A View From the Claridge

Part 1

1982. The move. I arrived in Birmingham for UAB, attempting the tentative role of ‘young gay man.’ I wasn't sure what drew me to Southside, but it was inevitable that I would settle into The Claridge. The building had once been grand; by the time I took up residence, it was merely old—a comfortable, aging repository for retired women, but also a rising tide of gay men and artists. A fitting stage, perhaps, for that first, dizzying exploration.

But my idealistic excitement was quickly met by a very loud reality. I was 18, naive and - frankly, exhausted. I spent my Friday night glaring at the ceiling. The girl upstairs was throwing a party and by 3:00 AM it sounded like a Vaudeville comedy show crossed with a New York discotek. I’d stand in the claw-foot tub showering the next morning, nursing a grudge, watching through the six-foot paned window as a buxom young blond in a 1950s one-piece swimsuit shook martinis for a group of beautiful, scantily-clad, sunbathing boys on the quad below.

I had already complained to management twice, so when I saw her walking toward the building, upending and twirling an empty liquor bottle, I seized the opportunity. I jumped out of the shower, threw on some shorts, flip-flops, and a loose T, and ran to confront the source of the noise on the stairs.

She didn't just walk up the steps; her character filled the grand staircase. I walked down and approached her, but before I could utter a word of my rehearsed grievance, she adjusted her headband, looked up at me, leaning in with a conspiratorial shimmy, and fixed me with a gaze that made me feel like the only person in the building.

"Honey..." she began, her voice a low, honeyed rasp. "You're a cute one," she said, patting my cheek. "A real Huckleberry Finn. Why aren't you out on the quad with us? I’m Gera,” she added with a kind smile. Then she waved an arm. “Come on and help me get some more vodka. The boys are gonna love you!"

She let out a laugh then - not a laugh that went out, but one that pulled the whole world in. It was a distinct, rhythmic, wheezing, nasal-voiced inhale that sounded like a cross between a Hollywood siren and Arnold Horshack. As she walked around me and continued ascending, I just stood blinking. My anger evaporated into pure confusion. I was so shy and awkward, but I followed close behind her.

That afternoon, I spent hours day-drinking on the quad with complete strangers - listening to their talk of music and boys. I soon realized I wasn't actually angry about the noise anymore; I was just heartbroken that I hadn't been invited sooner.

As the sun began to set behind the trees, she donned her big, floppy hat and movie-star sunglasses, looked at me, and said, "We’re heading out tonight and I’m gonna take the Belle sisters - Isa Belle and Anna Belle," gesturing grandly to each of her breasts with a shimmy. "Do you want to meet us?"

Birmingham in those days was a city with a split personality. High on the ridge, the elite looked down from The Club, their elegant dinner and "Saturday Night Fever" dance floor. But downtown, a different kind of creative class was flourishing. We had inherited the legacy of legendary dance halls like Tuxedo Junction. And by 1982, that energy of the night-life was fueling a similar vibrant, hidden world.

Before the lights got loud, we would congregate at Joe Bar, a beatnik sanctuary where the staff wore black turtlenecks, moving and acting with a quiet, practiced coolness. You’d find UAB and Birmingham Southern students mixing with artists, writers, doctors, and nurses, discussing poetry over vintage cocktails while Walter, who had once played piano for Cab Calloway, pounded out American Songbook standards on a battered upright in the corner.

But when the night truly began, the discoteks called. For the gay community, the discos were a rite of passage: Focus Phase IV, The Lighthouse, and the crown jewel, Belle Watlings.

I found them at Belle’s that night. It was a glamorous disco famously built into the bones of the old Dale’s Steakhouse. A massive fake oak tree - a leftover from the restaurant’s decor - still stood defiantly in the middle of the flashing lights and the sea of dancers. Gera was in her "Peg o’ My Heart" prime. She greeted me on the dance floor, surrounded by a crowd; she wore a short, low-cut dress and red lipstick, one arm raised to hug me, the other weighted by a massive white patent bag.

"Honey! You made it!" she screamed over the music.

Around 2:00 AM, she did a little "Pony" dance move across the floor toward me. "Let's blow this popsicle stand before it closes! You don't want to see these people once they turn on those fluorescents,” she said, pointing up. “Let’s go back to 802-with-a-view for a nightcap!"

As we were leaving, she tapped one of the boys and gestured. “Honey… would you get my wrap?” She pointed to the coat check just outside the main door. He returned with a full-length white mink stole - in JULY! She offered her shoulders, where it was set - and we were off. After hours more of drinking, the last thing I remember was her shouting, "Let’s all show Birmingham a thing or two! Let’s all go to brunch at Cobb Lane tomorrow!"

Sunday morning was silent. I tried calling - no answer. I knocked on her door - louder and louder. No answer. In its prime, the Claridge was the height of elegance, featuring "status" amenities like the porter’s door - a small kitchen cabinet opening to the hallway so a porter could whisk away trash unnoticed. I pried it open, pushing through a clattering waterfall of empty vodka bottles and cigarette butts to crawl into her kitchen.

I found her in the walk-in closet she’d converted into a bedroom. I knocked on the door. "Gera? It’s time for brunch."

The door flew open. She stood there, stark naked, holding the door frame for dear life as she shoved up her sleeping mask. "Huckleberry!" She didn’t seem the least bit surprised I was suddenly in her living room, having not been let in, but she did notice I was staring at her breasts. “Oh, Honey, these just hang like old tube socks when I don’t wear a bra.” Then, she snapped back into her signature party-girl voice, pointed to each in succession, and smiled. “This one’s the East and this one’s the West - and never the twain shall meet!” and gave me that signature laugh.

I stammered a second and said, "It’s 1:20 PM, Gera.

She looked dazed. "Is it Monday already?"

"No, Gera. It's Sunday. We were at your place last night. You told everyone we’d meet for brunch at 1:00 PM today."

She shrugged it off, pranced into the bathroom to start a tub, and then darted back to the kitchen. She grabbed a jar of Sanka, stirred it into a cup of hot tap water, and pranced back to the bath. She dunked herself completely, popped back up, wiped the hair from her face, and chugged the Sanka in one go while standing in the water.

A quick sundress, a headband, and sandals and she was ready. "Well, what are we waiting for?!" ...Then she paused for a beat. “Honey, can you drive?" she whispered. “I think I might still be a little tipsy." Part 2

After a few similar weekends, Gera asked if I was coming to her Christmas in July party. I reminded her I hadn’t been invited. She said, “Well, come on!” It was held in 802-with-a-view, and for my first big party at her apartment, I dressed for the occasion. My 18-year-old self had already discovered the specific alchemy of vintage stores; that night, I looked like I’d stepped out of an episode of “My Three Sons” in a sharp black suit and a narrow tie. I was less a "Huckleberry Finn" and more a study in curated cinematic detachment.

When I knocked, the door was pried open by a prominent local abstract artist, his eyes glazed with something beyond Christmas cheer. He looked me up and down, grumbled something inaudible, made a gesture and dissolved back into the density of the apartment, leaving me to step over the threshold. It appeared that the physical space of 802 had ceased to exist. In its place was a performance piece titled "A Christmas Memory at The Claridge."

The apartment felt like a living organism, breathing smoke and the sounds of Edith Piaf alternating with the Bee Gees. I navigated through a sea of affectations: the "irregulars" and beatniks mixing with socialites who were clearly just slumming it for curiosity. I even spotted a terse, disapproving lesbian couple huddled in a corner with a look of collective existential skepticism, providing the necessary moral anchor for the room.

I began my slow search for Gera. I squeezed through the living room and found myself navigating around a cluster of women who were working their cigarettes like posh British socialites at a royal reception, their gestures high-arc and dramatic, punctuated by short, performative exhalations.

But as I reached the dining room, the cultural study was stopped cold by the centerpiece. It was the Christmas tree.

A magnificent, tinsel-covered tree, with "Christmas in July" as its theme. At first, the tinsel looked unusually stiff, perhaps a modern polymer. Then, as the light of a flashing red-and-green bulb caught it, I realized what I was seeing. It wasn't standard tinsel. The tree was festooned, limb after limb, with glitter-sprayed, medical-grade syringes, their needles glittering like tiny, sharp stars.

And above them, nested at the top of the tree, was the angel. But its hair seemed out of place - it was too curly, too coarse, and too… brown… to be synthetic. A cluster of people stood around, sniggering as they recognized it: clipping after clipping of Gera’s own "bush," curated and placed like a holy angel’s hair.

I was still staring at the "angel’s hair," trying to decide if I was horizontal or vertical in this new reality, when I heard her from behind me.

"Honey!"

Gera appeared like a fever dream. She was dressed in an oversized, vintage Santa suit top with a plush white fur collar that framed her face like a halo of winter clouds. On her, the heavy red felt transformed into a daringly short Christmas mini-skirt, held together by a prayer and a safety pin. With her signature red lipstick and one arm thrown skyward in a gesture that was half-benediction, half-summons, she didn't just hug me; she annexed me into her immediate orbit.

"You look divine, Huckleberry. Very... understated," she whispered, her eyes twinkling like we had a secret no one else knew. She didn't let me speak. Instead, she pivoted me toward a man standing near the record player. He was bald, strikingly angular, and dressed in a structural dark turtleneck that made him look like a piece of modern sculpture.

"Honey, you must meet Yul Ulu," she rasped, her voice dropping into a tone of mock-reverence. "Yul is the only architect in Birmingham who understands that a building shouldn't just stand there - it should swing."

Yul nodded slowly, his gaze fixed somewhere above my left shoulder as he began a low, rhythmic drone about mapping his design process to jazz music, letting "structural integrity riff off the light." Gera leaned in with intense, wide-eyed focus, as if the secrets of the universe were being revealed.

"HONEY! YOU MADE IT!"

The shift was instantaneous. One second, Gera was a scholar of jazz-architecture; the next, she was a heat-seeking missile of hospitality. She hadn't even waited for Yul to finish his sentence. She had spotted a new arrival and was already halfway across the rug, her arm back in the air, leaving Yul and I standing in the wake of her perfume.

I leaned against the doorframe, sipping a fresh martini snagged from a passing server, a silent witness in a black suit. I realized then that 802-with-a-view wasn't just a place to party; it was a solar system where the different 'Birminghams' were forced to collide, held together only by the gravitational pull of the woman currently screaming 'Honey!' in the kitchen—the bright, burning sun of a Birmingham that didn't know the night was almost over. Part 3

Ten years is a lifetime in Birmingham - especially these ten years. By 1992, the "rising tide of gay men and artists" had begun to recede, leaving the Claridge and Southside much quieter. The kinetic energy of the 80s had soured, leaving just the old architecture that now seemed derelict and frayed. I was no longer the starry-eyed 18-year-old in the vintage suit; I was a young man who had moved on from the increasingly conservative, hostile, and unwelcoming State of Alabama. Like so many others in the creative class, I had seen the writing on the wall - a swell of religious nationalism that made our vibrant, edgy world feel like a target. We fled to more accepting shores, leaving Birmingham to settle into a cultural desert.

I was back in the ‘Ham for a visit when I saw her - near the deli counter at the Western Supermarket.

The Mae West aura was still there, but it felt heavier, like a costume that had been dry-cleaned one too many times. The headband was slightly askew, and the red lipstick didn't quite hit the corners of her mouth with the same precision I remembered from the Belle Watlings days. ‘Peg o’ My Heart’ was now being played by a woman who had transitioned, perhaps unknowingly, into ‘Lady Macbeth.’

"Honey!" she screamed when she saw me.

The shout still echoed, but the inhale that followed had a slight rattle to it - a bit more "Horshack" and a bit less “Siren.” She clutched the handle of her grocery cart like it was the rail of a cruise ship.

"Huckleberry, you’ve grown up!" she rasped, patting my cheek with a hand that trembled just enough for me to notice. “How are you?”

“I’m great, Gera. How are you?”

“Well, Honey, you know how it is…” she said, her smile momentarily slipping into something weary. Then she snapped back, a forced brightness returning to her eyes. "But don't you worry about Gera. I'm just out here scouting. I'm looking for a man to marry, Honey. A real man."

She leaned in, the old conspiratorial shimmy now a slow, deliberate tilt of her shoulders.

"And he’s going to be filthy rich," she whispered, her eyes momentarily flashing with that same fire from the early days. "So rich he’s going to buy me a convertible Rolls-Royce. All white, Honey. Inside and out." She paused, visualizing it there between the produce and the frozen peas. "And right on that polished wooden dash, I’m going to tack a brass plaque. Do you know what it’s going to say? 'Honey, nouveau riche is better than no riche at all!'"

She threw her head back and let out that snort of a laugh, loud enough to make a woman in the cereal aisle turn and stare, but Gera didn't care. To her, the Western was just another stage, and I was her captive audience. We exchanged a few niceties, then she drifted toward the checkout, her smile fading faster than it used to - the performance exhausting her.

By the mid-90s, the Claridge itself was succumbing to a different kind of decay: gentrification. The beautiful decay we had loved was being scrubbed away. The porter doors were being sealed shut and patched over, the high ceilings partitioned, and the aging hallways were marketed to a new class that didn't know about thrift stores and make-shift beds. As the great old bones of the building were laminated by sheetrock, agreeable gray paint, and neutral carpet from Home Depot, its soul was evicted.

It wasn't just the Claridge; the neighborhood was being hollowed out. In the early eighties, Southside had been a playground of possibility - a dense, colorful grid of galleries, kitschy card shops, and new restaurants. Back then, you could lose yourself in any of twelve different gay bars, with three or four massive discos like Belle Watlings or Focus Phase IV anchoring the night.

But by 1995, the map had folded in on itself. The galleries were gone, the fun shops had shuttered, and the twelve bars had dwindled to just three. Only one true nightclub remained - The Rage - its neon pulse a final, frantic act of raging against the dying of the light that was slowly consuming Southside.

The audience was disappearing. The "irregulars," the artists, and the boys from the quad had mostly grown up and moved on - or simply disappeared into the safety of larger cities. Gera was like a vaudeville star from the 1920s standing on a stage in the 1950s; the lights were still on, but the theater was nearly empty. Her act would end, followed by a long, echoing pause, and the sad sound of three people clapping out of obligation. Only a few remained - like the stylists who had built careers coiffing the blue-haired socialites of Mountain Brook - to witness the final curtains.

It was during this time, from the salt air of South Beach, that I heard through the fragments of long-distance gossip that Gera had finally found him. His name was Paul.

He wasn't the sugar-daddy of her fantasies; he was a good, solid man - a craftsman and woodworker. But most importantly, he was hers. They were engaged, and for a few months, it seemed the cracks in Gera’s facade might actually be mended. But as she moved into her late thirties, the drama shifted from campy vaudeville to something much darker.

The threats started almost immediately. Paul’s ex-girlfriend began stalking the edges of their lives, sending word that she was coming for Gera. She didn't want a conversation with Gera; she wanted to "hunt her down and slap her silly."

The most infamous close call happened at the Upside Down Plaza, that windowless cellar beneath the Western where the preppies clung to happy hour. One night, while Gera was in the back pool room with a couple of her remaining irregulars, the word came from the front: She’s here. And she’s looking for you.

Gera didn’t make a scene. She just scampered into the ladies' room, bolted the door, and faced the narrow, grime-streaked window. When the bartender finally unlocked the door to find the room empty and the window wide, Gera was already gone.

Our friends eventually found her at her new apartment - the "Pawnee Palace." But unlike a palace, this place felt smaller and more disheveled than 802-with-a-view. She was a mess of scratches and torn starched linen, her breathing still a series of ragged, terrified inhales.

"Honey..." she gasped as they walked in, her eyes wide behind a smudge of red lipstick. "That woman was gonna kill me. I've been diddlin' her man!"

She said it with a laugh, but the humor didn't reach her eyes. It was the first time the performance couldn't quite cover the cost of the drama following her. It was a frantic exit through a basement window that foreshadowed the day when there would be no window left to crawl out of. Part 4

2019. I had come full circle, back to Birmingham, living as roommates with one of those "beautiful boys" from the 1982 quad. The city around us was undergoing a miraculous resurrection - the grand old skyscrapers were being redeveloped into sleek lofts, and the warehouses were filling with art studios and high-end bistros. The creative class was returning, but Gera was no longer their sun. She was a fading moon in Irondale, a quiet, affordable suburb where she lived alone with two dogs and the ghosts of the Claridge. By then, Gera’s friends and "irregulars" had long since vanished, having traded the party for the challenges of their own aging.

"John! Honey!" she’d cry when I pulled into her driveway. "I'm so glad to see you! How long has it been?" The "Huckleberry" mask had finally slipped; she knew my name now, though the time between our visits was a sliding scale in her mind. I’d sit in my car and wait as she "pulled herself together." Ten minutes, twenty. Finally, she’d emerge, adjusting the brim of a big, floppy hat and straightening those movie-star sunglasses. "I had to iron this dress, Honey," she’d apologize, her voice a fragile echo of that old honeyed rasp. "Let’s go! We're gonna have some fun!"

At 65, she was a living Delta Dawn, still carrying the faded rose of her younger days. But the light in her eyes was different now. The diagnosis was FTD - Frontotemporal Dementia - a thief that was systematically dismantling the stage she had lived on for 45 years. There was a cruel, Shakespearean irony to the timing: her mother had recently passed, finally leaving Gera the inheritance she had waited decades for. The money was there, but the possibilities it could allow were now gone.

The decline had truly begun years earlier, on the night the ex-girlfriend’s threats turned from words to action. The murder of her fiancé, Paul, had been the blow that cracked the foundation. She was never the same after that; the campy Vaudeville act became a survival mechanism, an empty shell she inhabited because the bride-to-be reality was too painful to hold.

Back at our house, the afternoon would unfold in a rhythmic, looping ceremony. She’d sit with a vodka drink, taking careful, two-handed sips as if the glass might float away.

"What ever happened to Rodney?" she’d ask, digging endlessly through her purse for something she could never quite find. "He was always such fun."

"Gera," we’d say gently, for the third time that hour. "Rodney moved to Dallas fifteen years ago. We don't know what he's doing either."

"Oh," she’d say, the smile fading for a second before snapping back. "Well, let's watch a movie!"

We’d put on a classic, but she’d talk right over it, her mind unable to track the plot, preferring the performance of our conversation to the one on the screen.

Occasionally, we’d all fire on the same cylinders - someone would mention 802-with-a-view or Belle’s, and for a glorious, fleeting moment, we’d all be young and beautiful again, laughing until the air ran out. But then the fog would roll back in. She’d go back to searching her purse.

As evening fell, the exhaustion would take her. I remember looking over and seeing her slumped in the armchair. The red lipstick was smeared on the rim of her glass and a little across her cheek - a messy, tragic reminder of the Peg o' My Heart who once occupied the Claridge stairs with me. She had fallen asleep trying to watch "Now, Voyager."

I reached out and touched her arm to wake her for the drive back to Irondale. She blinked, looking up at me through the haze of 45 years, her eyes searching for a face she recognized.

"Huckleberry!" she whispered, a faint light returning to her face. "When did you get here?! How long has it been?"

In Loving Remembrance of Jeanie Morris Murphy

Top Me Off, Please

 

The Irish Goodbye

"The secret to life is knowing when to stop."

Quentin (played by Tom Hollander) in Season 2 of The White Lotus

YOLO

"You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough" ~ Mae West

A Misunderstanding of Assignment

Christmas, 1968. Country Club Lane, Atlanta GA.

The air was thick with it—not just the humidity of a Georgia winter, but the static of change. Or, to be more precise: the fear of it. The complexion of our southwest Atlanta neighborhood was shifting, a slow-motion tectonic plate movement that sent my parents retreating into the familiar bunkers of old cultural habits and familial biases. They were bracing for an invasion of those they thought were their enemy - simply because they were "different." And there I was, right in the middle of the living room: a precocious, effete five-year-old. I was the enemy within.

For my second-grade project with Miss Duck, I composed my Wish List for Santa. It was a short list. A singular list. At the top—and the bottom, and the middle—was “A Crissy Doll.”

Crissy was a mod marvel in a mini-skirt, but her true allure was mechanical. She had a knob in the small of her back. Turn it, and her auburn hair retracted into her torso, wound around an internal spindle. Push a button on her stomach, and the hair grew again. I was fascinated!

I recall the adults attempting the "redirection." The subtle nudges toward the Tonka trucks or the GI Joes. But I was single-minded. I didn't want a soldier; I wanted the girl - or deep inside, did I secretly want to be the girl?

Looking back, I can only imagine the whispered negotiations between my parents. My father had become a ghost in his own house—mostly silent, largely indifferent to my existence. My mother, perhaps sensing the void he was carving into me, drew me closer. She became my protector, my curator. On Christmas morning, her sheer will won out. There, under the tree, was a Crissy Doll. I was overjoyed. I coiffed that doll’s hair, short and long, until the gears groaned. If there was a war of words between my parents or sneers from my older siblings, I didn't hear them. I was fulfilled.

It’s a curious word: sissy. At five, it isn't about sexuality; it’s about affectation. It was a series of signals broadcast to a world that didn't ask for them. And children were, of course, the cruelest of anthropologists. I wore a sports coat and a bow tie to elementary school—my favorite armor—and was greeted daily with sissy and weirdo.

But I had been blessed with an ego that rivaled my intellect. I would stand on the playground with Miss Duck, discussing the "silly behavior" of the other children as if I were a visiting dignitary observing the local primates.

The fascination with the feminine persisted. I once offered up an impromptu performance in a girdle, while family was visiting. I stumbled down the hallway and into the living room where my mother was serving coffee—wearing her black patent pumps and one of her foundational garments. There was a gasp, then that terrible, brittle laughter—the kind adults use to mask their horror. I was summarily dismissed. My mother learned to lock her closet before guests arrived; And I learned that in the theater of the living room, some costumes were considered... “transgressive.”

By the time my father died, the cruelty of the world had begun to weigh. I began a structural renovation. "I’m not Kelly," I proclaimed. "Kelly is a girl’s name. Dad was John. He’s gone, so now I’m John."

I spent the next few decades transforming myself into what I perceived my world wanted. I became the ideal: masculine, muscular, a "man’s man" in a gay world that had become as complex and discriminating as any European royal court.  I found that even in our community, we, like our parents, had brought bias into adulthood with us. On Saturday nights, I often heard my friends, dressed in their leather finery sneer at the drag performers - "Why do we have to ruin our high with this sissy theater?" 

The irony was delicious, if a bit acidic.

In 2002, when AID Atlanta needed a new fundraiser, I proposed the "Atlanta Cotillion." A traditional Southern ball, but with a twist: twelve debutantes, all cisgender men who had never "presented as female," stepping into gowns for charity. I wanted a celebration of the feminine within all of us—regardless of where we sat on the spectrum.

The community was baffled. "Can we come as men if the men are women?" the lesbians asked. Some gay men insisted on wearing tuxedos because "a man, dressed as a distinguished woman is only complete with the complement of a man."

I shook my head. "I’m sorry," I said, over and over in frustration and disappointment. "You’ve misunderstood the assignment."

And I leaned into my own inner female - I stepped out as the Grand Dame. It was my first time 'in face' as an adult, a quiet reconciliation with that little boy in his mother's patent pumps. It was a triumph of identity for sure, but also one of industry; over ten years, we raised $1.3 million for the cause.

Now, my friends and I are at retirement age. We sit around dinner tables, and the conversation turns to "the kids" and their "new gender spectrum." My friends, the ones who fought for marriage equality, now bemoan the "litany of letters." LGBTQ+ They are befuddled by pronouns, by the "addition" of gender identity to their fight.

We sometimes see our long-time friend Molly (she/her/hers)—beautiful, trans, and "grandfathered" into their affection. She occupies a "cherished category," the singular exception that allows them to maintain their biases against the rest. But eventually, the wine flows and someone gestures toward the horizon with a mix of pity and exhaustion: “Is that a ‘they’ now?”

They squint at the gender spectrum as if it were a foreign map they refuse to read, willfully forgetting that they once stood on that very border of identity—likely clutching a doll.

It is the same bunker our parents built for themselves in the 1960’s. We have simply swapped the fear of a changing neighborhood for the fear of a changing lexicon.

Sean, my No. 6, who is thirty years my junior, often rolls his eyes and leaves the room, weary of the stagnation. And I? I am left wondering how we retreated so far into our hard-won "masculinity" that we became the very gatekeepers we once fled.

I think of the lyrics Madonna whispered at the turn of the century:

“But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading / Cause you think being a girl is degrading...”

I fear we are still struggling with the assignment.

What It's Like For a Girl - Madonna

lyrics by Madonna and Guy Sigsworth

Atlanta Cotillion

The Comfort of Our Loving Chosen Family

I have, by some measure of recklessness or sheer geographic fidgeting, inhabited eight U.S. cities. Birmingham, New Orleans, Fort Lauderdale, even a brief, sun-drenched pause in West Hollywood—a restless itinerary born of work, longing, or my desperate, repeated need to push the reset button. I am now, for the sixth time, back in Birmingham, where the cycle first began, a prodigal son without a parable, merely a habit.

This itinerancy—this compulsive crisscrossing of the American landscape also included countless fundraisers and the Sisyphean work of HIV/AIDS advocacy—has left me with a staggering collection of human contacts. Acquaintances, yes. Friends, certainly. But, most importantly, it has forged a chosen family of a size and tenacity that defies mere listing in a digital Rolodex.

My path, as I’ve chronicled in various unflinching accounts, has traced the dizzying heights of the acme and the devastating depths of the nadir. And through all of it, from the ecstasy to the sheer, unblinking horror, I have walked with these few, this steadfast, close chosen family.

The Birmingham Contingent

To return to this Southern city—to the origin point of my adult consciousness—is to settle, finally, into the loving bosom of men I have known for forty years. Forty years. It is a terrifying testament to human endurance, if nothing else. We are the brotherhood I once wrote of—the crew who traveled, absurdly, to Savannah in a Winnebago to watch the river succumb to a green dye job.

The history is untidy: there was the sleeping together—and the dating that curdled into something better. It was during this early time when I met my first partner, whom I quickly designated "Also John"—my No. 1. I first saw him at Basics, sitting at the bar in these cute orange gym shorts. I soon recognized he was also my cashier at the local supermarket. Within a week, I mustered the courage to ask him on a date. “Wanta go to dinner on Monday?” “Sure!” he replied. I don’t recall where we ate, but he stayed over with me that first night—and never left. Two years later we still lived together. It was both our first try at a loving relationship. But because we lost many of the men just older than us—the couples that might have been role models for us—we used the only examples we had: our parents, straight couples. Unfortunately, both of us had come from very bumpy family origins, so… 

But three years after we met, we remained loving friends as he went off to Texas to get his Masters. To this day, "Also John" is the closest thing I have to a brother—and I have a biological brother, mind you. We’ll get to the topic of how biological families have often failed a generation of gay men.

"Also John" remains my stalwart constant.

Many of us who had early encounters took the best of the salvageable material—the friendship—and continued. And in that continuation, we stumbled upon a profound clarity. The confusion—the sexual possibility—was relegated to the past. What remained was a companionship that was more than friendship; it was a commitment, a deliberate act of loving companionship. We cooked, we gathered, we watched the comforting, synthetic glow of The Golden Girls—a strange, surrogate domesticity.

Intimacy Without Fear

Then there is Atlanta, where the 1996 Olympics seemed to inadvertently sow the seeds for another grouping, sixteen strong, constant companions. This was the moment—between the cautious cultural visibility of My So-Called Life and Ellen, and the seismic shift in medical progress—that the world, and we ourselves, dared to believe we could be comfortable again. 

We had, by this time, matured. We were comfortable with man-on-man intimacy—and I do not speak of sex, but of brotherly closeness. A gathering for a film meant bodies piled on a sofa—a casual, tactile acceptance. There was no fear that a head on a shoulder would be mistaken for a preamble. It was simply the evidence of the bond.

It was this very intimacy, this effortless being, that led to the farce we called Gays and Grays Mother’s Day Weekend. Eight of us, realizing we had become the collectively chosen child of a beloved mother (what a grotesque, beautiful trope!), coordinated the arrival of our matriarchs. A cocktail party, a dinner. The wine flowed—the great grease of truth—and the dam broke.

The Education of Mothers

One of the mothers, with a disarming directness, asked the necessary question: “So are you all one another’s ‘play things’?”

The collective eye-roll from the eight of us—the Oh, Mom—was immediate, instinctive. But another mother interrupted: “No. I truly want to know the answer to that question.”

Ever the educator, I took a stab at the defining. “We are all friends. Most of us have a ‘special friend’ in this group, but the rest of us are simply friends.”

A second mother cut through the semantic clutter. “My ‘friends’ and I do not routinely hug and kiss when we greet and when we part.”

A friend countered: “Point taken. But I suppose, in that way, we are merely a large Italian family. We love one another, and we love showing it.”

Then, the final, surgical question: “So none of you have ever slept together—except with your special friend?”

The silence was the kind you could bottle and sell as an existential threat. A shared, shamed look among the sons. Then, a sudden, thunderous laughter. “We are not saying some of us have not slept together over the years, but still…”

“Hmm,” a mother observed. “The man you bring home to me, you call ‘your friend.’ You call all of them ‘your friends.’ Pardon my confusion.”

I jumped in, offering a compromise: “Let us agree to use the designation ‘significant other’—a term we grant men with whom we have lived and who we have managed to endure for more than a year.”

They nodded. They seemed to find relief in the structure. But if the mothers were to define us, it seemed only fair that we should test their accuracy. "Turnabout is fair play," I announced, turning to my own mother. "Given that designation, can you name my ‘significant others?’"

Once we reached eight or ten cries of “Mom, I never dated him!” or “Mom, do you recall me living with him?”—the volume rising with the wine—we all had to agree that communication had failed us all over the years.

Yet, I still break into a cold sweat when I imagine what my mother might have been thinking for all those years.

The Choice of Lifestyle

Years earlier, my mother had lamented, “I just can’t reconcile why you chose this lifestyle.” For years, I had diminished her, insisting this was no choice; one does not choose attraction. The argument, a well-worn piece of theater, flared up again during a twelve-hour drive to visit my lesbian sister.

Suddenly, she stopped the performance: “John, you’ve mistaken my meaning. Honey, I know you didn’t choose whether or not to be fey and attracted to men. That is ridiculous. You can’t choose that.”

She leaned into the silence of the car.

“The lifestyle I’m disappointed you chose was one of isolation—living apart from the family. You moved off to the City, spending time with those people we didn’t know—and in questionable places. You turned your back on your family—as if we were no longer good enough.”

She offered an example: “I had an uncle who ‘wasn’t the marrying kind.’ We all knew. He lived near my parents. He played his part in the family—babysitting, helping when someone was sick. Not doing that—not living as part of our family. That was the choice.”

I sat with it—disappointed that the misunderstanding had existed for so long.

“First,” I finally said, “I am sorry. You are right. I misunderstood you.” But then, the defense of a generation. “Mom, your uncle lived a lonely, isolated life. Would you have wished that on me? I had no interest in being cast in a supporting role. I would have been miserable.”

“So many men like me have made the same ‘choice’ I’ve made—because we can. Because our biological families couldn’t, or wouldn't, understand—or love us as we are. So, we sought out happiness—love—with like-minded people, in a community we built for ourselves. In that sense, yes, I chose this lifestyle. But it was the only chance I had to love and be loved.”

Our Clan of Handwavers

This was our mission. This was the fate of a generation, beginning in the mid-twentieth century and accelerated, execrated, by the AIDS pandemic. We were forced to create our own families. We made a large, caring brotherhood, within which we created smaller, essential, loving chosen families.

As we age, the peace of mind is immeasurable. We are there for one another. We know one another more deeply than many of us know our own family of origin. We accept, embrace, support. When I was homeless, I had a home. When I was hungry, I had a meal. When I found success, my chosen family was there, cheering me on. Unconditional. Loving.

The brotherhood is now an international scattering of Facebook feeds—the New York friends, the Philly friends, the New Orleans Boys. The intimacy of proximity is replaced by the necessary infrastructure of social media.

But most vital are the chosen families. The local, daily support system. Our rides or die—the grammar matters less than the conviction.

I think back to those fundraiser dance parties. Our little Atlanta family became known, affectionately, as “The Clan of the Handwavers.” You could spot us, on any crowded floor, amidst the sea of bare chests. We were dancing, only and always with our family, our hands thrown into the air, waving in time to the music—a gesture of pure, unadulterated celebration of our family, the deliberate, necessary family we built for ourselves.

The Long After: Survival's Unexpected Gift

Today, December 1st, is World AIDS Day. It is a day dedicated to remembrance, education, and the ongoing fight against HIV/AIDS. For many survivors, including myself, it is a day of complex reflection on the unexpected longevity we now share. It is in this spirit of reflection that I publish "The Long After: Survival's Unexpected Gift." This narrative explores the new frontier of life after the initial crisis, where the gift of survival brings with it its own set of challenges and profound meanings. This essay is the newest installment in a series on my blog that chronicles my personal journey through the epidemic and beyond. If you are new to my story, I invite you to explore the arc of my experience by reading the previous essays: "Love and Intimacy in the Shadow of AIDS," "The Fabulous 5000," "The Fiddler's Bill," "Part I: A Caring Brotherhood," and "Part II: Prince Charlie." On this significant day, may we remember those who paved the way for this survival, honor the resilience of the community, and commit to carrying the story forward.

I was, from the start, marked as 'different.' Sometimes adults used words like 'precocious,' or perhaps, 'pretty boy.' The latter was a fleeting, but perhaps necessary, truth—one that vanished as I grew older, leaving me merely common and gangly. This resulting lack of conventional appeal would become, I realize now, my first layer of defense. This early sense of difference, coupled with the death of my father, forged the necessary psychological distance—the essential preparation that allowed me to stand back and merely observe the coming calamity.

My older sister was also a study in difference; her sequence of relationships with women later confirmed what we had always, with a knowing silence, presumed. And at fourteen, my mother, who had perfected the art of strategic parental detachment, allowed me to spend Christmas Eve with her and her partner. That evening, my sister and her partner took me to a bar—Belle Watling's on 21st Street. It was my introduction to the life. The notable absence of women suggested, even to my limited intellect, that this was not a place to discuss needlepoint. I devoured it: the kind gentlemen who offered free drinks, the lighted dance floor. I was utterly captivated by the simple fact of the place, operating then without the slightest comprehension that this very gathering was already endangered.

I was, of course, entirely lacking in self-awareness. I hadn't yet reconciled myself to the truth that I was one of them. Nor was I the sort of youth men noticed: a hundred and twenty pounds at graduation, cursed with unmanageable, mouse-colored hair that seemed to defy both gravity and grooming. A truly compelling package indeed.

The move was 1982. I left home for Birmingham, attending UAB and attempting the role of 'young gay man.' By chance—or perhaps by the gravitational pull of the inevitable—I settled at The Claridge on Southside. Once grand, the building was then merely old, serving as a comfortable, aging repository for retired women and a rising number of gay men and artists.

I was granted proximity to the community before I ever dared to participate sexually. Looking back, decades later, the irony is stark. The very qualities that kept me tentative, quiet, and withdrawn—that simple, crippling lack of conventional appeal—may have been the unintended gift that saved my life. I was present at the party, yet shielded from the immediate consequence. The simple truth: I was saved by my own early failure to attract.

The Price of Witness

The news arrived in 1984 under the grimly polite, sterile pseudonym of GRID—Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. As if a new technical acronym could somehow sanitize a terrifying extinction. We heard reports of men disappearing in New York and San Francisco, but for a gay man in Birmingham, geography provided a temporary, foolish buffer. It was the mention of Atlanta that finally pierced the illusion, confirming the nearness of the physical threat.

The threat quickly became a personal imperative. I knew I had to submit to "the test." A good lesbian friend, displaying a solidarity that outpaced the compassion of the world, drove me to the county health department. Accepting the need and agreeing to the test was torture - but the true psychological violence was waiting for the results. Ten days. A mandatory follow-up appointment to receive the results in person, as if the news required a formal, official witness.

I was negative. My initial impulse—a ridiculous cheer—was swiftly replaced by the recognition that one doesn’t celebrate a victory in a game of chance. I could identify no moral or behavioral difference between my conduct and that of the men who received the opposite verdict. It was a statistical lottery, and my success felt like an accidental insult to the dead. And the trauma of the test never lessened; I submitted myself every six months as a kind of panicked, ritualistic observance.

The weight of the community’s despair became suddenly palpable at a New Year’s Eve party in 1986. After the obligatory, sentimental midnight kisses, the room broke into an unsettling, collective weeping—a truly dramatic finish to the year. I asked a close friend about the sudden, theatrical grief. He said, plainly, "Because not all of us thought we would live to see the end of this year—and some of us might not see the end of the next." It was then he began pointing them out: friends I had known for years, men who were already marked with a terrible secret I had been utterly oblivious to. The depth of that earlier unawareness—the sheer, functional blindness I required to maintain my life—is the detail that disturbs me still. By the end of 1988, four of the men I had embraced that night were gone.

This reality demanded a posture of action. My volunteer work at Birmingham AIDS Outreach (BAO), beginning in 1986, quickly transitioned from simple compassion into a structured, analytical engagement. The distance between observer and participant dissolved, but it was replaced by the need for strategic authority. By 1987, I was asked to serve on the board of directors, and by 1989, this activism formalized into a profession, launching my career as an HIV/AIDS corporate and social entrepreneur. This was the crucible where my professional expertise was forged in the heat of constant loss. The work became the necessary defense—a deliberate attempt to impose order and analysis upon the chaos I was increasingly expected to explain. Art, Ambition, Ascent

As I matured, attempting to form the character I felt I needed to be, I was compelled to offer a deeper solace, an escape from the unrelenting mathematics of death. My official work was to impose analytical structure; my parallel, and perhaps slightly more grandiose mission, became to impose an inconvenient beauty.

In 1989, while a graduate student, a sanctuary through music took hold. A few friends and I began the Birmingham Community Men's Choir. This was not a frivolous pursuit—though the notion of twenty-one men forming a choir during an apocalypse was certainly absurd—it was a deliberate, communal intervention against isolation. Our debut concert was merely the thrilling icing on the cake; the meat of it, the “cake” was the sense of community we had constructed. For two years, the choir offered a crucial support system, expressing joy and defiance through art, and laying the foundation for future groups.

My eight years as a student at UAB—a span that netted a bizarre collection of degrees—was, rather, the sustained, deeply intellectual strategy of creative student loan deferment. This dual existence finally ended when recruiters arrived from Caremark.

I was hired, and the move was to New Orleans—a chance to finally afford life and make a living helping my community. Meeting my Prince Charming—my No. 2 partner, Charlie—was the perfect opportunity to move and push the reset button. Having been shielded by my earlier lack of appeal, I now embraced the inverse: a commitment to an ideal.

My move began a mindful and deliberate focus on continuous emotional enlightenment, self-awareness, more relational maturity, and a relentless pursuit of physical improvement. The goal was simple: to be better, to do better.

I was brought in at Caremark to address a critical challenge: translating compassionate care for people with AIDS into an efficient corporate model. My unique experience was leveraged to achieve a commercial solution. I was designated a strategic innovator and corporate entrepreneur, tasked with developing a profitable business model out of what had been treated as simple devastation. The true revolution was the design of comfortable, welcoming community spaces, which managed the impossible feat of simultaneously optimizing nursing resources and creating a more dignified service. I was pleased to prove that compassion, when properly managed, could be profitable. The Architecture of Illusion

My professional arc carried me through Atlanta and eventually to South Florida, culminating in a settlement in South Beach—a perfect, overheated distillation of the inflection point the pandemic had reached.

By this time, I had acquired my No. 3 partner, or 'significant other'—a designation we grant men with whom we have lived and who we have managed to endure for more than a year. More crucially, he was my second consecutive partner who was positive, making us what the public health apparatus referred to with such cold precision: a sero-discordant couple.

I had made myself into a study in conscious, desperate re-design. I was spending up to two hours daily building a physical appearance that, by all external metrics, was the very physical ideal of a gay man. This ideal was confirmed during our travels to social and fundraising events. Yet, when I looked in the mirror, the triumph was never complete. I still saw that skinny kid with the mouse-colored hair. The attention, which I both relished and relied upon, was internally befuddling; the performance was flawless, but the validation felt empty.

Simultaneously, my professional reputation was expanding exponentially. I was supporting the growth of the first nation-wide chain of community-based HIV/AIDS specialty pharmacies, routinely traveling to 32 of the largest US cities. In these places, I was not merely a corporate representative; I met frequently with local HIV/AIDS community organizations, sharing best practices and cultivating a network of leaders. I was thus becoming a recognized expert—a key node in a national network of knowledge—setting myself up as an authority across the country.

My partner and I had built strong careers and friendships in South Beach. Yet, for years, so many gay men with an AIDS diagnosis had moved there to simply empty their bank accounts and die on the dance floor. This was a collective, final performance—a way to face death not with quiet despair, but by imposing a sense of dramatic control onto their fate. They were composing their own exits. Then, in 1995, science intervened: HAART arrived. Suddenly, the men who had executed a perfect, final plan didn't die. They were left, instead, with the bewildering, anti-climactic necessity of a future without a plan.

In response, I co-founded and led a critical, grassroots organization, South Beach AIDS Project. This was work of profound, necessary cynicism. We were building a localized safety net for individuals who were supposed to be dead, who were only now transitioning to longer, far more productive lives. It was the ultimate, satisfying bureaucratic challenge: creating infrastructure for the undead.

I meticulously built this infrastructure and personal empire—the career, the physique, the status—to master the crisis. But a monument built this high is, by definition, engineered for a long and catastrophic fall The Inevitability of the Fall

It was this dizzying altitude—It was this dizzying altitude—this feeling of having mastered my appearance, my career, and the crisis itself—that ultimately betrayed me. The six years leading up to the year 2000 had been an exercise in absolute corporate mastery. I was on the deck of the boat, secure in the illusion of my own analytical, self-made safety.

But it was my own ego—the intoxicating high, the illusion of safety, and shared by my 4th partner—that led us to embark on an Albee-esque experiment: attempting to regain some of the emotional and physical intimacy that fifteen years of epidemic had forced us to deny ourselves.

And then, in June 2000, the analytical distance shattered. I was called away from an executive committee meeting. On the other end of the line was my No. 4, delivering a simple, formal sentence: "I'm positive." My mind, that marvelous instrument of denial, immediately processed it as his issue—an issue I, the expert, would support him through.

It took weeks—a profound, almost ridiculous failure of self-awareness—to finally submit to ja test, citing a naïve "abundance of caution." A few days later, I returned for the inevitable verdict. My doctor, a good friend and a veteran of this long war, had the terrible chore of saying the words: "John, I’m sorry to say you’re positive." The ability to breathe left me immediately.

I had only shared the situation with one close friend, who made me promise to meet him for lunch immediately after the results. I met him there, consciously avoiding eye contact as we sat. After a pregnant pause, he said, simply, "So..."

"I'm gonna be fine," I said.

The response was everything: the confirmation of the result, delivered with an obligatory, feeble hope. For so many years, I had stood firmly on the deck, managing the logistics, throwing lifesavers to friends and strangers. Now, I found myself in those same dark, murky waters, an ‘expert’ floundering for a lifesaver myself. The Year of Necessary Seclusion

The year following the verdict was a period of profound psychological collapse disguised as quiet integration. I, who had stood in lecterns and educated hundreds, was now positive. The irony was so dense, so crushing, that it was nearly incapacitating. I gave myself a year—a calculated, necessary seclusion—to integrate this catastrophic shift, aided only by anti-depressants and a regrettable increase in drinking. I had to mourn my status, mourn the safety I’d lost, and mourn the men whose silence I could finally understand.

The landscape of a positive diagnosis is a terra incognita every person must navigate alone, yet its contours are tragically familiar. Some pivot from shock to resolve; others are arrested by a crippling denial. My path was an unwelcome apprenticeship in grief. It wasn't merely for the health I'd lost, but a profound, almost primal grieving of innocence. The foundational bedrock of my life—the unspoken assumption of safety and continuity—had been pulverized. Grief was less an emotion and more a persistent, uninvited inhabitant.

The challenge was not to get over it, but to find a way to cohabitate with this truth, slowly teaching myself that the only viable path to joy was through radical ownership and open integration of this new, unalterable self.

After a year of wrestling with fear, depression, and the internalized shame, I had gained the confidence to be outwardly, authentically okay. I devised the strategy of the Twelve: the individuals who would be most wounded by a second-hand announcement. I bought the plane tickets and scheduled the talks to occur over a single week. The conclusion of my disclosure was always the same: "Having been given this news myself by too many friends, I understand the weight it can carry. But I would ask that you please don’t talk to anyone about this until next Monday." By that following Monday, I had spoken to all twelve.

Everyone, bar one, responded with the compassion I had desperately hoped for. The exception was a physician, a friend, who began to yell: "How could you be so STUPID!? Of all people! I expected more from you! You've let us all down!" I simply stood and walked out. His outburst had only articulated the internal shame I had spent a year trying to suppress.

But his outburst, once survived, served as a final release. A sense of freedom, even power, came from that radical act of disclosure. The process of accepting, integrating, and finally embracing my new life meant knowing the whole world could know, and that I would, authentically, be fine. A Medication Labyrinth

The profound psychological resolution of my seclusion—the hard-won peace with my status—did not, of course, align with the medical reality. My physician now delivered the next, equally absurd truth: the current orthodoxy dictated I wait. My body was still robust, but I, the man compelled to action and analytical control, was now told to do nothing.

I was forced into an insane, internal negotiation with my own mortality: to wait until my body's innate defenses were visibly failing, to welcome the biological metrics of my own decline. This anxiety was compounded by the memory of the early years, having watched too many friends suffer through the debilitating toxicity of first AZT and the nascent HAART cocktails. It was this fear of poison, not a lack of commitment, that compelled me to agree to hold off on treatment.

Behaviorally, the shift was simple: after years of strictly practiced safer sex, abstinence during the year of disclosure was an easy, even necessary asceticism. But beyond that year, maintaining intimacy required maneuvering the moral minefield of self-disclosure. My own moral imperative—to only be intimate after honest disclosure from both—meant that every potential connection involved revealing a part of the self I had just fought so hard to integrate.

Two years into my diagnosis, the medical consensus shifted, and my doctor and I agreed it was time to start HAART. Now, the challenge was logistical. I, the corporate strategist who designed efficient care models, faced the bewildering inefficiency of my own treatment. I realized the ingredient was less important than the dosing schedule. Adherence, the single greatest predictor of success, demanded a protocol I could take just once a day.

This medication hunt was no easy feat. In the early 2000s, effective therapy required four or five medications in combination, yet few offered the once-a-day dosing I prioritized. I was, effectively, painted into a corner over the course of those first five years—a relentless search for a therapy that was effective, tolerable, and offered the best chance at lifelong adherence.

But fate wasn’t done. In June 2002, I lost my job, and subsequently I lost everything—my car, most of my belongings, and eventually my home. I was homeless. I extended my health insurance through COBRA, but when I met that limit, my coverage lapsed and I could no longer afford healthcare. For over two years, I went untreated and my health faltered. Ironically, the instability of being unhoused along with the associated mental and emotional paralysis made it almost impossible for me to engage supportive organizations like those I had pioneered years before.

By 2010, my medical condition, treatment regime, and emotional state were all stable - and all I wanted was to live a life without HIV/AIDS as the focus—a necessity born of sheer, exhausting survival. For the first time since 1990, I asked for a job that had NOTHING to do with the disease. Yet, the commitment to social good remained. My roles shifted to the government sector, tackling the complexities of integrated care models—developing and scaling continuity across the entire ecosystem of pharma, patient, provider, and payer. My success in fixing these systems was, I realized, made better, sharper, and more compassionate because of my intimate, personal experience as a patient and consumer within that very broken system. The Complexity of Survival

You live long enough, and you earn the right to the absurd. The terrifying urgency of the early years has given way to managed entropy—a state of existence that, by the time you're 60, is pleasantly rote. Life is good and stable, except, of course, for the predictable decay of the machine and the logistical nightmare of its maintenance. Even the isolation of COVID became just another variable to manage.

The body, having survived the plague, now wages a silent, private war on a dozen fronts. The side effects of the virus's history and the necessary interventions manifest as a litany of insults: failing eyesight, teeth, and joints; dropping testosterone, thyroid; high cholesterol and blood pressure—and, to top it off, hay fever! To be an adherent patient is no longer a virtue; it is a full-time, six-sigma management project. One requires a dedicated spreadsheet merely to keep pace with the sheer volume of medications and their refill dates. And God help the person who finds they have no refills or that an annual prior authorization is required. The system demands so much effort that I’m not sure how I have time left to simply live. I realize the life I saved by passively observing the plague now requires my full, relentless engagement merely to endure the cure.

But this is the final, cynical truth of survival: this suffocating logistics has become life. My own fortune—the good insurance, the stable career, the sheer administrative capability to navigate this labyrinth—only throws the harsh truth of the system into stark relief. Not everyone is fully insured or capable of managing this overwhelming complexity. For them, things are skipped, doses are missed, and conditions are left untreated. The gratitude I feel is inextricably linked to my profound understanding of the injustice. It is this failure of the system, this monstrous administrative burden, that drives my desire to comprehend and assist those who are not so fortunate.

The Final Metamorphosis

And then, you're 63. The body, having survived the plague and endured the bureaucratic war, demands a final, crucial adaptation. The furious pace of my younger life—long runs, weekend races, the heavy lifting aimed at looking buff—has given way to the necessary compromises of longevity: a daily quick two-mile walk, light lifting, stretching, and the gentle, ironic discipline of "chill yoga." But the life, despite the modifications, is still well-lived.

As I age, I find a shift in my emotional architecture. I like to say I'm becoming more "fragile," if only to observe the startled expression it provokes, but the truth is a creeping sensitivity. Whether part and parcel of the aging process or a mere reflection of the anxious times we all inhabit, challenges with anxiety have quietly asserted themselves. But alas, as always, we find a way forward.

This final chapter of transformation is defined by acceptance: of my diagnosis, my age, and the sheer complexity of my personal history. I have comfortably settled into the identity of a (tongue-in-cheek) well-dressed, somewhat erudite older gay man.

If I have learned anything over the years, it is the ability of a human to grow—not just change, but to become something more. So I embrace my new life with excitement. I no longer live in the image of the young ideal, but as a proud elder statesman. I have always listened closely to my gay elders, because they forged the way for me. I try to use their lives—their works—as a guiding light. Who knows what adventures or perils wait around the corner. For now, I am hopeful - but a bit cynical. And, considering everything, can you blame me?

Love and Intimacy in the Shadow of AIDS

On Saturday night at Belles, before the drag show, they'd play a slow song. One song. A chance for couples to touch, to be intimate. So many of my friends hated it. "Why would they bring everyone down for a stupid slow dance? No one wants to touch when they dance," they’d complain.

But to me, the moment was an aching reminder of what many of us as young gay men had never experienced—life without the shame of intimacy - and life without a looming expiration date. My mind goes back to the Sylvester hit "One Night Only." In that moment, the lyrics, originally meant as an anthem of a fleeting free-love culture, actually articulated a more disturbing unspoken truth for us:

“In the morning this feeling will be gone / It has no chance going on / Something so right has got no chance to live / So let's forget about chances / It's one night I can give.”

As gay men in the 1980s, we believed our days were numbered. Sex was a game of chance, a spin of the Russian Roulette cylinder. Friends were dying around us, and no one truly understood the cause, only the brutal, inevitable consequence.

Our fear was sometimes strikingly reinforced by the mainstream, straight world. On October 17th, 1989, just before I met my 2nd partner, I was watching coverage of the San Francisco earthquake aftermath. As the footage showed the destruction, a young child looked up at his mother with teary eyes and asked, "Momma—why does God let this happen?" Without hesitation, she replied: “It’s God’s wrath on the queers for infecting the World with AIDS.”

She froze, realizing the daggers I was staring into her. She had consciously given voice to the societal verdict: gay men were dirty, unnatural, and our sexuality was a biological contamination. The public health mandate to use condoms was not just a medical recommendation; it was, for us, a life sentence of penance. Straight couples could risk intimacy for love; we were mandated to risk only our lives if we sought connection outside of a latex sheath. And we felt we had no choice but to buy into the narrative. We were indoctrinated to believe that sex without barriers was shameful, an admission of our own inherently "dirty" nature.

I Was Given a Choice

That same month, I met Charlie in New Orleans. We found ourselves on the floor of a walk-in closet in my shared hotel room—a private space carved out of necessity. Before we were intimate, he disclosed: “I need you to know I’m positive.”

It was a profound, terrifying act of honesty. Though I acted cool, my mind was screaming. After eight years spent in mortal fear of this specter, I had been given the choice. I nodded yes. And we did what the authorities told us—a sterile, cautious, protected intimacy. The greatest act of human connection had been reduced to a series of administrative tasks conducted in a crawl space.

Charlie became my 2nd partner, and my first sero-discordant relationship. His honesty gave me choice, but it did not grant me ease. I was never madly in love; I’m not sure I knew how to be, how to overcome the trauma and indoctrination of the 80s and truly let someone in. We loved each other, but the truth beneath the surface was far more pragmatic. I remember I would say to him, “I love you. Today.” The unstated half of that truth was always: Don’t book a vacation we might not live to see.

The Suffocation of Love

By 1992, I was an HIV activist and educator, and I had met partner No. 3, Tom, who was also positive. Perhaps I embraced these relationships to wear them like a badge of honor - showing everyone that I could practice what I preached. But with Tom, I also began learning how to truly love and be loved. And, in a way, we did. We fell in love. But there was always something between us - a hesitance. And my meticulous diligence was also always there. I was exacting when it came to our protection practices, sometimes even wearing latex gloves, and always, always, immediately jumping into a scolding hot shower—a ritual of purification that symbolized the need to wash away the risk and the shame immediately after the act of love.

I could tell Tom craved intimacy. He wanted a touch that was passionate and carefree, not painstakingly planned and cautious. But I, ever the Boy Scout, didn’t—couldn't—give him what he most wanted. Consequently, I felt more and more inadequate. 

And we never talked about any of it. Not once. So, the emotional cost of our adherence to the rules began to precipitate our downfall.

Over time, our relationship was suffocated by what was not said. We traveled across Europe, from Switzerland to Prague, hoping a holiday would heal us. Instead, we spent days in silence, then argued, and then returned to silence. On the flight home, we didn’t even want our arms to touch on the armrest between our seats. The fear and the constant vigilance had successfully frozen our emotional connection. I left less than a week after we arrived home. Another relationship fallen to the weight of the burden and our adherence to the cruel rules we’d been given.

A Reckoning and a Reclaimed Future

By the time I met my No. 4, we had both reached a breaking point. We had grown to resent a life lived without true intimacy, without the easy abandon straight couples took for granted. The need for true connection, paired with an understandable ego—a rebellion against our second-tier sentence—led us to embark on a shared, Albee-esque experiment. We would reclaim the emotional and physical intimacy that fifteen years of epidemic had forced us to deny.

It was freeing: to touch someone and be resolute in the decision not to fear. We tested twice, six months apart, sharing our negative results each time. No more relegation. We committed, and we were intimate. That’s the way it should be, right?

Then, in June 2000, he called. “I’m positive.”

I immediately shifted into caretaker mode. It took weeks for me to finally submit to a test for myself. When my doctor, a long-time friend, turned to me with tears in his eyes and said, “John, I’m sorry to say you’re positive,” I held my breath for a moment. The only words I could muster were: "Well, fuck..."

This wasn't resignation; it was the final, devastating exhale after fifteen years of holding my breath against a specter. I had fallen, not through carelessness, but through the desperate, conscious act of rebellion against the societal sentence—the psychic toll of years without true, unburdened intimacy. The tragic irony was complete. I had finally achieved the "normal" life I craved, but it came with the virus I had spent half my life dodging.

The pain of that fall did not define the end of my story. Today, two decades later, the narrative is entirely different. I am living well, and happy for 10 years with partner No. 6, Sean. A sustained, true connection that felt impossible in the early days. We have been granted the unexpected gift of longevity, the very thing that felt cruel to even discuss when Charlie and I spoke of love, "Today."

The scientific establishment’s early messages, though necessary for survival, broke a generation’s heart. But the revolution has finally arrived. The advent of Undetectable means Untransmittable (U=U) and PrEP has done what decades of sermons and shame could not: it has restored parity and equity. The next generation of gay men need not be sentenced to a life of emotional freezing or transactional intimacy. The moral judgment has been stripped away by science. The fear that suffocated us—that mandated a second-tier existence—is finally obsolete.