As those who read my columns know, I love cruising, the kind you do on water. I have had many different cruise experiences, including sailing through the Galapagos and the Norwegian fjords. This time, I will be doing something a little different and am off on a new adventure. With 18 others, will be on a barge for six days, going from Lyon to Paris, through the canals of Burgundy. Each day will bring a new adventure. We will be embarking in Besancon, and traveling to Beaune, Arc-et-Senans, Dole, Saint-Jean-De-Losne, Seurre, Chalon-Sur-Saone, and then disembarking in Auxerre, en route to Paris. Of the 18 people, four are friends from D.C. and Rehoboth Beach. I look forward to meeting the other travelers. 

I leave for Paris on June 8 and made arrangements for a car in Paris to take me to the Gare De Lyon, to board a fast train to Lyon. A quick two-hour trip. In Lyon I will head to the hotel for a welcome dinner, where I will meet our guide and other travelers. This is a Gate 1 adventure booked by my friends at My Lux Cruise. We will be spending two days in Lyon before boarding the MS Daniele, built in 2016. It is modern, with space for both indoor and outdoor dining, a small lounge, the requisite bar, and very simple staterooms. Mine will have two single beds. Can’t forget the hot tub on the bow. I will be writing a blog during my trip, which will be published in the Blade, likely after my return. I will post pictures during the trip on social media. After six days on the barge, we arrive in Paris, where I will spend a couple of days with good friends. One planned excursion is to see the rebuilt Notre Dame. 

I will be away from D.C. on June 16, primary day. Since for the first time there will be ranked choice voting, it is possible we won’t know who wins until I get back on June 19. I hope everyone votes, and urge you to vote, as I already have, for Kenyan McDuffie for mayor. His main opponent, Janeese Lewis George, clearly doesn’t understand how D.C. government really works. She is trying to emulate NYC Mayor Mamdani with promises, but hers won’t happen. We don’t have a governor, and state legislature, to help. Our governor is in essence the felon in the White House, and our state legislature is the Congress. They won’t be helping. In addition, George has claimed the endorsement of an antisemitic organization, DSA, and is going to birthday parties for a guy who calls gay men like me ‘fags’ and says they shouldn’t be teaching his children in the public schools. The winners of the Democratic primary races will determine how D.C. moves forward. It really makes a difference. 

The world is a different place today than it was just a short 18 months ago, when the felon began his second term. This is the first time I will be out of the country since he began this illegal war with Iran, plunging the world into chaos. I wonder what the reception for an American will be in Europe these days. I remember back when Ronald Reagan was first elected, which was the last time in my travels, before Trump, I felt compelled to apologize for my country. At that time people would actually come up to me and ask, what did America do, and why? Yet as bad as times seemed then, they were nowhere as bad as they are today. The felon in the White House has made life so much worse for people around the world. Europeans have seen him get on his knees to Putin, and screw Ukraine. Now with this illegal, and unnecessary, war in Iran, he is impacting their lives directly. Fuel prices are rising dramatically, and there is a drastic shortage of jet fuel, causing cuts in flights. They see him work hand-in-hand with the war criminal, Netanyahu, in Israel. They see how he simply wants to enrich himself with things like his ‘Board of Peace,’ and in the long run, screw the Palestinian people. It will be interesting to hear how Europeans feel about all this. I look forward to listening to them. All I can say in response is I didn’t vote for Trump and will continue to demonstrate, and write against him, as often as I can.

Putting politics aside, which is hard to do these days, I am excited about this new adventure, and look forward to sharing some of my experiences with you. 

Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist.

Former Congressman Barney Frank, who died last week, was dogged during his life over being gay. The self-proclaimed only “left-handed, gay, Jewish congressman,” in Congress deserved better.

Frank’s perseverance paved the way for others. With wit and intelligence, he helped educate Americans about sexuality. As a federal employee and a member of the Federal Gay, Lesbian or Bisexual Employees (GLOBE), a government-wide organization founded by Dr. Len Hirsch, I saw Frank’s unforgettable speaking style when he was a guest speaker at our monthly events.

Frank’s detailed presentations about federal employment policies were not recorded. The only record of them, edited by Dr. Hirsch and other members of the GLOBE board, is in the minutes of the GLOBE meetings. I held several positions in GLOBE, including secretary, assistant newsletter editor, and as an elected member of the board. I drafted the minutes of the meetings.

GLOBE’s minutes were edited to protect the identity of federal employees. This was important because then-U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) attempted to obtain the minutes. Helms felt LGBT advocacy in the federal workplace was an illegal form of political activity. GLOBE was also concerned that the minutes would be illegally accessed and forwarded to Helms or used to blackmail federal employees. GLOBE’s minutes are preserved at the National Archives.

When I was named Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Program Manager at the Department of Agriculture in 1993, I immediately notified Frank’s office of my appointment. After a federal newsletter published an article about a speech I gave, Helms accused me of using government resources to support “a homosexual agenda.” During several hours on the evening of July 19, 1994, Helms told the Senate and C-SPAN’s television audience that LGBT federal employees had their minds in their crotches. He called LGBT federal employees “perverts.”

Helms had government documents that described the position of “Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Program Manager.” It was a program that used the incendiary words “promote” and “recruit” homosexuals. It was a huge mistake for government bureaucrats to have written such a program. Helms published it in the Congressional Record. Frank helped us through this battle and others. 

Aside from Frank, there were other LGBT members of Congress in the 1990s. Gerry Studds (D-Mass.), Steve Gunderson (R-Wisc.), and James Kolbe (R-Ariz.). Studds was censured for an affair with a 17-year-old male page in the House. Gunderson was publicly outed by a fellow House Republican. Kolbe was subject to sexual accusations.  

Among these gay congressmen, Frank weathered a hostile media, personal scandal, and vicious attacks from his Republican colleagues. In 1995, former Texas GOP House Majority Leader Dick Armey was caught referring to Frank as “Barney Fag.” His apology was grudging.

“I rule out that it was an innocent mispronunciation,” responded Frank. “I turned to my own expert, my mother, who reports that in 59 years of marriage, no one ever introduced her as Elsie Fag.”

After celebrating his 72nd birthday, Frank married his longtime partner. He successfully worked to place marriage equality into the 2012 Democratic platform, which President Obama endorsed.

Still, Frank was dogged by homophobia. The Tea Party’s Doug Mainwaring called Frank’s wedding “a mockery, a parody, a staggering caricature of the most fundamental and towering of American institutions.”

In an interview with Washingtonian magazine, Frank said he “hates being classified as ‘the gay congressman,’” as his legislative accomplishments go beyond gay rights. He co-sponsored the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

Frank will especially be remembered in Washington for his sharp wit. He once referred to advocating for gay marriage legalization as “cruising for gay rights.” He wrote devastatingly funny op-ed pieces, notably for the Washington Post.

Though Frank may not have wanted to be known as a gay congressman, when he spoke, the LGBT community listened. He was the Great Gay Communicator. Barney Frank deserved respect. May his memory be a blessing.

James Patterson, a life member of the American Foreign Service Association, is a writer and communications consultant in the D.C. area. 

If I admit I’m HIV positive, some men immediately reject me. If I lie and say I’m HIV negative, many of those same men will gladly have unprotected sex with me.

That contradiction has haunted me for years and made me wonder: What would the gay men who died of AIDS in the 1980s think if they could see us now?

The future would absolutely astonish them. Everybody carries around a handheld device that can instantly broadcast their thoughts, faces, bodies, and lives to the entire planet. We elected a Black president twice. Same-sex marriage is legal. Gay people can openly marry, raise children, grow old together, and even get divorced like everybody else. HIV itself is no longer “the deadly disease” it was when I learned I was infected in 1985 at age 23.

Back then, life expectancy was often measured in months. Surviving long enough to grow old felt like science fiction.

Now there are medications that can suppress the virus so effectively, a person living with HIV can become “undetectable,” meaning they cannot sexually transmit the virus. Countless people who once expected to die can now live long enough to worry about all the ordinary things people worry about as they age: heart disease, bad knees and what restaurant closes too early.

Back then, that wasn’t even a pipe dream. But the future also got weird.

What shocks me most is not the medical progress. It’s the emotional contradiction surrounding it. The general public no longer fears sharing space with people living with HIV. Most people understand you cannot get HIV from a hug, a handshake, sharing food, breathing the same air, or sitting next to someone on a plane.

But sex is different. Especially in the gay world, where stigma still lingers in strange and contradictory ways.

I’ve watched gay men reject HIV-positive men while simultaneously engaging in anonymous unprotected sex with people whose status they know only because somebody typed a word into an app. “Negative.” “Clean.” “DDF.”

As if viruses never lie.

At the same time, we now live in a sexual culture far more open and visible than anything most gay people from the 1980s could have imagined. The bathhouse has largely been replaced by hookup apps and social media. Sexual behavior is documented, broadcast and archived in real time.

But greater sexual freedom did not necessarily bring greater emotional clarity.

Some men still fear HIV intensely. Others eroticize it. Some even document their attempts to acquire it.

We solved the medical crisis of HIV far faster than we solved the psychological, emotional and sexual contradictions surrounding it.

As a long-term survivor, I sometimes feel like a time traveler trapped between two worlds: one that remembers the terror and one that barely remembers the war.

That feeling became the seed for my new novel,“The Unfrozen Few.” I imagined a group of AIDS patients from the late 1980s choosing cryogenic freezing rather than death, only to wake up in present-day America. They emerge into a world of smartphones, same-sex marriage, social media and medical breakthroughs, but also into a world that still doesn’t fully know what to do with people living with HIV.

In many ways, the frozen few are simply long-term survivors with the volume turned all the way up.

I think the dead would be amazed by how far we’ve come. And stunned by the ways we still haven’t.

Randy Boyd is a longtime HIV survivor, five-time Lambda Literary Award finalist and author of five novels, including ‘The Unfrozen Few,’ a speculative series about AIDS patients who were cryogenically frozen in the 1980s and awaken in present-day America. More information is available at randyboydauthor.com.