Tag: HIV

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The Truth Is, by Pat Gourley

The truth is I am a very lazy writer when it comes to putting fingers to keyboard and coming up with something for our weekly SAGE topics. I genuinely feel that my story, at least from a historical perspective, has pretty much been shared with the group. The format we use though has been very stimulating for remembering many past events and antics from my past particularly it seems from the 1960’s and 1970’s.

The truth is though I have much less to write about particularly from the mid 1980’s to the present. I seem to have experienced a diminution of involvement even in activities that seem to land right in front of me and ask for active participation on my part.

The truth is I am not exactly sure why this has happened but I can speculate I suppose. Maybe it is just a matter of getting older. I am getting older like it or not. As I rapidly approach my 70th birthday the truth is … that seems quite amazing to me. I know I am speaking to many folks here quite a bit older and am perceived by some of you as just a youngster. However, I do appreciate how remarkable it is really for someone infected with HIV in the early 1980’s to still be around and often griping about what are really first world problems. An example of a very vexing first world problem for me would be my bemoaning the fact that my neighborhood Whole Foods Market closed last fall and moved to LoDo. I mean really how I suffer so having only a King Soopers, a Safeway, a Trader Joe’s and a Natural Grocers all within easy walking distance.

The truth is I have been infected with HIV for at least 33 years, having tested positive in the summer of 1985. I strongly suspect though I came in contact with the virus and it set up shop in early 1981 making it 37 years, more than half of my life on Earth.

What is my secret to this longevity you may ask? Well the truth is I have no fucking idea. Beyond just maybe being one lucky son-of-a–bitch I can quickly rule out a few reasons right off the bat. It was most certainly not any sort of strong religious faith or conviction. I am an atheist and a half-assed Buddhist practitioner on my best days. Diet and exercise have always been important to me at least on an intellectual and philosophical level if not in my daily eating habits. Saturated fat and high dose sugar input in the form of gourmet ice creams indulged in freakishly often have done little I suspect in keeping my immune system in tip-top shape.

There is no doubt the HIV meds are the main reason I am still here and I do take them religiously. The truth is though that they are slowly accelerating many of the health problems driven by the dietary-fueled metabolic derangement so endemic in American life today with diabetes, stroke, dementia and heart disease being several prominent ones.

One possible current saving grace when it comes to my many dietary indiscretions is that the grocer closest to me is Trader Joe’s and their absolutely crappy ice cream selection. Talk about a first world problem, hey?

The truth is really when looking at my long-term HIV/AIDS survival that it is clearly related to my privilege. I am a white guy in a part of the world where the problems I face are really first world ones. I have been the beneficiary of many forms of privilege that have allowed me to coast for much of the past 37 years with relatively easy access to cutting edge HIV treatments and medications. That white privilege does unfortunately still play a huge role in HIV disease even today in the United States as reflected by the disproportional rate of new HIV infections. African American gay and bisexual men face a one–in-two chance of being infected in their lifetime. The same risk for white gay men is one in eleven. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/magazine/americas-hidden-hiv-epidemic.html

The truth is I am skating on pretty thin ice needing to continue toxic but necessary HIV chemotherapies and having numerous metabolic derangements undoubtedly accelerating my inevitable demise. So what keeps me going? Well not to in any way be pandering this group has been one. I find great solace in participating in a group whose existence is facilitated by the same organization I became involved with in 1976. The truth is where would I be without you?

© April 2018

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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Don’t, by Pat Gourley

“ Do or do not. There is no try.”

The Buddha


This quotation, ostensibly from the Buddha, is on my current favorite t-shirt. This is my favorite shirt since it has a long tail and easily covers my big belly. The belly fat is due in large part to two things: my major sweet tooth that seems to primarily kick in between seven and nine PM every night and my HIV meds that rapidly accelerate the metabolic syndrome that leads to abdominal fat deposition. My protruding belly is in stark contrast to my gaunt, wasted looking face that makes even Keith Richards look good on his worst days. I won’t even address the current sorry state of my ass.

The above quote may remind some of you of a line from Star Wars spoken by Yoda. The Yoda version also goes something like this just with more dramatic punctuation: “Do. Or do not. There is no try.” The Empire Strikes Back.

Supposedly Yoda lived to be 900 years old but the Buddha still has him beat by living at least several millennia prior so I am going with Buddha as the originator of this famous line. This I suppose could be a phrase comparable to the infamous “shit or get off the pot”. No hanging out on the throne reading the paper. For god-sakes focus and commit to the task at hand or not.

At first blush with this topic I thought I want to be a ‘doer’ rather than responding to the often-harsh command: don’t! Then it quickly occurred to me that there have been many “don’t-directives” in my life that I have to say have proved helpful. A few that come to mind are: don’t play in traffic, don’t own a gun, and don’t eat lead paint chips, don’t pick-up that snake or don’t sashay into a straight bar on Bronco Sunday afternoon and ask, what ya watchin’ fellas? And the one that I saw recently on Facebook, “don’t come out of the bathroom smelling your fingers no matter how fragrant the hand soap was you just used.”

Perhaps I was overly primed to see the following based on today’s topic but in reading a nice long article on Larry Kramer in the NYT’s from last week I was particularly drawn to several quotes by Kramer using the word “don’t”. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/nyregion/larry-kramer-and-the-birth-of-aids-activism.html

I’ll get to the quotes in a bit but for those of you perhaps not familiar with Larry Kramer he first came on the national gay scene in a significant way with the publication of his prescient 1978 novel Faggots. The novel was a rather unflattering though brutally honest look at the wild sexual abandon of gay male life in the later half of the 1970’s. Kramer as a result was persona non grata in the gay world but with the onset of the AIDS nightmare a few years later Faggots took on an air of prophecy.

Kramer also has significant accomplishment’s in the worlds of film, theatre and literature but perhaps in some ways most impacting were his successful efforts around AIDS activism. He was a seminal founder of both the New York based Gay Men’s Health Crisis and a few years later of the iconic and change creating movement called Act Up. I have included a link to this NYT piece on Kramer and highly recommend it as an important historical snapshot of this great gay man and his many accomplishments. He is a consummate example of the real life advice contained in the phrase “don’t be afraid” or to again shamelessly exploit an old Buddhist bromide “leap and a net shall appear”.

Quoting Kramer from the NYT’s article: “I don’t basically have fences to mend anymore. The people I had fights with down the line, some are dead. But even when we fought, I think we were always — I love gay people, and I think that’s the overriding thing in any relationship that I have with anyone else who’s gay. Never enough to throw them out of my life. I’ve never had huge fights with anybody. Much as I hate things about the system and this country, in terms of the people I deal with, I don’t have any.”

I have been keenly aware of Larry Kramer and his many bold and often at times very controversial proclamations and actions since 1978. He has pricked my conscience on numerous occasions shaming me actually to do more than I would have without his kick in the ass but still never achieving his level of fearless integrity. I still today in many ways lamely persist with my own at times crippled activism.

It is 2017, almost 40 years since the publication of Faggots, and as Larry reminds us, at age 81, in his last quote in the article the struggle continues: “I don’t think that things are better generally,” he said. “We have people running this government who hate us, and have said they hate us. The fight’s never over.”

© May 2017

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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Clearly, by Pat Gourley

So clearly is an adverb that means without doubt or obviously. With that definition in mind it is a word I should “clearly” be very cautious in using. It should be admonition enough against using this word that the main school of Korean Zen I have followed for years preaches, “don’t know mind”. In a jacket blurb for Richard Shrobe’s 2004 book Don’t Know Mind author Jane Dobisz defines Don’t Know Mind as “our enlightened mind before ideas, opinions, or concepts arise to create suffering”.  Well, I guess that might explain why despite my privileged white male existence I feel I suffer so much.
Let me cast caution to the wind and most likely prove my Zen teachers right by sharing examples of where I at least quietly in my own head use the word clearly.  Multiple times a day I most often say silently to myself: clearly, you are an idiot. Or clearly, your driver’s license should be permanently revoked. When seeing the current White House Press Secretary at her daily briefs and saying out loud to the T.V. clearly a blind monkey did your makeup. And most frequently these days clearly the words ‘President Trump’ must just be part of a bad dream and I’ll wake up soon.
Putting the many ideas, concepts, and opinions aside that I so often attach the word clearly so there are somethings in my life that are fact and the use of clearly or its synonyms ‘without doubt’ or ‘obviously’ are quite appropriate. Without a doubt, my HIV meds are keeping me alive. It was quite obvious that the early symptoms of HIV infection and T-cells below 200 I was experiencing in the mid to late 1990’s were clearly related to poor viral control due to inadequate medications.
Without doubt, I have diabetes with my most recent HbA1c being 7.6. Clearly, this needs to be addressed or the ravages of high blood sugars will come home to roost sooner than later. Since I already take a butt load of pills every day the thought of adding diabetes’s medicines is in my mind something to be avoided if at all possible. Despite what I think is the obvious solution to a low fat whole-foods-plant-based diet and daily exercise I find this regime to be quite the challenge.
At times I clearly try to rationalize the recent HbA1c of 7.6 by blaming my HIV meds, which are certainly a contributor, but not something I can do without. My recent 6 weeks in San Francisco also proved to be a dietary challenge but the reality is there are plenty of grains, fruits, and vegetables for sale all over that City, really more readily accessible than here in Denver. Just because I spent my mornings fixing breakfast for B&B guests and serving them cholesterol bombs in the form of buttered toast and eggs along with that delicious class one carcinogen, bacon, I clearly did not need to sample the leftovers. Serving steel cut oats, almond milk and fruit for breakfast to most B&B guests would not result in many positive online reviews I suspect.
It is easy to say but for me hard at times to resist. The smell and taste of bacon must surely be the work of the devil, if I believed in the devil: clearly here nothing to blame but my own lack of self-control.
Another fact-based use of the word for me would be: clearly I am one lazy-ass writer. Though participation in this group has been valuable in many ways I am also confronted with my slothful writing habits on a weekly basis, merely coasting on residual grammar habits instilled by years with the Holy Cross nuns. The prompt of a word or two as impetus for writing about my life has for me in some ways been quite ingenious and on occasion productive. It does get me to put fingers to keyboard though most often just a few hours before group.
The lazy part comes for me in that I almost always have many ideas on a subject that would without a doubt require much more thought, energy and research than I am usually willing to devote to it. The excuse I most often use is to keep my word count less than 800 and I do find it a worthwhile challenge to get the point across in as few words as possible. A more honest reflection here might bring into question my need to use valuable time watching all 16 Dead and Company shows, each at least three hours long, on their current fall tour or my near-daily masturbatory dedication to online adult entertainment, many hours clearly thrown into that void. That would be the adult entertainment into the void and not the Dead, who are playing superbly this go around by the way.
So despite my shortfalls here the discipline of writing at least several times a month has clearly been beneficial. Thank you all!
© 20 Nov 2017 
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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Tears, by Phillip Hoyle

I’m writing a memoir about my too-brief relationship
with Rafael Martínez who provided me my first experience of falling deeply,
hopelessly in love. Part of my preparation has been to study what writing
teachers say about memoir and, just as important, to read several memoirs. I
read Frank McCourt’s ’Tis, Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind,
Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie, several excerpts from other memoirs,
and am currently reading Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time.
I began the Rafael project years ago but realized I
was not yet ready to deal with organizing and writing about the experience of
love and loss. The grief was too keenly edged for me to be honest about myself
and fair to everyone else. The events took place fifteen years ago.
Two years ago I started readdressing the project. About
three weeks ago I started reading Monette’s AIDS memoir, a book I had read
years ago. I hoped I might learn a lot. A wealthy gay couple living in southern
California, Ivy League educated, driving around in a Jaguar, an attorney, a
Hollywood film writer living a rather high life seemed like a lot to take in. I
wondered if this story would even touch me.
By contrast, Rafael was HIV positive and poor, helped
a lot by Colorado AIDS Project. His doctors estimated he had about eight years
to go, but what they didn’t know was that he had full-term Hepatitis C. It was
diagnosed only three weeks before it killed him. Monette, while not my favorite
gay writer, skillfully took me to their home, clinic after clinic, test after
test, all experiences I knew too well for I went to such places with two friends
and with two lovers—just not in a Jaguar. Writing about Rafael while reading
this book opened my tear ducts, and I wondered: did I not cry enough fifteen
years ago? It seems likely.
My early weeks with Rafael showed how much we loved
one another and how practical and romantic we could be. I told him I would like
to meet his family before he ended up in the hospital. I was earnest though we
laughed. We thought we had time, but we were wrong. Too soon he was in the
hospital. There I met his younger brother, a very nice Mexican man who came north
on behalf of the family. The parents had learned that Rafael was gay and HIV
positive only six weeks before this hospitalization. The family’s life was in
crisis. Rafael got out of the hospital but then went back in with another
problem. Eventually more of the family arrived. I was caught between my lover
and his family; between Rafael’s insistence that they treat the two of us as a
family of our own, they being guests in our home, and what I saw so clearly in
his mother and father, the needs of shocked parents facing an illness they
didn’t understand and the possibility of losing their son altogether. In short,
I was pushed into an interpretive role of supporting both my lover and his
parents and siblings. I walked that tightrope, one that my ministerial experience
had so well prepared me to walk. And I was helpful. I cried but not much; there
were too many other people needing to be consoled and reasoned with and their
English was so poor and my Spanish functionally nonexistent.
We made it through. I helped them as Rafael was dying.
Still Rafael was strong and helpful and insistent. I was so proud of him. He
took care of his family. He reached out to nurses who were having difficulty.
He reached out to me. And of course, I cried, but not very much, not enough I now
am sure.
I’m carefully reading Monette’s scenes of bedsides,
hospital corridors, tests, last minute trips to favorite places, accommodation
to losses. I read; tears gather and fall.
I’m crying now.
© 16 Oct 2017  
About the Author  
Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his
time writing, painting, and socializing. In general, he keeps busy with groups
of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen
in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He
volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”
He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com 
Posted on

Don’t, by Pat Gourley

“ Do or do not. There is no try.”
The Buddha
This quotation,
ostensibly from the Buddha, is on my current favorite t-shirt. This is my
favorite shirt since it has a long tail and easily covers my big belly. The
belly fat is due in large part to two things: my major sweet tooth that seems
to primarily kick in between seven and nine PM every night and my HIV meds that
rapidly accelerate the metabolic syndrome that leads to abdominal fat
deposition. My protruding belly is in stark contrast to my gaunt, wasted
looking face that makes even Keith Richards look good on his worst days. I
won’t even address the current sorry state of my ass.
The above quote may
remind some of you of a line from Star Wars spoken by Yoda. The Yoda version also
goes something like this just with more dramatic punctuation: “Do. Or do not.
There is no try.” (The Empire Strikes Back).
Supposedly
Yoda lived to be 900 years old but the Buddha still has him beat by living at
least several millennia prior, so I am going with Buddha as the originator of
this famous line. This I suppose could be a phrase comparable to the infamous “shit
or get off the pot”. No hanging out on the throne reading the paper. For
god-sakes focus and commit to the task at hand or not.
At first
blush with this topic I thought I want to be a ‘doer’ rather than responding to
the often-harsh command: don’t! Then it quickly occurred to me that there have
been many “don’t-directives” in my life that I have to say have proved helpful.
A few that come to mind are: don’t play in traffic, don’t own a gun, and don’t
eat lead paint chips, don’t pick-up that snake or don’t sashay into a straight
bar on Bronco Sunday afternoon and ask, what ya watchin’ fellas?  And the one that I saw recently on Facebook, “don’t
come out of the bathroom smelling your fingers no matter how fragrant the hand
soap was you just used.”
Perhaps I
was overly primed to see the following based on today’s topic but in reading a
nice long article on Larry Kramer in the NYT’s from last week I was
particularly drawn to several quotes by Kramer using the word “don’t”.
I’ll get to
the quotes in a bit but for those of you perhaps not familiar with Larry Kramer
he first came on the national gay scene in a significant way with the
publication of his prescient 1978 novel Faggots.
The novel was a rather unflattering though brutally honest look at the wild sexual
abandon of gay male life in the later half of the 1970’s.  Kramer as a result was persona non grata in
the gay world but with the onset of the AIDS nightmare a few years later Faggots took on an air of prophecy.
Kramer also
has significant accomplishment’s in the worlds of film, theatre and literature
but perhaps in some ways most impacting were his successful efforts around AIDS
activism. He was a seminal founder of both the New York based Gay Men’s Health Crisis and a few years
later of the iconic and change creating movement called Act Up. I have included a link to this NYT piece on Kramer and
highly recommend it as an important historical snapshot of this great gay man
and his many accomplishments. He is a consummate example of the real life
advice contained in the phrase “don’t be afraid” or to again shamelessly
exploit an old Buddhist bromide “leap and a net shall appear”.
Quoting Kramer
from the NYT’s article: “I don’t
basically have fences to mend anymore. The people I had fights with down the
line, some are dead. But even when we fought, I think we were always — I love
gay people, and I think that’s the overriding thing in any relationship that I
have with anyone else who’s gay. Never enough to throw them out of my life.
I’ve never had huge fights with anybody. Much as I hate things about the system
and this country, in terms of the people I deal with, I don’t have any.”
I have been
keenly aware of Larry Kramer and his many bold and often at times very
controversial proclamations and actions since 1978.  He has pricked my conscience on numerous
occasions shaming me actually to do more than I would have without his kick in
the ass but still never achieving his level of fearless integrity. I still
today in many ways lamely persist with my own at times crippled activism.
It is 2017,
almost 40 years since the publication of Faggots,
and as Larry reminds us, at age 81, in his last quote in the article the
struggle continues: “I don’t think that
things are better generally,” he said. “We
have people running this government who hate us, and have said they hate us.
The fight’s never over.”
© 21 May 2017 
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. 
Posted on

My First GLBT Acquaintance, by Phillip Hoyle

My first gay acquaintance had a rather elegant name,
Edward F. Printz, III, something I never expected of a person from a western
Kansas farm. I knew him as Ted. Of course he drove a tractor, but he also sang
at school, was the drum major for the high school band, and by the time I met
him he’d been hired as the music director for our little college. My last
semester there Ted led the choir I sang in and taught me vocal technique. I
learned so much from him.
While I was unschooled in language like “gay” and had
heard “queer” as an old fashioned word one of my grandmother’s used with some
regularity, I knew in a flash that Ted would be interested to do some of the sexual
things that I also would be interested to do had I not got married a year and a
half before meeting him. I really liked his buoyant and outgoing personality
and hoped he would never ask me to do those interesting things with him. I knew
I would not ask him to do them with me. Still I realized that we were much the
same and came to understand that sameness to be gayness. I picked up the gay
word from reading a book in the school library, a sociological study that along
with its main topic defined some common gay male words. I learned more about
this world of gay and found myself interested, oh so interested.
 I felt no
compelling need to enter that world but still was curious. Ted and I became life-long
friends. He became a regular visitor in our home after I graduated. Since we
had moved to the city where his voice teacher lived, Ted visited us some
weekends. One summer while he was in graduate school and lived with us, Ted
served as tenor soloist in the Chancel Choir I directed. Our friendship became
more complex. The relationship between the ever-teacher Ted and the
ever-student Phil endured until Ted’s death on his 47th birthday, April 29,
1994. Eventually I did enter Ted’s gay world. I lived as an openly gay man and
dedicated my fifteen years of massage work with HIV positive persons to his
memory. And I recall his wisdom and humor almost daily.
© 17 July 2017 
About the Author 
Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his
time writing, painting, and socializing. In general, he keeps busy with groups
of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen
in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He
volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”
He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com
Posted on

Anxious Moments, by Pat Gourley

If you get confused just listen to the
music play
Some come to laugh their past away
Some come to make it just one more day
Whichever way your pleasure tends
If you plant ice you’re gonna harvest wind
A
few lines from Franklin’s Tower. Grateful Dead (Garcia/Hunter/ Kreutzman)
Let me just
repeat that last line for emphasis: “If
you plant ice you’re going to harvest wind”.  More on that further on.
Writing about “anxious
moments” in June of 2017 now 7 months into Donald Trump’s presidency presents
itself as a herculean task. I mean where to start? For me perhaps it is best to
start with a bit of self-examination of what may be causing my anxiety.
If my privilege allows me
to simply weather out the storm of the next four years with little or no
personal damage, and sadly that seems it might be the case, I must say that it
is very tempting to just put my head down and go about my daily routines.  That would be much less anxiety provoking I
think.
I have Medicare and not
Medicaid.  Paul Ryan and his bunch would
certainly like to get rid of both but Medicare seems a reach to far politically
even for that crowd. Medicaid on the other hand serves a much more vulnerable
and powerless group of Americans. The strong and largely elderly voting block
represented by Medicare recipients is somewhat of a bulwark against Republican
intrusions – Medicaid not so much.
I also get a small Social
Security payment and a pension from the City and County of Denver. Both of
these are fairly solvent entities that I expect to last for my remaining years.
That is perhaps delusion on my part but rather than get “anxious” about it I
prefer to just blithely skip along. I acknowledge this view may really be from looking
out on the world from my relatively privileged window. There is of course any
number of ways the whole really fragile edifice could come crashing down on all
of our heads. So I am choosing to resist
on many fronts anxiety provoking or not. 
Let me relate a very small, and perhaps even a silly way, I am
resisting.
Significant marijuana tax
revenues going to Colorado coffers are adding to the overall financial health of
the State and our City in very major ways, indirectly helping keep my City
pension solvent, a tax tide sort of floats all boats. I am choosing to do my
part by exploring marijuana edibles in earnest purchasing recreational rather
than medicinal and paying the larger tax. 
I could of course legitimately play the HIV card and get a medical
marijuana license but for now I can afford the higher tax on the recreational
herb. Taxes really are the cost of living in a civilized society and it would
only add to that civility I would think if a significant portion of us gets
stoned on occasion.
So what else, other than
getting high, am I trying to do to counter the toxic miasma of the Trump
presidency enveloping us all? Well I am trying not to ‘plant ice’ and by that I
mean I am acknowledging that nobody is wrong 100% of the time (thank you, Ken
Wilber). Well that may not apply to Trump but I am willing to give nearly
everyone else on the planet a pass.
Without getting too deep
in the weeds and stretching the metaphor to death you can simply think of the
phrase “if you plant ice you’re gonna
harvest wind” as another way of saying don’t be an asshole. That behavior often
causes anxiety for others and yourself eventually, adding however small to the
anxiety burden of the planet.
A recent personal example
of my regrettably ‘planting ice’ was when I encountered Human Rights Campaign
(HRC) solicitors out in front of the Trader Joe’s near my house. It was a warm
day and I suppose I was cranky from the heat but I decided to give these young
20-somethings a bit of crap around HRC’s early endorsement of Republican Mark Kirk
over Tammy Duckworth in the Illinois U.S. Senate race last fall.  HRC switched to Duckworth a few weeks before
the election supposedly due to nasty things Kirk had to say in a debate about
Ms. Duckworth and her family but the damage had been done in my mind.
Initially I felt mildly
righteous for sticking up for my longstanding belief that the at times too
conservative HRC was not my Radical Fairie cup of tea. By the time I got home a
couple blocks away I started to feel somewhat anxious about the interaction
though albeit it was pretty tame, no stone throwing or cursing had occurred. I
began to worry, a great hallmark of anxiety, that maybe I had not made myself
queerly obvious and they thought I was some old homophobic jerk. So I put my
groceries away and walked back down the street. After assuring the two I was
not stalking them I explained further my issues with HRC and threw in a few
other things to firmly establish my gay cred. They listened politely, nodding a
lot and I am sure hoping this crazy old queen would soon move on. I ended by
saying that I appreciated and admired their being willing to be openly and
politically queer on a public street. Not something I would have done in my
early twenties.  This proved to be one
more instance in my life where I realized if I were going to plant ice I would
soon be harvesting wind.
© 11 Jun 2017 
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.
Posted on

Setting Up House, by Pat Gourley

Having moved many times in my adult life and once while still living at home with my parents I am quite familiar with setting up house. The first move in my teenage years was when my family left Northern Indiana and relocated to NE Illinois in 1965, I was 16 years old at the time. This was as it turned out a great change getting me out of rural Indiana. Unfortunately, Mike Pence is really not an anomaly back there, and into a new home and school. At Marion Central Catholic High School, I was taught by a great radical Holy Cross nun who to this day influences my world view. Oh, and there was the older gentleman I met in my new surroundings who became my first queer love.

Though I have been very fortunate for never having to “set up house” after any sort of natural or manmade disaster I think this move as a teenager really set a tone for me later in life making frequent moves much easier. All but one of my moves since age 18 has involved setting up home with other folks and a wide variety of individuals at that. Two moves in the last 50 years, totally 28 years, have involved setting up shop with a male lover. Having a loving companion in your life with whom you decide to share living space with is always a bit different than moving in with people who are just roommates.

My most recent move, now a little over three years ago, is unique in my adult life in that it has involved no one else – not a lover or any roommates. I really do yearn for more companionship in my day-to-day living situation and would prefer this be somebody or somebodies on site. A lover at this time is fraught with hurtles and unlikely to happen. My HIV status complicates this certainly but really the big issue is finding someone who could stand to share a bed with me. I get up to pee at night an inordinate number of times and my propensity to fart in bed occurs often enough each night to be a contribution to global warming, a form of methane one step from being weaponized: the one and really only drawback to a largely plant-based diet.

Even my cat has had to adjust to these frequent nightly wind emissions. He will only sleep spooning my belly even though it is just as cozy in the crook of my leg. The leg position however puts him directly in the line of fire and is avoided it seems at all costs.

So, if I am to avoid one of my greatest fears of aging, living out my last years alone, it will need to be with roommates and individual bedrooms. I have many years of experience living communally and do hope that these last few years of going it alone have not made me into such a fussy old queen that sharing living space is now out of the question.

Though I have certainly learned to never say never I find the prospect of any sort of assisted living very unsettling and something I hope to avoid at all costs. Let’s be honest “assisted living” has become the politically correct euphemism for nursing home. Oh, sure a few assisted living situations come with a supported modicum of independence but these often involve significant financial resources. Ending up in such a place is something I personally dread more than dying alone and being eaten by my cat before someone finds my body. I am therefore in support of ballot initiative 106, the medical aid in dying proposal on the November 2016 ballot here in Colorado. [It passed.]

I have, I think, walked a fine line in this writing group acknowledging the reality of my HIV status while trying to avoid weaving it into everything I have to say. It is far from everything I have to say and I feel stating it too often can really be disingenuous to say the least. Having said that my options for finding like-minded individuals these days to set up house with has been severely limited by the many individuals l have lost out of my life from AIDS. I would therefore find it a bit cathartic to have us write some time about taking down a house after the death of a lover, parent perhaps or simply a roommate. This would I think be something most if not all of us could write about.

© 11 September 2016

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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Hospitality, by Phillip Hoyle

My
parents lived truly hospitable lives. As a couple striving to live within the
Christian and biblical tradition, they entertained strangers and travelers. They
knew the stories of heavenly visitors that sometimes showed up asking for a
meal or a place to spend the night. They were familiar with the Old Testament
story of Abraham and Sarah’s visit by angels and the New Testament
interpretation that the same thing could still happen. They read the biblical commendations
of individuals and churches that welcomed travelling prophets and evangelists. In
their own time they lived out the spirit of those old stories and
interpretations.
They
also entertained their children. Of course that idea is not caught up in the
hospitality laws and traditions of Hebraic antiquity, for in Jesus’ teachings
there was no righteousness in taking care of one’s children or parents. Anyone
with dependants simply was responsible for the attendant burdens. Yet when I
contrast my parents’ providence and attitudes toward their children with what I
know happens too often in other children’s families, my parent’s home shines as
a place of true hospitality toward progeny, offspring who were treated as
persons not property. Our home went beyond the ancient values that treated
wives and children as a man’s chattels, for my parents treated one another
humanely and their children as well. They also treated other people as human
beings of value, and thus they related responsively to and responsibly toward
them. Surely such a distinction can be listed as hospitality, extraordinary
hospitality.
I
enjoyed a great upbringing in a hospitable home environment. So did Myrna, my
wife. Upon coming together, we saw our home as an environment for rearing
children and entertaining friends and strangers. Thus we accepted foster children
and “foster” adults into our home. For five years we entertained, as it were,
foster children when we served as a boarding home for the Kansas Children’s
Service League, a group I knew about due to my mother’s long-time support of
them. We also welcomed relatives and friends to live with us while they went to
school: Myrna’s sister who attended medical assistant school, a foster-daughter
of my sister’s who attended cosmetology school, our friend Ted who attended
graduate school, an old classmate Donna who likewise attended graduate school,
and friends of our son and daughter, kids who needed familial support in
various ways. We welcomed a friend of our son’s who as a young adult lived with
us for several months, and we welcomed a slightly crazy woman to live with us
for several more months, a woman who seemed always to be almost one inch from
living on the street. These experiences among many others kept our house lively,
taught the two of us strength, adaptability, and perseverance. Our home became
a crash pad, a loving support, an oasis, a place of cross-cultural learning, a
bed and breakfast, and the center of loving tolerance. The experiences changed
our lives, our perceptions of social reality, and our willingness to take
chances on other persons’ lives.
I
wonder then why we were unable to enfold my homosexuality into such an enduring
relationship and environment. Perhaps hospitality and homophobia don’t mix well
and the antipathy against homosexuality is too well institutionalized in western
society, too highly integrated into myths of otherness, sin, and transgression.
Both my wife and I were surprised at how quickly we moved towards separation
when details of my sexual truth became extrovert. We remain friends and when
together still wonder why we live separately. We are both hospitable; using our
separate homes to benefit others, and we are pleased that our children do the
same. Still the question lingers.
An
elderly minister and I once discussed the injunction in Matthew’s Gospel that
allowed for a church to kick out a member who would not act right. The wise man
pointed out that according to other good news passages such a sinner had to be
welcomed just like a brother or sister. But somehow, when homosexuality enters
the picture, there emerges a deep rift of disappointment, dirt, despicability, disrespect,
and dire detriment, enough so as to rip apart an intergenerational, long-standing
love and hospitality. Obviously marriages are not magic; nor is hospitality
uncomplicated.
Hospitality
must have been very difficult for Rafael’s mother, yet eventually she welcomed
me into her life on behalf of her dying son.
She
had to enter the home he shared with his gay American partner, a man her own
age.
She
had learned of her son’s homosexuality only about three months before when he
was in legal trouble. Then she learned that her eldest son was gay, he was ill
with HIV, and soon after that he was living with an American man.
Rafael’s
father was warm. His brother was warm. His sister was warm. I had to read body
language to understand those things. His mother was not mean, but she wasn’t
warm towards me. Some of what I understood about her I learned from her son.
She was not happy with the situation. It was against the church. It was against
all her dreams for her son and all the expectations she had held for her own
life. Sure her son had fathered a son for her, but he was supposed to stay with
his family, not run off to America and live with some gay man.
Rafael
told his parents they were welcome to stay at our home while they were visiting
him, but I was part of the deal. They were to be our guests. Of course, he
didn’t make it home until we were arranging home hospice for him. Then he
stayed less than thirty hours for when the home nurse tried to insert a
catheter to his bladder, she got blood. He had just been diagnosed with
full-term Hepatitis C.
Cultural
expectations were going to be a problem. I did housecleaning although I knew it
was women’s work. Once his father invited me to come sit with him. Of course we
could not talk. He wanted things to be as normal and proper as possible with
his wife and daughter doing the cooking and cleaning.
I
too was gracious and hospitable.
I
have received the hospitality of strangers.
I
have received strangers into my hospitality.
Home
life and hospitality.
Myrna:
Hospitality and generosity.
OT
traditions, NT traditions.
Users
and the hospitable, the foundation of a prejudice.
Hospitality
and spiritual dimensions of growth.
Pragmatic
considerations in hospitality.
Jesus’
words of hospitality—both to receive it and give it. Holy images.
Hospitals
Hostels
Hosts
Invitations

© 12 Mar 2013 
About the Author 
Phillip Hoyle
lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In
general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two
years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now
focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE
program “Telling Your Story.”
He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com
Posted on

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.