![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Mar. 24th, 2006
It seems to be a day of mourning.
Mar. 24th, 2006 09:08 pmToday is the 10th anniversary of a friend and lover's death. He had AIDS. He was a gentle, gentle man. He was also one of the most tortured souls I've known. I use to think it was just a series of bad luck and being raised Catholic.
I met him the first day of classes at Southern Illinois University, Fall 1977. I was a Senior and he was a Freshman. He showed up at the Science Fiction Club meeting that evening with broken glasses (I think he was very close to legally blind without them) and there had been some mix up with his parent's payment, so he was not enrolled in any classes. He was all flustered
And this was not an unusual state to find him in. I'll never know how much drama he made and how much was the luck of the draw. Over the next 20 years we went from friends to lovers and back to friends. We spent hours and hours on the phone exchanging buckets of tears, advice and lots of laughter. During most of this time he lived in Chicago and I was in California.
Steady employment usually evaded him. He was married in early Dec. and was diagnosed HIV+ right after xmas. They had planned on having a child. The marriage lasted about a year. He died just a few months before some of the first "cocktails" started to bring folks back from the brink of death.
His was a life full of "bad timing". I loved him. I still love him.
I met him the first day of classes at Southern Illinois University, Fall 1977. I was a Senior and he was a Freshman. He showed up at the Science Fiction Club meeting that evening with broken glasses (I think he was very close to legally blind without them) and there had been some mix up with his parent's payment, so he was not enrolled in any classes. He was all flustered
And this was not an unusual state to find him in. I'll never know how much drama he made and how much was the luck of the draw. Over the next 20 years we went from friends to lovers and back to friends. We spent hours and hours on the phone exchanging buckets of tears, advice and lots of laughter. During most of this time he lived in Chicago and I was in California.
Steady employment usually evaded him. He was married in early Dec. and was diagnosed HIV+ right after xmas. They had planned on having a child. The marriage lasted about a year. He died just a few months before some of the first "cocktails" started to bring folks back from the brink of death.
His was a life full of "bad timing". I loved him. I still love him.
