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 or transactional. 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. 

30 - 60 - 90

The quiet is here with us, for now. It’s the silence of her exhaustion, 93 years deep. I am with the woman who has married four and buried four, as well as a daughter—a sentence that should belong to mythology, not a mother.

And I often wake hearing the echoes of that Sound.

Recently, we had a birthday. A confluence of numbers. A cosmic joke. My partner, Sean (No. 6), was thirty. I was sixty. My mother, ninety. Three lives, three stories orbiting the same sun, separated by three decades—yet, strangely overlapping. With a dark humor I appreciate, she sometimes calls our conversations "30-60-90."

She spoke vaguely of her life at thirty, what it meant at sixty, and now 90. My life now, at sixty, feels like a distorted overlay of her early years—the struggle, the seeking. Yet, I look at her now—and see the omens of my own ninety. And we both live vicariously and learn so much from Sean’s fresh perspective at thirty.

30

In her 30s, my mother was consumed by efforts to keep her family safe—consumed by holding it all together—protecting her children from the chaos. As mothers have done through history, the peace offering to my father was another child. A new start. I was the decade child, the desperate flourish, the attempt to patch the tarnish. But I was a precocious, effete almost alien child who only drew my father’s silence and indifference.

She drew me in closer. Consciously. She filled the void he carved. Later, she’d ask, eyes wide and bewildered, "Did I make you?" As if love could be the engine of difference. “No,” I said. “I was born different. I was the foreign object already in your womb.”

In 1970, I heard the cry for the first time—is cry the right word? What does one call that sound? That sound that starts so deep inside—a low-frequency moan born of the pain of inconsolable loss that crescendos into this blood curdling primal scream. Over the years, I would become far too familiar with this sound—as well as my subsequent failure to sooth or comfort her in those immediate moments to follow.

We had all lived for years with my fathers alcohol abuse—but this time he left his mark. Suicide by gun, leaving himself for my mother to find. Suicide. It was an act of terror, perpetrated against his wife—his children—his family. How did she manage? How did she find a way forward?

She remarried within months. A new, hopeful future that was still never to be. And eleven years later, cruel karma visited again. I was with her when she lost her second husband—and again the Sound—the heart-wrenching sound of profound loss. That day, there was mourning in the evening.

In my thirties, after the loss of so many of my close friends to the pandemic, I similarly began my work to start anew—to transform and grow. But then the diagnosis—and the dark years when I became homeless. A period during which it seemed I had lost everything—everything except a mother’s loving support. I not only found myself with debts to pay, physical and psychic—but I had to atone.

When I met Sean, my No. 6, we openly discussed the implications of a 30-year age gap. My goal became to “gay it forward”—to share as much of my experience as I could - maybe to ease his path. And he has such wisdom of recent youth to share—secrets of negotiating an ever faster changing world.  The pace of change exerts its centrifugal forces that would seemingly fling us all into oblivion. But then Sean is there to ground us - challenge us to adapt.

60

Now I am sixty. I have had six partners. She has had 4 husbands. We are our constant.

The bond intensified through my own tragic losses and through her subsequent grief. The third and fourth husbands—gone. And then my sister. For the third and fourth time, I had to endure that Sound—the sound I had grown to dread—and again there was mourning in the evening. Yet, as always, she rose again and moved forward -  buttressed by her faith, her family and friends. For many years now, they are the framework of her life well-lived.

People say we are unnaturally close. But would they if they knew? If they thought about it?

My life in my sixties is defined by this honour—to lovingly support her. 

The script: When my mother was this age—sixty—she moved in with her own mother to care for her in her final, independent months. The role, the setting, the deep, exhausting purpose: it was all predetermined. I am simply fulfilling the destiny she forged.

At 63, my body, having survived the plague and endured the bureaucratic war, demands a crucial adaptation. The furious pace of my younger life has given way to the necessary compromises. But I, too, enjoy a life well-lived.

Sean, my mother and I now also share a shift in our emotional architecture. I like to say I'm becoming more "delicate," but the truth is a creeping sensitivity, an assertion of anxiety. And my mother seems so much more fragile—she openly worries in a way I’ve never seen in her. Sean sometimes seems pushed beyond the breaking point. But alas, as always, we find a way forward.

I have comfortably settled into the identity of a (tongue-in-cheek) well-dressed, somewhat erudite older gay man. I'm happily in my 10th year with my partner, No. 6. I often remark to Sean, in defense of my actions or choices: "You'll see when you're 60." He just shrugs. It's like he can’t—or won’t—consider the idea, much less accept it as a defense. He lives in the fierce present. But I, bound by memory, am always looking forward and back.

90

Now she is ninety. My partner is thirty. And I am sixty. Combined, a full life spectrum.

I look at her and I have premonitions of my own decline. She describes to us what it is like to be ninety—the age when most all the people she's loved are gone. The joy and the darkness that comes from reflecting back on a life full of unspeakable horrors, profound love, happiness and growth—but with recognition of how few days are left for her - and the acceptance of the sheer complexity of her history.

But what remains is the sound, that terrible, echoing Sound.

I started the blog, John's Dura Mater Blog, because I needed a defense. A philosophical scaffolding to help me understand and express the wonder that is her legacy of endurance and resilience.

I am her son. I am the observer and the participant.

Albee wrote: "Writers have this schizophrenic ability to both participate in their lives and, at the same time, observe themselves participating in their lives."

If I have learned anything from her over the years, it is the human’s ability to grow—not just change, not merely become something else, but to become something more. 

Sean and I are similar in that we cherished the example set for us by our elders - those who forged the way for us.

That’s what this is. This is my attempt to observe my mother, who married four and buried four, who filled the empty space, who loved me fiercely through the chaos. I am finally in the first row, not just watching, but holding the space around the sorrow, waiting for that inevitable moment when that sound will one day be mine.