Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing up with the AIDS Crisis

BETWEEN CERTAIN DEATH AND A POSSIBLE FUTURE: AN INTRODUCTION

MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE

One time in 1985, when I was twelve, I remember standing in the checkout line at the supermarket with my mother when I glanced at the cover of the National Enquirer, and the headline screamed, ROCK HUDSON IS GAY.

Kids at school had always called me gay, it was an insult hurled at me as much as any other greeting. But I didn’t know exactly what this meant beyond not being sufficiently masculine until my first sex ed class, when the teacher described homosexual behavior. I remember holding my breath because I realized then that all the kids who taunted me were actually right. But how did they know before I knew?

So when I saw ROCK HUDSON IS GAY on the cover of the National Enquirer, I held my breath too. Who’s Rock Hudson, I asked my mother, as casually as possible, when she wasn’t facing the magazines anymore. A famous actor, my mother told me.

But actually, looking for that cover now, I realize it doesn’t say Rock Hudson is gay. It says he’s dying of AIDS. Were these the same thing? Kids had always called me gay and sissy and faggot—the best I could do to get away from them was befriend the girls, hide in books, excel in school, and try to be perfect so that everyone wouldn’t know I deserved to die. But then there was Rock Hudson dying on the cover of the National Enquirer, as if to prove it.

When I first started jerking off, I worried I might get AIDS from tasting my own come—I would study the texture, smell it on my hands, bring it almost up to my lips but not too close. I started having sex with men in public bathrooms when I was fourteen, almost every day after school, but I was trying not to feel it, what was happening between my legs. Maybe if I didn’t feel it, then I would win.

When I finally escaped to college, everyone knew I was queer, just like everywhere else, but suddenly this was okay. And the outsider image I’d cultivated in high school, now it worked. It drew people to me. But after spending a year mostly protesting against racist and classist admissions policies, I knew I needed to get further away from childhood and everything I was supposed to be. So I drove cross-country to move to San Francisco.

What I remember most from that drive was stopping at a rest area somewhere in the middle of the country where I’d never been and getting out of the car to throw out my trash—while I was stretching, the rest stop attendant came out wearing orange rubber gloves that went up to his elbows, pulled my trash out of the garbage can, and put it in a giant blue plastic bag that he immediately tied to dispose of elsewhere. You need to leave, he said, or I’m going to call the cops.

To be a nineteen-year-old faggot at a rest area in so-called middle America in 1992 meant you were a threat. What if someone got AIDS from your trash?

In San Francisco, I found dancing, drugs, and activism, in that order. I needed all three, but I especially needed activism. I knew that being queer meant everyone was dying, and ACT UP taught me to politicize my rage. ACT UP showed me that fighting AIDS meant fighting racism, classism, misogyny, and homophobia, all of them together, all of them at once, or else what was the point.

In San Francisco, I found the dykes and fags and gender-bending weirdos and other outsider queers like myself, vegans and dropouts and incest survivors, druggies and anarchists and freaks, sluts and whores and direct action activists. We needed one another to survive the world that told us we deserved to die—we broke down every day, in every way, but we believed we were creating something else. We needed to believe, in order to live.

This was a generational story, but I didn’t think of it this way, not yet. Because it was the only story I’d known. The idea for this anthology came about when I was on tour for my most recent novel, Sketchtasy, which follows a group of queens in Boston gay club culture in 1995, with all its pageantry and hypocrisy. Boston was where I lived after I fled San Francisco (and before I returned). When I started to write about 1995, I didn’t know this would be a novel about AIDS, but how could it not be, once I really went back to that time.

In 1995, more people in the United States died of AIDS than in any other year. From our current vantage point, we can see that something was about to change, that soon there would be medications that would make HIV into a manageable condition for many, but there was no way for me—or the characters in Sketchtasy—to imagine that then. So I realized that Sketchtasy was a generational novel about growing up knowing that desire meant AIDS meant death, that there was no other option. This generation that came of age in the midst of the crisis. The crisis was our lives.

Usually we hear about two generations—the first coming of age in the era of gay liberation, and then watching entire circles of friends die of a mysterious illness as the government did nothing to intervene. And now we hear about younger people growing up in an era offering effective treatment and prevention, and unable to comprehend the magnitude of the loss. We are told that these two generations cannot possibly understand one another and thus remain alienated from both the past and the future. But there is another generation between these two—one that came of age in the midst of the epidemic with the belief that desire intrinsically led to death, internalizing this trauma as part of becoming queer.

By telling this specific generational story in all its complications, how do we explore the trauma the AIDS crisis continues to enact, and imagine a way out? Could this offer a bridge between the other two generations?

When I first started to mention the idea for this anthology on social media, I didn’t know what to expect. But the response was electric. I was flooded by messages from people who told me they couldn’t wait for this book and people who told me they couldn’t wait to submit.

This is my sixth anthology, and I always start with an open call for submissions that I circulate as widely as possible. When I was writing the call for submissions this time, I was careful not to impose specific dates on the generational frame. Because I knew that this would vary depending on a wide variety of factors, including race, class, gender, religion, ethnicity, rural/urban experience, regional/national origin, HIV status, and access to treatment and prevention (over time and in shifting contexts). I knew that any generational frame only offers a partial truth, so I didn’t want to impose artificial boundaries. I wanted to put out the idea and see who responded.

I originally thought of this generational frame as including anyone who came of age sexually in the midst of the AIDS crisis and before the advent of effective treatment. But as soon as I started reading submissions the scope of the anthology expanded to include people who grew up well after the emergence of protease inhibitors but still felt like they were living between certain death and a possible future. So I decided that anyone who described a sex life before AIDS didn’t quite fit into this project, but I didn’t impose an end point.

Like any conditions for inclusion, this generational frame, however fluid, may be a fraught one. My goal is not to create a definitive text but to inspire even more stories, from even more angles. To facilitate more conversations. To deepen the analysis. To complicate the narratives.

As I was reading the submissions, I was flooded by my own memories, so many stories that I’d almost forgotten, hovering at the edge of my awareness. Especially memories about coming of age in San Francisco in the early ’90s—how AIDS was everywhere and how this was a given.

Now I think about how much shutting off was required, just to exist in day-to-day experience. You couldn’t express shock at everyone dying right in front of your eyes, because shock felt like a form of cruelty. So you would act like everything might be okay, even when nothing was okay.

You met some queen on the street, and she was showing off her lesions in a campy way, and then she was dead. You went to the beach with a group of people and some boy was flirting with you, and then you were asking around about him because there was that look in his eyes and you wanted to see that look again. But he was dead. Someone came over to look at a room in your apartment, this queen who wanted to do touch healing on everyone, and you were like, girl, get the fuck out. Then you would see her around on the street, and she was so friendly that you actually started to like her. And then she was dead. You slept with some boy who you knew was positive and he wanted to make it romantic, so he lit candles around the bathtub before you got in together, and a few weeks or months went by and you wondered what happened to him, but he was dead.

I didn’t go to memorials because I felt like I didn’t have a right to be there. I felt like I would be stealing other people’s grief. And this is a generational story too, I think, now, as I’m sobbing. We were coming of age in the midst of all this death. But we felt like it was not ours to mourn.

Now I wish I had gone to all those memorials. If there’s one thing I want this anthology to do, it’s to open up the possibilities for feeling, for feeling everything. Grief is not something you can steal. You can silence it, yes, and I think that’s what our culture has done—dominant culture, gay culture, queer and trans cultures. The grief has been internalized, and the consequences have been devastating—intimately, interpersonally, culturally, and communally.

I’ve included thirty-six essays in this anthology. I could have included many more. In this introduction, I could attempt to summarize each of the essays, but I’d rather allow them to exist in all their complications. I will say this—every time I read through these pieces, I find myself overwhelmed by emotion in surprising places, even after the work has become familiar, from reading it over and over. I can’t predict what you will feel, but I can predict that you will feel. Maybe it will be grief, or rage, or loss, or laughter, or longing, or curiosity, or inspiration, or empathy, or craving—expansion or contraction, devastation or catharsis, connection or confusion, revelation or confirmation. Or all of these at once.

Let’s talk about everything, so we can feel everything. Let’s feel it all, so our future remains possible.

What Survival Means

KEIKO LANE

FEBRUARY 1991

It’s already dark when I drive into West Hollywood. I circle around until I find parking on a residential side street. Walking toward Santa Monica Boulevard, I hear the chanting before I turn the corner.

We’re here! We’re queer! And we’re FABULOUS!

I can hear counter-yelling but not the words. As I round the corner onto Santa Monica, I see where the noise was coming from: Wayne, Cory, Judy, Kate, and about a dozen other queers covered in bright crack-and-peel stickers form a human wall protecting the front of A Different Light bookstore from about a half dozen protestors carrying signs that say, Sinner Repent, God Hates Fags, and, in unintentionally ironic tonal juxtaposition, Jesus Loves You.

I stand on the corner, watching, until Cory looks up and sees me. He waves and reaches his hand out toward me. I run over and hug him hello, then hug Kate and Judy.

Welcome to Friday Night Fundies, Cory says.

Fundies?

Fundamentalists. They’re from Calvary Chapel in Orange County.

Yeah, I know Calvary Chapel. My friends and I had come across this same fundamentalist Christian congregation on many Saturday mornings, as they worked with Operation Rescue to try to sabotage and close abortion-providing women’s health clinics, and we tried to keep them open.

Cory tells me that Calvary Chapel has been sending members of its congregation to harass queers as they walk along the sidewalks between Micky’s and Rage, two of the main clubs in the heart of West Hollywood, and A Different Light, the gay and lesbian bookstore.

For a few hours we walk parallel to the fundies as they move along the sidewalk between the bookstore and the bars. There are enough of us to form a tight line toward the street side of the sidewalk, keeping space clear between the sidewalk and the storefronts. Wayne passes out condoms to the queers walking in and out of the clubs.

A broad-shouldered Chicano queer with bright pink hair wearing a shirt so covered with stickers that I can’t tell what color the fabric is introduces himself as Pete. Cory told me about you.

I raise my eyebrows at Pete. What did he tell you?

That a new ass-kicking teenage dyke had just joined Queer Nation.

I turn my back to the fundies to face Pete, looking at him as he smiles at me. I’m trying to think of a smart response, but I can’t distinguish sweet teasing from what feels like strange, unnameable pressure. Before I can respond, Pete’s eyes cloud over.

One of the fundies, an older man, is coming up behind me, waving a Bible right at me, coming closer, fast. I turn around to face the man as Pete pivots to stand between me and the fundie, who continues waving his Bible. I realize that he is yelling at me. It’s not too late! Save yourself! Come join us!

I’m stunned. He’s still yelling. Repent! Sinner, repent! I have faced off with these people before but defending clinics, protecting a space, ensuring access for other women. They have never targeted me as an individual. I’m frightened. He’s so loud.

Something in me, some bit of calmness or distance breaks off, and I feel my anger. Taking a deep breath, I step out from behind Pete and stand next to him, planting my feet firmly on the sidewalk. I am saving myself! I yell back.

Sinner! he starts yelling at me, even more outraged. He lifts his Bible up over his head, yelling louder as he takes a step closer to me.

Pete moves back in front of me, straightening his spine, raising himself up on the full height of his boots, his arms stretched out, the neon-red light from the club behind us making his pink hair glow, taking up as much space as he can, making himself twice as big as the fundie, and keeping me safe behind the reach of his arms. You can’t have our young people! Pete yells as loudly as he can. People driving past slow down to watch. You’re already destroying your young people! Pete continues. Stay the fuck away from ours!

The fundie takes a step back and is enfolded by his circle of people. Pete turns back to me. Kate, Wayne, and Cory appear next to me. I’m fine, I tell them, but I’m trembling.

Yeah? Kate puts her fingers under my chin, tilts my head up under the streetlamp and the glare of the neon bar sign, and looks me in the eye. Really?

Really. Fine. And I am. Trembling from adrenaline, but the rush of fear has shifted into something brighter, hopeful. I am standing up for myself.

Twenty minutes after the protest ends, I pull the car up to the curb in front of Millie’s Cafe on Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake. The waitress, arms tattooed, nose and eyebrows pierced, waves toward the open tables in the small room, then smiles and nods slightly as her eyes scan the neon stickers on Cory’s shirt. We find a table against the wall. Over salads, we’re telling stories about where we came from and how we got to Queer Nation and ACT UP. Cory tells me that he’s been sick for a few years. ARC, though, not AIDS, he says. He’s playing with his fork, twisting a piece of a spinach stem from his salad. He looks far away. I haven’t been that sick, he continues. Not yet. Maybe I won’t be. Maybe there will be a cure. He looks up at me. I don’t yet know how to read the expression in his eyes. Hope. Irony. A dare.

There are so many things I want to say. That of course there will be a cure. That he’ll be fine. That we’ll … That we’ll what? Make it through this together? Everyone? I want to have something useful to say, but I don’t. He’s sitting across the little table from me, my new friend whom I am so quickly starting to adore. Maybe there will be a cure.

Do you really think so? I ask him.

No. He puts his fork down and sighs. They don’t care about us enough to find a cure. The faggots and the whores and the drug users. Yeah, I know, not only us. But visibly only us. We’re expendable.

I want to argue with him. I don’t want to believe him. Except that I do believe him. I just don’t want it to be true. I’m looking out the window at Sunset Boulevard. We’re just down the street from the women’s clinic where we gather some Saturday mornings to wait for notice of where Operation Rescue has sent people to shut down other health clinics. We jump into cars and race to the far corners of LA County to keep the clinics open. I know that ACT UP has organized similar kinds of actions to keep open the AIDS ward at County Hospital and to open the Chris Brownlie Hospice in the hills a few miles away. But those demonstrations weren’t about the fundies. That would have been easier. They were about the LA County government. And the federal government. I look back across the table at my friend.

I don’t regret any of it, Cory says to me, sitting taller, straightening his spine.

Any of what?

Sex. Living. Love. Survival.

I wonder what it would feel like not to have regrets. I can only imagine it by keeping still, by not taking risks. But I have already broken the silence, my silence, yelling back at the fundies. I can still feel the vibration in my throat. I don’t think I’ve ever yelled that loud.

What are you thinking? he asks me.

I stare at him. I can’t figure out how to tell him what I’m feeling, the gut sensation that I am betraying something my family has worked for, just by sitting with him in the little Silver Lake diner where I have spent so much time with student organizer friends, planning demonstrations against the Gulf War, or US military involvement in El Salvador, passing mostly unnoticed. He has a bright green Queer Liberation Not Assimilation sticker on his chest.

It’s the sticker. I put my fork down, giving up on my salad, and push my plate away.

What about it?

The Okinawan dance, at least in my family, has been about how to maintain cultural values about right and wrong but also go unnoticed, assimilate. To draw attention to difference is to be at risk.

At risk for what? He pushes his plate away. We’re delighted by the challenge of each other, energized, eyes shining, smiling as we work it out, out loud.

At risk for everything. I think back to the stories of Internment, families rounded up and imprisoned for months in the holding pens in converted stalls at the racetrack before being shipped to Manzanar. I flash back to choreographer Mehmet Sander’s quarantine enactment at Highways Performance Space on World AIDS Day and tell Cory about that night. Sander rounded up the whole room of us there for the overnight vigil, wordlessly herding us from room to room so that we felt the panic and helplessness that comes with loss of autonomy.

Cory listens to me, his eyes tearing up when I tell him about the push-pull I feel between rebelling and freezing. He takes a deep breath before speaking. Do you really think that they don’t hate us if we don’t stick out? They just don’t notice. So we live in fear and they get to be in charge through their obliviousness and we don’t know who might stand up for us. With us. When they notice they hate us, or they don’t hate us, but we know it, know where we stand. And we don’t spend our energy hiding. And when we hide, we have a harder time finding each other. What if it’s the Okinawan in you that connected you to queer rebellion?

I’m silenced by this idea. Keep talking, I say, my breath catching a little, excited and scared of what might come next.

Cory continues more emphatically. Any form of survival is an act of rebellion when they don’t want us to survive. It doesn’t matter if it is silence or screaming. That’s the thing; our survival is the rebellion. Our bodies are always on the line. Always at risk, whether it’s infection or quarantine.

And so, I say, picking up where he left off, trying it out, we put our bodies on the line for each other, for ourselves. It could always be any of us. It isn’t just an idea. It’s our experience as bodies in the world.

Both of us are teary. At some point in the conversation we had reached for each other’s hands, and now our fingers are interlocked on top of the table. We keep them there as the waitress clears the remains of our salads. We’re quiet for a few minutes, taking each other in. I feel the heat of his palm, the cooler, soft tips of his fingers.

AUGUST 1991

A summer night, warm, even with the breeze coming through the open window on top of the hill. There’s a sheet pulled halfway up our naked, post-sex bodies. We were rough with each other in ways that usually work, the muscularity of struggle and strain. Erotic as a reminder of aliveness. Arms pinned. Knees bruising the inside of a thigh. Hard teeth against the back of a neck. Languageless precision of bodily attunement. When it doesn’t work, we pull away, annoyed. Without words.

We’re both irritable, trying to settle into sweetness. Cory is unbraiding and rebraiding my hair. He tugs the loose strands down, tucking them into the braid, and I flip the braid back up, away from my neck in the heat. We had stopped at the hospital earlier. Robert has been admitted again. Wade was there, hanging out with Gabe, keeping him company, but when we walked in Wade didn’t look much better than Robert. Robert stayed asleep the whole time we were there. None of us said much. Gabe and I held hands. Cory sat on the side of Robert’s bed with Wade. Wade looked like he was fading, so I rubbed the knots that I could from the tight sinew of his neck. Save your energy for him, Wade murmured, though it didn’t occur to me until later that I didn’t know which of the other hims Wade meant. Gabe eventually shooed us away, saying that he was going to spend the night and we should go home to rest. Cory and I walked out with Wade and kissed him good night before heading home.

Now here we are. In bed, talking about Wade and Robert.

Will he get better? I ask Cory.

Who, Robert? Or Wade?

Well. I consider the question. Either. Both.

Yeah, they’ll get better. A little, for a while. But you do know it will get worse.

How much worse? I can’t imagine it.

We’re nowhere near the end.

I’m quiet, thinking about Robert, already in pain, already getting a little confused, Wade looking too thin and pale, his brown hair falling limply around his eyes. And Cory isn’t feeling well. He won’t talk about it, not really, but he’s a little out of breath, a little tired, and he’s had a headache for a few days. He skipped an ACT UP committee meeting that he’d said he was coming to and snapped at me that he had gotten busy when I asked about it.

In our restlessness, Cory gets up and fusses with the stereo. He plays a Diamanda Galás cassette loud and gets back into bed. She’s too much for my nervous system, and I’m having a hard time settling. After a few minutes I get out of bed and turn her off. I fiddle around with the radio until I find the jazz station, with Ella Fitzgerald singing I’ve Got You under My Skin. We both hum along with her a little.

Hey, Cory says, softly, tracing the side of my face with his fingers.

You want me to switch the music? I ask and start to get up.

No, stay. I like her.

Okay. What?

I want to show you something. I mean, I want to tell you about something. But I don’t know if you—he takes a slow breath, lets it out—if you want to know.

I look at him. I have no idea what he’s talking about.

The pills. I want to show you where they are.

Pills? Your meds? I know where your meds are. Do you need me to get something for you?

Not those pills. The other pills. He looks at me, waiting for me to catch on.

I feel a glimmer of recognition, and then it slips away. I shake my head.

You know, the pills. The ones. Enough of them.

Oh. I stare at him, trying to find words.

You don’t know how bad it gets. Can get. Will get. You haven’t seen it, he says, sitting up in bed. I don’t want that. I don’t want to be stuck in the hospital. I don’t want to not have control over what happens. I want to make my own decisions.

And one of those decisions …

Yes.

I nod, slowly. And you want me to …?

Help me. Cory took my hand.

How will I know?

You won’t have to. I’ll know.

Then what will you need me for?

Not to be alone.

You’re not alone.

What?

You’re not alone. I take a breath. I can feel my heart start to race, the edge of panic. Of wanting to convince him of something.

What do I have? Who do I have? He looks at me warily, like he’s tired and disappointed.

What about the story you told me? That you all borrow each other’s T cells whenever someone has something important to do and needs a little extra boost? Just that checking in on each other. Doesn’t that account for something? Everyone loves you. And you have me. I’m talking faster in my panic. From a distance, I feel my body pulling farther back from his body.

That’s what I’m asking. If I have you. He looks at me steadily. We’re both quiet for a minute.

I try to slow myself down. How will I know that you’ll be right? How will you know?

Cory looks away from me. I’ll just know.

But how? I insist. I can feel myself starting to panic again, starting to argue.

I just will. You won’t have to. I will.

I let go of his hand and cross my arms so he won’t feel me shaking. We argue about it a little more.

You want me to decide, I say flatly.

No. He’s frustrated.

How is it anything else?

I want you to help me. I don’t want to be alone. I close my eyes. Not yet, I whisper.

He takes my hand back. Not yet. He repeats my words back, as though they should soothe me. When it’s time. It isn’t time yet.

I exhale shakily. I can’t imagine it being time. I can’t imagine it feeling clear.

You want to love me? This is what it means to love me.

I hear him say it, and I don’t know how to reconcile it. I think I understand how it is love, but I can’t imagine that it will feel like love. I feel my love for him as the desire to always hold him close, safe. To never let go.

I let go of his hand. Then I get up and start pacing.

Come sit, he says. I sit on the bed, then pick up my clothes from the floor and stand up to put them back on. He sighs and gets up, pulls on his jeans and an Infected Faggot T-shirt. Come on.

Where are we going?

Walking.

I follow him down the long stairway and out onto Echo Park Avenue. As we approach the park, I hear the sound of water moving though the filtration system of the artificial lake. We walk around the lake, silent, listening to the sounds of the urban park at night. I see the silhouettes of ducks and geese in sleep poses on the steep banks.

I’ve never been in this park after dark. As a little kid, my parents used to take me here. We’d bring any leftover bread and feed the ducks at the lake’s edge. I’d laugh as they swarmed around us, trying to steal the bits of bread from my little hands. The paddleboats are tied to the docks of the boathouse. Sometimes we’d come and pedal around the lake. I close my eyes and remember the first time I was old enough to reach the pedals.

We walk toward the northern edge of the lake. Toward the lotus in the moonlight. But moonlight is strange in Los Angeles. We want to think it’s moonlight. That’s the story we tell ourselves. But it isn’t the moon. It’s houses. The streetlamps glaring down on us, catching us in the cross fire as they mean to illuminate the junkies and the sex workers, to discourage nighttime cruising and sex in the bushes.

We sit in silence by the path at the edge of the lake. Behind us is a large patch of bushes and, beyond that, the bridge onto the small island at the northeastern side of the lake, lined with tall reeds and trees. As we sit in our silence, I begin to tune in to the sounds around us. To really listen to them. For them. In urban Echo Park, when we hear rustling in bushes near us, we don’t think of bears, or of cougars, or even of the coyotes that come down from the dry hills late at night searching for food, for water. We think of sex, we think of cruising, we think of not having other places to go, or of wanting the internal feeling of risk amplified or matched by the external risk of violence.

If you don’t want to, then say no, Cory says. Say it out loud. Don’t just nod and hope it doesn’t come to it. It will come to it.

I turn my attention away from the tall reeds and back to him.

What if it doesn’t?

Don’t do that.

What?

Make me take care of you.

How am I making you take care of me?

By making me pretend that it will be all right.

There’s nothing left for me to say. There is everything left to say, but no words come. I reach for Cory’s hand and we sit together, quietly. Gradually, our stiff bodies soften toward each other again and we lean shoulder to shoulder. Finally, the breeze is starting to cool the air.

We listen to the sounds of intimacies around us and feel closer in their wake. And in our closeness, I feel the impossible distance between his story and mine. It’s the strangest of queer intimacies, this blurring of desire and death and negotiation of risk. Not the cruising around us but the risk of having to let go.

Under the gritty yellowed light, the lotus blossoms glow. There’s a moan and a quick hush from the darkness behind us. We listen to the kinds of joy that remain possible. Even in what we grow up thinking are the darkest places.

Surviving My Cousin

BRYAN M. HOLDMAN

She got a man living in the basement.

That’s how my cousin Demetrius—Dee, we called him—greeted me one summer, in the mid-’80s, as I fetched my luggage from under the Greyhound bus in Colorado Springs. My sister and I were there for a week to visit Mamaw, our grandmother. Dee had been living there the entire summer; his warm brown eyes and wide, toothy smile told me he was eager for our company.

Back home, I spent my playtime with my sister and our girl cousins. But at Mamaw’s, Dee and I were a pair. Sent outdoors to play all day. Plopped in a soapy tub to wash off the outside. Getting our Afros cornrowed and our scalps Afro-Sheened. Through it all, Dee always had an objective—like drinking the entire pitcher