I’m a Buddhist. I chant. What sets it apart from other faiths is that your prayers are definitely answered. You chant about what you desire or what you want to change in your life and you start to see things move.
Vern Hester, 53, is a writer and photographer. His music column in Windy City Times is called Bent Nights. —Leor Galil
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But there were a lot of other things. I guess the major thing was I found out I was HIV positive. At that point, a lot of people had been dying left and right. There was no cure; there was no hope. I went to one of my Buddhist leaders and he said, “You can beat it.” Nobody had ever said such a thing. I mean, even the doctor told me to get over it, that “we all gotta die sometime.” He was not the best doctor.
It was a really bad year. I lost my job at Wolf Camera. I had my own business that started failing, then I lost all this weight and I couldn’t get another job. I ended up in the hospital. Everything just went completely to shit.
At one point I wasn’t working for the gay press, and we ran into each other and she’s like, “Why aren’t you shooting for my paper?” So I went to work with her. I wanted to shoot the Pet Shop Boys, and there was no way I was gonna get that without a newspaper, and she’s like, “Oh, OK, shoot that.” Then I was like, “Patti Smith’s playing, I wanna shoot her!” She’s like, “Why don’t you just write a column, just get away from me?” So she pretty much turned me loose. She knew that I was someone who was not into Madonna. She knew I wasn’t going to go to Halsted Street and take pictures of drag queens and go-go boys. That’s not my shit. I want punk. I want heavy metal. I want rock ‘n’ roll. She had the vision to let me do it. We started getting access to David Bowie and the Stones and Tina Turner and Blondie. The other gay papers weren’t doing anything like that.
