“Some people moved away, hoping to escape it. Some of those people died anyway. Others dug in and took care of the ill. The women, some of whom were friends with the men and others who felt excluded by them, came together and nursed their brothers.
“At first some of us decided it was only the most promiscuous who got it. That was just denial. A banker moved in with a painter in 1980, not knowing that one random night in 1978, the painter had enjoyed a perfectly delightful evening with an accountant and came home with a silent virus in his blood. The banker and the painter, monogamous and faithful, would perish within months of each other in 1986, and no one could make it stop.
“It tore us apart. The disease. The way people reacted to it. Nationally, there was no reaction. Only fear that it would cross over and start killing straights. Otherwise, it was barely mentioned in the media, and the president didn’t mention it at all. Six years went by and twenty thousand died before he said the word AIDS.
“Some claimed that AIDS was God’s punishment for being gay. That was particularly harsh, because many of the dying had been told all their lives that they were evil. They finally got past that only to be told, on their deathbeds, that God had decreed their deaths. Very cruel.”
“That’s horrible,” I say.
“Of course, other religious people came through and cared for the dying. It seems like the disease brought out the best and worst in people, and I sometimes wonder if that would be the case today, or if the world has changed. Do you think it would be different today?”
“Probably,” I say.
He smiles weakly. “Well, good. Progress. Can you handle another story?”
I nod.
“This one is about a man from Billings, Montana.”
“Right,” I say, looking back at the cathedral as if he’s still in there.
“His name was Russ Smith, and he was a tall, goofy man. Looked a lot like you, actually.”
I blush.
He smiles. “Russ was a religious man. He was also a man of music. He could hear a melody, and an hour later he would still be able to remember it and could create four or five different harmonies to it. And he knew scripture. Tons of scripture.
“But ever since he was a kid, he felt like a freak. Because it was the fifties, and he knew that other boys, not girls, interested him. And he lived in Montana, where those things were definitely not discussed.
“So he got married to a woman named Phyllis, and he had a son, and like many, many other men at the time, he coped with living the wrong life by drinking. A lot. Living the right life was impossible.”
I close my eyes and try to imagine a world in which I’m made to marry a guy. The idea is hard to fathom. I don’t think of guys the way I think of girls. Their bodies are just — not what I want to touch. What if I had to? Could I do it?
“So mostly he drank himself to sleep, and as the drinking got worse, he got mean. He yelled at his wife. He loved his son, but sometimes he ignored him. And because he was basically good inside, this tore him up further, and he thought about ending it all.
“One day in the mid-seventies, he heard about a choir director’s conference in San Francisco, and he convinced the pastor at his church to let him go. It was the first of several consecutive years in which he flew to San Francisco for a week.
“Those weeks were what he looked forward to through all the cold winters. The second week of April. A chance to be somewhere else. To be someone else. To follow his heart. And during those weeks, I feel strange saying this to you, but he —”
“I get it,” I say.
He nods and smiles. “You get it. Let’s just say he made many friends, friends he’d spend time with once a year.
“Sometime in the late spring of 1982, he was getting dressed and looked down and saw a purple spot on his shoulder. He rubbed it. It looked mostly like a pimple that had popped, but a little different than that. Over the course of the next few weeks, several more formed on his chest and one on his neck. He went to the doctor in Billings. The doctor had no idea what it was. He went for tests. They were worried he had skin cancer. The news came back good, in a way. It was a rare form of benign cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma. The only thing strange about it was that he wasn’t a sixty-year-old Mediterranean man. That’s who usually got the condition, and they’d put up with the unsightly lesions and die of something else, years later.
“Russ went to the library to do some research. He couldn’t find anything, until one day, a search turned up an article about Kaposi’s sarcoma cases in gay men. His heart flipped in his chest. He cried, because he knew that was him. He knew these things were related.
“Information was scarce, but he learned what he could about what was at the time called gay-related immune deficiency. He learned that it was fatal. He learned that it might be possible to pass it to sex partners, and even though he and Phyllis were no longer physical, he thought about how he’d kissed her on the cheek a few times, and he sobbed in the library. He stole the medical journal he was reading, and he played hooky from work for a week, wondering what he was supposed to do. No doctors in Montana would know anything about what was then called GRID.”
“GRID!” I yell. “That was in the letter. ‘The world’s most dangerous and expensive grid’! What’s KSREF?”
“Oh!” Turk blurts, like he’s been goosed. “Blast from the past! The … Kaposi’s Sarcoma Research and Education … Foundation, I suppose?”
“Wow,” I say. “So not a Kansas referee?”
He smiles. It’s a sad smile, but it makes me feel closer to him.
“So anyway, Montana doctors had no idea what was going on, since it was happening in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. And even if they did, this was Billings, Montana. Russ knew if anyone found out, he’d bring shame to his family.
“Finally he gathered up the courage to tell his boss.”
“Pastor John,” I interrupt him.
“Yes, you mentioned him earlier. A name I had enjoyed not thinking about for a long time. So he told this Pastor John fellow, his best friend, and the man was good to him. To some degree, anyway. Your grandfather didn’t have much money saved up, and he knew he had to get to San Francisco for treatment. The pastor helped him get here. He used church funds to pay for Russ’s trip, and he created something of an underground railroad of religious friends for him to stay with. It was quite a journey.”
“I know my granddad joined AA along the way.”
Turk smiles. “A good thing too. Because when Russ got to San Francisco, he called his friend Graham. Graham, God rest his soul, had one friend who was in AA, and that friend was me. So when Russ arrived in town, guess who got to take him to his first meeting here?”
Turk looks out into the distance. A serene expression passes over his face.
“We fell in love almost right away. He was such a big, goofy guy. I get that when he was an active drunk, he was awful to be around, and there were moments when it was awful here too. Not easy, giving up the booze. But mostly he was sweet and incredibly creative.
“One morning in bed, I asked him for some orange juice. He went to the kitchen and didn’t return, and I started to wonder if he’d heard me. Ten minutes later, he came back and handed me a piece of paper. He’d drawn three rabbis wearing orange coats in Magic Marker. At the bottom, he wrote, ‘Orange Jews.’ ”
I shiver. “Oh my God. I would do that,” I say.
“You poor kid,” he says.
“I know.”
“The thing is, his health got better. Thanks to AA, he certainly got happier. His face got brighter and you could see that he was shining through, because for the first time in his life, he was himself, totally.
“We set up house, and, well, I was sick too. A few times, he had to nurse me through stuff. Pneumonia, mostly. And I had to nurse him through some ugly stuff as well. But we persevered. We went to AA meetings five times a week, and we talked about life and I learned to understand his faith, and by the end, it became a much kinder faith. He was a lovely, lovely man.