Notes on Greg Lugliani on the Day of His Funeral Mass: August 10, 2017

Central Park Pride June 1989 Stonewall 20

March on Washington for Reproductive Freedom, Washington, DC 1989

“Otter Colony on Avenue A (1989)” Pendulum SUNY Purchase December 11, 1997 Read my poetry at the SUNY Purchase art center for World AIDS Day 1997.

Today was the funeral mass of  Greg Lugliani …

During a brief period about 26 years ago, Greg and I often hung out at Tunnel Bar (First Avenue & 7th Street) on Tuesday and Thursday evenings (“Jägermeister nights”). It was on those particular nights that Greg – smiling – would get me to tell our “otter story.”

The story was basically this: That those of us in ACT UP New York were – in a previous life countless millennia earlier – a rogue otter colony basking on sunny shores, gallivanting, frolicking, and feasting on abalone. And that – after an intolerably long interval and many unfortunate twists and turns – we finally found each other at the main room at the Center on West 13th Street, on the streets of the East Village, and in assorted government and corporate conference rooms. The story was a tad different every time. Greg loved (and was amused by) the story.

Sometime in the mid-1990s – in Scott Hightower’s poetry group at GMHC – I morphed the story into a poem just to get it onto paper. While in Scott’s group during that period, we were asked a couple of times to read our poetry on December 1 (World AIDS Day) at SUNY Purtchase’s Neuberger Museum of Art. On one of those occasions, I read that poem about the reincarnated otter colony frolicking in and traversing the East Village in our motorcycle jackets and Doc Martens. A staffer of the student paper at SUNY Purtchase asked me afterward if I had a printed copy of the poem I read. I pulled it out of a folder and eagerly handed it over. It appeared in the next issue of the paper as part of their coverage of the event. Today I regret so much that I never gave Greg a copy because he was so much its inspiration.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1085866785087&set=a.1081510796190.13736.1178921718&type=3&theater

Greg introduced me to my first tattoo artist in Washington Heights (at a time when tattooing was illegal in NYC and trying to find a tattoo artist akin to finding a drug dealer). Greg was always intrigued that my first tattoo was a seahorse (particularly because I chose that animal due to male seahorses “carrying their babies to term”). My second tattoo? An otter floating on its back – leisurely cracking abalone shells on a rock that lay on its belly. In a way, I “wear” Greg on two places on my skin.