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About this episode

http://le-too.blogspot.comShe saved my life. I do not know if she sees herself as a dancer or not but she is one.I was drowning then. In a lot of things. In the fragments one piece at a time. Way, way, way over my head. Lost in this morass of a thing I did not know how to escape from.Did it have to do with another guy. It usually did back then. I don't give them that power anymore. I am content with how things are. My marriage is different. My relationships are different.Because I have constructed the choreography of it to be different because it fits.At sixteen, all I knew was this: the only way to get out of the situation was to get the hell out of Dodge. But I was sixteen. Most of you guys in Cinematheque left home before you were sixteen. More than a few of you were thrown out on your ear into the street. Leaving home at sixteen was a daunting idea to me back then. I didn't see any way out. So I blew my guts out with a shot gun.Now, there was a way out. Most suicide attempts are exactly that. Out. Out. Out.The first night in that hospital room, I vaguely felt her presence. Through the Demerol I knew she was in the room or her spirit was. You see, she has a very strong presence and she's very tall. She moved like a gazelle back then.I will call her AKS because I don't want the Internet stalkers who follow me around bothering her and they would. AKS will do. It is the least I owe her.The hatred that follows me around on the Internet is hatred I would rather have focused and directed at me than any of the people I love or a single one of the "at-risk" boys I work with.The recovery from the wounds took a while. She was there for me.She would visit me in the hospital. She wanted to talk. I wanted to dance. It hurt to dance but all dancers know pain is nothing.Survival took on many forms, wore many masks. I became a dancer. I danced on stage.My family did not know I was doing this. I had to hide it.My dad was a violent man. A man of fists and guns. Our family hid it like so many families do. But he would beat me to within an inch of my life. I cannot even begin to count the number of times he almost killed me. You measured up to his standards as a man or you didn't. I would be a dancer. We all know what that means, right. No dancer was going to live in my father's house. That ability to move to the music allowed me to leave the shell Tim Barrus lived in where he was afraid of Maynard.To survive, I danced. To work the pain out. Just out. Out. Out.Now that these people are all dead, I don't feel compelled to hide it. Or anything. My entire life is out there. Nevertheless, I read about what other people say and write about my life, and, frankly, I have no fucking idea who they're talking about.I pretended I had a job and that I also went to school. This was disingenuous. I was enrolled in high school but I almost never went there.In fact, to get me OUT of their hair, they simply graduated me. I was a LOT of trouble.No one knew I had this Other Life.The menial job I was supposed to have did not exist. Most of my time was spent in choreography and practice. People at Michigan State University thought I was a dance student. Often, I was the one teaching them.We choreographed Macbeth once for the drama department which staged the play outside. All of this took me away from the guy who haunted me.We also set Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf to dance. All male cast, no less. Every now and then, my path and AKS' path would cross. Antiwar was thick as blood.The draft board didn't want me. They said my wounds were too extensive. I didn't exactly tell them about the dancing.What surprises me about dance (still) is how you're really not connecting to the other dancers, even when paired.I tried that but there was really no one who wanted to be connected to. So you tended to simply connect to your own physical self. You could lose yourself in all that movement.You know. Two of you are professional dancers now. Yes, even with HIV.The one time I connected with the Other Dancer was when AKS came over to my house. I was married now and we lived in our own place.I was alone that day. AKS drives up. Comes into the house. We didn't articulate anything. We just danced, we connected, and she left.We went and lived our lives.I continued to dance. I wrote. I published. I had a kid.I am a grandfather now and good at it.She adopted. I caused scandals (everywhere I went, usually). I still feel fervently about demanding change. I do demand it. Lately, from publishing. I was deeply involved in gay politics in California. Then the UN. Then photography. I still cause trouble. Sometimes a lot of it.I taught in special education. I worked in psychiatric hospitals on intensive care units with adolescents. Often, I would get a lot of information from them in terms of how they moved. I taught dance to deaf children.Dancers know.I traveled around the world. A lot. I started working with boys with HIV/AIDS. We dance. Cinematheque is scattered now: Paris, Italy, the UK, LA, NYC.The work is a challenge and a struggle. You know that.It comes with a lot of pain. Pain is nothing to a dancer.My wife and I love to dance. Late at night on a beach is good.I went to live among the Apache. Then, the Navajo. My heart is still somewhere in the desert. I was exiled from America.I live in exile, but I am always moving. I own one bag and a service dog. That is all I own. If it can't fit into my bag, I don't want it. I own one change of clothes. I am connected to technology, but it has to be very small. My camera is smaller than the palm of my hand. It ALL has to fit into the bag which is always with me. I now carry one paintbrush. I sell my paintings or sometimes I give them away.Having had both hips replaced, the dancing is different now. With Avascular Necrosis and my shoulders riddled with hairlines fractures, it's harder to lift my arms up, and forget about lifting a ballerina because it isn't going to happen, and I'm too old to be on a traditional stage anymore anyway.The pain in the shoulders only is. There have been times when I have had to pick my pup, Isabella, up, and I manage okay.I remarried and then I remarried. Once, about twenty years ago, AKS called it the Writing Life. For some, it is exactly that.I was living in San Francisco the last time we connected. This time drowning but drowning in a sea of death and AIDS. Everyone I know from that time is dead and I knew a lot of people.About every twenty years, I try to connect with AKS again. I find her. She responds. It is not unlike this dance we do. Touch. Respond. Connect.I had an epiphany last night. Fritz used to call them AHA moments. I was thinking about AKS as a healer, which she is. And then I realized Isabella is a heeler, too. The name is apt. Blue heeler. I have to start spelling it blue healer.I wasn't sure I would hear from AKS; I reached out -- she's famous now -- I am only infamous, but I heard from her this morning. Maybe I reached out because we went dancing last night and my strained muscles feel good with it. There's always somewhere to dance in New York. I am writing this at La Guardia. We are headed off to Los Angeles to see two of the Cinematheque guys dance in the company they work with.I wanted to respond to her.I could just send another email. But no.So, Tim, what is it about. I am not conflicted, here. It's about movement. Not necessarily on a stage, but in a life. Not necessarily on a jet at 30,000 feet but in a life on the ground. Fragment to fragment. Movement. Connection. Movement.I wanted to blend together in the video below things that move because the human body and the lives humans live move, too. Sometimes they even connect even when we're like ships that slip through the darker waters of the even darker night. From fragment to fragment, the obliquity of selves and all the selves, we move, we stretch, we do not stay who we were. Those selves are now illusions and cocoons we've shed. Neverthess, fragment to fragment, we remember.Let me construct a video that might speak to the past twenty years. She'll get it.There are only four words to say what I am feeling. I have missed you. This video says it better than I can.In this narrative of images "the audience" will see a shadow spreading its arms and reaching just like she did.She connected. It takes some courage to spend a life doing that.Suicide is a part of the HIV terrain we dance through at Cinematheque. It happens. We are always attempting to come to terms with it. One theory (one I subscribe to) is that a heavy viral load is exactly that.You are carrying a load that weighs you down. It isn't psychological. It IS a weight and it can be measured. This is why it's so important that we take care of ourselves. To lighten that weight.When I was in Paris, it was Pascal who was hospitalized from his suicide attempt. Tristan came close enough. Now, Damiano.I was not there. But we have spent a lot of time and energy tending to your communication skills and you DID handle it. Not only that, you did it well.You see, YOU are Cinematheque. I am only the teacher. You handled it WELL and I am proud of you. Damiano will survive.Survival is not unlike this dance we do juxtaposed against the struggle. AKS and I are far apart geographically just like I am far from France at the moment. Nevertheless, we do this thing together.I don't know if "the audience" for this can actually tell where I'm in it doing my thing.But I am in there. In my jeans and shoes. Twirling.Fragment to fragment. The dancers and the dance. -- Tim Barrushttp://le-too.blogspot.com

• Release Date

  Jan 17, 2009

• Runtime

  04:26