Tag: HIV/AIDS

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Eye of the Storm, by Phillip Hoyle

I must have entered into the relationship through the eye of the storm. Our connection was pacific, even inspiring at the beginning, but somehow the eye passed and I found myself caught up in a hurricane of problems.

The calm beauty of our first nights together featured a sexual exploration like I had never before experienced, the two of us touching, responding, initiating, enjoying a reciprocal openness and delight. That second morning when I had to leave early—well 3:00 a.m.—to feed my visiting family, he again said, in a childlike voice, “Don’t go.”

“I have to go, but the kids leave today. I’ll meet you after work; we’ll have the whole night together. I’ll fix you breakfast.”

“I want to fix you breakfast,” he insisted.

That third night turned out like I’d hoped, and we basked in one another’s presence, held onto each other, actually slept in his bed. And then I was introduced to his skill as a cook, that breakfast the first of many meals we shared in following months.

But within a few weeks I knew he was HIV positive, was in deep legal trouble facing a third degree sexual assault charge, had twice tried to kill himself, had serious financial problems, was just newly out to his parents, was getting medical attention through Denver Health, had recently been in the hospital, had decided he wanted to stay well, and wanted me to move in with him right away. I also found out he was college educated, creative, funny, sweet, and made my heart pound extra fast whenever he showed up—always late. I was hopelessly in love with this guy in a way I had never experienced before. He said he was in love with me as well.

The storm brought many trips to the hospital and clinic for tests, imaging appointments, surgical procedures, examinations of new symptoms, introductions of new medications, and more. Fortunately the intensity of these problems was matched by the intensity of our enthusiasm for one another. Our days provided new revelations of our pasts, experiments of intimacy, delight in giving ourselves to each other through conversation, touch, laughter, dance, and food. Our storm was not a fight but rather an accommodation to delights that we hoped would have a long future. But as the weeks went on the specter of failure kept trying to get through the door that had been left ajar in spite of our love. We watched the building intensity of the storm, the complications of treatments, the appearance of symptom after symptom, the confusion of diagnoses. We were both wearing down, not in our love or commitment, but in our imagination of a future. And there were other challenges: work, exhaustion, and fear. Fear was my largest challenge. I had lost too many people from my life in the prior six years: parents, my marriage, a good friend, and the too-recent death of another lover. My grief over that loss had not sufficiently subsided. Still I was not thinking of running away. We were tight Rafael and I. But I wished I weren’t going through all this again, especially when I had never had such feelings of love with another human being.

My lover’s parents lived in Mexico. They had little English; I had little Spanish. I had wanted to meet them before another hospitalization. That didn’t happen. I met them as my lover’s condition complicated, as his death neared. The storm ended then, at least the main part of it. Yet a storm lingers in me. Fifteen years later it still roars on occasion.

The ancient Etruscans believed that once grief visits it never goes away. I have many joys, and in my old age can list grief after grief. Now I work hard to welcome grief as a friend, even when my losses do not feel particularly friendly. I keep looking for the eyes in new storms I encounter and appreciate the ways their calm equips me to live with acceptance and supports my overall joy in life.

© 9 July 2018

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

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Pride, by Terry Dart

I don’t consider myself a proud person. “Pride goeth before a fall”, at least that was something I absorbed growing up. As a young person I was proud of being part of a championship women’s softball team. That feeling has lasted through to the present.

Pride in being gay? Just being gay was not enough, is not enough. I am proud of how people in the gay community came together when the horrific AIDS troubles began. I worked in the Colorado AIDS Project office a couple days a week, a few hours, answering calls from New Yorkers who’d seen our posters in the subway.

(For a short time Denver CAP was one of a few sources for information.) So much went on: a man called whose house had been burned down because he had AIDS.

I do not know whether the AIDS quilt is being expanded. It occurs to me that maybe it should be part of our parade, or maybe there could be a modern event celebrating GLBTQ history.

When I was a little girl in the late fifties there was a film at the movie theater in Minot, North Dakota, the town where I grew up. The police came and shut it down. I saw this as Mom and I were driving by. When I asked her what “The Killing of Sister George” was about, she did not answer. Out of fear and self protection Gay people most often tried to make themselves invisible, or at least inconspicuous.

There were a few, like writer Truman Capote later on who managed to be out during hostile times when pride in gayness could not be shared or demonstrated in public.

Gay people endured physical attack and endangerment at the hands of bullies, police, and homophobes. I remember Matthew Shepherd. He was often in the CAP office.

I was attending a Rainbow Camp for Gay people at Medicine Bow, near Laramie, Wyoming. My girlfriend and I encountered Matthew’s killers at the Taco Bell or Taco John’s. We had no idea what they would do. They worked there. I recall hearing them discuss “When he gets out of class.” Later my friend recognized the picture of the prisoner in the Denver post. I recalled the coldness in the eyes of the person who waited on us. The murder took place—a pistol whipping with Matthew tied to a fence post. They left him there to die of his wounds. I would like to think this part is over and that we are safe now. But we are not. Proud we may be, but “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”

© 25 June 2018

About the Author

I am an artist and writer after having spent the greater part of my career serving variously as a child care counselor, a special needs teacher, a mental health worker with teens and young adults, and a home health care giver for elderly and Alzheimer patients. Now that I am in my senior years I have returned to writing and art, which I have enjoyed throughout my life.

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Choices, by Pat Gourley

A very dear friend has told me for years that my problem is I have too many choices. He is right, and I do realize that it is a privilege to not only have the freedom but the where-with-all to have more than one or even several options available when facing life’s many circumstances. Being a white middle class male in America in 2016 carries with it enough cache to often have more than one alternative when faced with life’s various challenges, and this has been the case for most of my life.

I suppose my queerness and later in the dance my HIV infection have somewhat limited my choices but to be honest when I look around at the rest of humanity I still have it pretty good. It is interesting that these two things, queerness and HIV infection, where not choices but apparently unavoidable realities. I realized at an early age that being attracted to men was not a choice on my part but something very ingrained out of the box.

I am quite certain I was infected with HIV in the early 1980’s before the causative agent had actually been identified. And I am not implying that folks getting infected today are choosing this but rather they assume that they are either not at risk or they are in the short-run choosing pleasure over possible consequences down the road, a very human response in many situations. I am frequently reminded of Jerry Garcia’s answer when asked why people do drugs and he replied, “Because they make them feel good.”

The challenge then becomes how do I best address my choices especially in a culture that worships “more is better.” I read this past week that Americans, in droves apparently, are resorting back to buying large gas guzzlers and fewer hybrid automobiles in the past couple years now that gasoline is cheap again. Depressing news for arctic sea ice and a whole lot more.

One way to tackle multiple choices for a particular problem or situation would be to ask what is “enough.” I stumbled on a parting wish shared by a mother to her daughter right before she boarded a plane and the words spoken were “May you have enough.” And as with more of my philosophical guidance than I care to readily admit to these days this came from a Facebook post. I was though taken with it enough to Google the phrase “May You Have Enough.”

So it turns out this may have originated as an Irish Blessing, author unknown. This seems to fit nicely with one definition of “enough “ and that is “as much or as many as required”. For me personally and my life choices these days I can ask is a bicycle enough for transportation or do I need a car. Are beans enough or is eating chicken or fish really necessary for adequate protein intake. Is Natural Grocers enough or do I need to cop to the much shorter walk and shop at Whole Foods? When I need a break is a short mountain trip enough or do I need to get on a plane to go somewhere. Is my air conditioning set at 75 degrees enough or do I need it cooled to 70? And on and on.

There is though a second definition of “enough” that struck me as very appropriate especially this past week and that would be to indicate that one is unwilling to tolerate any more of something undesirable.

I see a fundamental message of the Black Lives Matter movement being simply “enough.” Enough is enough and no more will be tolerated.

The essence of this is so difficult it seems for many of us white folks to grasp. In part I suppose we can be left off the hook because of the blatantly revisionist history, dating back before the revolution of 1776, that we have been spoon-fed. The root motivators for the American Revolution are much more complex than issues around a tax on tea. The historian Gerald Horne has written extensively on this topic and a 2014 interview with him on Democracy Now is a vital listen for all trying to grapple with the roots of racism and racial tensions in America today. Here is a link to that interview: http://www.democracynow.org/2014/6/27/counter_revolution_of_1776_was_us

What the revolution of 1776 was significantly about was protecting the institution of slavery. The Second Amendment was actually about ensuring the preservation of the Slave Patrol Militias, which were early forerunners of out police departments. The term well-regulated militia being actually a shortened sanitized phrasing.

Here is a link to an analysis piece on the connection between the Second Amendment and the need to protect the institution of slavery: http://www.thehypertexts.com/Slavery and the Second Amendment Slave Patrol Militias.htm

If this suggestion seems a bit far-fetched consider the very muted response from the NRA about the recent killings of two black men who were supposedly carry legal firearms. Their panties would certainly be in a wad if this had been “white patriots.”

I am not meaning to put too simplistic a spin on it but slavery is a profound way of limiting the choices a human being has. The ingrained legacy of slavery in America, still to this day, severely limits the number of choices needed for a quality and fulfilling life for many African Americans. Everyone should have the option of too many choices.

© July 2106

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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When We First Knew, by Nicholas

At first, we laughed. That was how the years of fears and tears began.

It was a cool, breezy but sunny day in San Francisco as we took our lunches out to Union Square. Scattered high clouds and wisps of fog flew across the sky but not enough to dim the sun or block its warmth. Lloyd, Bill and I worked together at Macy’s and loved to spend our lunch breaks on a grassy patch in the busy park, the center of SF’s retail district. The elegantly turned out ladies who shop swirled around us. From Macy’s to Saks to Magnin’s to Neiman Marcus, they pursued their perfect ensembles. Meanwhile, tourists hurried about trying to catch a cable car ride up Powell Street over Nob Hill to Fisherman’s Wharf.

As we munched our sandwiches, Lloyd, I think, read a little item in the San Francisco Chronicle recapping a report in the Los Angeles Times about “gay cancer.” We chuckled at this latest concoction of the flourishing gay lib movement. We had our own newspapers, book stores, bars, choruses, churches, and clubs, so, of course, wanting nothing of the straight world, we would have our own cancer. We laughed.

That LA Times report told of the strange coincidence of young and otherwise healthy men who happened to be gay contracting a rare form of cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma which usually appeared only in elderly Jewish men. A cluster of these cases had shown up in Los Angeles. Nobody had a clue as to why.

We threw away the newspaper and went back to work.

Lloyd, Bill and I had by chance one day walked into a temp agency, not knowing each other. A staffer there said there were three openings in the back office at Macy’s receiving, sorting and distributing expensive fine jewelry and watches for 19 Northern California stores. We all said yes.

We got to know each other a little on the walk from the agency to Macy’s. Lloyd was a former theater major and loved disco. He and his lover Steven were regulars at Trocadero, San Francisco’s top disco in the 1980s. Bill had just moved to SF from Boston to get away from his family and to take part in the punk rock scene. He loved the B-52’s. And there was me. Recently arrived from Ohio, returning to the city I loved from a decade earlier, and hoping to start of new life, a real life, in this dynamic community with its combination of dramatic flash, earnest politics and organizations of every kind.

The three of us—me in my early 30s, Lloyd in his mid-20s, and Bill in his early 20s—hit it off from the start. We were all sassy then and made up for the routine job with a running repartee. Every morning we re-hashed that day’s episode of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, a serial in the Chronicle whose characters parodied prominent city figures. Guessing what was true to fact and what was made up kept many a conversation going for days. After work many times we went out together to a cabaret. And we went dancing at the glitzy, all-night disco parties at the Galleria. I remember one Halloween when Lloyd used his theater skills to deck us all out as Renaissance princes. I danced all that night in tights and a velvet doublet with puffed shoulders, a flouncy beret and feathered mask. I found out what fabulous really meant that night.

Through 1981 and ‘82, reports of “gay cancer” continued to grow and generated deep fear in the community. Suddenly, cases popped up in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City and other places. It seemed to be a contagion that rapidly turned young men into withering, festering old men but nobody knew what or why or how it happened. Or who would be next. Then gay cancer grew into other diseases and came to be called Gay Related Immune Deficiency—GRID. Sexual transmission was believed to be involved somehow. Or maybe those disco queens just did too many drugs. Or too much alcohol and too much sex. Or a poor diet. Or not the right vitamins. Or not enough exercise, as if flinging yourself around a dance floor to a frantic beat isn’t exercise.

Bill, the youngest of us, was the first to get sick. He kept complaining of just not feeling well though his ill feeling didn’t match anything he knew, like flu or tummy ache. I told him that these weren’t days you didn’t want to be feeling well and urged him to see a doctor. He didn’t know any doctors, he said. So, one day I took him to see my doctor. I don’t know what the doctor said or did, but Bill seemed to get better. We even went dancing sometimes.

But then he didn’t feel like dancing. And some days he didn’t show up for work. And then stopped working. Soon he felt too weak to do much of anything. A few months later, he went back to his family in Boston. I lost touch with him but heard he died not long after that. He died before they could even name the disease that killed him.

Then Steven, Lloyd’s partner, got sick. Then two other guys in our little dancing circle. And then even Lloyd, whom I was closest to. It was like a stalker picking us off one by one. Pretty soon I was dancing alone. Suddenly, those corny, wrenching, kitschy disco ballads became desperate pleas longing for love and life.

I think back to that breezy day when we laughed and went on laughing until it was impossible to laugh and then some of us wondered if we would ever laugh again. I think back to the days of not knowing and then getting a phone call that let me know that I did know, did know another one sick and that I had come that much closer to it and maybe I’d be making the next phone call.

Wayne, a former boyfriend whom I’d dated for a few months, called one night. We exchanged the normal chat about how we were each doing but he hardly had to say anything to explain to me why, after months of not seeing each other, this call on this night.

“I have to tell you,” he said, “I was diagnosed with…,” something or other, the exact name of the obscure ailment escapes me or maybe I never even heard it. The word “diagnosed” told me enough. I had now, if I hadn’t already, definitely come into direct contact with whatever it was that caused this illness or combination of strange illnesses—nobody ever seemed to have just one thing going on.

I asked him how he was doing and feeling and he said he was doing pretty good. He was getting his support network together. Count me in on that, I said. Anything you need, I’m here. He said he was determined to beat this thing, an obligatory statement that everybody made back then not knowing if it had even the slightest chance of coming true. I said I hoped I could help.

“Maybe we should get together and go out for dinner or a movie,” I suggested. About the most anyone could offer then was hugs and hand holding. He liked that idea so we made a date. We got together a few times and I cooked a dinner for him sometimes. Wayne was lucky. He had lots of friends and we all made sure that he almost never had to be left alone. But each time I saw him, he was thinner and weaker and then he started getting seriously sick with high fevers, no ability to eat, and wasting away. His own body was killing him. He died six months later.

It would be a few years before science figured out anything. Eventually, a name was given this strange syndrome that turned healthy young men into withering, festering old men overnight. That name was Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome or AIDS. And AIDS was about to dominate my social, romantic, political and professional life for some years to come.

© 2016

About the Author

Nicholas grew up in Cleveland, then grew up in San Francisco, and is now growing up in Denver. He retired from work with non-profits in 2009 and now bicycles, gardens, cooks, does yoga, writes stories, and loves to go out for coffee.

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Purple by Pat Gourley

The first chapter of Judy Grahn’s wonderful tome Another Mother Tongue from 1984 deals extensively with the color purple and its historical meaning and connections to gay people. She posits both current and ancient connections to the color for us as a people.

Whether or not there are legitimate historical connections to the color purple and queer folk it certainly has appeared repeatedly throughout the ages in association with those of us often seen as “other”. For example we have continued to own and quite liberally use the word lavender, with lavender of course being a pale shade of purple.

I was involved with a project of the LGBT Center of Colorado called Lavender University in the late 1970’s. Interestingly one of the more successful gay male hook-up Internet sites is called the Lavender App first appearing recently in 2015. There are many other examples of the use of the word lavender in describing our organizations and us.

The color purple can be created mixing shades of red or magenta that have a more feminine association with blue and its male connotations. Though I prefer to view us as a distinct phenomenon rather than a hybrid of the straight male and female I can live with purple being attached to us as an expression of the ambiguity and mystery we present to the larger hetero society. It is to our advantage to keep them guessing as to who we really are. It is of course also a color historically associated with power and royalty. For years I had a wonderful flouncy silk purple shirt I would wear for special occasions that required that I appear as royalty.

Sadly it was the color purple in the form of skin lesions that began to strike fear in many gay men at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. The rather sudden and mysterious appearance of purple skin lesions on gay men over 35 years ago quickly became a dreaded hallmark of the disease. I am referring of course to the lesions of Kaposi Sarcoma (K.S.) which we now know is caused by a herpes virus, the acronym for it being HHV-8, human herpes virus 8.

I would add that the lesions appear most purple on white skin. When K.S. lesions are an issue for darker pigmented folks the lesions can still appear purple but also often have a reddish or brown hue.

K.S can cause problems other than just skin lesions with the sarcoma able to involve internal organs as well. It was the facial lesions though that I personally feared the most. If one wanted to be on the down low with your HIV infection it was often hard to mask the facial lesions. I was never one to be shy about my HIV but I was certainly vain enough to fear a lesion on the tip of my nose. There are limits after all to ones love of the color purple.

HHV-8 is most commonly transmitted through saliva. There was apparently a fair amount of this virus among sexually active gay men in the 1970’s and as HIV began to spread, and severely compromise immune systems resulted, HHV-8 was able to take advantage and in many the result was Kaposi Sarcoma. Fortunately with the advent of effective AIDS drugs that restore pretty good immune function this virus, though certainly still around, causes dramatically less K.S.

HHV-8 can now I suppose be viewed as just one more little virus that uses us humans as transport media but kept in check if our immune systems are in good working order.

I’ll end with an interesting antidote I heard Sunday at the gym watching television coverage of Nancy Reagan’s death. She was a close friend of Rock Hudson. It was apparently a photo taken of the first couple that also caught the back of Rock’s head while he was visiting the Reagans in the White House that showed a suspicious lesion on his neck.

As incredulous as it might sound the photo catching this lesion supposedly alerted Hudson to the fact that perhaps he was also at risk for this new and devastating illness. Being quite familiar with how AIDS would present and progress I suspect there must have been some major denial in old Rock’s life to not notice any other symptoms before a K.S. lesion showed up on the back of his neck. Or perhaps it is just one more validation of the strength of the color purple, a hue capable of often grabbing one’s attention.

© March 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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True Colors – Take a Walk in the Grove, by Nicholas

          I want to tell a story today that involves one of our own,
a member of this group. It’s about a group of people who showed their true
colors in their loyalty to one friend and created a unique space for our entire
community. Along the South Platte River on the edge of downtown Denver, is an
area of Commons Park designated as a spot to remember those who have died of
HIV/AIDS and their caregivers. It’s called The Grove and it is one of only two
AIDS memorial gardens in this country—the other is in San Francisco. Our own
Randy Wren was part of that group that labored for seven years to make it
happen.
          The Grove started with one man’s vision. Doug McNeil knew
of the memorial grove in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and asked, literally
as his dying wish, why can’t Denver create such a spot. Doug died of AIDS in
1993, a time when the LGBT community was focused more on the battle to undo the
infamous Amendment 2 than on the AIDS epidemic. Amendment 2, passed by Colorado
voters in 1992, prohibited any government or government agency in this state
from enacting any provisions to ban discrimination against lesbian and gay
people. (There’s an excellent exhibition on that history outside this door in
The Center’s lobby.) And it was a time of still rampant AIDS phobia.
          A small group of Doug’s friends vowed to carry out his dream
for The Grove. They weren’t the usual gaggle of community activists and
politicos. They included socialites, arts community supporters, an attorney,
and an Episcopal priest. Most were not gay. They organized a non-profit group
called The Grove Project, got 501c3 IRS status so they could collect funds, and
began the long process of taking on the bureaucracy of the city’s Parks
Department.
          The Parks Department never openly rejected the idea but
negotiations dragged on for years. At first, the area in front of the
performing arts complex on Speer Blvd was proposed. The city objected that
theatre and concert goers wouldn’t want to be reminded of the awfulness of AIDS
on their nights out on the town. Another location in a park in southeast Denver
was suggested but that would have left the memorial far from the Capitol Hill
neighborhood that was most affected by AIDS.
          At some point, the riverfront came into the discussion. At
that time, the area was just beginning to be developed. There was a quiet,
somewhat out of the way spot in a new park—Commons Park—that the city was
planning. That fit the criteria of being visible, centrally located and quiet
enough to promote the atmosphere desired.
          The Grove was envisioned to be a natural area for
contemplation. It was landscaped very simply with trees, natural grasses and
shrubs, and some rocks. A simple inscription reads: “Dedicated to the
remembrance of those who have lost their lives to AIDS and to their loving
caregivers who helped them live out those lives with dignity.”
          The Grove was dedicated in a simple ceremony in August
2000. Doug McNeil’s loyal and persistent friends accomplished his dream after
seven years of work.
          Now, The Grove sits largely ignored and sort of neglected
in a recessed corner of Commons Park, near 15th Street and Little
Raven Street. It is surrounded by high priced condos and apartments but it is
still a quiet and attractive area.
          Recently, a movement got underway to renew the spot, clean
it up, refresh the landscaping and, most importantly, make the community aware
that this historical and spiritual resource exists. In recalling all the
individuals who battled, and continue to battle AIDS, we remember how our community
grew from that experience. We remember those we’ve lost. We remember when being
gay changed from just giving the most fabulous parties to a truly mature
community of caregivers and advocates. We remember our past and that we have a
history. A history that is the root of our present and future.
          I encourage everyone to seek out The Grove and spend a few
quiet moments there remembering. And maybe you can help in its renewal. You too
can show your true colors.
© 2016 

About
the Author 
Nicholas grew up in Cleveland,
then grew up in San Francisco, and is now growing up in Denver. He retired from
work with non-profits in 2009 and now bicycles, gardens, cooks, does yoga,
writes stories, and loves to go out for coffee.
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Here and There by Pat Gourley

I realize that one of the great challenges of my life has been to appreciate that I am “here” and to not worry about being “there”. I have a nearly all-consuming preoccupation to be “there” and of course when I get “there” and that turns into “here” and then I am off and running in my head once again to get “there”.

In the early 1990’s when my partner David was feeling the ravages of HIV, I was the nursing manager of a local AIDS clinic and friends, acquaintances, strangers and folks I was working with were dying all around me. It was in those years 1990-1995 that I probably felt the strongest draw I ever have in my adult life to find some sort of spiritual solace, or maybe it was refuge I was after. My childhood Catholicism had long ago fallen by the wayside and a return to that worldview totally out of the question. I came to realize that most religions and my own prior belief in a “God” were responses to the fear of my own death and the stark reality that is it. Belief in an after-life was out the window with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. It was very hard to grasp that this amazing ego, “me”, will just come to an end at my death. Even today I find it at times unimaginable that this life is it and there will be no heavenly reward or more likely for me eternal damnation if I were to believe the bible to be anything more than bad mythology.

When I think about it religion and its belief in an after life is the ultimate “there” trap, truly a false illusion distracting from “here”. If it is really lousy “here” it will all eventually be better “there”, nothing but wishful thinking and snake oil at its worst. I suppose being involved personally and professionally in the AIDS nightmare up to my eyeballs was responsible for this longing on my part for a “there”. So I fell in with a group of local Buddhists. I was attracted first to the Korean sect of Zen called the Kwan Um School by a hospice nurse named Richard who worked with many of our patients in the AIDS Clinic. He was an active participant in the school and had close ties with one of its leading teachers a woman who was also a lesbian and hospice nurse herself, sort of the complete package I thought at the time.

Certain Buddhist sects are big believers in reincarnation, which I view as just another form of the “there” game though they would never admit this with all schools incessantly pointing to “being here now”. If I can’t escape the wheel of samsara in this life I will reincarnate and get another chance, or if I really fuck-up this go-around I may come back as a cockroach. My attraction to Zen practice was in part because they are not big believers in reincarnation and of course there is no talk of a god in Buddhism. The Buddha is viewed as an enlightened being, something we are also if we just wake up and see it.

At the time this Buddhism seemed the perfect salve for my HIV inflicted wounds and of course if I was honest it was my own HIV infection that was driving the quest. So for the next 12 years or so I was quite active with the local chapter of the Kwan Um School developing my own private sitting practice and being involved with numerous group retreats most often led by our teacher who came out from Rhode Island for these events.

I was involved to the point of taking the initial vows called The Five Precepts:

I vow to abstain from taking life
I vow to abstain from taking things not given
I vow to abstain from misconduct done in lust
I vow to abstain from lying
I vow to abstain from intoxicants, taken to induce heedlessness

These seemed to me way more realistic and appropriate suggestions for a moral life than the Ten Commandments ever were. Needless to say 12 years with the Sangha and lots of cushion time did not result in anywhere near full actualization of these vows.

One of the rather neat components of the initiation ceremony when I took my vows was the lighting of a small wax wick that was placed on the underside of your left forearm and allowed to burn down until you felt it start to singe your flesh. Talk about a strong method for getting you to focus on the moment. You don’t think about anything else but the pain of the here and now and putting that sucker out.

I no longer practice with the Kwan Um School but do still try to maintain some semblance of a solo practice. The whole goal of meditation, that I do really believe has tremendous benefit and lessons, is to be “here” now and not somewhere over “there”. To be banking on or even worse perhaps preoccupied with an afterlife really has the potential to rob us of appreciating the absolutely amazing reality that we are “here”. Our human birth is such an unbelievably unlikely reality as to be truly mindboggling.

The great teacher Ram Das summed it all up in three simple words: Be Here Now!

© 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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Anger by Pat Gourley

It was often noted in my teens and twenties in particular that I had quite the Irish temper. This seems to have greatly diminished over the years and now is an emotion I rarely indulge in. Much of the anger I have expressed over the years has really been not much more that self-indulgent bravado. Often the sort of flash in the pan display that passes quickly usually followed by regret and at times an appropriate apology.

There have however been at least two instances in my life where my anger was sustained and in one of those seems at times to persist to this day. Both of these involve the suicides of two people close to me, one professionally and the other a dear friend of many decades. Today I will address the suicide of a co-worker from over twenty years ago. The other death will be the focus of an upcoming piece.

Even this anger, at a tragic death, certainly seems to have a quality of indignant rage – ‘how could you do this to me’ which in some respects seems quite silly since they are the ones who are dead, but then so much of my life has always really been about me.

This first suicide involved a psychiatric nurse who worked in the AIDS Clinic at Denver Health in the early 1990’s. She was a lesbian woman who on the surface seemed very strong and as put together as anyone I knew. Unbeknownst to me, but not to several others in her life, she purchased a handgun I believe in late 1992, saying she feared for her safety around the passage by referendum of Amendment Two by the voters of Colorado which read as follows:

Neither the State of Colorado, through any of its branches or departments, nor any of its agencies, political subdivisions, municipalities or school districts, shall enact, adopt or enforce any statute, regulation, ordinance or policy whereby homosexual, lesbian or bisexual orientation, conduct, practices or relationships shall constitute or otherwise be the basis of or entitle any person or class of persons to have or claim any minority status, quota preferences, protected status or claim of discrimination. This Section of the Constitution shall be in all respects self-executing.

I thought after the fact that if I had known about her gun purchase and the stated reason for it I would certainly have confronted it for the bullshit it turned out to be. Even back then I was sort of the resident out radical queer in an AIDS Clinic no less a place full of ACT Up members in 1992 and I would have said “oh honey all they are doing is finally being honest about how they hate us”. The statewide vote on the referendum was something like 53% in favor of literally codifying discrimination across the board based solely on sexual preference and 47% opposed. We were simply being put on notice to a fact that had always been the reality. This was of course challenged in court and overturned eventually by the United States Supreme Court in the case Evans vs. Romer in 1996.

I would in hindsight have been right to call her on this purchase since she used the gun along with some alcohol and prescribed medications as lubrication to drive up to St. Mary’s Glacier in early January of 1993 and blow her brains out. I would hope I would have insisted on a better reason, than homophobes run amok, for buying a lethal weapon by a person who was in many instances a very out and proud queer woman.

You must remember this was in 1993 and the peak of the AIDS nightmare. So many of our clients were valiantly struggling to often just stay alive for one more day and this crazy-ass women who I loved and admired, in excellent physical health as far as we knew, goes and kills herself. It was a great blow to many of my staff and her clinic patients to whom she provided psychotherapy. It was difficult for me to even speak her name for many months but we did finally put up a plaque in her memory when our own unbelievably raw feelings subsided and perhaps I personally better appreciated whatever the mental anguish she was suffering from. There were apparently major relationship issues in her life and perhaps these involved anger on her part or maybe it was simply an overwhelming depression made worse by well intentioned use of psychiatric medicines that unfortunately proved to be disinhibiting in the long run and maybe even direct facilitators in pulling the trigger. Suicides seem to often to be impulsively facilitated in our society by the criminally easy access to guns along with alcohol and certain psychotropic medications most often legally prescribed.

My feelings around suicides of people in my life are not however universal and do not always involve anger. In those days in particular end of life decisions to speed the dying process along by many suffering terribly from the ravages of AIDS were not uncommon. For those unfamiliar with this time and its nearly unbearable realities I would encourage you to see the current HBO movie version of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, visually at least it is much more riveting and intensely in your face than the play ever was.

The best suicides as I recall from those days were well thought out and often involved much support from lovers, family and friends. The act was rarely impulsive, rarely to my knowledge involved a gun and rarely if ever done in isolation. News of these passing when they would reach the clinic often invoked great sadness and sometimes a sense of relief but no anger.

If this is to be an act with integrity it seems to me it should never occur as a result of subterfuge and certainly not as an expression of anger toward others or one’s self. That itself seems to be a very angry last dance that certainly does not affect in any positive fashion others in your life, many of who may care deeply about you. It strikes me as not only very angry but selfish. I appreciate that deep depression can often set the stage but a common caveat about suicide is that it is mostly the choice when one is coming out of depression.

As mentioned above I will again explore suicide in a future piece, one by a dear friend of many decades and my own personal feelings about it. Most days I tend to take a Buddhist approach that suicide will only result in another reincarnation something to be avoided and continued samsara on the wheel of death and rebirth, which could go very wrong with one perhaps returning as a banana slug.


June, 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.

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All My Exes Live In Texas by Pat Gourley

Actually none of my exes live in Texas, are from Texas or to my knowledge ever had any significant connection to Texas. I have been there only once. That was an overnight stay in Dallas for teaching purposes on a new HIV drug called ddc. We were beginning a study with it at the AIDS clinic where I worked. I believe the year was 1990 or 1991. I seem to recall that this overnighter was in August and other than staying in a very plush hotel it was the throat grabbing heat and humidity that I remember best. The short trip from cab to inside the hotel made me think ‘so this is what hell is like.’

For those of you who have not seen the Dallas Buyers Club, currently playing at the Esquire Theatre one of the drugs they were trying hard to have access to early was ddc. AZT was all that was available early on and many thought it was poison. Ironically it was the high dosage of AZT that was the big problem and in the long run it proved less toxic than ddc. AZT is still in use today in combinations with other drugs and ddc nowhere to be found.

I believe the first buyers clubs were in New York City and on the west coast a direct offshoot of ACT-UP organizing and efforts. They did not originate in Texas.

I strongly recommend the movie which I feel is great validation for folks not sitting by quietly waiting to be saved (or not) but rather taking matters into our own hands and strongly and forcefully demanding change and action. This is something we queers are quite adept at when we put our minds to it. There has been some controversy in the gay press about the movie and after last night’s Golden Globe awards where the best actor and best supporting actor awards were won by the stars of the movie some minor bitching continues. I won’t get into the controversies here other than to say I think it is perhaps a bit “much ado about not much.” Everyone does agree the acting was superb.

In retrospect I do feel bad that I was attending a drug company teaching session on ddc in Dallas in the early 1990’s rather than spending my time visiting their buyer’s club. We of course had to be properly trained on the drug before we could be designated a study site for it. I never got to meet the infamous Ron Woodroof and the charismatic Rayon, the lead characters in the Dallas Buyers Club.

In the movie the main protagonist is a man named Ron Woodroof played by Matthew McConaughey. The other main character is a trans-women played in quite dramatic fashion by Jared Leto named Rayon. A strong subtext throughout the movie is the genuine bonds that developed between her and McConaughey a supposedly straight man. The Dallas Buyers Club itself as an entity doesn’t really take off until Rayon becomes involved and brings in many customers. It needed a bit more legitimate queer street cred, which Rayon brought to it, countering the McConaughey character and his early on really vicious, drug addled homophobia.

Buyer’s Clubs became a quite widespread phenomenon in the late 1980’s and were a force even locally here in Denver until the late 1990’s when protease inhibitors came on the scene. The flawed but immensely better new drugs that actually worked to keep the virus at bay tended to take the desperate energy out of the sails of the various PWA coalitions and the often loosely affiliated buyers clubs.

Locally there was a strong PWA coalition and a loosely associated buyer’s club. I was never involved directly with either though I did on occasion contribute educational pieces for their newsletter called Resolute, my most infamous piece being one titled “Its Chemotherapy Stupid.” I might read it here some day.

I do though recall that our buyer’s club was run in a bit more egalitarian fashion than the Dallas Buyers Club was. Less profit motivated for sure and really queer run here. I only accessed them once and that was the day before my partner David died at Rose Medical Center on September 17th, 1995. His AIDS was quite advanced by this time and David had just been home a few days from a rather lengthy and traumatic hospital stay. He adamantly did not want to return for another stay or to die there if at all possible.

The big issue was controlling pain. All we had at home were morphine tables and plenty of them but they didn’t seem to be working and were a sustained release version. I thought a quicker acting liquid form might be more helpful but it was late in the evening and accessing it through his doc at Rose problematic. So I picked up the phone and called one of my friends, a local buyer’s club member. Within less than an hour our doorbell rang. No one was at the door but there was a small paper bag on the stoop with two bottles of liquid morphine.

Unfortunately, that didn’t work either. So we gave in and went back to Rose for IV pain relief. That did help immensely but David died the next morning at 9 A.M.

I am reminded constantly how lucky I am to be alive today. I turned 65 yesterday. I know that makes me a youngster in this room but in the AIDS community I am an old man. I do think I owe a great debt of gratitude to all the AIDS activists of the 1980’s and 1990’s for speeding up the process of drug development and access to these drugs for people with AIDS. If not for a lot of loudmouthed and uppity queens, including many in Texas, I might very well not be here today.

© January 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.

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The Essence of GLBTQ by Lewis

Wiktionary defines “essence” — in usage relevant to this topic — as 
     1) “the inherent nature of a thing or an idea” and 
     2) “a significant feature of something.”

Therefore, the “essence of GLBTQ” might be otherwise stated as, “What is it about gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or queer people that makes them unique from everyone else?” The inclusion of the terms “transgender” and “queer” complicates the answer to a degree that makes generalizations meaningless. In fact, the word “queer,” when appropriated to describe oneself, seems intended to obviate any attempt to characterize it in any meaningful, shorthand way. “Transgender,” because it has nothing to do with sexual attraction but is rather gender identity related, seems to me to also lie outside any attempt to describe the “essence” of the first three letters — GLB — which are primary referent to an individual’s sexual attractions.

Those who condemn homosexuality invariably do so on the basis of same-sex erotic behaviors. Those behaviors are not the “essence” of homosexuality but the manifestation — or “womanifestation,” if you prefer — of it. The essence is the innate part of our nature that is drawn to members of our gender, rather than the opposite gender. This seems to fly in the face of everything we know about Adam and Eve and Charles Darwin’s theory on the survival of the species. Consequently, it is subject to accusations that we are operating against the Will of God and Nature and, therefore, must be deviant, if not evil. It is as if we are the ugly duckling whose ugliness is on the inside and, therefore, never changing.

What distinguishes gay and lesbian individuals from heterosexuals is our being forced into the position of having either to conform to erotic behaviors that are unnatural — even repugnant — to us by repressing those desires that are such a vital part of who we are in order to appear “normal” or to act on our own natural inclinations at the risk of being ostracized by a significant portion of society. Our “essence,” in my opinion, is the strength of our characters that has developed during what is an existential struggle to be both true to ourselves and successful members of an intolerant society.

There are many gay men and women who have never allowed the prejudices of our society to interfere with what they see as their own natural and true behavior. A tip of my hat to them. They have displayed a courage and self-knowledge that I can only admire from a distance. Their “essence” has been knowing their own heart and following it wherever it might lead. This is a rare quality, even among those who have never experienced self doubt and the fear of social opprobrium.

For some who count themselves among the “GLB,” however, finding some sense of authenticity has come only with the undertaking of behaviors that are in themselves self-defacing — drug or alcohol abuse or unprotected sex, for example. For these, “essence” might well be overcoming addiction or dealing with the life-long consequences of HIV/AIDS.

Others of us have “gone along to get along.” We married in the traditional way, perhaps even had children. For these — and I count myself among them — our “essence” might be qualitatively analyzed in how we have related to our opposite-gender spouses and children, how we “came out” to them, whether or not we were faithful during the marriage, and what kind of relationship we have with them after moving on toward a state of greater authenticity.

I’m certain that there are gay men and lesbians who do not fall into any of the aforementioned categories. That is why I do not think that the notion of a “GLBTQ essence” is all that pragmatic. If anything, there may be an added layer or two of “essence” on our psychological auras. But, at the same time, we are all 99-94/100% pure human being, with, perhaps, a few more rough edges and/or a more highly-polished-surface here and there. I think the rest of the world is coming around to this view … and fairly rapidly. May it continue to be so.

We, the GLBTQ members of the most remarkable species of animal in the known universe have been granted a very special charter. We have been commissioned by the Great Mystery of All Existence not only to share our very special talents with the world but, in order to do so, to first learn to look in the mirror and see, not the “ugly duckling” that some of those we have loved may have so ignorantly and, perhaps, unknowingly branded us, but ourselves as whole and wholesome human beings whose lives will encompass a level of adventure that will make for many wonderful stories that beg to be shared.

[Everything that I have said above about “GLB” people would also apply to those on the “third rail” of sexual attraction discourse — men and women who are attracted to juveniles of either sex. Unfortunately, this subject is so fraught with phobia and loathing that merely to state that the sexual attraction toward children is akin to same-sex attractions to adults tends to elicit reactions one might expect from confessing to mass murder. I merely would state that none of us picked the type of persons to whom we are sexually attracted from a list like choosing the color of our next car. There are still perhaps 40% of Americans who believe that having same sex attractions is immoral. Those of us with a “glb” orientation should be the last to condemn anyone for attractions over which they have absolutely no control, unlike actions taken on those feelings, which are properly proscribed, just as statutory rape is properly proscribed.]

© 15 July 2013


About the Author


I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and had two children while working as an engineer for the Ford Motor Company. I was married to a wonderful woman for 26 happy years and suddenly realized that life was passing me by. I figured that I should make a change, as our offspring were basically on their own and I wasn’t getting any younger. Luckily, a very attractive and personable man just happened to be crossing my path at that time, so the change-over was both fortuitous and smooth. Soon after, I retired and we moved to Denver, my husband’s home town. He passed away after 13 blissful years together in October of 2012. I am left to find a new path to fulfillment. One possibility is through writing. Thank goodness, the SAGE Creative Writing Group was there to light the way.