Where’s that orange paperback, Art Deco, by Bevis Hillier? Michael Gass, my sparkling actor-boyfriend at Brandeis University, in Massachusetts, handed it to me in 1968, his sophomore, my senior year. The jewel of a book proposed the beauty of a reviving style he thought I would like — and would help me to get to know him better.
More important, he let me wear and ultimately keep his baggy, deco-chevroned sweater, which I wish I had held onto. Almost six decades later, I dream, in living color, that I’m wearing it, smelling him in it, as if we were in the same room.
We loved Hollywood movies. He clued me in to who Bette Davis, the scene-shaker with iconic drag-queen magnetism, really was. (Luckily, “Have yourself a merry little Christmas” Judy Garland was already mine.) We also discussed thrilling Joanne Woodward and the 1957 film she won Best Actress for, The Three Faces of Eve. In it, she was forced as a little girl to kiss her grandmother’s corpse, and the combination of trauma and grief split her into multiple personalities and literally drove her crazy. Three Faces gave me nightmares for years.
This slightly younger lover set out to be my queer mentor — the whispered word then was gay. I guess it worked.
We broke up, because at the time I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be as out as he was, which I regret. Yet we remained in contact, easygoing friends.
Then, in February 1984, I got a call from a stranger who said, in a dispassionate voice, that Michael had died “suddenly” of pneumonia after a short hospital stay. She had pulled my number off the end of his Rolodex.
Michael, who worked for WABC-TV in NYC, developed the first digital logo for Monday Night Football, which, when he admitted this to me, made us giggle. The Michael I had rolled around with would never, ever have gone to a football game, unless he were wooing some wide receiver.
Some of my seropositive cohorts, still here because of luck, accident, or prescient wisdom, found so-called “AIDS cocktails” (antiretroviral therapy) in time. We grieve together.
Yes, his pneumonia was a result of early HIV-1 infection. In the universe of dreadful coincidence, I very much later met a healthcare expert, Scott, on an online date. Both recently widowed, we found conversation by recounting loves and losses. When I mentioned the talented Mr. Gass from college, his face froze. It turned out that Scott, who had been trained as a specialist in infectious diseases but whose first job brought him to a New York hospital with early AIDS patients, had taken care of Michael. He clearly remembered the playful, erotic man I knew. Scott gurneyed Michael’s sheet-shrouded body into an elevator and watched it disappear. Later, he told me how the steady horror of his groundbreaking AIDS-patient work almost capsized his life.
Rage As Grief
I’m 76 now, taking PrEP, which almost totally prevents HIV infection. Darling spouse Daniel, 33, is on PrEP too.
My long, seronegative life is rife with AIDS grief. I lost lovers, friends, colleagues to HIV-related death and wish to report a few of their names: Joe, Delbert, John, Vito, Chris, Philip-Dimitri, Donald. Still, as I grow older, I see that grief has at least three faces.
Its first is personal loss, injected with a shaking fury that missing lives could have been saved. Government bluntly despised us: Pat Buchanan, communications director for President Ronald Reagan, called AIDS “nature’s revenge on gay men.”
“It’s their deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct that is responsible for the disease,” said North Carolina senator Jesse Helms — his typical reelect-me spittle. Helms was by no means an anomaly. The Federal Drug Administration’s cowardly inaction, profiteering from AIDS drugs, and price gouging, plus big pharma’s avarice in holding back government-funded PrEP research, killed us for years.
Grief is not just for a person but for a place, a home: apartments, shops, libraries, schools battered and wrecked.
Some of my seropositive cohorts, still here because of luck, accident, or prescient wisdom, found so-called “AIDS cocktails” (antiretroviral therapy) in time. We grieve together. Yet grief is additionally knotted for them, understanding that they could have been — or could be, in a lifelong imagination — the next to go, further losses to the obstinate AIDS pandemic.
Sad, raging grief is for those we knew and loved, which each panel of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, initially displayed in 1987, made clear. That massive artwork, stitched by independent mourners for thousands upon thousands most of us didn’t know, shamed in aching visual ways those responsible for a beloved’s demise. For a 1988 Village Voice article, I spoke to many of those in New York who sewed quilt panels, though I never had the bravery or skill to make one myself. When I finally saw the panels on the quilt in Atlanta, before it came to New York, they were serious, flowery, affectionate — so many teddy bears — and sexy, “always with names carried into the future,” I wrote. Visitors wept. Individual grief is never alone.
How to Celebrate Loss
The second face of grief is appreciation, how we keep the pulse and achievement of those we have lost awake, thriving. Let me give another example, the “John” on my list.
John Bernd was neither my lover nor, at first, my friend. He was a gangly, graceful dancer who, in January 1982, did a performance in New York’s East Village (at what was then called Performance Space 122) entitled Surviving Love and Death, which I reviewed for the Voice. Surviving was about John being ill in the early ’80s with something no one could figure out. “Is it the new gay cancer?” he asked, as he stretched on the stage in a way that showed his body was becoming a stranger. He had been advised to make healthy vegetable smoothies, so he blended one in front of us and drank, then slunk, already accepting that nutrition was futile. GRID, Gay-Related Immunodeficiency Disease, was just being named; “AIDS” arrived a year later. John, a close neighbor, continued to perform until he couldn’t, and died in 1988.
Fellow queer dancer Ishmael Houston-Jones worked with John and didn’t want his or anyone’s legacy to be erased by AIDS, so he developed “Platform 2016: Lost and Found,” a series of recreated performances and events devoted to Bernd. On November 15, 2016, Memory Palace: A Vigil brought readers, movers, and musicians to St. Mark’s Church, also in the East Village. I was asked to take part. We were offered colored chalk or crayons, and when my turn came, I told short, woven stories about those I had lost, including Michael Gass, striding, bending, and writing each name on a scroll of paper taped to the danceable wooden floor. Those who know me will confirm that I weep at the drop of any hat, but during that crowded, puzzling evening I grinned, even laughed. Joy can peek out of death. At the end I left, alone, to walk the few blocks to my dark apartment.
Grief’s Final Face …
… is perhaps that of the architectural historian Mahdi Sabbagh, who grew up in Palestine. He was part of a June “long-table” discussion, “Reclaiming Queerness, Reclaiming Palestine,” at Manhattan’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, an occasion that reminded everyone present how many queers have also been killed and erased by the ongoing genocide. But Sabbagh and others, like writer Hussein Omar, also explained how grief is not just for a person but for a place, a home: apartments, shops, libraries, schools battered and wrecked. Rubble and bones, empty doorways, ashen gardens. And Sabbagh admitted grief confusion, that this longer and wider sadness sometimes numbed him to silence, inexplicable and, as he said, “existential.”
Famine in Sudan, the Palestinian Nakba, or “catastrophe” (which I have grown up with, since it began in 1948, a year after I was born), and a long history of self-perpetuating wars are breathtakingly preventable and stoppable, like HIV infection and AIDS. Almost every day I wake up darkened by shadows of the unmet dead.
Certainly, this last mien of grief should be a massive shout, though still concurrent with the other, quieter two. I will continue to fight, for PrEP access and HIV elimination, letting queers and sexual beings like me everywhere stay alive, and helping worldwide survivors like us bulwark against racial hatred, borderless greed, skeletal hunger, and the vicious predation of war.
Can I possibly make these three faces one? A long-ago friend, Robert Glück, recently published a wondrous novel-memoir, About Ed. Ed Aulerich-Sugai was one of Bob’s earliest boyfriends; Ed tested positive for HIV in 1987 and died of AIDS-related complications in 1994. The book is about many things, but mostly grief, passion, and the slippery nature of memorial love. Here’s a passage in which Glück cites an earlier, unpredictable fictional memorialist, German writer W.G. Sebald, whose writing often focused on the Holocaust. According to Glück, Sebald’s work:
… marks a change in Holocaust fiction, because the shock of mass death does not overwhelm the complexity of his characters. Was Ed’s death a trauma that replaced his life? Was he thrown into the mass grave of HIV? In mass death, recovery occurs in the collective mind over time. It may take a generation to reacquaint ourselves with the dead, for their rich complexity to be apparent once more.
I suspect that it will take more than one generation, but maybe then, friends, the necessary task of grieving can be done. ❖
Jeff Weinstein is a writer, editor, and teacher based in New York. A former restaurant critic at the Village Voice, he’s contributed articles about art, style, books, and queer politics and health to the Voice, the New Yorker, Artforum, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Baffler, and many other publications.