Volume 58 - December 5, 2004
AN OBUTUARY – TEN
YEARS ON
Dear Friends,
As long-time readers of this newsletter know, most of what I write about here is of politics -- how people around the world are working toward human rights and justice. From time to time, however, the articles here turn to other, more personal topics. This is one of those, a story about a friend I lost exactly a decade ago today. I hope you will take a few minutes to read it and that you will find it something of value. In our next issue we’ll be back to our usual fare of politics.
Thank you to all who submitted entries to our essay contest, “After Election 2004 – What Now?” We’re going through all those essays and will announce and post the winning entries shortly.
Jim Shultz
The Democracy Center
AN OBUTUARY – TEN YEARS ON
It was ten years ago on this date – December 5, 1994 – that the world lost one of its most extraordinary people. Christopher G. McKenzie was my best friend. He died of AIDS.
Chris was a teacher at my high school in Whittier. To my recollection I never actually had him for a class. Instead we were thrown together by a commonality born of that specific place and time, two would-be rebels trapped in the conservative Disneyland of Richard M. Nixon’s hometown during the zenith and then glorious crash and burn of his presidency.
Chris was the kind of teacher whose classroom was always populated after school by a collection of students who didn’t fit into any of the established categories of high status. Were weren’t athletes, weren’t cheerleaders, weren’t stellar scholars. We were oddities.
For a teenager, having an adult who is willing to cheer on your strangeness, that is the difference between trying and quitting.
Out of that odd assortment of students came an awkward boy who wore a used green army jacket and long hair and who led his peers in a series of citywide political acts. Another convinced student leaders that no self-respecting high school should be without an officially-sanctioned Marx Brothers squad to perform at assemblies and events (he played Groucho). A quiet blonde became the school’s first girl student body president. A small Latino boy became a drama star.
It is clear to me now that because Chris was gay in the midst of a world populated by Republicans in light blue polyester pants, he must have gained a special insight into what it meant to stand apart, a special gift for supporting students who found themselves outsiders as well.
Our friendship only grew after I graduated. The summer before I fled Whittier for Berkeley and college we spearheaded a youth movement against police harassment. Whittier cops in the mid-70s developed the annoying habit of beating up teenagers who committed the high offense of driving up and down the city’s main boulevard on weekend nights with the primary aim of checking each other out.
Shortly after America’s 200th birthday Christopher McKenzie entered politics, running for the Whittier City Council. To the astonishment of conservative city elders he came within a handful of votes of winning. In a city where every council member took a turn being Mayor one can only imagine how the era of Anita Bryant would have reacted when the Mayor of Richard Nixon’s hometown suddenly burst out of the closet. Alas.
Chris was a deeply religious man, a Roman Catholic who in his own youth entered the seminary. On the threshold of priesthood he left but years later still drove through Los Angeles in a car adorned with a license plate that read “X JESUIT”.
Chris told me that he was HIV-positive one night in 1989 over the phone, as I sat on my kitchen floor, receiver to my ear and tears in my eyes. In 1989 being HIV-positive meant that you would die. It might take two years, it might take five, but the outcome was a given. Chris had been no more promiscuous than a lot of straight guys I knew. But in that blink of time when AIDS was on the loose but still unknown being gay was like being handed a losing lottery ticket, the cost of which was death.
Chris had high expectations for me. He always insisted that I run for public office, a demand that became noticeably more adamant as he started watching his clock run out. I asked him to do a reading at my wedding and he took the opportunity to stand before my entire family, all my friends, and my assembled new in-laws to declare that they should all gang up on me to make me run for President of the U.S. someday. He was not joking. Sorry Christopher, maybe in 2008.
I watched Chris prepare for his death. An odd thing AIDS in those years before the new medicines, like standing on the tracks in front of a freight train that moves so slow it takes years to smash into you, leaving you ample time to prepare for the day. With his partner Samuel, a sweet, tiny man from Guadalajara, Chris planned the details of how he would die, at home in a rented hospital bed with a hospice nurse at his side. They also choreographed his funeral. My eulogy included carting up a boom box to play an old Jackson Browne song he loved.
Chris wrote his own obituary which ran in the Los Angeles Times. He was quite pleased with it and showed it to me one afternoon toward the end. It included:
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.
As Chris was exactly ten years older than I, this month I am now exactly the same age that he was when he died. Looking at his life with ten years more wisdom I appreciate all the more his uniqueness, his genuine compassion, and above all his total willingness to be who he was in the face of so many pressures not to.
So, if on occasion in my political writings it seems that a straight guy with a wife and three kids is oddly vehement against the wave of anti-gay sentiment running amok back home in the USA these days, one reason why is surely the man to whom I dedicated my last book with these words:
In Memory of Christopher G. McKenzie
Teacher, Patriot and my Best Friend
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