Stories from the AIDS Crisis

Hello, hello, and welcome back to A Bit Fruity.

I'm Matt Bernstein, and I'm so happy that you're here.

So, by the time this episode is published, Pride Month will be over, but gay people still exist, or at least that's what I've been told.

I talk a lot online about the AIDS crisis, and specifically the years between 1981, which was when the first mainstream article on what they called then gay cancer was published in the New York Times.

By the way, it was called Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals and was published in a little column on page 20.

And 1996, which is when antiretroviral therapies, which are the drugs that keep people with HIV living long and healthy lives, became widely available.

During these years, the people most commonly associated with AIDS, gay men, intravenous drug users, were turned into pariahs by society and by the state.

You've heard the stories, you know, the government, the media, and the general public moralized the behavior of people who contracted the disease so that they could feel no responsibility at all for their callous attitudes towards what quickly became mass death and the collapse of entire communities.

Famously, it took Ronald Reagan, President Ronald Reagan, rolling around in hell as as we speak, four years to acknowledge AIDS in a press conference, and that was only because his friend, closeted movie star Rock Hudson, had just been diagnosed.

As a gay man born in 1998, tell me I'm young, just two years after antiretrovirals became available, I feel like I live in the shadow of this crisis, which I think is why I fixate on it so much.

It's also because I will never not be jarred by the way that I learned about the AIDS crisis.

Like, I don't know about you, but it just was not taught about in my school system.

We didn't learn about the AIDS crisis in history class.

And the extent to which we learned about it in health class was they told us AIDS stands for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.

Don't get it.

Good luck.

And so.

I did not know about this whole thing of like a generation of queer people dying.

I just wasn't aware until I learned about it through like an Instagram post when I was 17 or 18 years old and continued to spend my senior year of high school ruthlessly researching every single thing I could about this period in history, about this period in the history of my community that I had previously been oblivious to.

I made this episode a few months ago called Surviving AIDS in the 80s with the brilliant.

Peter Staley, who lived with his diagnosis in the early years of the epidemic and survived to see medication help him live a long life.

That is one of my favorite episodes.

And if you haven't listened to it, I think it's worth the listen, not because of me, but entirely because of Peter.

But like, what about everyone who did not survive AIDS in the 80s?

People who died of AIDS in that time were rarely memorialized the way that we think is appropriate or normal for when a loved one passes away.

Parents were so often ashamed that their child was gay that they'd lie about how they died to other people.

They'd say it was the flu or cancer or something.

Deaths were swept under the rug, bodies removed from homes in literal garbage bags, no funeral, no obituary, nothing.

But this is also recent history.

Many of the people who were taken from us during this time would be like not even old, but like middle-aged today.

They'd be at the pride parades that just happened.

They'd be our professors and shop owners and writers and artists and actors and uncles and partners and friends.

Some of them might even be

landlords.

Over the last week, I told people online to send me stories about their memories from the AIDS crisis.

And today,

I have compiled a series of vignettes sent from listeners of the show.

who were the lovers and nurses and family members and students of people who died from AIDS.

This is a bit of a special episode as it's different in tone and format from my usual episodes, but I hope you'll find that in these stories there are still the same sometimes serious and sometimes lighthearted and meaningful moments I try to build this show around.

So without further ado.

Michael and I lived right off of Castro in 18th.

in the very center of the gay ghetto.

I got up early in the morning, as I always want to do.

I walked by Cliffs Hardware in these big windows and I saw people congregating around one of the windows.

It was two Polaroid photos that had been taken and a handwritten note.

The photograph was of a young man naked, dead,

and his whole body was covered in huge lesions.

And this handwritten note said, this is my lover John.

He died last night in our bed.

And I want to warn all gay people that there is a disease out there that's killing us.

Please, be careful.

If it can happen to us, it can happen to you.

And that's when I first realized that there was something that was killing gay people.

When Michael was diagnosed with AIDS, went to bed for a year.

Went flat out to bed for a year.

Couldn't handle it, couldn't face it.

The last six months, maybe a year that he was alive, every morning in the shower where he couldn't hear me because I was in the shower, I'd cry.

I'd ball my head off.

And finally, he said to me, I know that you're crying in the shower, and you don't need to hide the fact you're crying.

You can cry whenever you want.

But I didn't want to cry in front of him.

I have to say, I highly recommend it.

If you're with somebody who is dying or terminally ill, nothing prepares you for it at all.

But if you can start to grieve before they die, it's extremely helpful.

We were lucky in many respects.

We had a

house over our head, we had food,

we had people that loved us.

I saw a lot of poverty,

I saw a lot of people suffering.

I knew people literally

that died on the street

from AIDS.

I rented a house on the north side of Berkeley and the owner found out that Michael was ill and dying of AIDS and he evicted us.

And this is 1992.

Berkeley, California of all places, and rented another house, did not tell the man that Michael had AIDS.

Michael died at 25 minutes after midnight

in 1993.

And the person at the mortuary said, I'm terribly sorry, but we cannot pick up Mr.

James for 18 hours.

Because so many men have died of AIDS in the last day that we don't have the personnel or the transport

his body for 18 hours.

You need to keep his body in a cool place at your house,

and we'll be there between 18 and 20 hours.

The people came 20 hours later.

They walked in the house with a plastic garbage bag, big one, black one.

And I said, What's that?

Well, Mr.

James died of AIDS, and that's very contagious.

So we legally have to put him in a plastic garbage bag.

And I said, not over my dead body, you motherfucker.

And I was prepared for this because

my ex-lover, Juan Diego Michel,

Ray Vaughan, his lover, when he died, told me they just shoved his body in a plastic garbage bag.

So I had a

velvet throw the color of burgundy wine

trimmed in gold fringe and

I put it over Michael's body and I said

when you're away from our house you do whatever you need to do but not in front of me

and our house had views of Marin County and the Golden Gate Bridge and they put him in this in this van and drove off into the

morning mist as the fog rolled in over the Golden Gate Bridge.

And that was the end of 21 years.

When Michael died, his death notice did not appear in the San Francisco Chronicle

because the food editor thought that he was not renowned enough and known enough to put his obituary in the Chronicle.

One of the sub-directors at the San Francisco opera, he called me up and he said, I heard that Michael died.

I said, yes.

He said, oh my God, the magic has gone out of our lives.

And that's how he affected people.

And for me to this day.

But you know, he's almost entirely forgotten.

He was a force of nature, the crown prince of haute cuisine.

That's how he was billed for 20 years.

To his horror,

Some publicist in New York clamored that name onto him.

There was a memorial.

It was called Angel Food Cake for an Angel.

And there were 800 people there.

Five days before the memorial, the phone rang at our house in Berkeley.

And it was somebody from Peter Jennings' office at ABC News in New York.

And they said, we've heard about Michael and we would like to do a live feed of up to seven minutes at his memorial on the evening news.

They interviewed me live.

I had said that Michael had helped a lot of people to get ahead professionally,

especially a lot of gay men and lesbians.

They sent me a copy of the piece that aired.

And the part about helping gay people was edited out.

1993.

Edited out.

Of course, it ran on TV.

A lot of people saw it.

A week later, there's a knock at the door of the house that we rented in

north side of Berkeley.

It was an eviction notice, and I had to move.

I had to move out.

It's June 29th.

2024.

My name's Anne Butterfield.

Thank you for your focus on an AIDS memorial special and for asking for and sharing these stories.

Sometimes it seems that these beautiful men who we mourn are a lost generation.

I was a lesbian in my early 20s in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s when my friends were getting sick.

As we saw the lack of support from our elected leaders and fear among society, while people were suffering, I knew I had to help.

For the next next several years, I, along with many in the lesbian community, volunteered with local non-profits to provide care and support for our brothers in the Bay Area.

It was a turning point for me and helped shape the rest of my life.

We were all learning about AIDS and HIV together in the 80s, and we did what we could to talk with others to reduce the stigma and fear.

We helped find resources for those testing positive.

We hugged and loved them.

We danced with them.

We sat by bedsides.

We gave rides to appointments and support groups.

We brought them meals.

We marched for them.

We wrote letters demanding more research and funding.

We often became their chosen family when they were not accepted by their own.

We helped dress wounds.

We prayed with them.

We read to them.

We laughed and cried together, and we later mourned for them and would honor their lives with beautiful squares in the AIDS memorial quilt.

I suppose one of the silver linings is that I got to expand my circle of friends and loved ones and these many men I got to know.

They were artists, teachers, engineers, writers, students, and business owners.

They were fathers, sons, brothers, husbands, and lovers.

Those who gave their lives to AIDS are our heroes.

We will never ever forget.

Thank you.

I was about five or six when my parents got divorced.

My mom had been a stay-at-home mom and she suddenly found herself thrust back into the workforce with two babies at home to care for and no backup.

That Easter was our first holiday without my dad, so we went to visit our nearest family in the Bay Area, my aunt and uncle, and their son Don, who I guess was technically my cousin, but he was so much older than my sister and I that we always just called him Uncle Don.

Uncle Don had sort of a Freddie Mercury meets Burt Reynolds vibe.

He lived over in the Castro in San Francisco.

It was so cool.

He'd never been married.

He had no kids of his own.

But he loved to play dress up with my sister and I and teach us how to twirl in our dresses and have fashion shows with my aunt's jewelry.

He called us his little princesses.

We were just kids.

We didn't know what gay or straight was.

We certainly had no idea this behavior at the time might be considered strange to the rest of my Midwestern family.

To my sister and I, he was just Uncle Don and we loved him and we thought he was fabulous.

That Easter, my mom was seriously struggling.

My dad had failed to pay his child support support, and she explained to us through tears before we left that she was so sorry to disappoint us, but that she just didn't have enough money to buy us new dresses that year.

It sounds silly now because you can just run out to Target and buy a dress, but back then we didn't get many new things.

And what we did get was really special and it was treasured, and it was usually for a holiday.

So to not be able to provide that for my mom then was was a really big blow.

Of course, it didn't matter to my sister and I.

We loved our mom, and we were together, and that's all that mattered.

So, we stuffed ourselves into last year's dresses and last year's shoes, and away we went to my aunt and uncle's house.

When we pulled into the driveway of their little blue house in Tracy, My uncle Don walked out to the car and said, Hi, girls, we're gonna go for a little drive first.

He took my sister and I to Macy's, that golden standard of a 1980s department store, and said we could pick out whatever Easter dress we wanted.

Money was no object.

He wanted us to get the fluffiest, pinkest, most fairy princess dresses we could find, and he was going to get them for us.

Mine had puffed sleeves, a little pearls on the bodice, and a tulle underskirt that twirled.

It was so beautiful.

I loved that dress.

I wore it all the time after that first Easter.

Only when my mom was at work, though, she never knew.

Sometimes I would just sit in it and watch 3-2-1 contact.

It was the first time since my parents' divorce that it felt like things might be okay again, that we felt kind of normal.

And my uncle Don gave that to us.

He gave us a piece of dignity and love that we so desperately needed that year.

I really loved him so much.

I was about 11 or 12 when I first really became cognizant of HIV and AIDS,

and then suddenly it was everywhere.

There was a national hysteria around it, and we felt it in our elementary schools, at home.

Everyone was talking with the news, everyone was talking about it.

No one understood what it was.

People thought you could get it from hugging, from sharing a drinking fountain.

And people were dying.

So many people were dying.

Images of hollowed out men covered in sores and hospital beds flooded the news.

They called it the gay disease.

And then suddenly it was in my home.

I was 12 when my mom got the call from my aunt that my uncle Don had passed away.

They said he'd died of a new type of cancer.

No one even knew he was sick.

No one.

There would be no funeral.

They didn't want Don's friends around.

They didn't want any kind of attention over his passing.

They weren't even going to write an obituary.

We weren't going to be able to say goodbye.

They'd already had him cremated.

And when I asked my mom through my tears why,

why had they not told us sooner so that we could see him?

She just took my hand and said quietly,

Sweetie,

you're old enough to know now.

You know Uncle Don was gay, right?

Do you know what gay is?

Yes, I said.

I lied.

Well, you've heard about AIDS, right?

You guys have talked about that in school?

Yes.

Well,

I think it's too uncomfortable for your aunt and uncle to admit this, but

I'm pretty sure Uncle Don died of AIDS.

And

he has to be be cremated because the funeral homes won't handle his body if he had the disease.

Even telling the story now, it makes me sick.

And I'm 12 years old again.

I'm right there.

I was so angry at the injustice of it then,

and I didn't even fully understand what all of it meant.

Not the way I understand it now.

He was a

good,

kind,

generous,

wonderful man,

and he died alone

without his family around him

wasting away in some hospital bed

and his death was hushed out a side door without the dignity or the rights he so deserved because his parents were too ashamed of who he was

He'd be 72 now.

He is a part of the last generation of our queer history.

He would have really made an awesome, great gunklet to my daughter.

And I would give anything to wrap my arms around him again and give him the acceptance and the love he so deserved

before he left this earth.

hello.

So, my name is Sage, and I'm a trans man.

And when I

was coming out on my journey on self-discovery and dealing with

everything that meant for my family, for my relationships, for my life, discovering this a little bit later in life, one of the people I really wish that I could connect with was my uncle Eddie.

I unfortunately didn't get to meet my uncle Eddie.

He died a little over three years before I was born of AIDS.

And he was alive during a time where he didn't know how the family, you know, was going to react to him, to what he calls his lifestyle, to his partner.

And he ended up kind of cutting off the family more or less for a really long time so that he could live his life.

And

it's heartbreaking to me to know like how much fear he lived in.

And so much of what he went through, I feel like really just paralleled a lot of my own story.

It's heartbreaking, you know, that I don't get to connect with him about that today.

He would be in his early 70s today.

And when I was asking my family questions about him, my aunt, his sister, sent me a letter that he had written her.

It was the first.

you know, real communication that they had gotten from him in a really long time,

telling them about who he was and, you know, what was going on.

So for the stories that you're collecting on AIDS, on, you know, people that you knew, I thought instead of me telling my Uncle Eddie's story, I actually am just going to read this letter that he wrote.

Yeah, so here it goes.

Dearest sis, well, here goes.

This is the hardest letter I've ever had to write.

Harder still because I've been dumb by delaying and delaying the inevitable and because I love you so much.

You and the whole family, I do love you as much as always or more.

Mom and dad and the boys too, more than I could ever say.

Try only to understand if you can that people do stupid things when they're scared and I am scared.

I'm sick, Jan, very sick, and while today I feel good, tomorrow, who knows?

How do I explain all this?

Hard enough if I was just trying to drop on you my lifestyle, harder yet for me.

I just got out of the hospital after two weeks in there and they don't know what's wrong with me.

Thought every single specialist, every department, had damn near every test devised to torture a patient, and they just don't know.

Basically, right now, my spleen is enlarged to the bursting point, my liver is enlarged, and some of my lymph glands are enlarged.

They've biopsied my lymph nodes and found nothing.

They nearly killed me drilling through my back, doing a bone marrow biopsy, and again, nothing.

A thousand x-rays and CAT scans, bronchoscopy, skin biopsy, and a lot of blood drawn.

The doctors can't diagnose anything officially, but inside I know what it is.

It's AIDS, Jan.

I know it.

As of yet, I don't meet the strict terms for that diagnosis.

My doctor said I may have ARC, AIDS-related complex, but I know what I know.

Maybe today they can only call it ARC because they can't detect any PCP pneumonia or KS cancer or any lymphoma, but it's just a matter of time.

And I think it's the lymphoma that I do have as my feet and legs are filling up with fluids and not draining properly.

I'm taking LASICs to make me urinate and help drain fluid, but so-so results.

They can't treat treat what they can't diagnose, so I'm home in bed hoping the spleen will shrink by itself.

I go back to see the doctor in two weeks to see if there's been any change.

My only other option is a spleenectomy, and neither the doctor nor I am in favor of that unless we have to.

Taking the spleen out may still not tell them what's wrong, and I'll be minus the spleen, which is just one more line of defense in my weak immune system.

He doesn't think I'm strong enough to go through major surgery right now.

So many things to lay on you all at once, Jen.

So many.

Through it all, I do love you all.

Please believe that.

Now try to understand, I also love someone else, someone you don't know.

His name is J.R.

Peters.

You can call him my roommate or anything you want, but he is the one I've chosen to live my life with, however long or short that may be now.

It is his ring I wear on my left hand.

Yes, a wedding ring.

I can't ask you to understand, only to accept, and if you can't accept him, then don't try to understand or accept me.

He and I are one.

If it weren't for him, I'd have no place to live nor nothing to eat.

He takes better care of me than any nurse, and being with him is a tremendous medicine in itself.

Now please, Jen, get any tears out of the way first if you call me.

I don't need them and they won't change anything.

I'm also too tired to write this all out more than once, so when you do calm down, can I impose on you to call mom and dad and Bob?

I just can't take great strain right now.

I mean, I get real tired just going from the bed to the bathroom.

So getting choked up right in this drains me lots.

Crying leaves me more drained than anything, and JR and I have gotten all of our crying over with and can't take any more for now.

So please tell mom and dad I love them more than life, but cannot bear a crying session on the phone.

Crying just leaves me exhausted and out of breath, and my breathing is short already and labored when I exert myself.

Also, I'm not going anywhere.

Period.

I will not leave Louisville.

I will be treated here as best they can for as long as they can.

I'm not going anywhere else for any treatments or experiments.

This is my home now.

This is where JR and I live and where we stay.

Oh, Jan, I know I've screwed up badly, not staying in closer touch all these years.

I don't know what to say.

It's hard to say anything through the tears.

I love you all.

Didn't know how to tell anyone I was gay.

Didn't know how to tell you anything when I first suspected I might be sick or when I first tested positive to HTLV-3.

But now, blam, I have to hit you with everything all at once.

Don't cry, at least not too much.

First of all, I have no regrets, believe it or not.

My 36 years I wouldn't trade or do differently.

My family I love so much, and my friends, and for 18 months, JR and I have been so very happy.

Now he's taking care of me as I would of him if it were the other way around.

Don't for a minute think I'm giving up.

Oh no.

You may remember that I can be a thick-headed Dutchman and stubborn fighter, and with JR, I intend to fight long and hard, and I may make it.

And if I don't, I will have lived and loved well and been loved by the best.

All of you.

JR has your number to notify in an emergency, Jan, if that's alright with you.

I'd like you to read this to mom and dad because I couldn't cry that much.

Ask them, too, to cry first before they call.

I mean it.

The strain exhausts me.

I'm too weak for a lot of tears.

In an emergency, I think you can be calmer, and I'd worry about him calling mom and dad in an emergency because I'd worry about their hearts.

This has taken me two days to write so far.

I can't do a lot at one time.

JR has my absolute power of attorney and medical authority to decide for me if I can't.

He can sign consent or refuse it for me, and he knows I forbid extraordinary life-prolonging machinery.

I will not be kept going by machines, and he alone has my authority to decide if I cannot.

I'm rambling, aren't I?

Sorry, I tire so easily these days.

Can you try to understand and accept me still, sis?

Can you help everyone else in the family?

Can you try to tell them how much I love them and just didn't know how to tell them all this?

Oh God, how I love you all.

I will always have that.

If you do talk to JR on the phone, try to love him too, knowing how much I do.

I've got to stop for now and leave everything else for later when I've had some time to digest all this and calm down.

Above all and through it all or despite it all, I love you all.

You will always be in my heart and prayers, always.

Let me rest.

Call me in the evening around 9 p.m.

is best.

I love you, Jan.

I love you, mom and dad.

I love you, Bob, Jim, Steve.

And I love you, Russ, Kristen, and Megan.

Eddie.

And

after

he wrote this letter, my family was able to reconnect with him and they flew down to Kentucky to see him and be with him.

And so he died knowing that his family loved him and accepted him.

And I'm glad that he had that.

But it really breaks my heart that he lived all of those years without them just because of what he was seeing with everyone around him, you know, losing their family.

people disowning their sons for having AIDS or being and just, you know, the fear that he lived in that his family would reject him and and that he didn't get to have their love and support through

a really really hard um and scary time of his life so he only he only lived for you know about maybe up to two months after this letter was written things progressed really quickly in a way that they weren't expecting but he was able you know to to make that peace and to be able to reconnect with his family and um just as I was going through everything myself it's it's just really tragic that the one person who could understand me wasn't here today

because of that so thank you for listening to his letter whether you use it or not it means a lot to be able to share his story

Matt, I have a foster mom whose name is Susie, who is a woman in a trans-Lesbian couple who raised me, who has been living with HIV since she contracted it from a blood transfusion as a teenager.

I think that her story is really important and I'll just give you the bare bones.

She was born in very rural Minnesota to very conservative parents and when she contracted HIV, you know, they thought it was because she's a bit fruity, which, you know, she is.

She came out as a trans woman much later in life, but obviously, you know, HIV is not a consequence.

It's not something that happens to people who are gay.

It's something that happens to everyone.

And it was just incredibly bigoted.

And she put up with a lot of prejudice from her family.

They alienated her and made her feel very alone during what we all know is an incredibly horrific medical journey.

But she has been undetectable for, it's got to be 10, 15 years now, but she had to go through every one of the trials in the 80s and 90s, which were, again, to use the word horrific, you know, she went through chemotherapy, radiation treatments, drug trials, everything under the sun while they were trying to formulate a cure.

She watched her friends and her found family die around her, and she came out of it just this incredibly badass,

strong warrior of a person.

A few years ago, she got in a really bad motorcycle accident.

She broke a couple of bones in her neck.

And I think it was the first time in her entire life that she'd really had time to sit around and really think about who she was and who she wanted to be.

And she came out as a trans woman, which was incredible to see and incredible to witness.

And I feel like we all knew that

it had always been there, and we were so proud of her.

Oh, man.

But

in very short succession after Susie's accident, both of her parents passed away, who had been, you know, just horrible to her.

And she got to come out and really spread her wings, which is something that, you know, you're lucky to live if you contracted HIV at the time that she did.

And it's not a life sentence now, but it used to be.

And I don't think that Susie's story hinges on coming out and her parents passing and finally being able to be herself.

Like, that is not at all the conclusion of her story.

I think she has many, many more years of proving us all wrong and being a badass biker chick.

But it's an entire lifetime that she spent being judged, facing incredible prejudice from every angle, and

being just blatantly, 100% authentically herself in the face of all of it.

And I think that her story deserves to be told.

Taking just a moment's break from the show to thank the sponsor of today's show, Blue Land.

And yes, I'll admit, running any kind of advertising on an episode like this does feel a little strange to me, but I can explain in two parts.

One is that advertising really does help the show run and make it possible for me to spend a day just going through emails, listening to voice memos that strangers have sent in to me.

And number two is that I have a little thing called contractual obligations.

But you know what?

I do feel grateful to be contractually obligated to discuss a brand that has been so supportive of this show and whose products I also really use in real life every single day.

In fact, my laundry is running downstairs right now and I just got out my Blue Land laundry tablets.

So you know what?

Shout out Blue Land.

You're a real one.

Did you know that it's Plastic Free July?

That's right, gays, not our month anymore, and it's also not plastics month.

It is distinctly not plastics month because it is plastic free July.

This kind of blew my mind.

People generate over 1800 pounds of plastic waste per year on average.

So you know the little things do add up.

Blue Land is on a mission to eliminate single-use plastic by reinventing cleaning essentials to be better for you and the planet with the same powerful clean you're used to.

Blue Land uses no single-use plastic in any of its components, its bottles, its tablets, its wrappers, and the shipping.

It's also really economically friendly because instead of buying, you know, a big bottle of cleaning solution over and over again, you just buy your little refill tablets, which start at $2.25 per tablet.

Right now, you can get 15% off your first order by going to blueland.com/slash/fruity.

Again, that's blue land.com/slash/fruity for 15% off.

Thank you so much to Blue Land for sponsoring the show, and now let's hear some more stories.

On August 18th, 1988, just shy of my ninth birthday, my mom came to tell me that my Uncle Dave had died of pneumonia.

At that young age, I wasn't familiar with death, but I remember feeling very sad since it was the first time I had known someone who passed away.

The funeral and those who attended are a blur to me now, but I do recall that it was devastating to my grandma, and my dad never really talked much about it afterward.

I have some vivid memories of my Uncle Dave.

He was a second grade teacher, and his apartment always seemed so cool to me, filled with neon lights and awesome decorations that screamed the eighties.

I remember his auburn hair, his full moustache always hiding a smile, and his bright blue eyes.

Decades later my sister and I began speculating about his death.

No one had talked about it for so long.

My grandma eventually passed away, and my dad, who has the emotional intelligence of a sea slug, always deflected any time we brought up Uncle Dave.

As we grew up and moved out of our small farm town in central Illinois to places like Chicago and California, we made friends who were gay.

They were our neighbors, they ran the best restaurants, and they became parts of our lives.

We often thought about Uncle Dave and the slivers of memories we had of him, how he died so young and from, quote-unquote, pneumonia.

It just didn't add up.

Yet the years kept passing, and we thought only about him occasionally.

Our family never talked about him at Christmas or any other holidays.

Then, last year, on my birthday, August 26, 2023, I was at my mom's house.

I saw the little tea sets in her china cabinet that Uncle Dave had brought back from the UK for my sister and me shortly before he died.

I turned to my mom and I said, I remember getting these right before Dave died of, holding up my quote fingers, pneumonia.

My mom's eyes widened.

She herself had been battling cancer, perhaps feeling that she didn't want to hide it any longer, just in case she spilled the truth.

My Uncle Dave had had died of histoplasmosis, one of the big killers of those with HIV/AIDS.

He had been sick when he got back from the UK and died within two weeks.

My jaw dropped.

Finally, 35 years later, we were told the truth.

It had been covered up by everyone in my family, because we lived in such a conservative town, particularly during the 80s, a time when such a truth cannot be openly acknowledged.

I went into the bathroom and just cried and cried.

A week later, curiosity got the better of me.

Since no one else was going to talk about it, I started digging.

The internet holds a lot of old records, newspaper articles, graduation announcements, and even findagrave.com.

I knew my uncle was buried in a grave behind a little church in the country next to my grandparents.

I hoped someone might have taken pictures of of that little church, and to my surprise, they had.

There was a picture of my uncle's grave, and I noticed that you could send virtual flowers to a loved one.

I found two comments below his picture, one anonymous and the other with a name.

I turned to Facebook to type in that name, and I found a match.

I friended him.

Figuring if he knew my uncle, he would recognize my last name and know we related.

If not, no harm done.

It'd be just some random person friending him.

To my amazement, Mark messaged me and told me he was one of my uncle's best friends.

Through him, I got connected with two more of his close friends, James and Bob.

It opened up a whole new world for me.

I got to know Uncle Dave like I never had before.

Mark, who happened to live close to me in California, had met my uncle at a bar called The Bushes in Chicago in the early 80s.

They became close friends and shared a love for collecting antiques.

I learned that my uncle's nickname was Miss O and that he was always fashionably late.

He loved divine, always had the latest stereo systems, and was adored by his students.

His friend Bob, who passed just a few months ago, once told me, If I had to describe your uncle, all labels aside, I would say he was one of the best friends we all had.

Not a mean bone in him, but he lived life to the fullest, used to make us all smile.

He was a good guy.

I even got the truth of his last moments on this earth.

With a tube down his throat, he wrote a note to Mark that said, I don't have much time.

And it was Bob who was with him when he passed, holding his hand.

All these secrets, hidden for so many years, made me realize there was no doubt I was meant to find these men, my uncle's best friends.

They had lost dozens of friends during the AIDS epidemic and were grateful to have made it out alive.

My uncle, David Jeffrey Uncan, born September 18, 1952, died August 18, 1988.

He would have been 72 years old this year.

Truly remembered by his family 35 years later, but loved for who he was by his friends for a lifetime.

A teacher, a happy-go-lucky soul who left us too early.

We miss you, Uncle Dave.

Miss O,

you are not forgotten.

Hi, my name is Abila, and I am 20 years old, and I'm from Illinois.

And my connection with the AIDS pandemic in the 80s and 90s stems from my biological uncle.

I'm adopted, so I have never met my biological family in person.

However, I was lucky enough to have contact with my biological mother via email and when I was in high school I was opening up to her about my sexuality and being queer and she responded saying that she is not frightened by my sexuality and that she is very understanding and open.

to queer people and queerness in general because her brother, her older brother, my uncle, was gay

and he was diagnosed with HIV and later on AIDS, and he was never treated for it.

He didn't want to rot away in the hospital, she said, but she didn't know about any of this at all because he didn't tell anyone in the family.

She told me that she

told me that him

and

his boyfriend went to Germany together

and

she hadn't heard from him since because he ended up taking his own life in Germany before the AIDS could kill him, essentially.

And after she

had told me this,

it honestly like really, really broke my heart.

It made things really complicated because I'd see photos of him and he was such a handsome man and he looks a lot like me, oddly enough.

I'm not used to seeing people that look like me because my biological family is, you know, in another continent.

Ever since, I've just had a new outlook on life, honestly.

I wish I had the opportunity to speak to him.

And every day I pray that one day I'll be able to speak to my and meet my family in Venezuela.

Yeah, Yeah, so that's my experience.

Thank you so much for listening.

Hey Matt, this is Emily from Redondo Beach, California.

I want to share the story of my late Uncle Carl, my mother's brother, who died of AIDS in 1989.

Before I get into the story of my uncle Carl, I have to tell about how my uncle's coming out led to my mom and dad becoming a couple to where they have now been married for 41 years.

My parents were servers at a restaurant in college where they became friends and developed a tight-knit friend group.

My dad's best friend and my mother's brother became very close and while we can all see where this story is going, it was quite a shock in 1980 when my dad caught his best friend and my mom's brother getting hot and heavy at their apartment.

And they both admitted to my parents that they were gay and had fallen for each other, but it was still a lot for everyone to take in.

Being friends who needed to process this new development, my parents went out to El Torito for dollar margaritas to discuss how two of their closest people in their lives had been able to keep the secret for so long.

The margaritas kept flowing, one thing led to another, and my dad woke up the next morning in my mom's water bed, and he's never left.

Their friend group remained strong, the newly out gays were welcomed with open arms, and while my grandparents were raised good old-fashioned Eisenhower Republicans, they also accepted my uncle for his true self.

Years passed, the 80s did their thing, and my uncle got sick.

I was born in 1986 and had the pleasure of being my uncle's first niece.

Unfortunately, a couple years after I was born was when my uncle was diagnosed with AIDS after being well for some time.

His story goes like many other stories in the 80s.

He was a pariah, doctors couldn't and didn't want to do anything and treat him, and he progressed very quickly into a painful disease.

My grandmother, who was unable to have children of her own after being sterilized when she had tuberculosis as a young woman, adopted my mom and Uncle Carl at birth from separate families.

She was a good, strong, community-oriented, loving woman who brought many people into her life that needed love and a place to call home.

And that didn't change when my Uncle Carl came out as gay, or even when he got sick.

My depression-era conservative grandmother did everything in her power to care for her son.

When he was in pain, my grandmother would drive her giant Buick down to south-central LA and buy marijuana from drug dealers because it was the only thing Uncle Carl could take to help keep the pain away.

She stayed by his hospital bed every day and every night until the day he died.

After his death, she hand-stitched the most beautiful quilt to add to the National AIDS quilt, where she went yearly and even took me and my sisters with her.

One of my earliest memories is running around the Washington Monument Lawn where the AIDS quilt was spread out and touch all of the fabric and imagine that the quilt would put everyone in the world to bed at night like a big, safe, warm place to sleep.

To this day, my mother and sisters and I will continue to be activists in the gay community to honor my late grandmother and my late uncle, who endured that horrible time with as much grace and love for others as anyone could possibly have.

Thank you for listening, Matt.

Growing up, I had always heard the stories of my mom's best friend, Charlie.

They met in junior high in the late 70s when my mom transferred from Catholic school to the public school system.

There, she was the self-proclaimed, awkward, fat Catholic schoolgirl that the kids in this city public school would bully.

She found solace in her new best friend, Charlie.

Son of a Methodist minister, the kids at their Massachusetts public school didn't know what to think of him either.

He was also, as my mom would call him, effervescent and would be relentlessly bullied for his more effeminate ways.

Charlie had golden curly hair and a quick witty sense of humor.

He also had a rebellious streak in him despite his desire to follow in his father's footsteps.

Charlie and my mom almost didn't graduate high school because they ditched so many days their senior year.

Instead of just ditching to get drunk at the beach, which they did do a lot, Charlie also dragged her to art museums, orchestra performances, and many other cultural events happening in Boston.

My mom often credits Charlie with filling in her education where the Lynn public school system failed.

Charlie also had a very distinct sense of style, as evident by his bright periwinkle tuxedo he wore to the senior prom.

I had the best dress date, my mom would say.

Shortly after they graduated high school in the early 80s, Charlie finally came out as gay to her.

She was surprised when he first told her, which I still think is the funniest thing.

Rumors started going around that Charlie was light in the loafers, and my grandmother warned my mom to not sort herself with that crowd.

Who knows what they'll think?

she would tell her.

Later that night, she went to her first gay bar.

Charlie introduced her to drag culture, and my mom remembers tearing up.

She had never seen femininity celebrated that was plus size, nor felt as accepted as she had in her life while at these bars.

To her, this wasn't a gay club.

This was a gathering of the outcasts of society.

And my God, were they fun.

Charlie was fun, and an amazing friend who always accepted my mom for who she was.

Knowing who my mom is, I know she did the same for him.

Then the AIDS crisis began to develop.

All of a sudden, people were going out less, and Charlie's friends were getting sick.

Really sick.

The bar started to shut her down due to lack of business, and Charlie and my mom lost their safe space.

What horrified my mom and Charlie the most was how the apathy of gay people turned into straight-up fear and anger.

People would be scared to even touch Charlie.

When Charlie finally delivered the bad news that he had gotten sick too, my mother became terrified for him.

He reassured her it was going to be okay and that he was going to continue to live and love life, which he did.

He traveled around the world.

Paris was his favorite city.

He was also able to get an art history degree from UMass Boston.

One of Charlie's life goals was to be a college graduate.

He made amends with his family and father, and even made amends with his belief in God.

While he never became a minister, his belief in God strengthened at the end of his life.

As a fellow queer Christian, hearing this part of his story was amazing, that we could be both, that he had the courage to be both.

Charlie died in the early 90s, right before the miracle cocktail came out.

It's been over 30 years and my mom still talks about him, but about the love she felt for him, the fun they had, and the connection she felt for the first time in her life.

She doesn't have many pictures with him, and all I've been able to learn about him is through her.

Charlie lives on, though.

When we go on drive through Lynn, she remembers their fun.

When her birthday comes around, she remembers him, as his birthday was only two days after hers.

She also remembers him and one of my best friends, who on more than than one occasion has stated how similar of people they are.

It's a tragedy what the AIDS crisis took from us and how the echo of its pain can still be felt today.

My mom still misses one of her best friends, and I'm more than a man I never even got the chance to meet.

My great-uncle, so my dad's uncle,

had AIDS and died.

My extended family has always been very conservative and Christian, and a lot of them are like Trump supporters.

Not all, but a lot of them.

So for a little while, I thought I was like the first queer person in my family.

About two-ish years ago, I found out about my great uncle.

I didn't know about him as a kid at all.

My family never talks about him, and now it's like really too late to talk about him because everyone who knew him is either dead or really, really old.

My mom, my dad, my aunt and I, my aunts, I found out later that my aunt's gay as well.

It's great.

We've been trying to secure as many pictures and stories about him as we can, but there's not a lot because

nobody talked about him.

And I don't know if they didn't talk about him because of homophobia or grief or a mixture of the two because he was really like young when he died and he was the baby of the family.

I think about him a lot.

Like, did he have a partner?

Are they still alive?

Did their family scrub him from their memory too?

I'm not the first gay person in my family, and I'm not the only one anymore.

But I feel like if I had, you know, my great-uncle Danny with me still alive, it would be so much easier to be gay.

And I think I would have been less nervous to come out.

And I think I actually would have come out to everybody because I'm not out to half my family.

And

I wasn't,

I was born 20 years after he died,

but I think it's still weird that I grieve.

Hi, Matt.

Longtime listener, first on caller.

My name is Ian.

I'm 26.

I live in New York.

I did not live through the AIDS crisis, if my age didn't make it obvious, but I'm lucky that I live in the legacy of people who were alive during the AIDS crisis.

My middle name is after my dad's cousin, Bob.

They both grew up in rural Ohio together and ended up moving out to the East Coast separately.

Bob was kind of a wanderer.

He hit his 20s, late 20s, and he didn't quite know what he was doing with himself and he got a botany degree at one point and just tried a lot of things, not all of them worked out.

But something that, you know, he was able to do openly more on the East Coast was be gay.

And he was in a relationship.

He had a boyfriend and he believed it to be a monogamous relationship, but his partner cheated on him.

And the partner was asymptomatic and Bob was not.

So Bob deteriorated pretty quickly.

And my parents, who I don't know if they were the only family members to really stick by him, but I think they were one of the few.

They, at the time, they were very cool, and I'll get into that in a second, about gayness in the 80s for a straight couple, but they had my two older siblings as toddlers at the time.

And while Bob was dying, they took...

the kids to go hang out with him and the way that it was told to me was

Bob was laying on the couch doing bad and having two toddlers next to him just be curious about the world and playing like nothing was wrong and and interacting with him like nothing was really wrong with him except for the fact that he was just laying on the couch and was low energy brought a lot of life back to his eyes and I just think that's a really good image but um I feel really lucky to carry Bob's middle name with me, or my middle name of Robert with me, in that,

you know, I'm a gay man here now.

I like to think that he's kind of getting a second chance.

I think of him a lot I also think of him whenever I take my prep which I think is you know what a miracle that is but

I think it's fun that I'm also in my late 20s and I don't really know what I'm doing but botany is pretty cool and yeah it's it's this really interesting connection that I have to this guy who I never got to meet but

My dad has all these really cool t-shirts from living in New York at the time and he was a book salesman and he has all these shirts that are like Shakespeare was gay, and it has lists of gay authors and pink triangles on them.

And it's really interesting.

And my mom worked in the death ward in Hell's Kitchen as a social worker, and she was one of the people who would like to sign lovers and boyfriends and partners in as cousins and not, you know, so that they could get in to see the people of dying of AIDS.

And so that's very cool.

What interesting residue that that had is when I came out as a teenager, I didn't get a homophobic homophobic response necessarily, or one that was rooted in religion like I was kind of expecting.

When I came out, I got the response, if you live out and openly, you're gonna die.

And I think

that's just a really interesting response.

I think we talk about the age crisis like this this vacuum seal of gay men experienced it and Reagan didn't acknowledge it.

And that's kind of the main things that we talk about with it.

And obviously, most of the accounts that we have about it were people who lived through it, you know, not the people who died.

But obviously, people of all sexualities, genders, AIDS still exists in the world.

Like, AIDS was not siloed like that.

But I feel like the conversations keep going to that, and especially, you know, centered on white men.

But I think it's interesting to see the residue of straight couples who also saw people die and how it affected how they saw gayness, especially when their son came out as a threat to his life, not as

a sin.

But I also, on a lighter note, I guess, I just took up playing tennis here in New York because I watched Challengers and I wanted to play tennis.

My dad sent me his racquet from when he played, and he went to NYU, and he said there was this guy, Ralph, who was the second gay man, out gay man who he ever met, who he played with.

And Ralph taught him tennis, and my dad taught Ralph racquetball, and that's how they spent their time.

And I guess they were just really good confidants in each other.

And as my dad puts it, Ralph was turning tricks, which is just very 80s to me, to pay for school.

And that's how Ralph got AIDS and died.

But apparently he was very, very good at tennis and like placed in New Jersey and Newark competitions or something like that.

But I feel very honored to have a racket that was adjacent to him, you know, that got to play with Ralph.

And I feel really honored that I get to carry Bob's name with me and carry these...

two

really cool gay men who, well, I mean, Ralph was clearly like he was very good at tennis, but Bob, I think I like his story best because he's not super exceptional.

You know, he was this guy who was curious and didn't necessarily succeed constantly and was still a person who had value.

And I get to carry on his value and carry him with me.

And

I really like that he's a guy and I

love him and I get to have him with me.

And that, my friends, is our show today.

Thank you so much if you've gotten this far for listening.

I realize listening to this back that this was, you know, I'll say it, this was a brutal one.

And in making this, we're documenting and discussing a frankly brutal period of time and a brutal thing to reflect back on.

Like, how the fuck did we as a society behave this way?

How did we let this happen?

And to be clear, we let this happen.

And that, to me, is a stain on humanity that will never be washed out.

I'm sorry, I know I usually end these episodes on like a joke or a pun or a meme or like, you know, try to be cute.

And

I'm trying to think if I, if I have that this time.

Oh, actually, you know what?

I do.

I do have a quip to end this on.

So.

In one of my recent posts about the AIDS crisis, you know, oftentimes the language of we lost a generation of gay men is used.

And I think that there is a reason that we say things like that, because in many ways it's true.

But obviously, not every single person in the generation died.

And I do have some older gay men who follow me on Instagram.

And I can understand why if you survive that period of time and you're still, you know, hanging around on Instagram, that you'd be like, well, you know, not all of us died.

And, you know, you have every right to feel that way.

And so I was reading the comments on this recent Instagram post i made and one of these older gay guys wrote not all of us died some of us are still here and just so you know we own all the property and that

and you know what they deserve it if you like today's show feel free to send it to someone who might enjoy it or find it meaningful or go have a good cry or go talk to your old gay neighbor or you know i'm in no position to tell you what to do.

I'm a podcaster.

I'm in no position to tell anybody what to do.

I love you so much.

Thank you for being here today.

Happy Pride, and until next time, stay fruity.