This excerpt is taken from Sara Youngblood Gregory’s speculative poetry collection DEAD BOYS IN SPACE, published in May 2026 by YesYes Books.

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PROFESSOR: Thank you for joining me this evening. First and foremost, I must thank our generous HOST for sponsoring this lecture and for allowing me a bit of secrecy around today’s agenda. After many years of study and many months of planning, I am thrilled to finally share the results of my research this evening with such esteemed scholars, patrons, and most importantly, officials of State and Force. The topic at hand is actually one we all know about—or rather one we think we know about—the space colonization of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

PROFESSOR: Now, you have all been briefed before your arrival, but I will go over the more fundamental aspects of this colonization—that which even a child would likely know—and begin complicating this story, layer by layer. My aim, friends, is to separate the parable from the plausible.

Now, please direct your attention to the screen behind me.

PROFESSOR: An estimated 1.6 million homosexual men aged 24 to 44 were successfully displaced and relocated to the Lunar Base between 1981 and 1996.

Though you may have learned that all homosexuals were relocated, this belief is a latent, yet potent, remnant of the government’s disinformation campaign of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

See how myth can fly?

So, what happened to the very young? The very old?

Efforts were made to relocate elderly homosexual men, many of whom were previously cataloged, within a small margin of error, during the so-called Red Scare of the 1950s. However, these men died too quickly for systematic accounting or re-homing.

And unlike this older population which were more likely to be known and surveilled, homosexual men under 24 often lacked the necessary intergenerational mentorships and sub-cultural spaces needed to enact their sexuality. As mass raids of neighborhoods, bars, and bedrooms became increasingly frequent and ever-more granular, many in the sub-24 population chose celibacy in order to avoid the attention of so-called body snatchers. How, then, would one identify every boy with a homosexual thought? It’s sifting sand with sand—impossible.

However, 85% of all those diagnosed with AIDS throughout the epidemic were between 20 and 49—in other words, the lunar colonization did effectively wipe out the entire homosexual male population in the United States, even if there is more nuance than popular history allows. Moving on now . . .

PROFESSOR: The Cold War began in 1947, though in reality this conflict was more a hotbed of violence than a permafrost. Uprisings, proxy wars, psychological assault, iron curtains, red red borders, chemicals, nuclear armies. . . no single speaker, no single presentation, no solitary man could ever begin to pull at that thread of conflict. No. Our focus, then, must be only the Space Race.

The true turning point began with the Sputnik Crisis of ‘57. The USSR launched the !rst successful satellite, Sputnik I, into space—a humiliation for the United States government and a fraying of confidence for its people.

Power, you see, isn’t who holds the knife. It’s making sure you are never found empty-handed. Or so thought our ancestors.

Four years later, Yuri Gargarin—young, whip-thin, a dedicated communist—became the first human ever to enter outer space in the Vostok I. This craft was not overly impressive, as it resembled a cramped, over-heavy fishbowl. Yet you can imagine how alien defeat must have seemed to Yuri’s enemies.

On May 25, 1961, the United States president—part figurehead, part commander, part empty screen—asked his country to pledge to “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth” before the decade was out. The country rallied to the cause.

This was the point of no return.

PROFESSOR: Imagine the audacity of such a plan. The genius! I can think of no better strategy to form and perfect a fully functional, life-sustaining Moon Colony than through the deployment of a population with an expiration date and no possibility of procreation. A population who, given enough time and resources, will fuck themselves to death.

HOST: Please hold all questions until the presentation is over.
 
 
PROFESSOR: Thank you, HOST. Now, as I was saying . . .

The AIDS epidemic coincided quite fatefully with the Space Race. Colliding with nationalism, the American obsession with the frontier, as well as advances in technology, medicine, and fanaticism these two seemingly disparate crises became locked in twin orbit, all the while spinning faster and faster and out of control. The first man—mark me, a real astronaut, not a homosexual—landed on the moon in 1969, making good on the president’s extracted promise.

The first-known record of HIV-AIDS from a governmental agency was 12 years later in 1981. First referred to as Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, or GRID, the Center for Disease Control published a small report about an unusual lung infection afflicting five gay men in the then-populous city of Los Angeles. However, some sources suggest anecdotal word-of-mouth reports, even in the form of local radio wave broadcasts, had spread amongst the community of strange illness as early as 1978. There’s an old expression—canary in the coal mines.

Regardless, by 1981 the epidemic was burning through boys left and right, the Cold War was nuke-hot, and the flag on the moon was getting lonely.

The project was announced publicly after 25% of men with a confirmed diagnosis were permanently resettled on the Moon Colony, via Patroclus flights 10 through 200. The President showed grainy, but distinct, photos of the gay men living on the colony in compound structures. This was during the State of the Union address in ‘85. That is nineteen hundred and eighty five, yes. Seems like a long time ago, doesn’t it? Well, it isn’t.

From a scientific standpoint, this was a landmark achievement. A fact beyond reproach.

However, in my research I found that much of the global population at the time believed the growing Lunar Base was fake. Other nations took it as a wholesale sign of desperation that the U.S. would use such bizarre propaganda methods—and consequently, those nations began to move more boldly against American empire on Earth. Ironically, the colony meant to settle the Cold War once and for all, actually lit the match.

PROFESSOR: Within a year of the colony’s collapse, the Soviets flew some sort of small dog to the moon, strapped with cameras to investigate, leading to the eventual exchange of nuclear arms between the two nations. The dog’s name was Lucky. This will be important later.

Now, to answer the query from the crowd. The homosexual community was overwhelmingly supportive of leaving Earth. And given what became of those left Earth-bound, this exiled population showed, from what I understand, uncharacteristic foresight by embracing space travel.

Though of course, there is some discussion as to the extent of that willingness on an individual level. Most boys gladly left their families, jobs, homes, planet. . . But there are some fringe testimonials from Earth-bound families who protested the raids, the surveillance, the separation from loved ones. . . there are scattered reports of riots of undetermined size. . . even some limited records of human rights complaints and/or violations.

But naturally, these alleged complaints fall outside the scope of my research.

PROFESSOR: Now, before communication from the moon was completely cut off in ‘96, we do know that there were functioning nightclubs, saunas, and workstations—including greenhouses, mechanics, air quality assurance, reclamation centers that recycled water from urine, feces, sweat, and, yes, semen.

But

There were problems.

Of the odd few million men who lived, worked, breathed, and slept on the moon, none were reported dead in the first five years of transmissions.

There are two popular explanations we were all taught. First, some claim with certainty that a prolonged state in low gravity suspended the effects of HIV, even AIDS. This is simply fanciful thinking, not science.

Others theorize that fifth column insurgents hacked into the main computers and turned off the Death Count System—a sort of symbolic yet maddening protest against the government’s response to AIDS. Further supporting this theory were the similarities with Earth-bound “die-in protests” popular amongst radicalized female homosexual and transsexual factions.

The Death Count System mattered to the politicians back home. It acted as a sort of timer, ticking lower and lower with each death in the population. When the number hit zero, the Lunar Base would be ready for its true occupants. The gateway to the stars would open. A return on investment in sight.

While this theory is certainly thrilling—hackers, and protests, and angry presidents—it’s impossible. On the moon, death was tied up in every decision, every bit of data—how many times a toilet was flushed, a bed slept in, a tap turned on, a piece of fruit consumed. No, there was no way anyone could have duped the Death Count System.

These men were simply. . . alive.

THE SOUND OF A BIRD,
 

HOST: Please settle down. You will be removed from this chamber if you disturb the presentation. All your questions will be answered.

May the officers address the intruders. . . and please pick up that woman off the floor. I believe she passed out. Is she shaking? A medic maybe as well. . . No? Just leave her there for now.

HOST: Please, professor, continue…

PROFESSOR: It’s hard to imagine what AIDS was like. The oldest among us, even generations removed, could not remember a time when AIDS was actually Earth-bound. It simply does not exist here. In this, the colonization was successful.

I have read reports, real medical reports, from doctors during the time pre-dating colonization.

Imagine a half-man.

A skeleton, walking around, struggling to keep skin slipping from the shoulder. Trays of food left outside hospital rooms, nurses too hateful to cross doorways, men too starved to bend down. Mothers feeding sons in childhood bedrooms, lovers touching hunger, holding hands.

PICTURE IT

PROFESSOR: Somehow,

and alone but for each other, these exiles put a stopper on one of the most aggressive illnesses in the history of mankind. . . once they touched down on lunar surface, not a single gay man died of AIDS.

Then, for some unknown reason, they decided to die together, all at once in a single day.

This is what we were told, that long-ago myth spread by American officials: the men died via mass suicide.

       upon realizing they would not die of
       AIDS,
       did they decide to die anyway?
 

The official history does not make sense.

Why would these men abandon so quickly what seemed to be a functional Eden with all the benefits of Sodom?

If they were so seemingly untouchable by either God, death, or country. . .

In order to answer this query, I gained entry to the restricted archives from Geneva, which were never digitized and instead stored in an underground bunker in Fallout Zone 28. From transcripts discussing Lucky’s voyage in 1999, I know that there were no dead bodies to be found on the Moon Colony. The greenhouses were overgrown jungles.

The showers were still hot, the saunas still steaming.
The morgues were empty and the water ran clear.

The beds were made, but rooms were stripped of personal possessions—photos of family members, love letters, condoms, electric fans, blankets, clothing all missing. And of course, the rockets (which one scientist noted after the final Patroclus flight, “littered the moon’s surface like headstones”)?

PROFESSOR: Esteemed scholars, patrons, officials of State and Force… what I am about to disclose is considered heresy.

THE SOUND OF A THOUSAND WINGS