The Future Is Now

       Sixty-two years ago, I was shepherded out of an elementary school classroom and into church to pray for the assassinated President Kennedy. Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind” was on the radio. In high school, I protested at Chicago’s Democratic National Convention.

      Fifty-two years ago, I bought a one-way ticket to New York to pursue my dream of becoming a dancer. I found community with other gay men, although we had no legal protections; we could be fired from jobs and evicted from apartments. Our sexual activity was criminalized. 

      Forty years ago, I managed Trisha Brown’s dance company with a rotary phone and rolodex. With press kits in my backpack and a Eurail pass I knocked on doors of theaters and opera houses across Europe introducing the company's work.

      Thirty-one years ago in Minneapolis, I was inundated with hate mail during the Culture Wars. The AIDS pandemic was obliterating an entire generation. My artwork eulogized and mourned. Later, complications from spinal surgery left me paraplegic.

      Twenty years ago, I worked in arts administration and philanthropy in San Francisco while creating disability-inflected videos and essays. I married my husband and rekindled a childhood love of Shetland ponies. With equine in tow, we moved to Vermont in 2010.

      Seven years ago, I retired from running the Flynn Center in Burlington and served two terms in the Vermont House of Representatives. Writing and media projects continue, along with exercise and daily chores at the barn. I am steeped in the realities of aging.

      In each of these decades, optimism raged during boom times as well as despair in downturns. While political, demographic and environmental forecasts appear dystopian, I am buoyed by the grass-roots resistance and resiliency experienced in my lifetime.

      As an artist, I learned to begin, and begin again—improving on what works, dropping what doesn’t, whether solo or as a collaborator. Failures and mistakes fuel advances. Cultural investments now will better prepare us for whatever cataclysmic catastrophes lay ahead.

      Even in the Trumpian hellscape of eliminating the arts, humanities, DEI initiatives and trans identities, I dream of diverse inclusive downtowns revitalized and people finding common ground through artistic engagement, children finding voice with arts education central in K-12 curriculum and artist soothsayers providing succor.

      The arts are where hope lives.

      I know artists will create vivifying metaphors, define space (real and imagined), commemorate losses and victories, and articulate the unconscious, engendering a safe space for unsafe ideas—a necessary role in a profane world.

      Five years from now, I will have reached my average life expectancy. Did I make a difference? What is my service today? These are my questions as I ponder coming times. In the near-term, if we do the hard and necessary work today, a society we conjure together will flourish.

      The future is now. Here’s to robust communities!

John R. Killacky is the author of “because art: commentary, critique, & conversation.”