If you’ve spent decades of nights in bed staring up at the ceiling wondering where your guardian angel is and how you’re supposed to do all of this on your own, then Sam Moore’s All My Teachers Died of AIDS is the tender-hearted, queer-minded excavation of gay community history for you. 

My great-grandmother had a brother who died of AIDS in the early ’90s. Only a few years later, I was born. At thirteen, I exited the closet in a flash that disoriented the whole family: a brief I’m gay to Facebook at two in the morning on a school night. An aunt pleaded that I take it down and speak to my parents first, but I chose to lie in bed. A few hours later, clad in my Catholic school uniform, I refused to get out of my mom’s car outside the school building and sobbed in the front seat as I confessed what I’d done.

Sam Moore’s All My Teachers Died of AIDS opens with a flash of heartbreak. “I was never taught how to love, or what it might mean for / someone like me to feel / desire.”

It’s only fitting for a chapbook that sits patiently at the corner of death and queerness—decorated with candlelight vigils and boys with pink triangles on their hearts—to open with an image of emptiness and yearning. Moore’s poetry delicately gestures to the landscape of political violence during the AIDS crisis and meticulously points out the homes of gay men fighting to survive—homes like The Inheritance and Queer as Folk, the Broadway stage and television, Giovanni’s Room and Close To The Knives. 

Great-Grandma’s brother’s name was Jon or John. I’ve forgotten to ask about the spelling. He ran an interior design store about an hour north of where our family established roots, and one of his nieces worked as his right-hand woman. He loved paperwhites, narcissus papyraceous. Decorated his home with them as often as he could. That’s how I first learned of him, a few months before my 25th birthday. They smell like piss to me, but they must’ve filled his home’s air with opulence. He would put them everywhere, and he was always ready to host, my dad said as he passed me a small garden tray with four fully bloomed flowers to take to my mom’s home. He’d greet you at the door and there would be music playing. It would smell great and there was art everywhere. 

Moore’s verse excavates decades of hidden-away queer lineage. The second part opens with Moore parsing through the intricacies of the first memories (and lack of memories) learning about AIDS. This remembering acts as the base for the necessary archival dig, leading us directly through statistics back to the very beginning: “The man who died that December, the first of his tragic kind, / was 49.” The author’s desire to be specific, to appeal to the qualitative reader, evolves seamlessly into a production of activism and community history in front of a doomsday scenario backdrop: DON’T DIE OF IGNORANCE and the passing of Section 28, the Silence=Death Project, ACT UP, and the Reagan Administration. It’s 1985, the year Reagan first muttered the word AIDS and The Normal Heart’s first off-Broadway production that brings the audience center stage amidst the wreckage and the history. Twenty-five years later, we’re still center stage, but this time we’re on Broadway in front of a larger audience, standing between three white walls covered in the same vestiges of activism and “the / names of the dead” while the curtain falls.

I spent my nights as a teenager watching the Canadian talk show One Girl Five Gays. Each week for five years, host Aliya Jasmine asked the men a series of 20 questions about love, sex, culture, relationships, and their lives. Each night, five out of a cast of twenty or more entered the small studio space and filled it with their stories. And I took notes on it all, the host’s questions and the cast’s lives. My gay elders were in their mid-to-late twenties and early thirties, living their lives only a weekend’s trip away from my hometown in southwest Michigan. They were elders I only saw after everyone else had gone to bed, with the TV volume as low as I could possibly manage to hear. The last time I looked for past episodes, I found only a few cut-up, seven-minute fragments out of the five seasons—low quality ruins of my memory.

It’s funny how different the flowers must’ve smelled to him, Great-Grandma said when we talked about him the next Christmas. I want to let people have their feelings about it all, but you should have this, as she pulled a small cerulean bottleneck vase out of a display cabinet in her living room. Small enough to fit in one hand. As I inspected the simple shape and its subtle designs, she declared, it was his.

In the third section of their text, Moore writes: “Queer life can be dreadfully lonely, thinking you’re the / only person in history to have felt this way, afraid you’ll never / survive it.”

I wonder what life would have looked like if Jon or John had survived. I wonder if I’d be a better host or decorator. I wonder if I’d keep paperwhites around my apartment. 

To have someone say
I’ve been here before is a blessing, a hand reaching out,
sometimes through history, and
taking yours.

I wonder how different life would be had I known of my elder’s death when I was first learning of myself. I wonder how different life will be now that I do.