I had an hour-long phone call with someone with whom I’d been out of touch for five years.
G and I met in our late 30s and shared many a good time in the years that came after. Vacations, holidays, wine-tasting trips, visits to Monterey coast. Books, movies, writing. Cooking, drinking and laughing. Parties and a memorable trip to Mardis Gras 1990 that included a night at the Lords of Leather Ball, a trip during which I was one of two straight women with six gay men. I saw more chaps-framed naked butt cheeks than I’d ever seen before (and ever will, in all probability.)
We were family, and compatible, both. My mother was crazy about him and one of my friends asked more than once, “Are you sure he’s gay? That you can’t marry him?”
Our friendship was forged in those shared experiences, but it began around the AIDS crisis. We both volunteered for the Aris Project, the AIDS education and support organization in Santa Clara County, and we met when he was a facilitator for my training class.
As an emotional support person to someone with HIV or AIDS, a volunteer had to be emotionally stable him- or herself. At the time, the two-weekend-long trainings were steeped in powerful exercises to help volunteers get in touch with empathy, their own mortality and self-esteem. They were emotional and draining.
“I remember you brought your own pillow to the training and I remember you just sobbing into it during one exercise,” G remembered.
“And I remember you saying to me over and over, ‘keep crying, Carol, keep crying,'” I told him.
The experiences at that training were so visceral that I can still dredge up those feelings today. In fact, I became a trainer, myself and more deeply involved, not only working at trainings, but also facilitating a support group for women with HIV.
In the late 1980s AIDS was mostly a death sentence. The early treatments were almost worse than the disease. We attended a lot of funerals in those years. G and I were soldiers together in the trenches of the war against AIDS and it shaped a friendship deeper than I could have imagined.
Today, my friend and I were amazed to list the many, many people we knew who are living with HIV some 20 years after diagnosis.
The Aris Project is long gone, now, and that’s both good news and bad. At the time it closed down, for reasons having to do with management and funding, it was still needed. Yet now, several decades later, the fear and stigma surrounding HIV has greatly dissipated. Something we could have never anticipated all those years ago.
How it was that we became estranged years ago? To be honest, I don’t even remember the details, although I’m sure he does, as his memory has always been sharper than any elephant’s and he’ll probably be doing the New York Times crossword puzzle long after they throw me in the old folks home.
Although I’ve always been someone who’s wanted to “talk it out,” at this stage in my life it really doesn’t matter. What I know is this:
“You are the gay brother I never had,” he told me last week.
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