I Lost 27 Friends To AIDS. Anyone In Same Boat?

[killerb]

I have 2 very close relatives who have AIDS right now and have been given a very short time to live by all of the docs...

however none of us have given up...

I've only known 2 others who died of AIDS...

 

[Penis Aficionado]

I feel for your losses, all of you. It's easy for people who weren't there to forget that an entire community, coast to coast, was decimated back then. And that, besides taking your friends from you, it took from all of us a lot of the most creative people our country had.

 

[briefs]

Like midlifebear I won't give a count. It is high. I also have a few friends who have lived with it since the early days. I have, too. I did start a count, though. What a grim thing to do, but I'm sure it helped me keep hold of some sanity during the 1980's.
The first ones I knew about were active in leather and fisting. So was I and, for safety's sake, assumed I had "it", too. I stopped all risky sex in order not to spread whatever it was. I figure I've had it for over 26 years now.
The loss was catastrophic to me, my friends, and my community. My joy from the previous decade was accompanied by grief.
I think midlifebear describes things pretty well. The Los Angeles and San Francisco crowds have always been pretty close.

 

[Capitolhillguy]

Thanks again for keeping the thread alive. I agree with one of the posters above that for 99% of the time I come to this site for a fun diversion, but I haven't found another forum on the net besides this one on relationships where I felt could speak with a community that might have some members who can validate my experience. Those who aren't drawn into the discussion can just skip it and move to a more carnal thread.

 

[D_Harry_Crax]

The anger I feel is because a government chose to ignore an issue and not protect it's own people. This defeats the purpose of a representative government.

Well, you're going to get more and more angry the more you think about the ways that the U.S. government hasn't protected people. We can start with the utter incompetence of the FBI and CIA with respect to 9/11, and basically the incompetence of the CIA for its entire 60+ year history. (Read Tim Weiner's excellent book for starters, but there are many, many others.) There's the FAA in bed with the airlines, so the FAA doesn't require obvious safety measures. The FDA rushes drugs through the approval process sometimes they do as much or more harm than good. The Agriculture Department is only inspecting a fraction of a fraction of the food we eat. Another event like Three Mile Island (or worse) wouldn't surprise me because of incompetence at the Dept. of Energy and other agencies. Etc., etc. We're really lucky that more disasters don't happen in the U.S., and on some of these things, such as bridges (remember Minneapolis), we're living on borrowed time..... And I'm not an anti-government Republican; I'm a Democrat who has watched government regulations be overturned, and government regulators be fired or at least not replaced (after resignations, retirements, etc.) all over the U.S. government starting in the Reagan administration.

 

[musclemonkey5]

I really want this thread to continue, and therefore I am making a post to bring it back up. I think it is important for the current generation be know something about history, especially before being careless with sex and thinking they are invincible.
Thank you guys for sharing your heart felt stories, especially you midlifebear. I've only known one person to die from aids, but I think that's enough to know what it feels like. I visited her soon before she died, my parents had only recently told me she had some kind of disease. That was the first time I had heard of AIDS. She was our pastors wife and mother of me and my brothers favorite baby sitters. It was like losing someone out of our family. She looked horrible. I couldn't take it at that age, there was nothing I could do to help her.

 

[conchis]

I lost my best school mate (riposa in pace, amico mio_rest in peace, my friend).
for the plague we must to say thank to the animal experimentation.
without vivisection on primates AIDS would not be here.

 

[las000005]

I have not lost any friends to AIDS.

 

[midlifebear]

Dear las000005: And no one wants you to lose any friends (or enemies) to this pernicious disease. So, be safe. And also be nonjudgmental.

 

[Bbucko]

I used to keep a tally running in my head. It started in 1982 and I stopped it ten years later when I buried the man who remains the high-water mark of my tempestuous emotional life and a month later his ex passed. The number was sixty.

By no means have I stopped losing friends. I've just stopped counting the losses in my tally; I couldn't bear the counting any longer. I've lost five in the last two years alone; all but one was younger than me, and he was just a year older.

Of the seven guys in 30 years whom I've truly loved and who've loved me in return, only two are still alive, and they're both HIV positive. By the 1995 I'd lived in Boston for seventeen years, but there was no one whom I could call to get together with on my 35th birthday, so I went out alone and didn't see a familiar face all night.

People call me things like "stoic", "nihilistic" and "reckless" as if it's some choice I've made or something I should regret, without ever really understanding that the person I am today (good and bad) is a direct result of the loss I've experienced beginning at an age when no one should have to experience such things.

But somehow I'm still alive without succumbing to bitterness or self-recrimination, and I see that as something of an accomplishment.

 

[Capitolhillguy]

Thanks guys for keeping this discussion "alive". It does help to hear from others.

 

[B_Lightkeeper]

I've known of maybe ten since I moved from Birmingham in 1987. Of course, I'm sure there are more that I don't know of and countless no-name others.

And to think there are hundreds (including many on this forum) that bareback. It's stupid...as well as sad. :frown1:

 

[B_VinylBoy]

For me, I've only lost 5 friends to the disease. The most recent was someone who assumed he was positive, but never saw it in his heart to either find out or do something about it. He never told a soul, not even his best friends or family. Then one day he had to go to the hospital for getting sick and they told him the news. Of course, by that time it was too late.

So many opposing forces have been at work in our society to label those who have either HIV or AIDS as outcasts. It's really disgusting to have seen such ignorance fester for so long, and for it to still exist even with all of the knowledge that surrounds the virus and how it really affects us as human beings. Being a gay man, I can't help but be somewhat informed about HIV. But I certainly don't know as much as the person who has to live with it day by day. At least I don't think I do.

I look at a few of the smart people on LPSG who are comfortable enough to disclose their positive status and I can't help but be impressed by their raw honesty and courage. I consider myself VERY lucky not to have contracted HIV. And to be honest I don't know how I would react if I found out I was. If anything, I wish I could have introduced the last friend I lost to the virus to people who were just like the few on this board. Perhaps if he could see examples of people living complete, fulfilling lives despite having the virus he would of had the courage to be more proactive and not live in fear?

 

[Meniscus]

I lost 27 friends to Aids back during the Plague...

..They (I know, who are "they"?) claim a person can only know about 100 people very well. I swear I knew a lot more than 100 people who I could call my best friends.

27 friends? 75 friends? 100 friends? More than 100?

I don't mean to sound flippant or to get off-topic, but I cannot conceive of having that many friends. If I counted up all the friends I've had in my entire life, including the ones I wasn't very close to and never really liked very much, I don't know if I could come up with 27, let alone more than that. The number of people I'd consider to be close friends would be probably be fewer than 10.

...Virtually my whole circle of friends back then were gay men.

I've heard of this phenomena--gay men having a circle of friends comprised primarily of other gay men--but I've never experienced it. Does that still happen these days, or is that an obsolete paradigm? Sometimes I wonder if it's because of AIDS that my generation lacked role models and mentors to introduce us to gay social circles. (But it's probably just because of my introverted nature and because I never lived in a city with a large gay population.)

The late 60's and throughout the 1970's was a heady time for incredibly brilliant, creative gay men who left a giant cultural gap in the early 1980's when they died.

Which was right around the time that I hit puberty and realized that I was gay. Suffice it to say that my fear of AIDS affected my maturation as a gay man. Fortunately, I'm still HIV negative, but the downside is that I didn't have the courage to lose my virginity until I was 27 and ten years later I'm still not very sexually experienced, the sex I've had has been pretty bland, and I've never been in a serious relationship. I've had a few gay friends over the years, but they weren't close friends, and I've never been part of a social circle of gay men. I've never felt like I was part of a community and I have no sense of gay culture.

I worry about the younger generations. In some ways I think they have it easier, growing up with gay characters on mainstream TV and in the movies, with same sex marriage a reality in many parts of the world. But they also grow up with MySpace, Facebook, chat rooms, Web cams, and cell phones. They're not just consuming massive amounts of porn (including bareback porn and internal cumshots), to which they have easy access, but they are participating in it. What kind of culture can we expect them to create, seeing as how there doesn't seem to be any culture from previous generations left for them to inherit? As if that werent' bad enough, it's my understanding that many gay clubs are plagued by crystal meth, ecstasy, and other drugs, and rate of new HIV infections is alarmingly high.

I don't know where I'm going with this and I don't know what else to say. I'll leave it to wiser minds than mine to make sense of all this.

 

[Capitolhillguy]

Meniscus,
In my case, certainly the 27 people alluded to were not all "best friends" although all of my best friends at the time were in that number. They were all acquaintances I socialized with, had sex with, and chatted at the gym with. Some were clients from work. Even so, their loss has had a cumulative effect on me. I was always an outgoing guy and networked to know a lot of people, almost all who are pushing up daisies now.
When I moved to Seattle in my 30's, Capitol Hill was pretty much like the Castro. For quite a number of years all of my friends were gay men. Often it was the same for them. That culture has changed since the Plague and gays are less insular here in my opinion. Here, gays no longer live in the ghetto but live everywhere in the city.
About the younger generation, HIV is no longer a death sentence and that DOES change a lot of things. It is very inconvenient, but the not dying bit IS a huge difference IMHO. It probably makes barebacking more acceptable in some cliques. I am glad I was not big into fucking so I escaped getting HIV. I was always an oral queen.
The younger generation has a lot more acceptance and doesn't have the coming out issues and ghetto mentality that pervaded mine, but they have their own problems. Because of the pervasive Internet culture, they can be always connected with their friends, but they don't know how to say anything significant. I have yet to find anyone under 35 who possesses any real conversational skills.

 

[crescendo69]

I went religious shortly after AIDS started for about 19 years, with very few gay contacts and no sex the first 8 years or so. I lost touch with most gay friends during that time, and, after remeeting one, found out he had contracted HIV. As I never had a large circle of gay friends, I can only name one I know of who died of AIDS, but we had long lost contact. I don't consider myself fortunate for this; it would have been nice to have known more gay friends. But as I am rather introverted..

 

[husky14620]

Yes. I lost some friends and folks I knew and loved.

The first one was a man I knew who came down with AIDS, and was hospitalized with Kaposis sarcoma.

He cried to my wife and me, that he had turned ugly and he knew he was going to die.

I told him to turn over and I massaged his back. He wept again, because no one wanted to touch him. Most of his friends deserted him.

He died month later. Alone.

I don't believe you when you say he died alone. He had you and your wife. You may not have been there at the exact moment of his passing, but you were there when you rubbed his back. And I hope you were there more (I'm sure), after that as well.

 

[matticus201]

Meniscus,
In my case, certainly the 27 people alluded to were not all "best friends" although all of my best friends at the time were in that number. They were all acquaintances I socialized with, had sex with, and chatted at the gym with. Some were clients from work. Even so, their loss has had a cumulative effect on me. I was always an outgoing guy and networked to know a lot of people, almost all who are pushing up daisies now.
When I moved to Seattle in my 30's, Capitol Hill was pretty much like the Castro. For quite a number of years all of my friends were gay men. Often it was the same for them. That culture has changed since the Plague and gays are less insular here in my opinion. Here, gays no longer live in the ghetto but live everywhere in the city.
About the younger generation, HIV is no longer a death sentence and that DOES change a lot of things. It is very inconvenient, but the not dying bit IS a huge difference IMHO. It probably makes barebacking more acceptable in some cliques. I am glad I was not big into fucking so I escaped getting HIV. I was always an oral queen.
The younger generation has a lot more acceptance and doesn't have the coming out issues and ghetto mentality that pervaded mine, but they have their own problems. Because of the pervasive Internet culture, they can be always connected with their friends, but they don't know how to say anything significant. I have yet to find anyone under 35 who possesses any real conversational skills.

I certainly agree that medication and the promise of treatment changes things. I don't engange in anal sex often, but the times that I have, especially when the guy is younger, they act surprised when I bring out a condom. I think this is absolutely insane.

Secondly, I find it weird that the majority of people feel that if you are in a relationship, you don't have to use condoms. However, the individuals never go together to get tested. It's as if there's a magic forcefield around monogamy. Well, not if you don't establish your status first!

I myself have been directly touched by HIV three times. Once, a guy I hooked up with had the incredible courage to tell me a couple of weeks later that he was positive. We had had brief unprotected sex, and I was terrified, but, luckily, HIV negative. After the initial shock and anger I felt, I realized what balls it took to admit this to me. I now also have two good friends who are HIV positive. One has known for many years, and is curretly taking drugs and doing well as far as he lets me know. The other is a recent diagnosis, and he isn't coping very well. Recently, he was put on a cocktail and took himself off of it. Two weeks later he was in the hospital with multiple infections, including pnuemonia. When he called me from the hospital and couldn't even get enough breath to get one word out, it hit me. Anyone who thinks this is a liveable disease "just like diabetes" is just kidding themselves. Yes, there are treatments that enable people to their lives as fully as possible, and yes, those with HIV can certainly live full and enriched lives, but the treatments themselves will eventually take their toll. I can't fathom the constant fear that a sneeze, or a cough, or a runny nose could be it. And the importance on taking your medication is paramount, it's not like taking an antibiotic, you can't just make up the dose later.

Midlifebear and capitolhillguy, I'm truly sorry for your loses. I too feel anger and frustration at rising HIV rates. The only way that we'll ever continue to get the word out that HIV is serious is to hear stories that you two can tell. Thank you for sharing them with us.

 

[midlifebear]

Meniscus: When I say more than 100 best friends I mean more than 100 best friends. All of them very close and the kind of friend with whom you share a substantial amount of life experience such as protracted month or two month romance, old lovers, the friends I frequently entertained at my house for weekly dinners and Sunday brunches for more than 10 years. The same crowd of friends with whom I taught to ski so I would have gay friends eager to go skiing with me. My coworkers, we all confided with each other and met new romances via one another, dealing with the public tending bar during San Francisco's halcyon years of disco palaces and leather dungeons. The men I would leave work with after 2:00 AM and hit the baths with. And the men who were in my general graduating class from college. The young film makers (at least 4) who were incredibly close friends. The young semi-famous painters whose art still hangs in my homes. Five very entertaining best friends, all writers, who rented a house in San Marino and sneaked past lines of protesters during the writers strike in 1980 working as scab writers for a horrible soap opera (all dead by 1982). A cadre of men, all of us best friends primarily because we were famous for having big dicks, who moved to the Lower West Side of Manhattan in 1979 and bought an entire warehouse, turning each floor into a loft (all dead). My best friend who became famous in the 1970's as a major designer and built his dream home on Fire Island and whose home, when written up in the NYTimes Sunday Magazine featured a photo of the two of us lounging a bit too close for comfort on his deck with the caption "Clever, design-conscious summer resident and friend enjoying the sun." It was 1980 and The New York Times still couldn't bring themselves to write "gay designer/architect and friend." So, everyone we handed out T-shirts for the rest of that summer season that read "Clever, design-conscious summer guest" was a close friend invited to spend one or two weeks -- more often than not, not even invited, they just showed up knowing they would be welcome. These were not simple "acquaintances" or "friends of friends." These were men we knew intimately: their birthday's, their likes and dislikes, their talents, where they originally came from across the USA and Europe and especially their personal stories.

I have two "sisters", both not related by blood but with with whom I grew up in Ewetaw and both from the same Japanese-American family with whom I often exchange e-mails. These were the girls who were like my family when I was a child, because I spent more time with them and their brothers than I did with my own family. Both became powerful business women in the New York fashion industry. We knew a lot of the same people and whenever we have dinner the inevitable subject comes up regarding who died, or is still alive and living with HIV and as a result, no longer "current" in the New Yawk world of designers who made it and then disappeared.

Like I wrote in an earlier post: a Rolodex full of red X's.

But you obviously are not me. You don't cultivate and nourish friendships the same way as I do. Not a problem. Just be damn grateful you have the few friends you do have. They are important reflections of your success and happiness in life, and I'm not talking about a career or lots of money.

EDIT: I hate to sound curmudgeonly, but Capitolhillguy wrote something that I find significant: I, too, have yet to find anyone under 35 who has anything significant to say, except for a few young actors, writers, and "artists" of various stripes that are engaged in cross-cultural investigations about their lives. Maybe I'm just getting too old, but there's no question my generation was much more interesting than those worrying about java scripting and text messaging. Hell, even my old dealer in San Francisco who kept me supplied with marijuana in 1970 spoke fluent French, had a BA in comparative literature and probably could have written a pretty damn good Masters Thesis on Colette.

 

[husky14620]

27 friends? 75 friends? 100 friends? More than 100?

I don't mean to sound flippant or to get off-topic, but I cannot conceive of having that many friends. If I counted up all the friends I've had in my entire life, including the ones I wasn't very close to and never really liked very much, I don't know if I could come up with 27, let alone more than that. The number of people I'd consider to be close friends would be probably be fewer than 10.

I guess some of that depends on your definition of friend. I have dozens of friends, but I count as family less than one dozen. I was fortunate, I lived in a somewhat sheltered backwater (Buffalo), and back in the day, that only one of my friends died, about a year after he moved away and I lost touch. I found out one night from another friend, and had to be driven home. And I don't drink, it was all the emotional response.

I've heard of this phenomena--gay men having a circle of friends comprised primarily of other gay men--but I've never experienced it. Does that still happen these days, or is that an obsolete paradigm? Sometimes I wonder if it's because of AIDS that my generation lacked role models and mentors to introduce us to gay social circles. (But it's probably just because of my introverted nature and because I never lived in a city with a large gay population.)

It has/had a lot to do with the community and the times. Today, unless you are in a very rural or conservative community, there isn't a "gay community" per se, geographically. But in the 60's, 70's, and even into the early 90's, many of us moved to places where we were more accepted, the west Village, Haight, WeHo; but as we became more accepted by the larger community as a whole, we began to venture out into it more as well. Today we live in dispersed suburbs like every other minority group, perhaps more so, due to our "invisibility".

Which was right around the time that I hit puberty and realized that I was gay. Suffice it to say that my fear of AIDS affected my maturation as a gay man. Fortunately, I'm still HIV negative, but the downside is that I didn't have the courage to lose my virginity until I was 27 and ten years later I'm still not very sexually experienced, the sex I've had has been pretty bland, and I've never been in a serious relationship. I've had a few gay friends over the years, but they weren't close friends, and I've never been part of a social circle of gay men. I've never felt like I was part of a community and I have no sense of gay culture.

I fell that you're about where I would be if I were twenty years younger. I was forced to go to that gay community to find friends, or be willing to completely bury that facet of my being to remain in the "straight" world. There was no middle ground back then. When I came out, the three biggest worries were:

Being Bashed
Being Outed
Getting VD as in Syph, Drip, Crabs, Scabbies, or Warts. All but warts could be cured with a shot, some pills, or a cream.

And they were pretty much in that order.

I worry about the younger generations. In some ways I think they have it easier, growing up with gay characters on mainstream TV and in the movies, with same sex marriage a reality in many parts of the world. But they also grow up with MySpace, Facebook, chat rooms, Web cams, and cell phones. They're not just consuming massive amounts of porn (including bareback porn and internal cumshots), to which they have easy access, but they are participating in it. What kind of culture can we expect them to create, seeing as how there doesn't seem to be any culture from previous generations left for them to inherit? As if that werent' bad enough, it's my understanding that many gay clubs are plagued by crystal meth, ecstasy, and other drugs, and rate of new HIV infections is alarmingly high.

Part of that culture loss is the result of losing more than one (almost) entire generation of the community to AIDS. When I look around what is left of my generation, I feel both fortunate that I personally lost so few, and great loss that so many of my "peers" were lost. And some of that lost culture is a result of the aforementioned dispersal of the "gay community" out of the ghettos and into the suburbs. The shared experience that creates a culture comes from SHARING THE EXPERIENCE! Younger gays haven't had that shared experience, with others of their own generation, or of their "elders". When I was young, I was involved in the "early" gay rights groups, felt the frustrations of having the "elders" pooh-pooh every idea, learned from them where the cruising was safe, and where it wasn't, learned how hard it is to do good drag.

I don't know where I'm going with this and I don't know what else to say. I'll leave it to wiser minds than mine to make sense of all this.

It's funny how a topic like this can lead to so many feelings on such a variety of subjects, yet they are all so closely inter-related. It was the terrible conditions many of us faced that drove us to live in these "communes/communities", which brought us together as "families/friends", which created "gay culture", which (partially) lead to more rapid spread of the disease, but also lead to our more organized response to it as well. As David says in Twilight of the Golds, "Every human being is a tapestry. If you pull one thread, or one undesirable color, then the whole fucking thing falls apart and you wind up staring at the walls." Today's gay community is a tapestry built from the threads of the people in it. Sadly, so many of those threads are missing, and so many have moved "up" to the 'burbs, that we are beginning to stare at the walls ourselves.