Tag: AIDS

San Francisco as the epicenter of loss: Part II

Posted on by kathleenmc1953@sbcglobal.net
Untitled (Burning Skull), 1987. Keith Haring: The Politcal Line. deYoung Museum, San Francisco. 2015.
Untitled (Burning Skull), 1987. Keith Haring: The Politcal Line.
deYoung Museum, San Francisco. 2015.

For those of us who weren’t ill, AIDS gave us a new and better reason to live.

The 80’s were a time of death and resurrection in San Francisco. Those of us who had survived the nihilism of the late 70’s felt lucky to be alive. We had to either get wise quickly or be carried away with the rising tide of illness. The recovery movement in San Francisco was born.

It’s easy to forget but half the city seemed to get clean and sober in the 80’s. It became clear to many of us that using drugs and alcohol clouded our judgement and facilitated our indulgence in activities that could compromise our health and our lives. We had to wake up quickly.

And we did.

Alcoholics Anonymous was never so popular, particularly in the LGBT community. During most of the 80’s the clean and sober contingent of the Gay Day Parade was overwhelmingly the largest. It was usually placed at the end of the parade so that onlookers became participants, marching into the end-of-the-parade festivities at the Civic Center as part of the fold. Just as, in the 70’s, you were a nobody if you didn’t indulge in substances, in the 80’s you were on the fringes if you did.

Most of our friends who found out they were HIV positive, if they wanted to preserve what was left of their health, stopped or severely limited their use. And, for the rest of us, getting high was incompatible with helping our friends who were ill. Narcissism had given way to altruism.

We also learned to appreciate life. We were still young and, as we saw many of our friends dying, we experienced what older people do when their age cohort begins to succumb. This has a profound effect on you. You really understand that life is finite. You get on with things. Your mundane concerns seem, well…..mundane. It occurs to you that you might want to do something meaningful with your life.

This period of time truly shaped our lives. Several of us became therapists and social workers, other friends became nurses. All of us, no matter what profession, volunteered and fund-raised.

My best friend, Dannie, was still alive and well. We continued to plan trips and travel together. And then one day on a trip to Vancouver Island by ferry he turned and said to me, “Kathleen, I’m HIV positive”.

This was 1989 and became the closing salvo of the decade for Dannie and me. It had taken awhile but now he was in the bullseye of the epidemic. The skeletal figures, oxygen tanks, experimental treatments and hospices would no longer be one circle removed.

Dannie’s health would deteriorate in slow motion in a few short years….

San Francisco as the epicenter of loss: Part 1

Posted on by kathleenmc1953@sbcglobal.net
Keith Haring, Untitled, 1983 The Political Line: Keith Haring, De Young Museum, San Francisco, Ca., November 8, 2014- February 16, 2015
Keith Haring, Untitled, 1983
The Political Line: Keith Haring, De Young Museum, San Francisco, Ca.,
November 8, 2014- February 16, 2015

It was 1981 and I was at the underground MUNI Van Ness Station in San Francisco. The platform was sparsely occupied. Who knows where I was going. Public transportation was a part of my daily routine.

I had had my struggles in emerging from a very self-destructive lifestyle (to say the least) to one in which I was trying to stop using drugs and alcohol. My success at this endeavor was intermittent at the time but I was making an effort to change my course in life. This cost me friendships with people who I hung out with. I knew I would never stay clean if I continued to see them.

My friends defined me in my 20’s which, I think, is pretty much the case for most people. The loss of my party friends was a major loss for me as I began my recovery. A treatment program somewhat prepared me for this. I had no warning or preparation for the other overwhelming loss that was to take place in my social sphere.

It was not unusual in those days to run into someone you knew from the nightlife especially if you were taking a train to the Castro, the gay hub of San Francisco. I was standing on the platform when a familiar face came into view. My friend, Spider, approached. (At the time many people had odd nicknames that described their personality, some aspect of their appearance or how they made their living — Flamingo, Peaches, Rusty Nails.) He was the most drug-addled of all the people I knew. His name fit him well; he had a removed and sinister air about him and was at the center of a literal web of people in the gay drug scene.

He was, on this rare occasion, not under the influence of a drug. That struck me as strange in itself. He said he had been ill lately and chalked it up to a case of the flu. We had the most mundane of conversations. We caught up. I explained that I was trying to get out of the party scene and so had not been in touch or returned his calls. He seemed to understand. I watched as he ascended the MUNI stairs towards the street level. There was a fatalistic air about him that made me quite uneasy but I passed it off as a relic of our shared past.

Three days later I got the call. A mutual friend informed me that Spider had been admitted to the hospital and transferred to the intensive care unit. He had a severe pneumonia which was very difficult to diagnose; it turned out to be pneumocystis. He was intubated and in critical condition. While he could still speak he had asked that some friends be notified.

During this time a number of gay men had been getting deathly ill. No one really knew what was wrong; people were saying that it was the “gay plague”. Most people were misinformed and naive. Paranoia was the order of the day. Who might have it and how you got it were mysteries. AIDS was a diagnosis that was not even on the radar yet. We were still in unknown territory.

I called a physician friend who had treated both myself and Spider and we hurried over to Ralph K. Davies Hospital in the Castro. I was only 27 and had never been in the presence of anyone critically ill. We stood at the bedside in shock. Spider was unable to breathe on his own and was no longer conscious. We did our best to say goodbye. He died soon after our visit. It was very quick. In those early days there was not a lot they knew about prolonging life when you had the illness.

AIDS decimated the gay community in San Francisco from 1980 to 1995. Spider was the first friend I lost. He would be far from the last. My circle of friends became ever smaller as the noose tightened. Virtually all the gay men who I knew from the 70’s, save one, would be dead in a fifteen year span….