Remembrance of 18th (?) July

Andrew Sullivan over at TheAtlantic.com is feeling pretty good these days, what with public pressure being brought to bear in what may prove to be a decisive fashion on the whole matter of our severe --and, to put it frankly, embarrassing-- travel restrictions upon foreign visitors who are HIV-positive, of which Sullers himself is both.

Then there's the fact that the anti-same-sex marriage ballot initiative in California appearing a good bet to go down to defeat in November (and do forgive me for not referring to it as "gay marriage" --last I knew, the non-corporeal legal arrangement of marriage doesn't have a sexual orientation; is its opposite-sex counterpart "straight marriage"?).

Speaking as one who is not gay but who counts a number of gay people among his friends (just as his daddy said that he one day would do) and who believes in the principle of fairness under the law --which should, to the reasonable extent possible, amount to complete and total equality-- I reckon these two developments to be most welcome.

Indeed, I marvel at the social, cultural and political advancement of openly and unapologetically gay people in this country that has occurred within my very own lifetime. A lot of hard work went into it, plenty of disappointment and abuse was (and continues to be) endured, and the degree of cooperation and support lent by the majority straight population --us folks who exist in sufficient numbers to determine just who around here gets what-- in helping to advance these goals is also noteworthy.

These developments and my attendant reflections come at what is a rather weighty time for me, given that it is now 23 years ago this week --before antiretrovirals, before Magic Johnson, before ACT-UP and SILENCE=DEATH, before Ryan White and even a few months before Rock Hudson-- that my father succumbed to the ravages of AIDS, making him the first of around 10,000 in this country to do so.

A number of profound and in many cases conflicting emotions are aroused by this annual season of remembrance. It all sort of pivots off of the fact that my old man was pretty much an asshole who caused a lot of pain for many of the people in his life. It has to be said that he never had things too great himself, being a product of the South Side of Chicago, a Catholic parish kid and altar boy who never offered anything athletically and was unaccomplished as a man of intellect.

His own parents separated when he was three and eventually obtained a divorce --something that Catholics just didn't do in those days-- and by his own recollections, he was engaging in homosexual behavior from the onset of puberty. Quite how and why he got involved with my mother after leaving home for university is beyond me, and so you're looking at the written output of one of the two products of that rather unholy union --which itself was rent asunder by my father's dalliance with at least one of the students under my mother's tutelage in a suburban high school.

None of this is any sort of embarrassment to me; it is what it is, and I neither could nor can do anything about it. At the video link above, you will see my reflections that I recorded whilst testing out my webcam earlier this month. As I note in it, the whole thing began for me when I pulled a weekly edition of Newsweek out of the mail pile during the summer of 1983.

On the cover was an oversized photograph of a test tube filled with red blood and the markings KS/AIDS on the tube label. Atop the photo was the word EPIDEMIC splayed across the breadth of the cover, and my mind turned at once to the notion of a swine flu outbreak. Thus intrigued, I turned to the article inside, and I was greeted by a photo of a group of men in their 30s riding in an open convertible down Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood at what I recognized in an instant to be the annual Christopher Street West celebration of gay pride.

I'd spent the previous summer out there with the old man and in fact had strolled around at the pride parade. I knew West Hollywood well, having spent plenty of time enjoying its restaurants, shops and magazine stands as a 15-year-old with bugger all to do for the summer whilst the old man worked his gig at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. I sought no trouble on those streets, and it never managed to find me.

So it is rather needless to add that my concern was aroused when I delved into the Newsweek article, and I developed an immediate sense that I would be touched by this awful new disease within the confines of my own life. I had heard vague talk the previous summer about a "gay cancer," but details were lacking. The article brought it all into focus, with its dire tales of pneumonia and Kaposi's sarcoma and its stark presentation of rates of infection and mortality.

A year and a half after that, my old man rang me up and asked what I was up to. I'd graduated from high school in June and was up to fuck all, and he thereupon invited me out west for an indefinite stay. Things were full of promise for this then-17-year-old, not least of all with the prospect of spending a warmer winter than anything that the Midwest might serve up.

I soon was disabused of any notions that the good life was my inheritance once I stepped off a plane on the day after Christmas in 1984. The old man's psoriasis was giving him fits, and the L.A. weather wasn't cooperating; he relied upon the sun's rays to work magic on his skin condition, but it was a gloomy December, and he was receiving regular light treatments from a Westwood dermatologist.

By the end of my first month there, two unwelcome developments had cropped up: my skin was itching something awful, keeping me up nites scratching myself raw, and showering only made it worse; also, the old man sprouted one and then a second purple lesion on his face --one on his forehead, and the other along his jawline.

I had no idea what was bothering my skin and torturing me to the point of near-madness in the bargain, but I knew at once what the old man's lesions were all about. Having read the Newsweek article a year and a half before and taken note of the accompanying photographs, I knew that it was Kaposi's sarcoma and that my father was exhibiting one of the known symptoms of AIDS.

I recount in the above vid the occasion of when he and I made one of his regular trips to the dermatologist for a light treatment, at which time he paraded me before the doc for a look at my skin --and an instant diagnosis of scabies for me, which also accounted for his own persistent skin problems. He also had asked about his lesions, and the doc referred him for a biopsy.

So it was another trip to a doctor a few mornings later for a biopsy, immediately after which the old man, in an irritated and unceremonious fashion, declaimed to me that it was very possible that he had AIDS. What followed in the weeks ahead was a series of doctor visits to specialists at locations spread throughout the Los Angeles Basin, with the end result of that being regular treatment at the hands of one Dr. Mitsuyasu at the UCLA Medical Center.

The waiting room alone was an education in the AIDS crisis, packed wall to wall as it was with sick people --some of them desperately so and dying. They started the old man off on Interferon, which he injected subcutaneously twice each day; eventually he was moved to chemotherapy, which sickened him horribly --he would shiver with cold on sweltering 90-degree afternoons, and he found air-conditioned indoor environments utterly intolerable-- and only hastened his demise.

As the end neared, he dropped me off at Cedars-Sinai one morning --I had gotten a job there tracking down loose reports in the medical records department-- and drove himself to UCLA, where he got himself admitted and stayed for a few days. He only spent one or two nights at home after his discharge --an unspeakable nightmare to witness-- before being admitted to the hospice center at Cedars, where he lived out his final couple of weeks.

And so on the morning of what I believe was the 18th July, upon being picked up for the ride to work by a friend of his who worked at the hospital, I was informed that he had succumbed on the previous evening. Living a life in denial to the very end, the old man had not made aware of his illness any of his family members --mostly elderly aunts and uncles, as he had no surviving parents and no siblings-- and so upon me devolved the dubious privilege of taking phone calls from crestfallen 80-year-old Catholic grand-aunts demanding answers and sobbing into the phone; truly my father's son to the bitter end and beyond, I did as I knew that he wished in lying about the cause.

My grand-aunt Bernice was one exception in this parade of stunned grief --she was the gentlest of souls, the sort who would trap a fly in the kitchen and release it outdoors in preference to swatting it dead as would any of the rest of us-- and she was a picture of calm understanding; she didn't say as much, but she knew.

What followed for me was the discomfiture of a public memorial service in the conference center at Cedars --he was far from universally beloved there as elsewhere, but there was a huge crowd, and more than one chuckled at the spectacle of a Catholic priest presiding over a service in a Jewish hospital (in spite of himself, the old man would have loved that).

His uncle, a former executive at Marshall Field's State Street flagship store, and his uncle's (ahem, gentleman) companion flew out from Chicago for that, and it was the last occasion upon which I received holy communion --which I wouldn't have done except for the fact that my granduncle was in attendance, and, as with so many other things in my life where my father was concerned, it was the keeping up of appearances that mattered.

Then there was cremation and a burial at sea in the company of a handful of his friends outside of San Pedro Harbor, and the bastards at the Neptune Society charged an extra fee for the handling of his remains on account of his death having been due to complications from AIDS; if subsequent legislation in that regard entitles me to a refund for that, then I would like it to be paid with interest.

So I returned home in mid-August to north-central Illinois for three weeks' R&R --a lot of beer, weed and mushrooms, in other words-- before heading back out there, staying with a host family and working another job at the hospital before pretty much losing my mind and coming back here for good two months later. My last day in L.A. was spent consuming a fifth of Tanqueray before noon and heading off to Westwood in search of Marilyn Monroe's final resting place, but that's another story to be saved for some other time. I haven't been back since.

So anyway, enjoy the vid if you can --it's kind of eerie, and I look like about a dozen different people throughout. I've got sores on my face from bug bites --can't keep 'em out of here during the summer-- and regret that this is so. As I noted, I did it late one nite when I was testing out the webcam, and it was lit only by the TV perched upon my desk. I'm sure that I'm capable of better, both in video and in writing --but it's anniversary week, and I felt a need to get something up here. So cheers for your indulgence.