[Speech for the second World AIDS Day vigil in Newcastle, UK, on December 1, 2005. My speech for the 2004 vigil is here.]
It’s a difficult thing, to lose someone… but we still have the stories, the memories.
A couple of weeks ago, I received a fairly large package from an obscure address in the California mountains. I was expecting this – some weeks before he died, Jay had e-mailed me to say that his friend and executor Marilyn was sending me something – but I didn’t know what it would be.
It was a photograph, packed in way too many Styrofoam peanuts in a box too large for it – maybe because someone thought it was very precious, and needed to arrive intact. The photograph is frankly pretty amazing – it shows a man with a long drooping mustache, wearing a neatly wrapped nun’s wimple on his head, plus a vast, ruffled, elaborately constructed dress that looks like it could have been the style in the French court two hundred years ago. The dress is patterned with all sorts of music signs – notes, staves, G-clefs, and so on; he is carefully buttoning up a pair of very high, very fancy boots, each of which has maybe forty buttons on it.
It’s quite something, believe me.
I recognized the man in that amazing dress – it was an old friend of Jay’s, and also of mine. Bill Graham was his name, but he was known as the Reverend Mother – he was a member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the hilarious male nuns that were such an important part of 1980s San Francisco life. You may know them from Maupin's Tales of the City – they’re the nuns roller-skating through the streets, putting up political posters and handing out condoms and safer-sex brochures. Bill himself was called Reverend Mother because he was such a kindly father- (or maybe mother- ) figure for all the other nuns, and for a lot of other people too. As you can guess, Bill was beloved by many – including of course Jay, who apparently hung the photograph over his desk, next to the window. Bill died in the late 1980s, rather quietly, during the height of the AIDS epidemic; for Jay the picture was a reminder of a source of wisdom and kindness in the midst of disaster.
Jay himself was startlingly handsome, in a Prince Charming kind of way – blond wavy hair, strong chin, dimples. He was also amazingly kind, wise, and helpful, especially to ditzy youngsters like me who needed somebody to explain what the hell was going on in life. In the late 1980s, he left San Francisco for a series of sometimes mysterious new directions – he lived in San Diego for a while, and worked with psychiatrist Jeff Leiphart on documenting and publicizing alternative health research related to AIDS, including good and bad stress (apparently they’re different), hyperbaric diets, and so on. When he left San Francisco, he became more of a loner, partly because, as he admitted, he found it unbearable to spend so much time thinking of dead friends; he avoided contact with old acquaintances, he purchased a boat that he used to sail around the world. He always had big ideas and launched into them with great energy, leaving them behind when they no longer seemed interesting or fulfilling.
He was diagnosed as positive in the mid 1980s, probably not long before he left the Bay Area. I had looked for him intermittently over the years, chasing rumors and often losing the trail; but it wasn't until the winter of 2003-2004 that I found him again. He had moved to a house in Hemet, a tiny town in the California mountains, where he stayed until he died. He was working on a massive historical novel about Charles Dickens. He described his life – very solitary, very quiet – a beloved dog, an elaborate irrigation project for the land around his house, reading and no television, a landlord he seldom saw. He told me that he didn't look well – lipodystrophy, wasting – but as I hadn’t seen him face to face since the late 1980s, I was skeptical, thinking he probably didn't look so bad. He started going into Palm Springs to see doctors, and also started working with a writing group – I believe some of them have been looking to see if his novel can be published in some form.
By May 2004 Jay and I started regularly e-mailing each other - supposedly once a day, and always at least three or four times per week - to keep each other working, to try to inspire each other, and to whine about our various minor HIV illnesses. He was a great comfort to me at a number of points where I just needed somebody to kvetch to about feeling tired, old, or whatever. This exchange ran for more than a year, until he found out, in June of this year, that he had liver cancer. After allowing himself a brief time to get upset, he started focusing on what time he had left: how could he plan for the future of his book, how could he responsibly leave behind his family, his belongings, and the handful of people with whom he still kept contact? I last heard from him in September – after that I sent a few e-mails, but didn't get any answers until a friend of his told me he had died the week before.
I don't know if I can sum up Jay's life: he was clearly remarkable, in a lot of ways – a born hero, in fact. He remembered so many of us from his earlier life, dead and alive, in such detail – he had a great love for his friends of the 1980s, and the fact that he went off to be by himself in his last years was not because he didn't miss us all. In fact, it was a result of one of the most powerful forces in his life – his need to look at the big picture, even the great picture; and his insistence on trying to live in such a way that his life would have a bigger meaning, and a greater impact.
***
Stories inside of stories. The memories and the love we held – well, really, the love we still hold – for all sorts of people who aren’t with us any more. That’s become a big part of my life – I know I can move on, but my memories are precious to me, as they should be.
On the other hand, there are all those people who haven’t left us yet – or who shouldn’t leave us yet. In the past two years, I’ve worked with, and come to know, a lot of people who were born in Africa; some of them have been sent back, sometimes ruthlessly, in the past few months; others have been threatened, pushed around, and as far as possible pushed away. The British government has sent back people with AIDS, many of whom have been on medications here – often ignoring the fact that those same medications aren’t available back in Africa, which means deportation is essentially a death sentence for most.
For those who have died, we have our stories and our memories. But there are a lot of people here – and a lot more out there, in the city, across the country, even across the world – who haven’t died, and who don’t need to die. I love my stories, my memories: I love those photographs, and I love remembering Jay, Bill, and many others. But I don’t want to be left with only memories: so many people in my life, in our lives, should still be here in five years, in ten years, in twenty – we should get to make new memories and to see them often, healthy and happy. I hope we do.
[December 1, 2005]
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