No One Asked for This

One of my mother’s dearest friends when we lived in Dallas, my “Uncle” John, was diagnosed HIV positive the year I was born. John was gay. After moving to El Paso, we visited him once or twice, but as his illness progressed and my mother became busier trying to wrangle me into growing up, our contact with him became limited to monthly phone calls and the three tins of polvorones my mother would bake for him at Christmastime.  The cookies were a big deal, every first weekend of December we’d churn out dozens of them to send to John—they were a favorite of his that his mother used to make and served as a depressingly sweet reminder that even though he was suffering through the holiday season alone, his friends out west loved him and were thinking about him. After John’s diagnosis, he lost everything. His friends abandoned him, the stigma of his diagnosis’ ties to the gay community was too great (still, in ’94). His family life, strained for years, fell apart when his body did.

Reading Mark Doty’s, “Tiara,” I couldn't help but think of John, who died alone in his apartment, on hospice, 16 years after he was first diagnosed. A year before he died my mother made a final attempt on John’s behalf to reach out to his family, he has begun deteriorating rapidly and wanted to see his mother one last time. My mother’s phone call ended when his mother referred to him as a “dirty f*ggot” before hanging up. He died alone because the world thought he asked for it. 

My mother, who has been a nurse for 40 years, still remembers the first patient she cared for in the hospital who was dying of Kaposi’s sarcoma (AIDS-related cancer that appears as lesions on the skin):

“We didn’t know what it was but we knew it was bad. The only cases we saw were gay men. They didn’t come to see us until they were already too sick for us to do anything except try and make them comfortable. No one would come to visit them in the hospital, not even their partners. They [other gay men] did not want to be associated with the disease. It was so sad. At the time, we didn’t understand how it was spread and we didn’t wear gloves to draw blood or insert IVs, but it was the eighties. We’ve learned a lot since then.”

A few years ago, I took Roger Platizky’s “Gay and Lesbian Literary Culture” course and as a requirement we were asked to attend the World AIDS Day service that Roger leads every year. After a candlelight vigil around campus, Roger led us to Wynne Chapel where he had a notebook full of people he knew and lost to AIDS and asked us to write down the names of anyone we knew who had an AIDS-related death. After writing John’s name and taking my seat, the service began. I lasted a whopping 15 minutes before losing my marbles over a poem Roger wrote from the perspective of a friend who died looking at his square on the AIDS Quilt. Spending a semester with Roger and going over gay literary responses to the AIDS crisis did not make John’s death easier for me to understand; if anything, it became more complicated.

Now, 7 years after John’s death, inundated in information on homosexuality and homosexual identity formation since taking Roger’s course (and this one), I struggle to understand—who would ever ask for this?