Spending time to nurse his own life partner, Assotto often said that he had little time to write prose. Poetry was a means to record on paper a swift testament to the ones he loved so well and defiantly, to set the record straight on issues of political oppression and AIDS hypocrisy. Poetry, more than any other medium, seemed ideally suited toward conveying the sense of boundless emotion and praise I felt toward my friends. I poet Winfred Owen, and began to understand his sense of pathos and mortality. I too was witnessing an entire generation of America's best and brightest being annihilated.
Poetry can safeguard the spirit in times of war and plague and societal strife.
It has the power to transcend and to create a communal voice, a sense of universal understanding. Like choral voices of old, poetry in those years sang of the staggering defeats of the gay, lesbian, and minority communities. This defeat nonetheless brought with it a certain honor and place in history. There were universal outpourings of defiance and incredible acts of valor and compassion. AIDS poetry became an invocation to the reader to join in a communal sense of grief mixed with outrage at the incredible intolerance that surrounded the disease.