AIDS at 25: The People I Lost

It was twenty-five years ago this week, the first week of June 1981, that a mysterious pneumonia among gay men in the US gained its first notice in a US medical journal. It was gay men of my same generation that were its first victims. Three of them were close friends, one of them my very closest. Here is something of their stories, vibrant and loving men worth remembering on the anniversary of the birth of a plague.

Martin O’Malley and Daniel Brewer

Martin and Daniel were already a couple when I met them, a long-standing one. Daniel was a nurse in San Francisco, where I lived. He worked with prematurely born infants and we met as I was enlisting nurses to help campaign for a piece of California legislation to put birth defect warnings on wine, beer and spirits bottles. He was tall, muscular and graceful – the kind of San Francisco man that prompted women I knew to note their misfortune that he was gay.

Martin was a wild man. He was born and raised in Philadelphia, in a family environment that seem to destine him to live in a world of wild imagination and a touch of craziness. He once told me that, to teach him the alphabet as a young boy, his father took him on the train from Philadelphia to Washington, looking for things that began with each letter in sequence. The trip ended with a run through the Washington zoo to see the zebra.

For a time Martin served as the executive director of a shelter for homeless families I helped start in San Francisco in the mid-1980s (homelessness, that other plague that took root at the same time as AIDS). He served with a mix of creativity and utter incompetence as a manager. Painfully, we had to fire him. But we remained friends anyway.

Daniel was diagnosed first. As AIDS began to take control of his body his muscular frame shrank to a spindle. Soon after he was no longer able to work and soon after that, unable to leave the small apartment that he and Martin shared on Potrero Hill, just behind San Francisco General Hospital – global AIDS central at the time. His nursing friends, including a blonde Florence Nightingale named Amy Casey, managed to sneak in to the apartment everything that Daniel needed to die peacefully at home, from a hospital bed to a generous morphine drip during his final days. I am sure most of what they supplied him with was utterly illegal, but none of us cared.

Martin tended his dying partner with such grace, attention and love that it shown as an example to straight and gay couples alike. I think of Martin and Daniel and that dedication in days like these when people like the President of the United States and others declare that allowing couples like them to marry would “undermine the structure of the family.” I don’t see how it would undermine the structure of mine.

I was with Martin on the day – with Daniel still alive but dying – that he found out he was HIV positive. The two of us were the same age by a few months. I remember him telling me with tears in his eyes, “We didn’t do anything that you guys (the straight ones) didn’t do in college. No one told us it would kill us.” Sex as a death sentence. We were all just getting used to that. For Martin, his tending to Daniel was not only an act of love but also a horrible preview of coming attractions for himself, one he would have to endure without his lover and partner by his side. Daniel died in San Francisco in 1988. Martin died in Philadelphia a few years later and we held a memorial service for him in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.

Christopher George McKenzie

The dedication to my last book, The Democracy Owners’ Manual, reads as follows:

In Memory of Christopher G. McKenzie
Teacher, Patriot and my Best Friend

Chris was a teacher at my high school in Whittier, the kind that students hang out with in his classroom after class. He taught English but his love was photography and a good number of his English assignments involved students doing slide shows. I never had him for a class. We bonded over our both being Nixon-bashers in Nixon’s hometown during Nixon’s presidency. Our friendship may have been the best thing to have come out of that twisted administration, that and détente.

Our friendship lasted for years beyond our shared time at Pioneer High School. It lasted through his wild run for Whittier City Council, in which he fell short by just a few points of becoming the first gay member of one of the most conservative little bastions in conservative Southern California. It lasted through him standing up at my wedding, invited to do a reading before all my friends and family, and taking the opportunity to ask them to help him pressure me to run for President of the United States. It lasted through that evening that I sat on the floor of my kitchen in San Francisco, with tears in my eyes, as Chris told me through a telephone receiver that he had tested HIV positive.

Those were the days in which to test positive meant you would get AIDS and to get AIDS meant that you would die. Death waits for us all, but for Chris and others, it waited without patience. He lived his life knowing that he has a very limited time left to do so. Our conversations were dotted with reports on cell counts and the language of measuring one’s closeness to a fatal illness. Toward the end he started plotting his death the way one might plan how to decorate a home. He wrote his obituary. He planned his memorial. A one-time candidate for the Catholic priesthood, Chris drove around Los Angeles with the personalized license plate, X JESUIT.

On December 5, 1994 Chris died, at home, his partner Samuel, an immigrant from Guadalajara at his side. Another one of those couples whose love and commitment threaten to undermine the American family. The obituary he wrote for himself for the Los Angeles Times – which he had shown me with great pride a few months before –
included this self-confession:

Fascinated by earthquakes and politics, he was an avid gardener
who loved Yosemite and good books. He never reached his goals
of being President, writing a book and earning a million dollars.

Martin, Daniel, and Christopher – three names and three friends lost to AIDS, among 25 million others this past quarter century.