No Day But Today - I Die Without You: The Beautiful Grief-Joy of Rent After 30 Years

For a certain segment of baby Gen X and elder Millennials, the musical Rent became a formative part of our identities when it first debuted in 1996. Those of us who didn't quite fit in the ever-increasingly glossy mainstream, and yes, a whole bunch of us also questioning and figuring out our sexuality and/or gender identity. Our grief of not belonging, the grief of coming out (this was the 90s, famously not a great time to be queer), and the grief of moving into the great unknown of adulthood, all got wrapped up in the grief of this group of friends navigating breakups, their encroaching mortality, and the death of one of them. Did we see or understand that then? I surely didn't. But amidst all that jumble of grief was also its twin -- joy.

As teens and early twenty-somethings, the grief of it all is not what pulled us in and made us fall in love. It was the freedom, it was the belonging, it was the joy.

"To being an us for once, instead of a them."

Here in the midst of an absolutely tragic story, set in the height of the AIDS crisis, many of us found ourselves and found something that resembled hope. It's no surprise that on the eve of leaving for college, I found myself on Instant Messenger talking to a friend, neither of us remotely out yet, and I was pouring out my heart about how terrified I was for everything to change. And in the 2 am glow of IM, she replied with the lyrics that had been giving her courage...

"There's only now. There's only here. Give in to love. Or live in fear. No other path. No other way. No day but today."

I wrote them in my journal and made them my mantra as I faced the unknown of leaving everything and everyone familiar. Writing this out now, I can see the closet was truly glass for both of us. But there we were, two queer kids trying to find our way in the world and finding hope in the words of Jonathan Larson, who himself would never live to see his work debut. As he wrote this rock opera, little did he know he carried a ticking time bomb in his chest, and that he would die hours before an audience got to grieve Angel for the first time. The themes of death and grief reaching behind the curtain and making Rent his own legacy project.

"One song. Glory. One song, before I go."

Larson imbued much of his own life and the lives of his friends into this adaptation of La Bohème. There's parts of him in the character of Mark, but also he's largely inspired by another friend of his. The attendees at the Life Support meeting are named for his friends who died of AIDS: Gordon, Ali, and Pam. It then became customary during the Broadway run to change the names of the Life Support attendees to honor loved ones of cast members who were either living with or who had died from AIDS. As we watch Mark recording the lives of his friends, and unknowingly documenting the last year of Angel's life, we're also seeing reflections of Larson and his friends for whom this musical would become a memorial. It's truly life imitating art, and art imitating death.

"There's only us. There's only this."

Rent will also be forever intertwined with my own grief journey. By 2005, the musical was far from my mind, something that was meaningful to me years ago, but that was the 90s, this was the new millennium. I was a year out of college, trying to figure my shit out, and then I get a call at work -- my college friend Sandy is dead. Cue the upheaval and the way grief sends you into this state where you start feeling like a phantom in your day to day. I found myself at the movies with another friend who wanted nothing more than to avoid the discomfort of my grief, and there, during the previews, I saw the first trailer for the upcoming film version.

"Or the way that she died...Remember a year in the life of friends."

In the dark of the theater, I shattered. My friend leaned over, not to comfort, but to say, "Isn't that the AIDS play? Eww." Spoilers dearest gentle reader: that friendship did not survive much longer. A few months later, Thanksgiving weekend, I'm back in a theater, this time with my college bestie, and we let our grief for Sandy flow. We watched this group of friends barreling towards grief, while we ourselves sat on the other side of that rupture. I wore out that CD soundtrack over the next several months, making it both a battle cry and eulogy. Three years later, the National Tour would come to Cleveland and I could finally see the show I'd been wanting to see for over a decade. Then an ice storm would shut down the highways. A dream deferred yet again. Months later, another of our college friend group would die.

"Life goes on, but I'm gone - No other path, no other way"

Flash forward nearly another decade and now I'm living in the DC area when the 20th Anniversary Tour would bring Rent to The National Theater. It was summer, so no threat of an ice storm to bamboozle me, but now there was something much worse swirling around-- neo-Nazis. A few blocks from the theater, the first Unite The Right rally was taking place the same day as my tickets for Rent. I felt compelled to go and stand in opposition, and also look that darkness right in the eye. Aside from leering glares and a few choice comments, nothing went sideways and an hour later I was in my seat FINALLY getting to see the play I'd waited over 20 years to see in person. It was everything I'd hoped, and the heaviness of the evil I encountered earlier melted away. Then, less than two months later...Charlottesville. This same group would take their hatred to a new city and this time with lethal consequences. The joy of seeing Rent live was now forever wrapped up in layers of grief for the death cult that was now normalizing violent hatred from our highest offices.

"You're living in America. Where it's like the Twilight Zone."

As we now celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Rent, the themes of the play are giving me an odd bit of comfort. Here are these characters struggling to make ends meet in a society that is not only hostile to them, but views their lives as devoid of worth, and their deaths as deserved punishment. The rent is too damn high, and developers are pushing people out of their communities, making way for something new and corporate, devoid of human warmth. Then there is this Cyber Land threat, that they're told is an inevitability, so they just need to accept it and embrace modernity. Sound familiar? The rent is still too damn high. LGBTQIA+ folks, especially our trans siblings, are under threat from encroaching limits to our rights, and also violent threats to our lives. Private equity is at the helm of this new phase of gentrification, creating an affordable housing crisis across the country. And now we are in the throes of this generative AI boom (shoutout to which ever bot is crawling this and stealing my words to train itself to be more "human" - 1. baby you could never, you simply don't have the trauma, and 2. tell your boss I said to go fuck himself) where we're told to just accept that it's going to steal our voices, our art, and even our faces, and there's nothing we can do about it.

"They've closed everything real down, like barns, and troughs, and performances spaces, and replaced it all with lies, and rules, and virtual life. But there is a way out."

Ok Rentheads, you know what to do..."Moo with me." And by "moo" I mean give yourself fully over to your joy AND your grief. They are not in opposition to each other, they can exist side by side, and sometimes even merge into one beautiful moment of grief-joy. If they want us living in Cyber Land, disconnected from community and each other, then we lean harder into our humanity. If AI is churning out frightfully more and more realistic things, then we need to get weirder. Maybe it's time to clad yourself in bubble wrap and dance to the sounds of iced tea being stirred.

"The opposite of war isn't peace...it's creation."

When so much is aimed at making us hopeless, getting us to isolate, and dulling our emotions so that we becomes husks of people, making space for joy and grief is a radical act. And when we come together, especially to share and hold each other's grief, we resisit the stripping of our humanity. Because allowing ourselves to feel the grief in our own lives and in the world around us, taps us into something bigger, into something more interconnected.

"I quit, Dying in America...And when you're dying in America...You're not alone. I'm not alone, I'm not alone."

At the end of Rent, and it is in life, we exist in the tension of living despite everything we have lost. The final lyrics overlapping, creating a cacophony of emotion before settling on one final, unified outcry. Memento Mori - remember to die. Memento Vivere - remember to live. There is so much to grieve, especially these days, but there is also so much to keep living for - for whatever time each of us has left.

"I die without you.

No day but today.

No day but today."