Making some sense out of it

On the night before Easter 1983 (it's funny how we remember the exact dates when our lives change), I saw a double feature with my mother.  It was Educating Rita, a lovely movie with Michael Caine and a very young Julie Walters (the future aka Mrs. Weasley from Harry Potter).  The second feature was a movie that would become my all time favorite, kind of odd for a 15 year old boy when I tell you what it was.  There was one scene in the Big Chill that spoke to me, a lonely, sad teenager, in a way nothing had before.  Sarah, a character played by Glenn Close is talking on the telephone, an actual hand held land-line, kids. Meg (Mary Kay Place) comes in the room with a cigarette.  Sarah motions for Meg to pass her the cigarette, which she does.  Then Sarah takes a couple of quick drags and passes it back.  Now I had just secretly started smoking cigarettes, but I don't think it had anything to do with that.  I sat in that dark movie theater and thought to myself, I swear to you with tears in my eyes, One day I will have a group of friends like this.  I had no idea how my calculation would prove to be.  I believe that it was a calculation, certainly more than a prediction.  I have maneuvered through life, almost repeatedly, in search of friends like this.  As I said, I was very lonely at 15, painfully so, the victim of an all too familiar, now, childhood peppered with mental illness, foster care,my parents' separation, sexual abuse, and already one suicide attempt.  Much of that is for another story.  This one really has a happy ending, which I'm getting to.  Eventually. 

Flash forward, four and a half years later, I was nineteen years old, newly out of the closet, again (yet another story), and had just moved from Minneapolis to live in Southern California.  At first I lived with my brother and his wife, both very accepting, embracing really compared to most of my siblings back home in Minnesota.  My brother Danny had even researched things and found one of the 3 or 4 gay bars in all of Orange County, back then, for us to go to.  I don't think that's changed much in Orange County some twenty five years later.  He took me to a place called the Lion's Den in Garden Grove, CA.  It wasn't my first experience in a gay bar, not by a long shot, but it would become extremely significant.  There I met a man named Rick, he was my age, so somewhere in between 19 and 20, and like me certainly not old enough to be where we were, drinking in a gay bar.  I have to tell you that everything about the world changed almost the moment our eyes met.  It's corny, but I believe I feel in love at that moment.  My heart beat faster, my breathes were slower, my words were jumbled in my throat even before I spoke them.  Certainly some were still jumbled as they came spilling out. 

Rick, lived in Laguna Beach, with his much older lover, Tom, and two roommates, both of which would become lifelong friends.  It wasn't long until I had moved in with all of them.  When Tom got up in the morning to go to work, I would crawl from my bed, into Rick's.  Thus was our relationship, my first love.  I was the other woman and I romanticized that ridiculously.  WE lived together for just a couple of months until I took a gig caring for a man who was dying of AIDS and wished to do so at home.  These kind of jobs were very easy to come by in the 80s and 90s.  I had actually gone to nursing school, briefly, but dropped out when it became clear the degree wasn't necessary to get the jobs I wanted.  I lived and cared for this man for three months, until he died.  The schedule was always pretty standard, 4 1/2 days on, 2 1/2 days off.  In the days off, I would usually go back to Rick's.  We continued our affair for about nine months, off and on.  After my patient passed away, however, I got my own apartment and expected Rick to leave Tom and move in with me.  God, how silly I was back then.  At first, we broke up, AGAIN.  Then got back together.  At one point, Rick actually did leave Tom and move in with me, but that lasted less than two months.  They were an incredible two months!  One night, my Rick grabbed my stethoscope and attempted to conduct a little experiment. Would the sounds of my heartbeat or my heartbeat itself change as he kissed me?  Of course, we all knew the answer to that. 

On another night, we were making love.  It was one of those experiences where by the light of a single candle, we could find every inc of each others' bodies, effortlessly.  The tears in my eyes mingled with the sweat on my face.  It was sweet, wet, absolute passion I have rarely experienced since.  Then I realized that Rick was crying, too.  I swooned a little in that moment.  He was inside me and all at once my life changed irrevocably.  He began not just to silently weep, but sob uncontrollably.  Then he confessed.  We had gone two months earlier for the not so romantic sign of the times, his and his AIDS tests.  I was negative.  PHEW!  He had tested positive, but told me he was negative.  For the following two months we had a lot of sex, all unprotected.  I lay there, with the love of life, collapsed on top of me, crying, apologizing, begging for forgiveness. At first, he was actually still inside of me.  I guess I cried, too, a different variety than the beginning of this scene.  Eventually I dealt with the betrayal, but that doesn't happen quickly when two people are naked and sweaty and at least one of them is so very much in love. 

Obviously Rick moved out, back in with Tom, of course, and soon after I started another nursing job.  Within a year, I had tested positive.  It was March 8, 1989, less than two years after moving to California.  I was 21 years old.  My brother and his wife had already moved to Miami, so I had no family near me.  I, however, had a group of friends, amazing young men, beautiful, strong, fiercely independent, but all reliant on each other.  It was a dream come true, something I'd sought since that Easter eve, less than six years earlier.  We were quite exactly like the group of friends in The Big Chill, only young, all male, and gay.  All of us had come out in the year or two prior, only one was actually from California, some of us lived together at different times.  We fought, we cried, we supported each other through lost jobs, spoiled love, family abandonment, and one other thing, a thing tragically common in that day, somewhat less so now, thankfully.  We were ten young gay men, all in our very early twenties, one or two not even out of their teenage years.  Within less than two years, a span of time of maybe six months prior and eighteen after, Rick had exposed me to HIV, eight of us tested positive.  My gay little version of the Big Chill.  My first group of cigarette sharing besties. 

Nearly twenty-five years later, I am 46 years old.  The ways that the beginning in Laguna Beach, CA, shaped my life as an out gay man are immeasurable.  I dallied in porn.  That ended abruptly after having filed just a couple of scenes when I tested positive.  I was told by a sort of porn mentor just to go with it and absolutely not to disclose my status.  Bareback was the norm back then.  No one asked about anyone's status.  Rick, who had an actual career in porn, certainly continued to work, as did a couple of our other friends.  I, however, could not.  Another promising career arrested too soon?  Who knows?  I rather doubt it.  I don't think I was very good.  I certainly wasn't in the two scenes I've ever seen.  I did film one with Rick, but have never seen it.  I don't even know if it ever made its way into a film, but I have always wondered if perhaps I was better in it because of the experience and chemistry Rick and I shared.  That stuff had been rarely thought about until I stumbled quite accidentally on a group of new gay porn stars and gay porn fans, quite a few of whom  are women.  Go figure!  I never imagined.  My situation back then, save for the whole HIV/AIDS connotations is so similar to that of ones I see now, incestuous, crazy, bittersweet, absolutely and unrelentingly beautiful, and life altering. 

In the eighties and nineties  --I eventually moved up the coast to San Francisco and then onto Seattle-- I saw AIDS affect the gay community like an endless storm, ravaging us, threatening to destroy, but inevitably strengthening beyond comprehension.  Even now perhaps it's incomprehensible the effect AIDS and HIV has had on the gay community.  Certainly it lessened our numbers.  In my little corner of the world, numbers were lessened devastatingly.    I lost 73 close friends before, at the end of the nineties, people actually seemed to stop dying.  Seventy-three.  Seventy-three!  Some were lovers, some co-workers, close acquaintances, some drag mothers and sisters.  Yes, I did drag and that career lasted far longer than the porn one. Every loss was felt.  In 1998, I left Seattle and moved home to Minnesota.  I was beaten up, emotionally battered, exhausted.  When I go back to Laguna Beach, San Francisco, and Seattle to visit, it is very much, to me, like revisiting the site of a Holocaust.  Let me go back to that wonderful group of ten to demonstrate.  The group I had sought out, calculatingly.  Remember eight of us tested positive in the last year of the eighties and first of the nineties?  I am the only one still alive. 

It's difficult to imagine, I'm sure, a thing that you wouldn't change for the world, yet hate in almost equal measure.  Hate, though, may be too strong a word. What can you call something so dark that sets a tone so exasperating, at times sad, horrible, triumphant, so astonishingly bittersweet?  The man I am today is because of every minute that has come before, from that moment in the dark movie theater watching the still all-time favorite Big Chill, and even certainly moments before, through the rest of my teenage years, those years on the West Coast, loving, learning, falling down repeatedly, getting back up, each not nostalgically a thread in a tapestry.  I've been thinking so much about this, lately.  Gay Pride is a few days away.  In March of 2015, it will be twenty-five years since I tested positive.  Mostly I am healthy, but I've endured some med changes over the last couple of years that have left me a bit shell shocked and frazzled, a bit, my wholly positive outlook.  Certainly my newest group of friends has brought some of this up.  My heart absolutely goes out to every last one of the young gay men I have net-met.  How could it not?  Even subtracting almost completely the HIV ingredient, although obviously not that completely, the friendships I see, the fights, public and behind the scenes, the tears I'm sure are cried, the hearts broken are all so reminiscent. 

And so to an extent, my life has come full circle.  I love the concept of the porn mom!  Just love it!  The community of people reaching out through DM, email, traveling miles to meet in person, fangirling, fanboying, all strangely odd, yet utterly fascinating.  And quite lovely.  This story, I am certain, is far, far from over. 

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this.  I hope there will be lots more to come.