Shortly after midnight on June 28, 1969, eight policemen raided a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in New York City’s Greenwich Village. There was no particular reason for the bust. Like ingesting doughnuts, hassling gays was a routine part of their day. That was about to change, because for the first time, they gay men fought back.

It was a warm summer night, and the commotion attracted a crowd that turned into an angry mob that began throwing rocks and bottles, burning trashcans and shouting, “Gay power.” By the time the protests had ended, the number of people demonstrating outside Stonewall was in the thousands and a new movement was born.

Among those watching the action was a longtime neighborhood activist named Jim Fouratt, a gay man, who had been a close friend of Abbie Hoffman and the person most responsible for the seminal Central Park Be-in of 1967. Instinctively, Fouratt knew the moment was at hand for gays to step up, as blacks and women were actively doing, and demand — not ask — for their civil rights. That week, with Fouratt and others leading the way, the Gay Liberation Front was born. 

The Village’s hidden parks, a perfect place for an interview on this warm June afternoon, even with the occasional roar from a passing truck. As we sit down, he shows me one of the CDs he has been carrying. It’s Eminems’s The Marshall Mathers LP. While he admires its craft, he finds its homophobia extremely disturbing. It occurs to me that it is remarkable that someone  his age knows about, much less listens to something like that, but Jim’s youthfulness is not only in his appearance — it’s in his outlook as well.

I am eager to hear from Fouratt about his extraordinary work as Jim Fouratt, the activist, not necessarily Jim Fouratt, the gay activist. And as a former record company executive, he’s also a real music buff. It’s great fun to just sit around and talk rock and roll.

We get together twice. The second interview deals mostly with two topics that are so important to Jim’s consciousness: gay liberation and AIDS. Both subjects bring tears to his eyes. 

My mother was 15 when I was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She had run away from a convent school from Fall River, Massachusetts with my father, who was 20 years older than she was. He was a carny man with the circus.

My Mom left my father when I was very young. We went to the state of Washington and then to Rhode Island, so she could take care of her father. When I was around six, she married a man who was a short order cook. I didn’t see my father again for years until the 1960s, when my name was in the paper a lot. By then, he was a bookie, and he wanted to tell me how to live my life. I wasn’t interested in hearing it.

My family wasn’t political. My stepfather had served in World War II, at the age of 15. He and my mom were good people. I remember watching the Kefauver hearings [hearings into organized crime in America, run by Sen. Estes Kefauver] and the McCarthy hearings. There was an ad that said, “One Million Americans Stand Up for Joe McCarthy.” The ad gave you a number to call. I didn’t know any different. I thought I would be civic, so I called it, and they sent me these petitions, and I went around this neighborhood trying to get people to sign it, and nobody would. When my mother found out, she was mortified, and she ripped it up. I think my whole life has been retribution for that.

I was a good student. I was a regular on a public affairs television show about the U.N., and I was active in Junior Achievement, which taught me how to be a good capitalist. At our annual dinner in 1959, the keynote speaker was Robert Welch, who was head of the John Birch Society. I had won the salesman of the year with my French salad dressing.

I was very social. I was a great date. I was a good dancer. I didn’t try to fuck the girls, so they liked me. This was the ‘50s when “nice girls didn’t.”                   

In high school, there was one teacher who was kind to me in a mentoring way. He was an English teacher. It was very hard for me to write, and I liked to read even though it was difficult. I didn’t know I was dyslexic until much later. This teacher recognized all of these things, and he showed me that it was okay to find my own way and my own voice. Of course, he was gay, although never did I know that, but I think he recognized this gay kid, like good gay teachers do. They mentor, they don’t seduce.

I graduated around the time of Pope John XXXIII [a Pope who liberalized many of the Church’s rules and practices]. I had a very intense religious awakening, and I decided to join the priesthood, which was where many homosexuals went historically. I chose an order in Baltimore that had a priest named Father O’Connor who was known as the “Jazz Priest,” because he dealt with jazz musicians. Their other priest went to Hollywood. I loved show business, so I figured that was the place for me.    

I think I realized I was gay, but I still didn’t know what that meant. I used to hitchhike a lot. I got a lot of blow jobs, but I was never gonna do any of that myself. I didn’t feel that being gay was wrong, but maybe I realized I had to get away because I couldn’t be like that in my neighborhood.

At the seminary, there was an English teacher who was very protective. He would have this coded talk with me, about how I would have to be careful. At the time, a scandal erupted about two seminarians who were found to be in a homosexual relationship. Rather than apologizing, they had justified it on a theological basis with John the Apostle and universality of love. As a result, there was a panic in the order about homosexuality.      

Once a month, we got fifty cents to go into town. One night I went to the public library where they were having a beatnik poetry reading. There was this incredibly handsome poet with long blonde hair who was reading. Afterward, I had sex with him, and he gave me crabs. I didn’t know what crabs were. I went to the head of the seminary, and he explained it to me and asked me how I got it, and I blamed the nuns. 

There was another student who I used to make fun of because of his “anatomical shortcomings.” I was ruthless about it because he was such a rigid prick. I had collected some nude photos of men as an art project, and this guy found out about it and reported me. They asked me if I was a homosexual, and I told the truth. I was immediately put on a bus with $25 and sent home.        

This was 1961. I got off the bus in New York City. I started walking around Greenwich Village, and I saw this golden-haired man, who was carrying a bible, cross the street. I followed him back to his apartment, and he became my first boyfriend.

There weren’t any gay bars in those days, but on the corner was Julius’s. Everybody said they went there for the hamburgers, and nobody was gay —  until they had a couple of drinks. In the afternoon, it became a sort of literary salon. Some of the people around the area went on to become very famous. Some people went on to die. And some people just went on, and nobody knows where they are.         

In New York in the early 60s, the Bohemian culture was an underground culture that welcomed a lot of people who were not allowed into mainstream society. We had blacks and whites living together, a lot of gay men, a few gay women, jazz. Rent was cheap. You did what you had to do to survive, which usually meant working enough weeks to qualify for unemployment, so you then could work on your art. To support myself as an actor, I worked at Eastern Airlines as a reservations clerk. Then I got fired because the CEO, a World War I flying hero named Colonel Eddie Rickenbacker, didn’t want homosexuals working there.         

In my acting class was this German woman. She and I were supposed to do a scene together, but she wanted to get a little atmosphere first. She said, “I’m going to a meeting in Times Square. Why don’t you meet me there?”         

That meeting was the first anti-Vietnam demonstration in the United States. I was arrested, along with numbers of other people. They said I was running down the middle of the street shouting obscenities and blocking traffic and attacking pedestrians. None of that was true. There were a number of gentlemen in suits with little tiny things on their lapels, literally chasing us. I didn’t know who they were, so I ran. Now, I’m a little guy and I could run fast. Big mouth and quick feet. I got tackled and thrown to the ground by men who turned out to be secret service agents.        

This was in 1963. Forty three of us were arrested. There was a CBS television crew that documented my arrest. Their film showed everything. I was on the sidewalk. I was chased by people I didn’t know, and I was thrown to the ground and arrested. But I thought, “You tell the truth and everything works out fine.” The cop gets on the stand, lies through his teeth and I’m found guilty. You ask me if I had a radicalizing experience. That was it. I had told the truth. They couldn’t subpoena the film because the FBI had taken it. I got five days probation. From that point on I never believed the cops.         

A few years later, I got so sick from hepatitis, I nearly died. In the hospital, I let my hair grow. When I came out, the hippies were just starting, so I just became a hippie. I was doing whatever scam I could to make a living. Sometimes, I got acting jobs. On a television show called East Side West Side, I had a recurring role, playing drugged out hippies.         

I was really into rock and roll. In the ‘50, I would listen to Alan Freed’s Rhythm and Blues Review at night with the radio under my pillow. The music took me to another world out of our little working class pink house.

I’d go to rock and roll shows at the Loew’s Theater in downtown Providence, and on the bill would be Ruth Brown, the Flamingos, Lavern Baker, the Del Vikings, Buddy Johnson, Clyde McPhatter, Dinah Washington and the Platters. They would come on one after another, and the music was sexy and passionate and because it was still relatively unknown, dangerous.

I had a friend who knew Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager. When the Beatles came to Carnegie Hall, I got backstage, and I ended up taking them to the Peppermint Lounge, which was a hot club then. We all ended up back at the Plaza, and I ended up in bed with one of them.

Around that time, the Diggers started in San Francisco, and I thought we should start a Diggers in New York. Like the Diggers did, we created a “Communications Company” to put out a street paper. A friend called and said the Village Voice was throwing out their Gestetner printing press. He said, “I will leave the door open. If you can get people over here at nine o’clock tonight, you can take it,” so we did.

All these kids from the local schools would steal paper from where they worked and bring it to me, so whenever the police did something, or whenever there was an activity, we would get out the word. We could write and print something up in ten minutes. I had a list of about 20 people who would come right over and help drop it off in different places. For hippies, we were pretty well organized.

The Communications Company promoted the Central Park Be-In in 1967, which was my idea. We wanted to do it in Central Park, but unlike the way they did it in San Francisco, we didn’t want the focus to be on entertainment. We just wanted to encourage people to find within themselves the kind of joy and spontanaiety that hippies were supposed to be about.

We printed up 50,000 posters, and the kids came in and put them up all over the city. I alerted the press about it, and it ended up being much bigger than we anticipated. It was a beautiful day. Thousands of people came to the park, and there really was no focal point. It was all you can imagine it to be, people running around naked, people sharing dope. There were lots of dogs and babies. It was a really wonderful, unfocused event.
        
Soon after that I met Abbie Hoffman. Being the organizer that he was, Abbie saw that between the Communications Company and the Be-In, we were doing something. Abbie was very charismatic. When he wanted to turn it on, he could turn it on. I liked him, and I liked what he was trying to do.  He had this sense of wonder and an absolute belief that anything was possible. He was never a hippie. He just saw hippies as people he could organize.
        
Things were really changing in the city in ‘66 and ‘67. You had the war going on, and you had a lot of draft evaders coming into the city along with this huge influx of apolitical hippies. They were mostly working-class runaways who were who were trying to create an alternative economy. It was very idealistic. There was communal food, the so-called “hippie stews,” rice and beans, and that was all shared. There was a lot of sharing. People thought, if you didn’t need something, give it away. It was anti-material, although we didn’t use that word.
        
You had 17 and 18 and 19 year old kids playing Momma and Dad and trying to create not just a family, but a community of people that cared about each other. They built communal homes out of abandoned buildings on the Lower East Side because it was the only way people could afford to live together. They were not cynical. They believed in the capacity of humanity to make a better world and be kind to each other.
        
Unfortunately, it all imploded in a few years because there were too many people, and too many people doing bad drugs after the psychedelics were being laced with amphetamines. Also, a lot of people weren’t into sharing, they were into stealing, and they weren’t into making love, they were into raping.
      
There was also a sexual revolution going on, which said that everyone should fuck. If you were a young woman, that meant you had to “put out” or you were a dyke or a prude. Women were still treated as sex objects and hippie mommas and still did all the cooking. All the seeds of destruction were planted right there, because the consciousness did not realize that you couldn’t be free if everyone wasn’t equal; that freedom of choice meant that you had the right to say yes and to say no. That was one reason why we had women’s liberation.
        
To try and politically organize the hippies, we did a series of actions that got a lot of publicity and were a lot of fun. One was a “free day” at Macy’s. We gathered a lot of stuff, some very nice things, and we gave them away on the sidewalk in front of Macy’s. It was hilarious, because it was so hard to get people to take things for free.
        
We wanted to make a point about greed, so we decided to go down to the New York Stock Exchange and give away free money. That’s the one people remember most. We collected money from the drug dealers. I think the word we used was “tithe.” These were dealers in pot and LSD, an important distinction to us in those days, as opposed to people who sold amphetamines.
        
We took around $3,000 in one-dollar bills, and we got into the Exchange easily. There were no barriers up there, and we went up to the balcony over the floor and just started dropping the dollars onto the traders below. It was  amazing to watch them bend over to pick up dollar bills. We actually halted the stock exchange for a few minutes.
        
In those days, Con Ed [the company that supplies energy to New York] was pouring out dirt from their big chimneys on the Lower East Side. Ecology was becoming an issue, so we decided to do something called “flour power.” We got all this flour, and we made ourselves up in whiteface with the flour. Then we got into the Con Ed offices and threw flour everywhere, basically doing to them what they were doing to our air.
        
Every year there was an Armed Forces Day Parade in New York, and we decided we had a right to be in that parade. In 1967, the theme was “We love our troops.”
        
We entered the parade, saying, “We love our troops. Bring them home. No more deaths.” Our feeling was we were Americans, too. We were proud to be Americans. We just wanted our boys home. The day before the parade, I heard that someone I went to school with had died in Vietnam. He was the golden boy, a tennis player and a nice kid, and he died. How many thousands of times had that been experienced by people? 
         I really believed we would be able to march and we would be able to speak to America about stopping the killing. We thought our message was as vital as any other message in that march. We thought this was a way we could talk to people who supported that war, and people whose sons and daughters were coming home dead.
        
What the fuck were we thinking?
        
There were about 50 of us. When we got there, we took our places around Fifth Avenue and 60th Street. We had instruments, and we dressed the way we dressed all the time like the longhaired hippies we were. The Boy Scouts were right in front of us, but they kept trying to move them away from us.
        
Very soon, we realized this was a scary situation. People really hated us. To them, we were just anti-American longhaired, hippie fags. I got pulled out of the line. I tried to run, but they caught me and was literally tarred and feathered. It took three days to get that shit off me.
        
That summer there were major riots in Newark. We wanted to participate by helping out. All the stores closed, and people couldn’t get out of their buildings, and there was no food, so in our naive wonderful way, we decided to bring a bunch of food over and put it in the middle of the housing project. Somehow, in the middle of the riots, I got an ice cream cone from some place. We were all being our hippie, Yippie selves, walking around without any fear in the middle of this race war. Then the police arrived, and one cop asked me if I was a boy or a girl. How many fucking times had I heard that? I said something something appropriate, and he grabbed me. As he did, the ice cream cone fell on him, so I was arrested and charged with assault with an ice cream cone and for refusing to tell him whether I was a boy or a girl.
        
Not long after that, we began to discuss going to Chicago for the 1968 Demoicratic convention. I was against it. They were talking about having a Festival of Life with all these rock bands, and they had no rock bands. Kids were going to go with the idea of having a good time, and I was afraid they would get hurt. Abbie disagreed with me. We took a vote, and Abbie won. Then he had a press conference. Someone asked, “Why did you do this to Jim?”
      
And he literally said, “Jim is a homosexual. He is in love with me, and I am not a homosexual.”
        
That devastated me. It wasn’t true. My feelings for him were not sexual. But that’s what they did to gay people all the time. Abbie never dealt with his homophobia. Some of the others were better. I went to the Black Panthers as an openly gay person and met with Huey Newton [the head of the Party]. He issued a statement that said people should be judged not on the basis of their sexual orientation, but on the basis of their practice. No one else was saying that.
        
In the 60s, you had a lot of gay and lesbian movements where the members were not out. In the theater world, no one was gay to the public. In reality, everyone was gay. In the art world, where you had all these famous emerging painters, almost all of them gay. Everyone knew it, but no one said anything.
        
I looked feminine in a sense, so I never passed for being straight. I had a boyfriend around. I never made a big deal about being gay, but I never pretended I wasn’t. There was a national TV talk show hosted by David Susskind. He did a show on hippies, and we went on. We were all trying to shock people, and I just sat there and said, “I’m gay.” I really didn’t realize that I had done this, but people were shocked by it. I assumed I could just say it on television, but for years and years afterward, I met people who said, “I saw that show, and I had never seen anyone gay before.”
        
I remember Stonewall vividly. I had just gotten off the subway and was heading home when I looked down the street and saw a police car going up to this loathsome bar. As I walked down the block, I saw two officers get out of the car, go into the bar, and the next thing I saw was someone running out of the bar. I walked over there, and at one point, the police closed the door and called for reinforcements.
        
I immediately went to the phone and started calling people, “Get down here.” I did that all the time, and people always showed up at everything else, but no one showed up at the bar. It took two days for them to have the courage to show.
        
But other people started to show. It was a Saturday night in the summer; it was better than television. The police had handcuffed this “passing” woman [a man in drag] and were attempting to put her into their car. At that moment, something happened that was wonderful, because it was completely spontaneous. They hadn’t cuffed her tight, and she got out of the cuffs and got out of the car. There were some drag queens outside the bar, and they were doing what queens do in situations like that, making jokes and having fun, and the cops were doing their tough-guy thing.
        
Anyway, she threw her body against the car without any idea of what was going to happen. She started to rock the car, and it began to tip over, and that was the crucial moment. The crowd became excited, and the police became frightened, and it all changed.
        
The next day, a group of us got together and we organized the Gay Liberation Front. That was the importance of Stonewall. There had been bars raided before. That was not new. What was new was now, we had a politically aware, seasoned group of people who were going to organize as gay and lesbian people. 
        
We decided we would get in the face of the gay and lesbian community and in the face of the straight community. Our motto was “We are your worst nightmare. We are your best dream.”
        
We wanted fundamental change. There was going to be a revolution, and we were going to be a part of it. We gathered together people who had never been political before —  college educated people, students, Ph.ds, straight people, street queens, hookers, passing women, blacks, browns, white upperclass, communists. We had them all in one big room. How do you work through that? Thank God for the women that came in, because they had been through the early stages of women’s liberation, and they had done consciousness raising. We developed cells. We put together people with common interests. If people wanted to work on a dance and not be on the street, we said, “Great, make a good dance.”
        
We allowed people to be at the level they were at and not tell them they were wrong. Gay and lesbian people were always told they were wrong, and after a while they started to believe it. That’s what oppression does. We went around the country organizing gay liberation fronts. I must have spoken to around 100 different campuses, and it took off. People were spontaneously coming out all over the country.
        
In 1970, I drove to Texas in my VW van to a Gay Liberation Conference. While I was leaving a friend’s house, I was stopped by the police. They said my license plate was out of date, which it was, by one day, and I was arrested. I was also charged with possession of heroin and possession of dynamite. I did not have any heroin in my van, and I did not have any dynamite in my van. I did have Mao’s Little Red Book, which was very hippie stuff in those days. 
        
I was put in the Dallas County Jail, which was right across the street from where Kennedy was assassinated. The jail was under federal court order for overcrowding, because the death penalty had been done away with. All the people who had been sentenced to death in Texas were being returned to the Dallas County Jail to be resentenced to 5000 year prison terms. I was put into a tank with 60 men who had been on Death Row. Me, with my long hair and bikini underwear.
        
Fortunately, my instincts were very good. I knew there was a hazing process in jail, and I sort of figured out that I had to do something. I took a tray of food that a guard gave to me, and I threw it in his face. Of course, I got beat up by the guard, but there was a redneck hippie who saw was happened. He was born-again, and he was the biggest motherfucker in the place. He had also read about me in the alternative newspaper. Since he was born-again, he wasn’t going to sexually abuse me, but he did become my buddy, and he protected me.
        
I was in jail for three months. Eventually, they dropped the charge to marijuana possession and I got parole. I didn’t use marijuana. It was planted on me. And they took my van. They sold it at auction to a police officer’s wife for $25. 
        
My parole officer said I couldn’t associate with any homosexuals or with any political people. I didn’t pay any attention. I went to a meeting in Seattle. When, I got picked up for jaywalking, they did a check on me and they found I was violating my parole because I was associating with homosexuals. Two Texas marshals flew up to Seattle to take me back to Dallas, and I was put in jail again. My buddy was still there. He had been sentenced to 20 years for possession of two joints.
        
I was in for another five months. Again, I was paroled. This time, all they wanted to know when they interrogated me was where Bernardine Dohrn was [Dohrn was a member of the Weather Underground and was in hiding at the time] because when I was first arrested and they asked me my name, I said, “Bernardine Dohrn. Check out my legs, can’t you see?”
         
By then, the ‘60s were over. For me, they ended with the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont where the Hell’s Angels were in charge of security. I was there, and it was awful. The minute you got there, you sensed that there was something wrong. There were all these young people fucked up on reds and wine. It wasn’t that kind of exuberance that you saw at Woodstock. It was a gritty day, and the Stones came on just after the sun had set, and there were all these fires around. It was scary.
        
To me, the drug culture had triumphed. You had a war that was still draining America, and on stage surrounded by tough guys was this androgynous, swivel-hipped, male singer sashaying around the stage, singing about the devil. This is what happened to the hippie dream, and it was ugly.
        
Around the country, People were blowing up buildings. It wasn’t pretty anymore. Much of it was the fault of the government, which was having people killed in a stupid war, and the bombers were intent on bringing the war home. In that way, Altamont was more truthful than Woodstock was.
        
I had no illusions about Woodstock either. This was when the grape boycott was on, protesting the conditions of the farm workers, and backstage all these musicians were sitting around munching on grapes. I couldn’t believe the hypocrisy.
        
Still, ever since then, people have wanted to recreate Woodstock, the myth of Woodstock, the freedom of Woodstock. Woodstock was a nightmare. There was no food. There was mud everywhere. You had to be really high to have a good time at Woodstock, but it gave people their identity. That’s what they cherish, to hold onto to their youth.
        
Around that time, I moved into a collective which was trying to organize gay and lesbian people to come out. It was about empowerment and self-acceptance. I remember reading about a political group in Canada. Three members were gay, and they were ready to commit suicide because they believed they were defective. I did not want that repeated. That was what Gay Liberation was about.
        
When I saw the first gay march on Washington in ‘79, I stood on the street, and it just made me weep. [tears fill his eyes, and he stops speaking for a minute] Three people marched with a sign that said they were from North Dakota, and it really touched me that they might not do that at home, but that’s why the marches were important. They could go home knowing they had a community, in the same way that Woodstock was about. It gave them a community larger than their own in the community, and it inspired in so many people the courage they needed. Many of those people who stood up later died, of AIDS and of suicides. It’s not always a happy story.
        
Today, gays and lesbian come out and they don’t feel that is a big deal. They feel they are entitled to everything. Well, my generation, and the people before me didn’t feel that at all. We thought we were entitled to nothing for the most part, unless we passed or pretended.
        
To me, if you don’t have a radical point of view and you think that gay liberation is about having more sex and a place at the table, then it doesn’t change anything. If you don’t see who you are and where you are in the world and what you can do to change it, then you get gay Republicans. That to me is anathema.
        
One night in the ‘70s, I was out dancing with a friend at a club that wasn’t doing too well. This was right after Studio 54 [a popular disco in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s] had opened, and she said, “I bet you know what to do to make this place work.”
        
They gave me a control of the place. I turned Hurrah, into the first rock disco, and it was incredibly successful. I saw it as political work. I had all kinds of different musicians. We had a very mixed audience. We had a video installation. Eventually, I had all the hot. I could have made a lot of money, but I didn’t care about the money, and I made bad business decisions.
        
MTV ruined live music. The audience to go out and hear things was no longer there. They wanted to hear what they had already seen. There was no longer the sense of discovery, the sense of going out and seeing something they didn’t know about or a video presentation or artistic presentation.
        
Drugs also changed things, especially cocaine and crack, which was a very different kind of psyche. I talked to Janis Joplin the day she died. She did not want to die. She was making a record. She was feeling pretty good. She had called me to say this person was coming down to see her, and, “What should I do? I said, “Get out of the motel and go back to the studio and stay there,” but the person showed up with the dope, and Janis was dead. She went to the morgue and had a toe tag on her that said, “DOA.” It didn’t say rock star. People do dope, and they die. I’m not romantic about it.
        
In the early ‘80s, there was a kid I knew who was an actor. He was also a hustler and a prostitute and a drug user. One day, his sisters told me he was sick and we needed to do a benefit for him. I asked them what he was sick with, and they said, “GRID.”
        
“GRID?”
        
I went to visit him, and I had never seen anything like it. He was covered with funguses. Here was someone dying that was younger than I was, who wasn’t overdosing, who wasn’t in an automobile crash. He was dying of something I didn’t understand.
        
After he died, I got a call that an artist I knew was very sick also with GRID. I went to see him at Sloan Kettering. He was grotesque. Just down the hall was another friend of ours, a journalist. He was also dying, and he was pissed off. He kept saying, “This is not fair. You have to promise me that you will do something about this. “I’m gonna haunt you if you don’t.”
        
I promised I would. Then he died. That was three people in two weeks. They were all gay. Around that time, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis had just been formed. Everybody was suddenly terrified about dying of GRID, which of course late became known as AIDS.
           
I started something called “Wipeout AIDS.” We would get people together in groups and talk about it. The most significant question I learned to ask a person who was living, was not, do you want to live? Because everybody says they do, but why they want to live. Most people I knew who were black or minorities, could not answer that question. That’s what’s called oppression, if you have nothing to live for.