Another lost idea

My sketchbook often becomes the resting place for all the ideas that roll around my head. For example, this image depicts a story that I originally thought of as a response to the AIDS crisis that was prevalent through the Nineteen Eighties and Nineties. I know for one, working at a gay bookstore through the early Nineties, gay men were not really looking for stories about living with AIDS. We always sold more porno than literature at the bookstore. Too many men were already living with HIV and preferred to come to the bookstore as a way to escape, not be reminded of their illness. By the late-Nineties mainstream publishers were beginning to recognize there was a gap in gay literature that was vaguely "AIDS-shaped" and began publishing books like Micheal Cunningham's A Home at the End of the World.

Anyway, my story was going to be about a young drag queen who, before he dies, gives his trunk of dresses and scrapbooks to the volunteer who befriends him in the hospice where he's attempting to recover. She is naive and is emerging herself as a whole person, into a world where the consequences of your actions determine what happens to you. In the process of the story she would meet an older man who she has sex with and then has to become a single mother because she does not want to marry. Year's later her son discovers the trunk in the attic and asks her about it. She then discovers her own son has an affinity for cross-dressing.

I have to admit, I didn't take the scenario very seriously. It is overly sentimental and dramatic without really tying the relationships together, save the memory trunk. For me, I was more interested in the drag queen who dies than the young woman who seemed to me wanting to take over the story. I knew it wouldn't go anywhere, but it is still here as an image in my sketchbook, just in case I change my mind and attempt to turn it into something more than just an idea.