to being a bunch of little digital cubes—flat, like we were in the opening of The Brady Bunch or on an episode of Hollywood Squares. Each alone, discrete.
The levels upon levels upon levels of alienation that viruses can force humans to endure, I thought. Absent to me in that moment was any consideration of how viruses might connect us. Instead, even at a digital funeral, I felt reminded that, like those facing the bubonic plague in Michel Foucault’s description of a seventeenth-century lockdown in Europe, “Each individual is fixed in his place. And, if he moves, he does so at the risk of his life, contagion or punishment.”
During the memorial, people spoke for hours about Lorena’s kindness, how she showed up in court for others, and about her infamous rolling cart. I found myself wondering where her cart was that night. When people die, there is something so lonely about the mundane objects they leave behind that wait in vain for their human to return: the toothbrush that will never scrub molars again, the glasses that will never help eyes to see once more, the book that will never finish being read.
Listening to dozens of people bear witness to Lorena’s life on Zoom, I felt self-conscious about crying while on camera in a way I had never felt at an in-person funeral. I thought about how I’d taken for granted hugging others at funerals. And I thought about how, when gay men got AIDS in the 1980s and their families of origin abandoned them, lesbians and other gay men took care of them and creatively gave them intimacy and community. Or their funerals were treated as political protests, giving the bereaved a chance to grieve communally and to vent their anger and fight the conditions that had taken their friend prematurely. But with this new plague, none of these modes of queer comfort or haptic care were possible without facilitating the further transmission of the virus, more sickness, and more death.
There would be so many online memorials in the next year for so many people, including queer friends who died young and not from COVID. The least we should have done to honor them was to hold a wake in a piano bar like Marie’s Crisis, followed by a dance party in someone’s loft that turned into an orgy in their memory. And now, not only were the trans people in mourning bereft of physical comfort from one another, they had lost the leadership of one of the strongest pillars of their community—Lorena herself.
What gets lost when a leader of the viral underclass is erased from their flock?
When SARS-CoV-2 silenced Lorena, what effect did that have on other viruses? How free were they to circulate even more? Without Lorena to give out condoms and sterile syringes, how many more people would become infected with HIV and hepatitis C? Without her hustling up support in court for young women in trouble, how many of them would wind up in jail for long periods of time—where they’d be more likely to contract influenza or COVID-19?
When Zak Kostopoulos was killed in Omonia Square and Zackie Oh disappeared from the drag stages of Athens, how did that loss compound the precariousness of the viral underclass of Greece? Without Zak’s beautiful face smiling openly when he spoke about living with HIV, what harm befell queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming Athenians? With the video circulating of his slight body being kicked to death by a shop owner with the aid of police (and with few consequences), how was the far-right Golden Dawn empowered to enact vigilante violence against queers, migrants, sex workers, and people without homes?
For the people who killed Zak didn’t just mortally wound him. Like cops in the United States who commit murder on video in a way that haunts the dreams of Black Americans, Zak’s killers plagued the slumber of Greece’s queer underclass with nightmares. “There are people who shouldn’t be able to sleep at night,” Zak himself wrote, and yet, “they’ve made people who deserve better lose their sleep.”
When film archivist Vito Russo died of AIDS in 1990, what role did that have in allowing gay male politics in the United States to mutate conservatively—and to abandon the viral underclass without ever kicking “the shit out of this system,” as Vito had charged us to do? When the formerly incarcerated Black feminist Katrina Haslip died in 1992 from AIDS at age thirty-three, what did her death do, not just to other people living with AIDS, but also to imprisoned Black women already so vulnerable to so many pathogens (while being ignored by so much of the world)?
When Bob Rafsky died of AIDS in 1993, shortly after Bill Clinton became president, how did the loss of this agitator affect Democratic carceral policies in a way such that HIV, influenza, and the coronavirus could more freely flourish in cages?
In the fall of 2020, what immeasurable losses occurred when eighty-one members of the Mississippi band of the Choctaw died of COVID-19—more than 10 percent of the tribe? How did the loss of elders’ stories and leadership wound not just the hearts of the Choctaw, but their ability to form community and resistance within the U.S. empire?
When COVID-19 took the life of Asian American writer Kimarlee Nguyen at the age of thirty-three, how did that cut down the Cambodian immigrant community she came from? Her former writing professor, author Kiese Laymon, once described Nguyen to me as a teacher who was “really good at loving people.” How did losing Nguyen’s love hamper the Asian American students who relied on her to understand their own health, culture, art, and selves in the world—and how did those losses leave them more exposed to health disparities?
And when my friend, Village Voice editor Ward Harkavy, died of COVID at the age of seventy-two, what did his loss do to marginalized people who were disabled and who stuttered—for whom, as a journalist and fellow stutterer, he’d always advocated? What effect would his inability to mentor young journalists have on the coverage and fate of the viral underclass?
Akin to how plants growing around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant are affected by the half-life of radioactive waste, the unnecessary deaths of these beautiful people created fallouts beyond mere absences. Their deaths went viral, the effects of their vacancies growing exponentially to harm more of the underclass. Like infections that couldn’t be contained, their deaths created collateral damage—such as the community spread of grief itself. This resulted in decreased prophylaxis and increased vulnerability for already marginalized people.
In this way, when a virus takes the life of one of the viral underclass’s leaders, the impact radiates outward and death becomes a form of collective punishment meted out on an entire community already hurt by marginalization.
It’s hard to predict how severe the fallout will eventually be from a death like Lorena’s, because when it comes to understanding the importance of a leader in their circle, death often reveals how their importance has long been unspoken or unacknowledged. And Lorena’s death was a reminder that the full measure of what she’d been enduring, and what she’d meant to her familia, had been obscured for some time.
In the first few months of the coronavirus pandemic, many writers understood that it was going to exacerbate the dangers that members of the underclass already faced with other pathogens. Even before any COVID-19 vaccine was in production, strains on the supply chain for medical resources like syringes were already affecting millions of people around the world living with tuberculosis, HIV, and malaria. Researchers estimated that the interruptions to HIV care caused by COVID-19 would result in an additional four hundred thousand AIDS deaths worldwide in 2020. Meanwhile in the United States, as Zachary Siegel reported for the New Republic, the coronavirus pandemic became an excuse to defund the best efforts for dealing with the opioid addiction crisis. While dentists and physical therapists were supported in having the necessary resources to see patients in person, addiction health experts often were not. This led to more isolation, HIV, HCV, and overdose deaths.
In April 2020, not long after Lorena Borjas died, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, talked about various metrics of the coronavirus. When measuring the number of people diagnosed, infected, sick, and hospitalized, the one metric “that’s the furthest out is the deaths, that lags behind the others.” Fauci sounded slightly optimistic at that moment, explaining that someday we might “continue to see deaths at a time when you have actually very good control of the new infections and the outbreak itself.”
Death is out of precise synchronization with the other symptoms of a pandemic; it arrives later than other worrying signs and lingers longer than signs of improvement. In the United States, COVID-19 skeptics failed to comprehend this, or even how hospitalizations lag behind new cases. Why weren’t hospital rates rising precisely with infections? they wanted to know, not understanding how the incubation period impacted time lines. Sure enough, a week after diagnoses spiked, hospitalization rates correspondingly rose, and a couple weeks after that, so did deaths—just as the CDC had predicted. (This happened again with the Delta and Omicron variants.) And so, just as death is an imperfect metric for understanding a pandemic, it is also an incomplete metric for understanding the marginalization and vulnerability of a community.
“I always say yes to everything, and end up spreading myself pretty thin,” Zak Kostopoulos once said, without regret. “I was visible, and that struggle for visibility mattered a lot to me.” Zak’s visibility mattered a lot to others in Athens, too, as did Lorena’s in Jackson Heights. But prior to their deaths, both had been in danger for some time, as much of the viral underclass had been.
Yet that danger didn’t come into stark relief for all to see until they died. For them, death was the final act in a series of traumas they had faced over the course of a life of struggle, of so much more than a virus. They had been vibrant lights within their respective communities. But an understanding of just how important their light was in guiding their people didn’t fully materialize until it was snuffed out.
When California rolled out its COVID-19 vaccination program in 2021, it prioritized people by age, placing relatively healthy older people ahead of severely immunocompromised younger people. After treating old people as disposable in 2020, the state got vaccines to them first, but in a way that was still ableist. It made little distinction between people of any age and offered little accommodation to people who were younger, severely disabled, or unable to travel to a vaccination site. As activist Alice Wong told news media early that year, she was scared for the “very young, disabled, critically ill and immunocompromised people who could die before it’s their turn to be vaccinated.”
Alice is such a pillar within disabled communities, and to me personally. Her loss would have been incalculable if SARS-CoV-2 had gotten to her before a vaccine did. Other disabled activists did perish before they got vaccinated.
The potential and actual loss of leaders in minoritized communities has the power to create a compound loss. For every person like Michael Johnson who gets out of prison early, there are so many more like Lorena and Zackie Oh—people living with one virus whose lives are ended too soon by another, or by police, or by addiction. That Lorena’s death was recognized by the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Washington Post is a testament to how powerfully her loss was felt, even to a news media that had largely ignored her activism while she was alive. But for every Lorena, there are dozens of activists and organizers who never get this kind of public recognition, but whose losses are nonetheless felt deeply by their communities. And if someone’s plight isn’t recognized until they are dead, what can be done to help them in life?
How will her comunidad cope without Lorena? A community already so exposed to HIV, ICE raids, and transphobia before the novel coronavirus came along? Her loss will be felt in the liver of a transgender person injecting contraband hormones with unsterilized syringes. Her loss will be felt in the soul of an immigrant showing up for arraignment in the Queens County Courthouse who looks out to see that no one has shown up for her—before she is taken back to holding for months or years to await trial, while being repeatedly exposed to the flu and other pathogens.
The loss of Lorena will take a long time to comprehend if it can be fully mapped and understood at all.
As I finished writing this book, I accidentally stumbled upon a video that Zak Kostopoulos had made many years before, in 2013. By the time I saw it, I had seen a nonverbal short film starring Zak called U (for “undetectable equals untransmissible”), a lot of videos of Zackie Oh lip-synching to pop songs (like “Sweet Transvestite,” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show), and of Zak speaking in Greek, which I don’t understand at all. Yet I’d never really heard his voice in a way I could fully comprehend.
This YouTube video was different, for Zak was speaking in his first language, from his childhood in the United States: American English. In years of trying to know him, I had no idea such a video existed.
“Hi there, my name is Zak Kostopoulos, and I’m sending you this message from Greece,” he said, looking directly into the camera.
Sending this from the other side of the Great Divide, I thought.
Addressing people who are newly diagnosed with HIV, Zak smiles gently in the video. Unlike in the film U or in his book, Society Doesn’t Fit Me but My Little Black Dress Does, Zak seems lighthearted and open about his viral status. He tells people he’s been living with HIV for some time, “and it’s been quite a journey, but not an unpleasant one, all the way.”
Calmly, he speaks to people who may have just been diagnosed with HIV as well. And while he is sympathetic that it’s new information that can be frightening and might feel overwhelming at first, he wants these kinfolk to know that they can handle it and “can live a full and happy life living with HIV, as long as you don’t let it get the best of you and you don’t give up.” Friends can offer support, because no one should go through it alone.
“Also, I know being diagnosed with HIV comes with a lot of stigma and discrimination and stereotypes you’ll have to face,” he continues. “But it’s nothing to be ashamed about, and no matter what anybody says, the fact that you have HIV does not make you unworthy, or dirty, or anything like that.
“It just makes you human,” he says, succinctly conveying in just five words a sentiment I wish every human could believe about themselves—and about every other human affected by every virus.
We each need relationships with other people to understand who we are; there is nothing like looking into the face of another human or tracing it with your fingers to understand who you are as a person. And maybe—maybe that is the most valuable aspect of humankind’s relationship with viruses: they remind us that in our breathing, and in our kissing, and in our hugging, and in our dancing, and in our fucking, we are human.
These are the things that make us human! I pray Olivier knew this at the end of his life.
We will never eradicate all viruses; there are more of them on our planet than there are stars in the universe. But if we accept our vulnerable humanity, and if we learn as a species to live in relationship with viruses, we will not need to let their harshest consequences pool within a viral underclass. Indeed, if we learned what it meant to cohabitate with them responsibly, viruses could teach us to create a world without class or other hierarchies.
In his YouTube message, Zak assures the newly diagnosed that they will, indeed, find people who will “love and support you for who you are, because you’re basically the same person.” He also tells people without HIV that if they know someone who is recently diagnosed with the virus, there’s no need “to change the way you act around them. You don’t have to change the way you treat them—there is nothing to be afraid of.” The video is so gentle, so human. Unlike his howls in his own writing and his primal prancing in his drag sets, here Zak gently calls people in.
“So, basically, I think that’s about it. Just don’t give up, keep on smiling, fight the stigma, fight the stereotypes, be yourself, and—love.”
His eyebrows rise in a smile.
When those men kicked Zak to death, flaying him alive on a carpet of broken glass, they not only stole his life from him and from the people who loved him. They removed the guardian who stood ready to welcome any immigrant newly arrived in Athens. And they kept any newly diagnosed member of the viral underclass who could have found him online from connecting with him in real life.
Watching him on video, I wondered: How can the loss of such an immeasurable gift be measured?
“That’s all,” he says, kissing the air. “Thank you, bye.”
we are all already polluted by each other, our bodies
connected and permeable, energised and endangered
by the life (vitality, livingness, flourishing, decay, dehiscence)
that that connection engenders.
THOMAS STRONG