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Dreams and Nightmares 1: Driving throught Rabbits

Driving Through Rabbits  My friend Denise and I had planned our trip from Cincinnati as well as we could. We both would need our cars in California so we decided to drive separately, together. We didn’t know how long it will take us to get to there, but we figured it would take five or six days. Looking back from an era when we have electronic supports for maps, planning, and finding resources along the route, it seems like a rather risky and difficult trip to undertake, but at the time it seemed ordinary. I can’t imagine now taking off and driving across the country not knowing where we would stay, or the exact path from day to day. But that’s what we did.             We left on the morning of June 5, 1981, and headed west. Through the use of flashing our headlights and beeping our horns we signaled to each other when we need to pull over to go to a rest stop, or to get something to eat at a restaurant. There we would plan our next leg of our journey, including looking for a h
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Dreams and Nightmares 2: Panic in the Break Room

Panic in the Break Room The Flood Building stands at Fifth and Market in downtown San Francisco. It was built before the 1906 earthquake and was considered one of the new “skyscrapers” at the time. Now it’s dwarfed between real skyscrapers, but it holds onto a classy style of architecture with certain elements that no longer exist. The doorway and windows have carved ornamentation. There is a solidity, an ornate heaviness which proclaims stability and protection for the people inside.   There are marble floors in the hallways, real wooden stalls in the bathrooms, and windows that actually open to let in fresh air during the many nice days enjoyed by the city.             In the early 1980s I was working for a health insurance company whose offices were in the grand old Flood Building. Each morning I would emerge out of the MUNI station after my commute from the Sunset neighborhood, and come up to meet the decorated façade. The antique elevator, with its folding gates, would tak
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Dreams and Nightmares 3: Kenny

Kenny One of the first people I met when moved to San Francisco in 1981 was Ken Stevenson. He and I were both in our 20s. He came from Maine and talked about harvesting potatoes. When we were pigging out with some delicious food he’d cackle, “As my grandmother used to say, ‘Slow down! Food was meant to save a life, not take it!”’ I was from Ohio and both sides of my family were farmers, so I understood his potato references. And we both loved our grandmothers dearly. Actually, Kenny and I were similar in several ways. He and I had both been part of Catholic religious communities, had unaccepting families, and had moved to San Francisco to begin constructing our new lives. We met in church, at a Dignity mass for gay Catholics, and became fast friends. We would spend a lot of time together because we lived very close to each other. And because we genuinely liked each other. We laughed at each other’s stories, hung out at bars together, and talked about dating the various man availab
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Dreams and Nightmares 4: Disinvited

Disinvited In the spring of one of those years in the late 80s I heard that my youngest brother was going to get married. Weddings are always huge family events, with many of the plans happening at all intervals and in chaotic ways. Vince decided that he didn’t want to go in so I made reservations to fly alone. I would use that time to reconnect with some old friends in Cincinnati, Jimmy with whom I was especially close, and my cousin Paul. I was happy and relieved that Paul and Jimmy had become friends because I had felt guilty about leaving both of them behind when I moved to San Francisco. Sometimes we get so absorbed in our day-to-day lives that we don’t realize how much time is past. But suddenly it was three weeks before Kevin’s wedding and I have not received an invitation. Not unheard of since the formal invitations were more of an obligatory detail rather than an actual guest reference. Yet even in a family as large as mine this was an unusual oversight. I called my mot
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Dreams and Nightmares 5: I Can’t Do This Any More

I Can’t Do This Any More After Kenny had died in late 1986, it seemed like the deaths were coming ever more frequently. The local gay newspapers ran obituaries, and those columns were taking over more pages of the newspapers as time went on. On Sunday evenings at church we would pray for the sick and the dead and I began to get anxious at the thought of what new names we would hear. Several hundred gay men came to worship together. The chatter at the social afterwards would always include questions about whether we had heard about so-and-so who was newly sick, or so-and-so who had just died. It wasn’t just at our church, but this was the situation at every gay gathering. AIDS, and those who suffered from it, became the ever-present topics of discussion instead of fashion, music, and movie stars. It seemed like just after we had experienced gay liberation all the fun stuff about being gay had been taken away. One Saturday afternoon Vince and I had gone to yet another funeral and
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Dreams and Nightmares 6: Crazy with Fear

Crazy with Fear The media was relentless. Every day there was some news about some possible treatment, some possible discovery, some possible cure. Most of this was just so much verbal electronic spinning. First such news would bring optimism and hope, and then when the newest promise fell through, it would again stoke our fears and incite panic. There was nothing any of us could do. Monogamy helped, unless one’s boyfriend cheated, which happened. How terribly tragic to think that you had trusted a man with your body and your health only to find out that he infected you, and now you were both on your way to an early death. I heard such stories and did my best to ignore them. I felt like a child who claps their ears and says, “nah, nah, nah,” to drown out someone who’s telling them something they don’t want to hear. There were times when the only peace I could find was when I was with my friends or Vince and I was totally absorbed into the present moment of whatever we were doing.
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Dreams and Nightmares 7: Conception and Pregnancy in a New Way

Conception and Pregnancy in a New Way              Late summer, 1989. My friend Tom Rust had talked my partner Vince and me into going to a meeting put on by Alameda County Social Services to learn about the process of adoption. Tom was not in a relationship at the time and was somewhat interested in adopting as a single man. Vince and I have been together for nearly 7 years. Adoption was an idea we had entertained and discussed with various people, even gone to an informal gathering, of mostly lesbians, to talk about the possibility and various methods of getting a child. After a few years together, we had wanted to expand our relationship. In straight relationships the natural thing to do is to have a child. And for straight people it’s usually pretty easy: just stop doing birth control. That was not one of our options! Many gay couples get cats or dogs and refer to them as their children, but that didn’t interest us. I had been a paperboy and so did not want a dog, a
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