I really don’t want to screw this up. When I received the email invitation to write this piece on behalf of Ryan J. Haddad, Danny Sharron, and Playwrights Horizons: I teared up — I did not feel given up on. In a way that I was genuinely concerned that I was given up on. The grief I feel in my body. From the way this Administration has affected the field and my involvement in it and the fear instilled within me that I won’t be touched for a very long time and I feel locked up because I don’t know what I am allowed to say lately. But now I’m activated. BEING SEEN IS ACTIVATING. Some Background Context on the History of our Relationship because I believe that’s why I’ve been asked to respond: Ryan held my face on stage after {my lingerie play}: that was how we first met. (Who carried him up those stairs of Rattlestick???) Ryan and I were in The Public Theater’s EWG together. I wrote the part of William F*cking Shakespeare for Ryan in My H8 Letter to the Gr8 American Theatre. Ryan read the inscription for the tree I planted for Queer Magic at the Harvard Arboretum for Clairvoyance. Infinite Love Party and Ryan’s Dark Disabled Stories, Our Bushwick Starr Babies. Our relationship is like a mushroom and it is medicine. These moments were all born from the heart. I want to retain my connection to my heart as much as I can during this time. Hold Me in the Water: I truly love this maturely erotic and scintillating title: I’m already primed for the release of floating in Ryan’s world that is so clearly an extension of his heart. Here is an artist who knows how to love and be loved. To share so authentically of himself so that everything and everyone can soften. And here he will be, with a sexual rigor. I navigate this invisible disability that very few know about that I spend most of my time masking. The stigmatism that is so very real. My nervous system feels wrecked lately and co-regulating with kindred others is what helps it. So I sit down in the Theatre to receive Ryan and his Art and I immediately tear up from the relief that RYAN IS BEING SO SLUTTY ON STAGE. I feel life-force rushing into my cheeks. I can feel his words sinking into my skin like teeth and I feel ALIVE. I feel the release of being dommed into submission by a vers. I feel like nothing is coming to hurt us and we get to watch Ryan love and allow himself to be loved. We get to watch Ryan be present with his experience: it is a True Bliss Point. How can we take care of ourselves through giving our hearts away? I meet Alison Kopit, the Access Dramaturg in the Lobby. The levels of care. The layers of what it takes to be held as an Artist, so that Audiences can be held too. The clarity with which Ryan is able to communicate his needs. Him being so lovingly held through this and it showing is a TRUE MIRACLE right now. I feel hope again in my chest. Our bodies need Justice: I learned this phrase from an unnamed woman who has started a YouTube channel called “Exiled and Rising.” Ryan and I run into each other in the elevator: for this I am so grateful, it feels like falling into each other: I am grateful for his weight, for the ways our necks find each other, we text each other at night, in the morning, throughout the week, I want to be a sexy gay man and give him the world, this is probably codependency, I freak out knowing that this writing is going to be published, I am scared, I am grateful, I want to be honest, I am so grateful to Ryan. For being so loving. CARE IS POSSIBLE and CARE IS HAPPENING right now. And we need his Art to show us what bodies deserve.