. . .
At the beginning in New York, while my roommates, who were straight, had dates, I went to Uncle Charlie’s, a gay bar on Greenwich Avenue. Although the guys still laughed and drank; although Madonna kept on pushing her love over the Borderline, it was the beginning of AIDS, wartime. The newspapers were filled with photos of men with lesions from Kaposi’s sarcoma. Reality had turned on us; we were very young but it didn’t matter. At Yourdon Press, a woman joked, “Who will do my hair?”
“Maybe,” I replied, “it’s your chance for a makeover.”
By the time I heard the fourth or fifth person my age say they did not expect to be alive in a year, I stopped going to Uncle Charlie’s. For a while, I avoided all gay men. As the disease got closer and closer, I began once more to pray before I went to sleep every night. I said the prayer that Betty and I had said, way back. It was just a child’s prayer, but that was how I felt, like a kid far from home.
It was a fast shot to this new place; it was such a fast shot from being young and hopeful to young and thinking about dying. I was twenty-three years old.
The disease was all we talked about and all we didn’t talk about. I didn’t know if I was sick, but all I could think of was George and Betty finding out not only that I was gay, but also that I was dying. It would kill them and they would be disgraced: I was not even certain that the people in Paris would hold my funeral in the church. Someone told me that back in Missouri, in Columbia, where I had gone to the university, a woman had circulated a petition to drive some gay men from her neighborhood. In the newspapers, there were stories of parents who sent their sick sons away and religious groups who screamed of God’s wrath. I knew my parents would care for me until I died, but every day, every minute, looking at their faces would be worse than dying alone. I decided not to tell them if I got sick. I would write them a letter for them to find later, a message saying I did not mean to hurt them, that I loved them.
Again and again, I tried to start this letter, just in case. It would be easier to write beforehand than from a hospital bed. When it was finally finished, I left the envelope on my bureau, glanced at it some mornings as I thought of my mother at home, sitting at the breakfast table reading the bridge hands in the Globe-Democrat, adjourning to the bathroom for a secret cigarette. Reopening the letter many times, I subtracted, edited, threw in some jokes so they would think I was able to laugh in my last days. I wanted to leave them something to keep. I wanted to remind them that I was more than someone who died of sex.
I thought of my father; he would have no friends to talk to if I died. There were the men he played golf with, the women who sang with him in the choir at church. Maybe they would be kind to him. More likely, they would not know what to say. There would be no one to help him understand. When I thought about my parents, I felt ashamed. They suddenly seemed so vulnerable to me. I did not want to cause them pain, but all over the city of New York, mothers and fathers were crying.
. . .
My friend Ned, who was older than I, seemed to know only dying men. Visiting a friend of his, Kevin Hayne, in the hospital, I held Kevin’s hand while the nurse tried and tried to find a usable vein for his IV. The needle hurt every time she jabbed him and he cried out. His thin white arm was a long history of sharp, hasty stabbings. When she finally succeeded and hit a vein, he screamed out loud and it seemed to me that his pain flowed through his fingers into me, like a shock wave. I yelled too, and ran to the bathroom, trembling. I wanted to get out of there. But he could not. So I could not. I hoped he would not die that night with just the two of us there. I had no idea who to call.