My best friend from high school died of AIDS in 1993; he’s been dead almost as long as he was alive. I miss him still, deeply regretting decades of lost opportunity to create additional memories together.
My best friend from college, John, died in 2024 as a result of the same disease after enduring more than 35 years of every possible discomfort and illness you could imagine; his last decade was spent in a wheelchair. Despite all his challenges, John continued to work and to advocate for his community, friends and family. He was also able to marry the love of his life in 2013, thanks to the court decision Obergefell v. Hodges.
Mark, my high school bestie, never heard of Obergefell, never saw “Will & Grace,” never celebrated Pride Month or stitched a panel for the AIDs quilt to memorialize loved ones; he also never kept the promise we made to each other to marry and have kids together (how we would do that, exactly, was left for later discussion) should we not find true love or fail to talk any hot men into getting broody with us.
Mark was my prom date, my drama club co-star, my favorite disco-dancing, 5 a.m. breakfast partner, as well as being my on again, off again roommate during the early years I spent in New York City. John was my peer theatre nerd, debating the merits of practically everything while studying literature, history, speech and linguistics for four years, including running around the West End and out to the Fringe during our junior year abroad. John was a dance partner, too, in well-lit studios and dark rooms filled with 20-something energy moving to pounding beats.
Coincidentally, both of these beloved men had moms whose first names were Beverly; both were also products of conservative Southern Baptist families. John, who graduated from high school in South Carolina, was the son of a naval officer married for 61 years to John’s mom; Mark was the son of a minister his mother divorced when he was in grade school. She’d had Mark when she was still a teenager, and three more kids in quick succession. I met his father for, I think, the first and only time at Mark’s memorial service. He might have attended our high school graduation, but if he did, I don’t remember him.
John’s family were supportive of who he was throughout his life, even while his parents were nonplussed by their son’s sexuality, and troubled by his choice to live in New York City, that storied locus of projected dreams and fears. Mark’s mother, on the other hand, attempted to beat the gay out of him with a heavy leather belt during his adolescence; she also told him more than once that she would rather he was dead than gay, although, giving credit where it’s due, she did help nurse him during his last few months on Earth.
I believe that their deaths, 31 year apart, can, in part, be traced back to the way in which each of their similar, yet very different, families loved and accepted them — or failed to — for who they were. Individuals live longer and happier, in other words, when they are loved and accepted, whatever their gifts or flaws, either real or perceived. I believe human beings deserve to be loved and to pursue happiness, however they are shaped and formed, whatever their melanin levels, identities, beliefs, religion, legal status, gender, height, weight or income — all of that regardless of however or wherever they live, or who they love.
I believe this primarily because I am 100% in support of allowing others to be themselves, largely because their choices are none of my business. This necessarily includes, of course, my absolute right to be myself, which also means my “no thanks-ing” other individuals’ versions of their authentic selves, because permission to “you do you” doesn’t include a blank friendship check re: your bigotry or phobias.
From the moment he was diagnosed with AIDs, my beloved friend Mark gave up and in; he was tired, tired of fighting for years to find acceptance and love beyond the limitations of his own bone marrow belief — a belief beaten into him — that he was unworthy. John fought daily and for decades to live, choosing love and hope, because love is what he was taught. In my dreams, we are dancing, still.
”I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.” – T.S. Eliot