By Rea Carey
Special to lesbian.com

The new anthology, Crisis and Care: Queer Activist Responses to a Global Pandemic, is timely in many ways. It’s the second collection of essays edited by Adrian Shanker. About Crisis and Care, Robyn Ochs, editor of Bi Women’s Quarterly, wrote, “In Crisis and Care, Adrian Shanker and the contributing authors make the bold case that we are defined not by the bad things that happen in our society, but by how our community responds.” Central to the book is writing by LGBTQ+ women including Denise Spivak (CenterLink: The Community of LGBT Centers), Jamie Gliksberg (formerly of Lambda Legal), and Michelle Veras (National LGBT Cancer Network) as well as a powerful foreword by Rea Carey, the former executive director of the National LGBTQ+ Task Force.

Here is a short excerpt from Carey’s introduction to the book:

 Over the course of my thirty years in the LGBTQ+ movement, including seventeen years at the National LGBTQ Task Force, I have seen our LGBTQ+ movement adapt to trying times before. We have shown up for each other. But the sudden and significant changes to our lives because of the COVID-19 pandemic were different—it wasn’t anything like what we had experienced before. It immediately surfaced and magnified existing health access disparities, as well as discrimination, especially for Black and Brown members of our community and for trans and gender nonconforming people.

Rea Carey (Franklin forum participant head shots).

Yet the LGBTQ+ community quickly created virtual connections, assessed the immediate impact, launched mutual aid efforts, modeled resiliency, and demanded health equity. The LGBTQ+ community responded to a global pandemic with determination that we would all get through it together, and that the most vulnerable members of our community would have our collective support—and, importantly, that we had much to teach the rest of the country about responding to a health crisis being mishandled by the government, as was the case during the early years of HIV/ AIDS.

We should remember this moment in time. We should always respond with the care and resiliency that our LGBTQ+ movement demonstrated throughout this crisis. No doubt we will need that strength again.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has changed our lives, probably forever. This book looks at the power of community. When LGBTQ+ people speak up, fight back, and make demands for an equitable and fair world, oftentimes we win. Crisis and Care is available from local bookstores, or from the publisher at www.pmpress.org/crisisandcare 

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Now that President Biden and Vice President Harris are in office, I’ve been able to have my first Covid 19 vaccine shot. It was no big deal. I went to our county fairgrounds expecting to be injected through my car window, the way I was tested. I thank my lucky stars the test was negative. I’m grateful to the medical profession that persisted in making tests and vaccines available despite the disinformation and profiteering of our former leaders.

Turned out, the vaccines were administered in the same exhibit building that’s used for our winter farmers’ market, a very familiar and reassuring space. The six-foot tables that usually serve to display crafts or local mushrooms and goat cheeses, were now place markers.

Two representatives of our Sheriff’s Mounted Posse, minus their mounts, stood at the door, masked and chatting with new arrivals. We weren’t exactly an unruly crowd—age seventy-five at the youngest—so there was little for them to do. Once inside, our temperatures were taken, we were sent along to show ID and turn in required paperwork. Some internet averse or disabled people filled out that paperwork on site, assisted by caretakers and community helpers.

One half hour was allotted for each group to be vaccinated. Firefighters led the way to makeshift corrals, maybe twelve foot by twelve foot, and to inadequately distanced folding chairs. No matter, it’s in the nature of groups to group, and people knew each other so there was never a chance some would voluntarily social distance, despite the fact that they were there to prevent dying in a pandemic.

The firefighters then deposited us, one at each end of the tables. I spotted non-gay neighbors in front of me and we cheerfully visited—at a distance. They’ve since invited me to ride with them for our second shots. That could have been fun and memorable, I thought later, especially if we gave one another the virus while enclosed in a car.

Which brought me back to the first inoculation I remember. I was in elementary school when American schoolchildren became guinea pigs for Dr. Salk’s vaccine. We waited on line outside the Flushing, Queens P.S. 20 gymnasium, in enforced quiet, dozens of solemn, worried kids. Personally, I was terrified of being shut inside an iron lung and welcomed the chance to avoid that fate.

The Covid 19 vaccines have emergency authorization; the polio shots were experimental. Some children received the actual inoculation, others a placebo. We filed into the gym and stopped at little stations staffed by who-knew-who. I asked this time, and confirmed that RNs were giving the Covid injections.

As Polio Pioneers, we received pins and certificates (which many of us still have, including me). Mothers of pupils volunteered to comfort us. I lucked out with a mom who put her arms around me and held me close during my ordeal. If I hadn’t already been a dyke, I would have become one from that experience alone—what pain?

The more recent injection was painless. For about two days afterward I couldn’t lift that arm without great discomfort, but as vulnerable elders, we accepted the necessity of inoculation with stoicism. There was a nurse for each row of recipients so those in the back were able to watch for horrendous reactions from the procedure. There were none.

The last corral was the observation room where we waited thirty minutes, in case we needed an epi pen or ambulance. The firefighters roamed among us, smiling and joking with people they knew, checking on us all. Eventually, we crammed together on line to schedule appointments for our second shots.

As a seasoned Polio Pioneer, sixty-odd years later, it strikes me as funny that I felt a little proud, just as I had in grade school, to be part of this mass health effort. There’s a bond now, between my neighbors and myself, that we went through the unknown together, that we believed in the science and the medicine and did our patriotic duty to keep America safe.

Before my observation period ended, I took a seat at one end of a long bench and exchanged greetings with a courageous man perhaps twenty-five years my senior. As I watched the clock, I considered myself lucky, way back when, to have received the real polio vaccine rather than the placebo. In the present, I know I’m lucky to have reached the current vaccine eligibility cutoff age. And lucky to have outlived the willful mismanagement of the Covid 19 pandemic.

Copyright Lee Lynch 2021 / February 2021

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