RYAN
(CO-FOUNDER OF THE GOSSAMER COURT)


A long time ago the message came to the 20-somethings of my generation that a disease cycle had begun. Mother Earth exacts a price from the human race when it gets too arrogant, ignoring laws respecting nature, while polluting the environment and abandoning the knowledge of tribal ages regarding excess.


It was my birthday in 1986 when my former lover Tim called to tell me that he was stricken with AIDS. He was the first in my circle to die from the disease that September 7th of 1987. There would be nearly 30 more before the eighties came to pass, with no end in sight.

The President of The United States, pandering to the Religious Right, would not utter the word AIDS for seven years, that is until the disease touched him, when his friend a fellow actor named Rock Hudson, succumbed to the illness.

Good Christian's like that sanctimonious asshole Jerry Foulwell knew that to mention AIDS would mean facing and funding research for its treatment and cure. There can be no compassion for homosexuals is the only way to read his rhetoric.

Those Queers get what they deserve.

Tim was into Crystal Meth, the baths and he took no precautions. I could not handle his excesses. I loved him and told him that when he needed me I would leave Boston and fly back to San Diego where he lived, staying with him until the end, for as long as he needed me, because his Evangelical Christian family, especially the step father, who would beat him into concussions, even his mother would not take care of an abomination like him, once his ugly little secret was out and about.
With these folks, Jesus and the community only forgive those who are really sorry, self loathing and guilt-ridden for being human.

Condoms were an old sailors trick and my father, a US Navy Seal told me about why he used them in his wild days, when I was about 12 years old; "It's not about a paternity suit Fishbait. It is about keeping your little pecker and ass safe, for your good health."

Papa had a brothel keeper's sense of humor, with European wit.

My doctor friend, Ahmed, once said to me, regarding death; "You don't know what it feels like when you hold someone and their soul leaves their body. It overwhelms you".

"Yes, Ahmed, I do know what it is like" was my reply.

I am a shaman and no one dies alone on my watch. From first to last breath we celebrate life and the process of dying.

Tim had been dead 10 years before I was able to talk about his death because of the stigma attached to losing a lover to that disease.

Even though I broke up with him long before he caught the virus, my fear of people treating me differently was validated when I wrote about his passing the first time and received hate mail, the jest of it being “Queers must die and burn crispy for eternity.

Giving into fear makes us less than ourselves but to not acknowledge it at all makes us liars. You rise to your feet if you can and face its ugly countenance, trying not to project fear or bitterness on others. And for your own sake, as well as the rest of the human race, do not act as though your own transgressions are made better because you attack others, for what you yourself do.

Tim was my lover and, perhaps, what spared me the infection of this deadly virus, was my antiquated idea of what romance is supposed to be like. You should strive to consummate relationships with those you truly love. Poly love, multiple partners is fine, just be responsible about those plural relationships, as the life that you save may be your own.

To discover that my lover was promiscuous remains something difficult to handle because I have lost loved ones, with 70's hunger, desires and appetite, to AIDS.

A sex addict is something entirely different than a swinger, for the most part anyway. When I left Tim, I found him a wonderful young lover named David, a man who could handle his indiscretions, a friend who could get through to him when he was being stupid.

The main problem with guilt and shame besides their homicide of the free-spirit is that they are induced by things which are contrary to our nature. The pressure builds and eventually that energy explodes in un-healthy ways such as acting out, which is in part responsible for sex and love addictions.

Coming between a sex addict and his or her prey is a bit like coming between a starving monkey and a bunch of sun ripened bananas (or more to the point) a junkie and his fix. While Tim was more of a love addict, the behavior is not that different from that of the sex addict.

To accuse someone of cock-blocking another dehumanizes the one you are sleeping with or the one that you wish to sleep with, as you are calling them nothing more than a piece of meat. That disrespects the soul, as well as the physical Being.

Buddhism teaches us to see the god within, IE the soul, not just ourselves but others as well.

As much as I loved Tim his use of nasty terms like this and others that come out of a meat rack mentality are disturbing to me.

I was raised Buddhist and felt the Karmic burden of leaving him behind alone and sought to find someone for Tim once I made up my mind to leave him because I was violating my oath to tough things out for better or worse. This was before my friend learned he had what they then called Gay Cancer, GRID then AIDS.

The thought of him being alone pulled at my heart, causing me to seek and find another for him. It is fortunate that David, the man I found for him, was not stricken after Tim got the dreaded disease.

I introduced being plain and honest with each other, to them, which was a shocker to these Christian Boys, who, for all their sense of moral superiority where huge liars because they allowed lies that the church put in them to pour of their mouths, preaching truth that is contrary to their heart.

Yes, we found Tim a replacement lover, as if this crazy being that is me could be replaced. Still, It seemed the compassionate thing to do for someone I loved, as Tim was very shy about talking to people, and could not deal with being alone, as I have been most of my life, even when I was paired up with someone. It took me years to learn that the medicine I needed most was released in the love that my loved ones, tribe and friends have for my crazy ass.

In those days of wine, roses and anonymous buggery, the 70's, they had orgy rooms and bath houses, places where one might shake glands before they shook hands and used mouths for things other than taking. All orifices were open to suggestion and not all were not attached to one's face for verbal conversation but for the communication that body parts rock in.

Hey, people in those days wore Avocado Green and Burnt Sienna colored polyester clothing and shoveled cocaine in their noses, so they could drink and sex each other more while doing more coke.

Clinically speaking we were all a bit loony when we began to abuse the wonder of the various Liberation Movements.

Yes, many of us were head cases back in the day and some still are because old habits die very hard. Jayel Draco is around 25 now and we both agree that the excesses of the participants, the trail blazers of a new morality and not the government killed the free love and Mary Jane inspired movement's, blessings.

Tim and David really loved one another, yet in different degrees they both had a lot of that unresolved "kid in a candy store" baggage. It does not matter so much that my man wanders but what is important is that he not take chances that endanger both of us, and those around us. Be careful what you do in front of the children and what your words as well as your actions seem to validate as OK, without explanation anyway.

We learned that Tim was ill after he and David had been together for 3 years. It is a terrible irony that Tim was finally at the point where he no longer sought to validate his being among us by tallying up the stem that he was getting.

I told my lover and companion a few years ago of my loss and my shame at keeping quiet for so long, with regard to this tragedy, about having lost a former lover to AIDS because I was concerned about society and stigma. It is not right to do this.

By the same token, my lover at the time, who as far as I know remains a good, sanctimonious, judgmental, self-loathing Christian just like his father, who was caught up in semantics with regard to my referring to his son as my lover in a piece I wrote, “lover” being the most PG-13 description I could use with regard to our relationship.
The point is that this man, his father the good pastor, was more worried about what his congregation and society thought than the expression of truth.

Well, screw congregation and society, stigma and shame, as they are the inventions of an uptight hung up and intolerant world. We owe the younger ones among us the truth, if nothing else and if we as a collective, regardless of religious stripe, do not give it to them we will have another generation of hypocrites beyond the Emo whining in despair, those who will leave more kids with the impression that it is OK to lie in the name of Jesus, just to save face.

It’s like saying, its OK to fuck the pool boy, just don’t be seen with him in public.

I was with Tim during the last moments of his life at the San Diego Naval Hospital where I learned to walk again after a very serious accident and back surgeries. I held a big football playing Navy Commander, Tim’s doctor, in my arms the night that he died.

The good doctor was balling like a baby because he was powerless to save his best medical photographer, which is what Tim was...

This new disease dumbfounded the good doctor and many like him. It also brought out the worst in people...

The next day, with tears streaming down my face, after that long night of holding the hand of a friend passing into the next life, I would hang glide in the nude over Blacks Beach off the cliffs of La Jolla, CA, as a tribute to Tim, who always thought I was way too many degrees, too hung up because I did not want a mini battalion of Marines pawing all over me. They could flirt with and paw me one at a time in those days maybe.

Tim would love this dare he created within me. I did get a ticket that day for landing naked in wings too far down the coast ,on the family beach of Torrey Pines. Oops!

It was a hot afternoon, when they called me to come to his bedside. While the end would not come until midnight, the stage was set.

Tim had not even told his Evangelical Christian mother Glenda, of Arab, Alabama that he was queer. I would have to bear her wrath later. That was one of the more painful moments of my life but I took the abuse because this woman had lost her only child.

His body burned with fever, as toxoplasmosis and pneumocistis rendered him powerless and mindless. He came out of his semi-coma to ask me for a Pepsi, perhaps so that he could lapse back into that coma, without adding an additional burden to the man who cleaned him, cooled him and comforted him, in his final moments. He had been in and out of the coma those last days but he was not so out it it that he did not try to protect this very sensitive, empathic mama bear from pain.

Heath officials in those days were so terrified of this retro-virus that those dying were often left abandoned in their own excrement and a hug was as rare as the Blue Moon. The Doctor, David, a beautiful Puerto Rican Navy Hospital Corpsman named Jose and I where the only ones not afraid to give the kind of love that involves holding a dying person, consumed with an unknown enemy disease.
There was need of comfort care at the end of Tim's life because despite all of his human flaws he was a kind-heated person deserving of love. They wore space suits in those early days adding to the drama of the dying.

I did fear for David getting this disease and being sick. There was guilt at my having introduced the two.
The sad thing is that David helped Tim to find a release from this addiction to the flesh of the anonymous and now as the partner of one fallen, many of his gay friends would treat David as worse than anonymous because he too was now suspect of carrying the disease that no one, no matter how bad or wicked, should never suffer.

It takes a special person to piss off much of the Southern California Gay community, which is exactly what I did, when I pointed out how shallow many of them were, for running from loved ones stricken, not just the disease but their friends and lovers. Perfectly coiffed and manicured gay boys, sold on Madison Avenues vision of what they should be, were leaving hippies, radicals, drag queens and lesbians to hold the battle lines, just like the freaks did during the Stonewall Riots.

A small group of us in San Diego, including a good Catholic priest with AIDS from treating the sick, were smuggling medicine into the country, drugs the FDA was snail paced to approve, as we started meals on wheels programs and changed diapers while so many were dying.

Ryan or Angelsboi was a founder of The Gossamer Court and his first sexual experience is what got him the virus, when he was about seventeen. That wonderful brave and courageous young man suffered through his last year of life, never telling me how bad it was, as he showed me how to network with other artists, as we built the court's machine, one that many artists and musicians have been helped by.

The biggest show at that time, of The Gossamer Court, was produced at CoSM to pay tribute to a very unselfish Being. Ecstatic Voices was an appropriate name for such tribute because in the end he could barely speak but what he had to say about hope never dying made me cry, so we spoke for him.

David, to this very day, is a wonder to behold, but what of the cost to create such a magnificent human being? Do you have to lose big? Death is the unkind mistress of life.

How do you tend to the dying?

Just like you are going to see them again, real soon, one must suppose.

The Irish understand how to deal with death. They do not comfort you with lies, but love, and I took Tim into my arms in the end, wiping the sweat from his body, forgiving his minor transgressions, and yes, I did slip him something narcotic, to ease his pain. Why is it that we show more compassion to animals than human beings?

The medical profession has gotten better but there is no reason, with all the choices that medical professionals have, not to relieve the suffering of one’s fellow man by treating pain with judicious medication.

Some doctors are too blind by their arrogance and sense of self-importance to be easy on the listen to those, in their eyes, too stupid to hold medical degrees, so it is necessary for some of us to kick them in the ass from time to time.

When un-able to see that there were some people that they cannot save, the good doctors pile on a bunch of unnecessary tests that are often taxing and painful beyond belief, merely adding insult to injury. This is why the loved ones of those with a terminal illness need to be good advocates and fighters for those who are unable to fight for themselves, because degree deaf doctors and those who come out in opposition to holistic care are assholes whoring for the pharmaceutical companies and those grief stricken with the thought of losing a loved one are most vulnerable to those lacking in good ethics.

I can see the folly in withholding something to relieve the pain, in the name of ethical medical standards, when someone is that sick. They need to make legal in all states, medical marijuana.

Yes, with a burning fever, I held Timothy Wood in my arms and I prayed, "God, take him back now. Let him suffer no longer. I will take the pain of his absence in my life but please be merciful and end this now.

" People thought me horrible for saying that prayer in front of his loved ones.”

It took hours for him to give up his spirit. As sick as he was, he teased me a few times. I thought that my bladder was going to burst because I would not leave him, for fear that he would go alone. My urinary tract, at some point, lost feeling and I didn't care.

In his final moment of madness, he opened his eyes for a lucid moment and whispered a secret, from his lips to my heart, words that I did understand;

"It is not the soil or the foul air that keep Orchids from blooming, but the absence of love." Wow!

I felt him, soul to soul and, as he was going, I realized the limitations of time, in this life, leave us all so vulnerable to tremendous grief in the end. It is best to keep things simple and forsake all resistance in surrendering to love.

Perhaps fools do live with too much heart yet one is an even greater fool if one does not live with a heart at all.

It was a little past midnight when he gave his soul back to God. In prayer I tried to navigate his soul to his creator.

Do not go before your time, my friends, and do not settle for a life without love in it.


YUST LUNDBERG COPYRIGHT 2007