Mandy Gardner - Live or Die

 

So, I'm walking through the cemetery, and I have been for quite some time. I just assumed that there would be a sign that would point me to where she lay. She was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, but I found signs that pointed the way to Eugene O'Neill, but no Anne Sexton. I'd been walking around the cemetery for quite some time when I finally found a little guard shack. It was actually a little visitor center, but it was closed because it was Sunday, and the cemetery was mostly shut down that day. But I walked around the outside of the building. I had traveled all the way to Boston from my home in Atlanta and I really wanted to pay my respects, but I just couldn't find her.

 

So, I came upon the office and I found a door that was propped open by a mop bucket. I am not the kind of person who just breaks into places, [chuckles] I'd never done this before. But I'm staring at this mop bucket and I'm thinking about why I'm there. And why I'm there is because when I was in high school in the early 1990s in South Carolina, they didn't have a law that was about not talking about gay people, or the existence of queer or trans people, they just did it. The school board in my town actually banned the book The Grapes of Wrath, because it took the name of the Lord in vain. So, you can imagine there were no queer stories told at all.

 

So, when I was 15 years old and starting to realize that this was my life, I thought it meant that I was going to be lonely for the rest of my life, and then probably hell awaited me on the other side of that, because I had no other stories that told me anything different. So, like many other queer and trans kids, I had to go looking for my own stories that would give me some glimmer of what my future life might be like. Anne Sexton, who was not queer, she was a married lady, but she wrote poems about lesbian desire, about love. She wrote a poem called Song for a Lady, and put it in a book entitled Love Poems. And that little poem, that little scratch of a poem, was so beautiful. It gave me a little glimpse of intimacy, of actual happiness that I could aspire to one day. 

 

So, yeah, in my early 20s, when I had the opportunity and the money, I went to Boston and I went to go visit her grave, but I could not find her. So, yeah, I stepped over that mop bucket and I went inside that little office. Luckily, no alarms went off, and I found a guidebook and I stole it. [audience laughter] I ran outside, and there was a map in there, and it told me how to get there. So, I get to the grave and I'm disappointed again, because she committed suicide in 1974, which was one year before I was born. Her husband had apparently-- She was a confessional poet, she wrote about all kinds of taboo subjects. So, he had not put a line of her poetry on her grave. It's her name and her date of birth and death, and that is it. 

 

I recited some of her poetry and smoked a cigarette as a burnt offering to her, [audience chuckles] and then I was leaving. And just as I was leaving, an old sedan pulled up with four teenage boys inside of it. I immediately got tense, because I got bullied a lot by teenage boys and it's just a reaction that I still have. But the driver, he jumped out of the car, which made me a little more alarmed. I thought I was about to get mugged or gay-bashed, I wasn't sure which. But he just said, "Do you know the way to Sacco and Vanzetti's grave? We're here for a class project." [audience laughter]

 

I remembered that in this group, I was the thief, and I gave him the guidebook I had stolen in penance. [audience laughter] And then, he said, "Who are you here to see?" Anticipating a blank stare in response, I said, "Anne Sexton." And he said, "Anne Sexton? Is she here?" [audience laughter] He turns to the boys in the car, "Hey, guys, you remember those Anne Sexton poems we read in English class? [audience laughter] Anne Sexton, I fucking love her." [audience laughter] I remembered one of my favorite lines of Anne Sexton's poetry is, Live or die, just don't poison everything. [audience aww] I left there and I vowed to myself that I would always tell my story every opportunity that I got, because you never know whose life you might save, and you might even change the world.