I Have A Confession To Make: I Am Afraid To Tell My Stories

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I have been struggling to continue my memoirs. I was cranking out the chapters very quickly, with the stories just pouring out. I have hundreds more stories to tell. And yet, I am terrified to continue.

My heart calls me to tell the bad stuff. And I can’t face it. I have three entirely-separate attempts at Chapter 17 in my Drafts box, but I cry too much to continue, and have to give up each time. Here is a tiny, tiny taste:

I was there at every point of the AIDS Holocaust. I held dozens of dying men in hospital beds when nobody else would come anywhere near them. In those days, TOUCHING a man dying of this mysterious and unknown disease (or even breathing the same air) could have easily been a death sentence, for all that anybody knew.

I didn’t care. I didn’t want these strangers to die alone, terrified, abandoned and unloved. If I died from touching them, then so be it. My heart wouldn’t let me behave in any other way.

Nobody ever came closer than the door, even if covered in Hazmat-level protective garments. None of the nurses even wanted to enter the room, much less change their bedsheets or feed them. They did everything that they could to avoid it. The nurses and doctors were good people, but they were terrified, and as ignorant as all of us were, back then.

The common “joke” on the topic back then was “What do you feed a gay man dying of Gay-Related Immunodeficiency Disease? Pancakes and baloney slices. Why? Because that is all that will fit under the hospital door.”

So I would lay in these dying men’s hospital beds, avoiding the tubes going in and out. I would embrace them tenderly, and croon loving words to these men who were haggard, emaciated and often comatose. When the time came, I would say “It’s okay to let go. I will remember you, brother, It’s time to let go of the suffering.”

The first time that I did this, it was with a 23-year-old redhead, as cute as a young man in the prime of his life can be. He and I had been regular fuckbuddies. I saw him at all of our huge 1970′s fuck-parties. Then, he got sick, and THREE WEEKS LATER, I was holding him as he died. The avalanche of death continued. I was attending two or three funerals a week.

For years. I stopped counting the dead when I lost 140 men who were close to me.

Out of the hundreds of gay men that were directly connected to my life in the 1970′s, there only two of them that didn’t die in the early 1980′s. We don’t see each other as real - We are like ghosts to each other. We can’t talk together except on the most trivial levels. The pain is too close to the surface, and it never goes away.

That’s all I that can say now. I have hit the wall again. I don’t know if I will ever be able to tell everything. I don’t want to burden the generations after me, but I know that the stories need to be told. before my generation dies off.