He Loved Romance, Rabbits, and Old Movies
I moved to San Francisco in 1997, having missed out on the age of disco and the worst of the epidemic. I have friends who were here then – they tell me about everyone disappearing. Twenty years on I wonder about the long-term effects of living in a subculture and losing half your friends in the space of a few years, in a country where most people lived a different reality. I started going through the old obituaries from the Bay Area Reporter, from the years when I was still in college in Florida, ’89 to ’93. After reading a few dozen I noticed a pattern of mustaches. So I went back and kept a running tally: of 263 photographs, 75 were clean-shaven. 50 had beards or goatees. 138 had mustaches. That’s nearly 53%. I started this tabulation with tongue in cheek, maybe to keep a little distance between me and what I was reading. And before I started the tally I barely glanced at their photos. But now I had to look closely at each man’s face. I don’t know for sure when each photo was taken. Their friends and family picked photos from before each man got visibly sick. It took me two days to read 263 obituaries. They are from the men whose last names began with A, or B.
My hairdresser, who I met in 1991 through a mutual friend (who died in 1992) said he stopped counting the losses of his friends and clients when the numbers got into the seventies.
I hope no one ever has to endure that kind of numbing count again–every loss is engraved on someone’s broken heart.
March 19th, 2010 at 6:07 pmI’m one of the survivors of that period. I was living in Dallas and lost my partner, my two closest friends and most of my social circle. It was the most difficult time of my life. I’ve been HIV+ for twenty six years. I still wonder why I am still alive.
March 22nd, 2010 at 5:45 amI came out in the mid-80s and lived in Boston for a long time, and my memory of the time is the strangeness of being young and discovering the world and myself, and so much loss at the same time. In my 20s I went to funerals the way my straight friends went to weddings, and while that slowed down, sometime I feel like gay men my age are marked by coming at that weird time.
Now i’m hitting middle age and it’s the start of the time of life when friends just die – from heart attacks, from cancer, and so on – and it feels strangely familiar.
March 23rd, 2010 at 3:05 am