Why I Can't Mourn For Ronald Reagan

This is something I wrote shortly after Ronald Reagan died in 2004. A friend back in College Station suggested that the gay community join those who mourned his passing as a show of solidarity and respect.

[NOTE: since this was written, over four years have passed, as has my cousin, a two good friends, a man that I loved deeply and my friend Gloria. It's now been 22 years, 4 months and 12 days since I became HIV-positive. Oh, and I made it past 40 over three years ago...]

Why I Can't Mourn for Ronald Reagan

My words are written more for myself, and for my friends to know how I feel about Ronald Reagan. My 311,136 cents worth. About $0.02 an hour since I was infected with HIV. Seventeen years, eight months, and thirty days [see above, and make that 369,070 cents]. I no longer count the hours for myself, neither those past, nor guess at how many I have remaining. But figure they are worth more than just two cents, right?

It's difficult for me to forgive, and impossible to forget, the lives lost to this disease so far. Freddie Mercury, Pedro Zamora, Peter Allen, Rock Hudson. So very many more. I cry when I start thinking how many more will follow.

Myself included. As a man living with AIDS, it would be far more disrespectful - to the now over 25 million world-wide who have died - for me to give up my anger. Not for a man who never earned my respect, nor my forgiveness. Not mine, not that of those others still living with AIDS, and certainly not that of the dead. They no longer have a voice in this world, but I doubt they'd mind my speaking on their behalf.

I just keep thinking of the numbers. A year and a half ago, someone in the world died of AIDS or related complications every 12 seconds. Recently, that rate skipped quickly past every 10, and last estimate is now at 8 seconds.

Perhaps, when I die, I will have an eternity to consider forgiving Reagan. Until then, I'm not sure I can. More certain that I won't.

A good excerpt, as a reminder to those who too easily forget:

"It will be plain to all, including a generation who was not there at the time and generations yet to come, that one of the primary building blocks that went into the construction of Reagan's conservative icon status -- his defense of "family values" -- was affirmed in large part by acquiescence in the agonizing deaths of gay people. Reagan watched 28,000 die before he could permit the name of the disease that killed them to pass his lips. Conservative Republicans have evidently discovered a certain level of discomfort with these historical facts. Every AIDS activist alive -- and certainly every one of those who no longer are -- knows that Ronald Reagan was the Marie Antoinette and Emperor Nero of AIDS. They also know that, at the time when he was playing to his base and his administration was expressing its vast unconcern for the fate of a generation, that attitude was basically okay. The divine retribution theory was quite popular inside and outside the White House (Reagan's actual, non-dramatized words: "Maybe the Lord brought down this plague" because "illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments")."

I can't feel remorse or compassion right now for Ronald Reagan. Not for his physical passing, at least.

For the mental 'death' which preceded it, yes, most certainly. It's a sad thing to lose your past, watch it fade away, and slip from your grasp. Must be horrible. You forget what you lost, and, eventually, you forget that you even lost something at all. For this, I have pity. For the loss of a once-strong mind, I can mourn.

With many AIDS patients, Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy (PML) can destroy the parts of the brain controlling motor functions, vision and/or memory. There is, I suppose, a subtle irony in that.

If you want to see a good film dealing with PML, based on a true story, with the characters coming straight from director Randal Kleiser's own life, rent "It's My Party" (1995). Harry Stein was the real name of the character 'Nick Stark' (played by Eric Roberts, Julia's brother), and Kleiser became 'Brandon Theis' (Gregory Harrison) in this stunningly poignant, tear-jerking yet hilarious look at death and life, at courage and loss, and of a gay man facing the choice to live without sight or memory, or end it while some vestige of those most precious senses still remained. Other great names in this very low-budget film: Margaret Cho, Roddy McDowall, Olivia Newton-John, Marlee Matlin, George Segal, Lee Grant, Bronson Pinchot, Ron Glass, and Greg Louganis.

I do not expect, nor am I asking, for anyone to forgive my inability and unwillingness to forgive Reagan. My anger with him began before I was infected myself. Before I even accepted my orientation. He added to my hesitance to acknowledge to myself, or proclaim to the world, that I was gay. I denied who I was because of the hatred towards me which he engendered, or at least encouraged, by his silence, especially about AIDS. My anger at him has existed longer than my anger at myself for being so damn stupid. And that, I know, I will never forgive myself for.

I will not hate, but neither will I forgive or mourn. He was 93. Lucky bastard. I'll be happy to reach 40. Five for Fighting's song, "100 Years," saddens me a bit if I listen too closely to the words:

"Fifteen there's still time for you / Time to buy and time to lose, / Fifteen, there's never a wish better than this / When you've only got a hundred years to live."

Twenty one, for me. A virgin. I thought, at the time I got my test results, my life was over. That in only five years, at most, I'd be dead. Obviously the 'counselors' who gave me the news, and I, were wrong.

Keith, the young man who infected me, died just two weeks shy of twenty-seven. I've now lived a dozen more than he. Nobody can tell me why I'm still here, or how my body is recovering so quickly from my stress-filled past. Nobody seems to care to question, or to seek answers.

Am I bitter? Hell yes, I am. Am I angry? Can't you tell? I also carry the anger of friends new and old still alive; my cousin battling AIDS mostly alone (abandoned by my family) in a hospice house in Ft. Worth; and those two souls I knew in my younger days who have lost their battles. I anger for those I admired in life, and cried for when they died.

I worry about Gloria, my dear, sweet friend from South Africa. I wish I could see her again, or at least get word that she yet lives. Her beautiful accent still echoes in my memories and my nightmares, and I constantly wonder how I can apologize to her, tell her I'm so sorry I am not the Angel that she always called me. Alive or not, she's beyond the reach of my voice, and my emails have been unanswered for far too long. As I said, I worry about Gloria.

I think my refusal to mourn Reagan's passing, and my inability to forgive him, is justified. Regardless of what others may think of it. Or of me.

I will continue with my battles--gay rights, and improved funding and support for HIV/AIDS prevention, education, non-toxic/natural solutions, hospice services, testing/counseling, and the like--until my final breath. Whether from AIDS, or some other cause, I will risk my life, and my financial stability, in each of these areas of importance. My passion has become an inferno, and I can no longer dampen the fires which burn inside me.

This is what the tarot reading I had done on me at a Pride event this past Friday said. That I had two choices in a very important decision. Only two. And that I'd already made my decision.

I never considered that I HAD a choice. When I thought later that night about what the cards had read, I knew what my other possible journey could have been. It was an easier one to walk, unlike the one I've set myself upon. As Robert Frost wrote:

"Two roads diverged in a wood, / and I- I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference."

But I'm too far along now to turn back, despite the rough terrain I must now walk. I could not--would not--think of going back to being the weak, useless man, waste of life and breath I was before. The idle, emotionless stone, who didn't even notice life passing him by. Didn't care, either. Just sat, doing nothing, being nothing. A Nowhere Man, waiting for Death to take him from this cruel, hateful world.

That was a path I could not take. Not again. I am not one to reject a second chance at life. I'm now embracing what I once kept at bay. Better to risk that life, and my financial security, to improve the lives of those I care for and loved. And the lives of strangers, who suffer alongside me. As with many things in my brave, new self, necessity is at the heart of my decisions, and my choices often are one: just the hard road, never the easy.

My family won't wear the red ribbons I gave them this past December. Not for me, and certainly not for my cousin, nor for all the rest. I have to wonder; will they abandon me, WHEN I get sick? In this disease, there is no IF. Will they leave my cousin, or me, to die knowing we were never really loved, our lives unworthy? Or will my refusal to mourn for Reagan seal my fate? Would they ensure my solitude on that last walk home?

Screw them. My true family is the one I've selected, or been selected to be a part of, more than those who made me.

I know. You all think I'm crazy. Or that AIDS dementia has set in. If only. If only it were that simple. If only I could blame my status, and take no blame or responsibility for my own fires. I just hope I am not consumed by them, as they continue to grow.

As a writer (really?), beautiful poetry and metaphores help me mask the horrors I must write about sometimes. From the reader, and from myself. It's the act of placing a single flower upon a pile of corpses. The act itself is an attempt to do something, to keep from going mad with anguish and grief.

I think I need more flowers...