Tag: Empire Baths

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The Men in My Life, by Pat Gourley

Good grief where to begin
with this topic? It could certainly be the title of a book with many, many
chapters. As I have written in the past it has been the women in my life who
have had the most profound impact of substance. By that I mean they are the
ones who have most influenced and shaped my intellectual, philosophical and
certainly political bent. The one possible male exception would be Harry Hay.
For this piece though I
am not going to write about Harry but rather a person who has been in my life
for the past 38 years. This is a man who is now in his late 70’s who I first
met I think in the fall of 1978 or perhaps the spring of 1979 that bit of
history being somewhat fuzzy. We met for the first time and gloriously fucked
at the Empire Baths and then got together the next night at my house for a
repeat. That first night at the tubs I had picked him up in the showers and to
be honest it was his quite ample and thick cock that first caught my attention.
I really don’t think of
myself as a size queen and have thoroughly enjoyed many penises of all sizes
and girths over the years and know from lots of experience that it is not the
size of the member but rather the skill of the partner that makes all the
difference.  It is no longer the case but
in my teens, 20’s and 30’s the sight of a large, stiff dick was irresistible
with all caution thrown to the wind and if this appendage was attached to a man
who also knew how to use it, all the better. 
I really most enjoyed unwrapping a package that came with no assembly
required.
Over the next few years
we came to know one another quite well. I learned that he was married and lived
in rural Colorado. And most shocking of all he was a Republican! Amazing how if
the sex is really good party affiliation seems to rarely be an issue.
Our get-togethers were
always sporadic but consistent over the years and I came to truly appreciate
our genuine mutual love and his no strings attached generosity. I did meet his
wife on a couple of occasions. She is a wonderful, dynamic woman who he still
lives with him in a Western, rural and very Republican state. I never asked and
have no idea what she knew or did not. 
From the early 1980’s on, at my insistence, our sex became scrupulously
safe which turned out to be a good idea after I tested positive for HIV in
1985. He was always the top though so any risk to him and or to his wife was minimal;
latex sealed that deal, even with almost all play being just mutual masturbation.
The dramatic difference
in out worldviews and every day life has been a recurrent and at times a challenging
lesson for me. Our truly loving relationship has been a reminder to not take my
own politics too seriously. I do believe if we could get a majority of the
world’s men to lie naked with one another, even just on rare occasions, the
world would be so much more peaceful and less toxic in general.  Ah, the stuff of dreams.
Though I have only an
inkling of how closeted his life may still be I have always been very
protective of his identity and his hetero life. He has described himself to me
as gay but I don’t ever try to deconstruct that too much. As a good San
Francisco friend recently said in describing another queer theorist writing’s
in the Gay and Lesbian Review: “his
ramblings sound like Tourette’s with a PhD”. No need for me to risk being that sort
of analyst with my dear friend.
We most recently got
together a few days ago on a visit to Denver. Most of our time was spent
soulfully chatting about the recent suicide of a mutual friend and deeply
listening to one another grieve and shed a few tears about this loss.
There was a bit of naked
play on this visit, nothing to compare to 30 years ago of course, but still
enjoyable and generous on his part. No, I did not succumb to lecturing him on
the fact that his dick would work much better if he could get the animal
product out of his diet.  We got to the
point years ago where the quality of our time together was not predicated on
the rigidity or complete lack thereof of our hard-ons. Something that seems to
be a real barometer of many long-lasting gay male friendships I think.
Speaking only from a gay
male perspective here I think it worth mentioning the truly amazing and
literally millions of gay male friendship networks that are enduring and often
totally non-sexual that characterize so much of our queer lives. This is
something that truly differentiates us from many of them. Let me close
paraphrasing my favorite Harry Hay quote of all time: “the only thing we have in
common with the straight world is what we do in bed”.
© 27
Mar 2016 
About the Author 

I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled
by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in
Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an
extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.
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A Guilty Gift?, by Pat Gourley

In an effort to catch up with
the group topics I am combining “Gifts from Afar” and “Guilty Pleasures”.  I am using the title of this piece “A Guilty
Gift?” as a possible metaphor for my own HIV infection. Please don’t interpret
the use of this metaphor on my part as personal “slut-shaming” since nothing
could be further from the truth. Nor do I for a minute view my HIV infection as
a gift.
I was most certainly infected
in late 1980 or early 1981 and it could have been in the rectory of the
Methodist Church in Aspen Colorado or as likely at the Empire Baths here in
Denver. Either way I suppose that the behavior, most likely with my legs in the
air, that lend to my infection could be viewed as the result of indulgence in a
guilty pleasure.
By 1980 though I had long ago
stopped viewing getting fucked as something to feel guilty about. It had become
one of the true pleasures of my life. It did not start out that way though with
my first bottoming experience being with a cop in Gary Indiana in the summer of
1968. Note to self from that experience: do
not ever use shaving cream again as lube. This was a very unpleasant
experience that I did feel guilty about for a few years actually. However, in
large part on the basis of my first very positive sexual experiences with a
dear man a few years my senior the previous year (1967) I was able to work
through the guilt in time for my move to Denver in late 1972.  By the mid-1970’s I was a raging homosexual
activist and enjoying the many pleasures of the heady sexual liberation that
came with the blossoming of the emerging LGBT movement back then.
As I have written before I
have often wondered if a mushroom trip one night in the fall of 1979 at the
Empire Baths, that went a bit array, was not a premonition of a much bigger
nightmare to come. Were the gargoyles that adorned the walls of the outdoor pool
at the Empire Bath speaking to me, telling me that night to flee for my life or
announcing the arrival of a “gift from afar”? Maybe both! A gift in the form of
a resilient little virus called HIV.
It is now widely accepted that
HIV in humans originated from a similar virus found in a species of chimpanzees
in western equatorial Africa. This Simian virus was likely transmitted to
hunters infected when butchering these chimps for bush meat and it then mutated
in them into the HIV we know. Why this seems to have blossomed mid-20th
century is still conjecture but one interesting theory is that the European
colonization of parts of Africa forced the native Africans off the more
desirable land for farming and into the jungle areas where hunting bush meat
became a necessary source of protein. That would be one bitchin’ bit of Karma
wouldn’t it?
Hindsight can be a most potent
and effective teacher. The proverbial “if I only knew then what I know now” is
a frequently engaged mental exercise.  However,
we really aren’t psychics so feeling guilty that we are not is a big waste of
time. Living life to its fullest is inherently a risky proposition, and
mistakes will be made.
 I think it is certainly true for many of us with
HIV infection to view this virus as a gift from afar and that it is the direct
result of a guilty pleasure.  That view I
think though comes from very faulty thinking around health and illness, a view
still very prevalent today. The unsound and simplistic view is that being
healthy comes from being good and being sick from being bad. I would remind
everyone that no one gets out alive or as the Grateful Dead so succinctly sang
“if the thunder don’t get ya’, the lightning will”.
It may seem that I am blowing
off the reality that my actions have had consequences. Certainly they have even
if many of those actions were quite pleasurable in the moment and the
consequences a real bite in the ass down the road. I accept total
responsibility for my HIV but I really don’t engage in feeling guilty about it,
certainly not now 30 plus years down the road. I am much more likely to feel
very lucky to be alive today with this infection when so many in my life are
not. Guilt I think can be viewed as a form of regret about something that has
already happened and it is really a bit of toxic self-indulgence.
My main “guilty pleasure” these
days is primarily an addiction to ice cream almost always eaten in the evening
before bed. The “gift” if you will for my persistent indulgence in this
sugar-laden fat bomb several times a week may very well be Type 2 diabetes
eventually.
I was recently stunned by a
comment made by one of the Physician’s Assistants in the Urgent Care Clinic I
work. He had I think probably just seen a diabetic patient with unfortunate symptoms
related to diabetes, a necrotic toe perhaps that would require IV antibiotics
and maybe amputation. His rather forceful statement was:      “These
days I would rather have HIV than diabetes”.
Needless to say this comment
has stuck with me on more than one occasion when I am downing a pint of Ben and
Jerry’s, this shortly after taking my evening HIV meds. Guilty pleasures and
gifts from afar indeed!
© 17 May 2015 
About
the Author 
I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled
by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in
Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an
extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.
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Reputation by Pat Gourley

It has been some months at least since I have quoted Grateful
Dead lyrics in one of my written pieces here so I think it’s about time. A line
from one of their classic songs, Uncle
John’s Band – a tune by the way covered by the Indigo Girls, states “all I really want to know is are you kind”.
If I address “reputation” from a personal perspective I would most want to be
known and remembered for being kind.
While watching a 60 Minutes piece last night that featured a
few of the Dallas nurses who cared for Mr. Duncan the first Ebola patient in
the U.S. I was actually moved to tears by their genuine empathy and kindness
toward this man who was dying a horrifying death while at the same time at
considerable risk of infection themselves. As a nurse myself I can attest to
the fact that while we are not necessarily immune to the sight of human
suffering we are not often easily shocked either. This disease apparently is an
exception to that rule. Large amounts of human secretions are often part of the
game with nursing in certain settings. Ebola though seems to take that to a
whole new level most often in the form of voluminous amounts of vomit and
diarrhea. In the end stages of the disease even small droplets of these
secretions are teaming with literally millions and millions of viral particles
and it only takes one to pass it on.
They interviewed four nurses and all four seemed to exude
genuine kindness but I was most impressed with an African American woman and a
portly man with a definite and beautiful fey-air about him. Though not the case
anymore gay men were at one time a preponderance of the male nursing population
and we are still quite well represented. I will remember these nurses not so
much for their bravery but their dignified and uncompromising acts of human
kindness, wiping his tears and holding his hand albeit through multiple layers
of protective gear among many such acts in his last days. I would like to have the
epithet “he was a kind queen” attached to my tombstone or rather an urn full of
my ashes before they get scattered in San Francisco bay.
I suppose there was a time in my distant past when I did not
want the rather large “queer’ part of my being to be sullying my reputation in
anyway. I do think though I was lucky and got over that one quickly. One sort
of throws caution to the wind in that regard when you enter certain health care
professions and nursing in particular as a male in the 1970’s. I was probably
at my most flamboyant professionally in the 1970’s and I am sure had the
“reputation” as being the flaming homo nurse. Only once though in 40 years of nursing,
when working ICU, did a patient openly verbalize that he didn’t want the
“queer” touching him. My co-workers were much more upset about this than I was
at the time and it’s probably safe to say that the amount of kindness directed
this man’s way may have been severely curtailed during his intensive care stay.
Efficient and appropriate medical care does not necessitate kindness but it
sure goes down a lot easier with that in the mix.
As I alluded to I was quite out of the closet during both
nursing school and on the job in the 1970’s. I think my ‘homosexual-reputation’
if you will was solidly cemented one night in the ICU at University Hospital when
I had just returned from recovering from a bout of hepatitis. Hepatitis was
being discussed by a group of us including some docs and folks were speculating
whether or not I may have gotten the hepatitis on the job, something not
uncommon for nurses in those days before the advent of “universal precautions”
and good hepatitis vaccines. As I recall without missing a beat I quite
flippantly said that it was much more likely I was infected at the Empire
Bathes with my legs in the air. That was the end of that discussion.
As Andy Warhol so famously said everyone gets at least 15
minutes of fame, which I suppose you could say, then becomes a significant part
of his or her reputation. For me personally though I certainly hope that is not
the case. In early 2000 a writer with Westword came to Denver Health wanting to
do a piece on the current state of the AIDS epidemic. I had always shunned the
press wanting to do AIDS pieces because they so seldom got it right and what
could be worse for one’s ‘reputation” than to be grossly misquoted. The
reporter, a fellow named Steve Jackson, was a frequent freelance contributor to
the paper often doing long feature pieces. He apparently became bored with the
usual AIDS talking heads, mostly docs, at Public Health and was steered in my
direction by someone in the building.  He
and I actually hit it off having some sort of Grateful Dead connection as I
seem to recall and I spent quite a few hours telling him my story.
A long story short I became the entire focus of the piece and
wound up on the cover of the next issue. My own fifteen minutes of fame if you
will. The piece was insufferably long as it appeared in print and I was still
the case after the editor, Patty Calhoun, had cut a full third of it before
publication. I have never posted it to my web site in part because I found it
to be embarrassing, not because it affected my reputation at all but it really
seemed to focus on my own personal drama in a very over the top fashion. If any
good came out of it though I hoped it might have persuaded some folks at risk
to finally get tested and get on meds. I was, as was graphically laid out in
the piece, probably twenty years into my own HIV infection and still walking,
talking, working full-time and posing for Westword cover stories.
One might think, and I suppose I did too, that such exposure
would have major repercussions but it actually had virtually none. For one
thing it was too long for most folks to get through and secondly I attribute
this lack of fallout to the strength of coming out. If all your secrets are
already out their in your personal and work circles and most folks are already
bored with the old queen’s story and simply adding a few thousand more Westword
readers to that mix doesn’t much effect one’s life or reputation and it did
not.
In fact the response at least that blew back to me was quite
muted. Oh a few mostly gay positive men came up to me in person and were very
supportive but most responses ranged from “oh is he still alive” to my personal
favorite “I thought they only put convicted felons on the cover of Westword”.
The lesson for me seems quite obvious. One’s reputation
hopefully is not in anyway significantly influenced by any particular 15
minutes of fame but rather by a lifetime of being kind or at least trying to be
to all you encounter. In that respect I am great believer in Karma and what
goes around eventually, despite frequent bumps in the road, comes around.
© October
2014 

About the Author 

I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled
by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in
Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an
extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.