Twenty years. Hard to believe it’s been that long. And yet, no matter the years that have gone, or the years yet to come, Keith will always be a part of my life. Part of me.
On February 10, 1990 Keith Harris, my first lover, died in Austin from AIDS related symptoms. I had last seen him nearly three years prior, around the 20th of February 1987.
He’d shown up at my door looking extremely ill. His arms were like sticks, his face sunken and pale. He was sobbing heavily, body heaving and shaking as tears ran down his face. I tried to deny to myself what I was seeing. A word that I refused to accept kept pushing itself into my thoughts, and I kept pushing back.
Then Keith forced himself to speak through whatever agony was wracking his body, tormenting his soul. “Nobody will come near me,” he choked out. “Nobody will even give me a hug. Everyone keeps telling me I have AIDS but I don’t.” His voice strained with the torture of his own words. “I can’t.” A wave of agonizing gasps made him pause. “I don’t have AIDS.” The tears and spasms overtook him, and he couldn’t say anything else.
But he’d said enough. He’s spoken the word I tried to ignore. Now the truth was apparent, even if I wished it wasn’t.
Without thought, my arms opened up. Keith fell into them, wrapping his arms around me as though I was a life preserver tossed to a drowning man. I now felt every quiver, every quake that ran through his body. Felt the wetness of his tears run down my neck, soaking the shoulder of my shirt. My arms embraced him and pulled him tight against me.
As I held Keith in my arms, I thought briefly about what it meant for me. We hadn’t used protection; I never thought to ask him to, despite having witnessed the eruption of AIDS in the world. He looked healthy back in September. I was certain that I would face what Keith was going through myself soon enough.
I then wondered if the other men that Keith had slept with knew. If they were aware that Keith’s condition was a harbinger of what faced them. But I didn’t waste much time on them. They weren’t here at my door, in my arms. Keith was. He needed me to comfort him, to say that he didn’t have AIDS, that everything would be alright.
To be honest, I could have easily justified pushing him away, slamming the door in his face. Telling him he had AIDS. Blaming him for cheating on me and infecting me with a terminal and fatal disease. The thought never crossed my mind.
A little backstory. Keith and I were seeing each other for a month, from mid-September through mid-October. We met at The Crossing, the only gay bar in the Bryan/College Station area. He told me his name was Richard Keith Harris III. I thought we were dating; he didn’t, at least not exclusively. I was unaware of that when I wrote a letter to him on October 11th ending our relationship. His life outside of work was at the bar; I believed that gays shouldn’t have to hide in the shadows, that we could have an honest and open life.
So, before I wrote that letter, I wrote myself a poem. Reminding myself why I had to walk away from my first relationship, my first lover, my first time. My first love.
Breathless
To catch a gentle wind,
Breath of the Earth;
To feel the soft wet kiss
Of sweet rain on lips,
For even a brief part
Of the shortest eternity
Is as divinely impossible
As touching the fiery heart
Of the most distant star.
But I have done this.
And perhaps again,
In a different world,
I will do so once more.
And yet will I release the breeze
When my heart dares not continue
To bind the dying wind.
For happy am I in heart and soul
To have caught the wind,
And happier yet
That I could return its freedom.
I did return to the bar three weeks after the letter. It was Halloween, and I couldn’t miss celebrating my first one as an out gay man. To be honest, I wanted to see Keith again, even if just as friends. As I sat at the bar, looking toward where Keith was talking with some other guys, Silver Flame came over and followed my gaze. Silver was a drag queen I’d become friends with during that month with Keith.
Silver put her hand on my shoulder and told me, point blank, as her eyes followed my gaze. “Keith never wanted a lover. He’s young and just wants to have fun. You were just a new face that he enjoyed spending time with, but you weren’t the only one. He spent time with a lot of guys.”
I suddenly felt betrayed. Hurt. I could sense the anger rising inside me. I politely thanked Silver for letting me know, then left the bar. It was before midnight on All Hallows Eve. I held back my tears as I drove back to my apartment. When I got home, I went to my room, closed the door then fell on my bed, crying.
After a short time, I got out of bed and started writing my feelings out in a poem to Keith. Every stroke of the pen bled my emotions out on the page. So intense were they that to this day, one can feel the anger, hate and pain.
It was long, but here is the first stanza of what I named Black Cat:
Panther prowls hungrily
Through the deepest shadows
Of the sun-forsaken jungle.
Hiding silently among the trees
Waiting, Waiting.
Ready to pounce
When least expected.
If you can’t figure out, the panther is me. Keith is the prey. The last stanza gives it a finality. Or rather, a fatality.
Until my heart has fed deeply
Upon your pain,
And my eyes have seen
Your heart
Broken at my feet
Speak not to me,
For the Panther prowls...
Satisfied with what I’d written, I typed it up, then drove to Keith’s house. I put the printed page in his mailbox and drove away, thinking that he was out of my life forever. Forever is such a fickle word. As you read above, the threads of our lives would be woven together once again.
Eventually Keith calmed enough that I could draw is both inside and closed the door. I continued to hold him, but loosened my embrace as his weakened. I kissed his neck, told him it would be okay. That word never came up, was never spoken by him or me. I pulled back so I could see his face. The brilliant emerald green eyes I loved were darkened, muddy. My hand brushed away some of his tears and I kissed him on the lips, cautiously at first, then with more passion as he responded.
I suggested he stay the night. He was exhausted and could use a friend. He agreed. We headed to my bedroom, both of us removing our clothes before climbing in my bed. That night we made love. The sort of desperate passion that we both needed to express. No condoms, because I knew they weren’t necessary any more. I had seen my fate in his eyes and accepted it for what it was.
In the morning Keith told me that he had to go to work. I told him to call me or just drop by afterward if he wanted to talk. He said okay, then walked out the door and my life. I would never see or hear from him again.
When Keith didn’t contact me, I decided to call him at work the next day. His manager told me that Keith had not been in, hadn’t given a reason. I went by his place, but his car wasn’t there. That night I dropped by the bar and asked Silver if she’d seen him. She said the last time she’d noticed him there he looked pretty sick. I then asked his roommate, the emcee for the drag show, if he knew where Keith was. He informed me that all of Keith’s things were gone. No note, nothing to indicate where he went.
I cried more when I got home. I knew where he would have gone - back home to his family in Georgetown. He must have accepted the truth of his illness and hoped they would help him through it. I wrote the following, that night. February 22, 1987. One day before Keith’s 24th birthday.
Forget the Rainbows
Oh, how oft have I reached out
To touch the distant stars?
And what number the times that I
Have watched the dreams drift by,
Or chased the pretty rainbows
That lead one to bountiful gold?
Well, forget the rainbows,
Look not upon their false beauty,
And grasp not for hopes
That slide between fingers
Like the fading fog they are.
Turn away from the heavens,
And the lies they cast down
To taunt our mortal lives.
Oh, how can I forget the rainbows,
When they are all I have,
Though I have them not?
You guessed it. I cried some more. A lot more. I hoped he’d come back, that he’d let me care for him. Again, I wasn’t important. He was. I had seen and read enough about AIDS to know what he - and I - would be up against. If I could ease his suffering by being at his side, it’s what I’d do for him.
In the meantime, I got tested and verified that I had been infected. Two days before I got the results, I met Kenneth. Very long story short, he and I were together for almost thirteen years. When the web was born in 1993, and as search engines became prominent, I started looking for anything about Keith. No luck. Of course, the amount of information was nothing like it is today. But every once in a while I’d see if there was anything at all. Anything. Even if it was an obituary. As the futility became apparent, I looked less frequently.
In 2000, the relationship with Kenneth ended abruptly. Ironically, it was February, though not quite thirteen years after that last night with Keith. A few months earlier I had been diagnosed with AIDS, still not on meds, still not sick.
In March, I finally found Keith, or at least learned that he was no longer alive. The social security death index does not list people who died less than ten years prior. Kenneth’s departure from my life was timely. I was more saddened to learn that Keith had passed away just three years after that night than I was with the breakup.
Three years later I finally found an obituary, part of a list of obits from the Gatesville Messenger posted to a genealogy site. From it I learned that he’d been born in Waco and his life ended in Austin. I also learned that he wasn’t “the Third” - his father’s name was Al. I’d met his mother Wanda and his younger brother Michael one weekend when he and I made a trip up to Austin in 1986. His ashes were interred in a cemetery near Turnersville, Texas.
My sister Nicole had taken over doing our family genealogy. I called her to see if she could possibly find Keith’s parents. She asked me to email her the names. Three and a half hours later she emailed back: mailing address and phone number for Alwin Harris in Georgetown, TX.
I sat on that information for two months, pondering whether I should call. Keith had been gone for fourteen years a that point. Would his father or mother still be alive? Would they want to be reminded of their gay son who died of AIDS?
January 2004 I had left my long-term job at Texas A&M. I decided to call. A woman answered - I didn’t know if it was his mother, Wanda, or somebody else. I identified myself, then said that I knew Keith many years ago. She pointed out that he had passed away in 1990; I told her I was aware of that. I just wanted his family to know he was a good man at heart. I asked how he died, since the obituary didn’t state that. She told me flat out “He died of AIDS. I was sitting by his side, holding his hand when he passed. How could I do anything else - he was my son.”
So it was Wanda that I’d spoken with. I told her that I’d visit his grave when I could, and thanked her. I tried to strongly imply that I wanted to get a photograph of Keith, since I had none, but to no avail.
I was busy packing not only for a trip to Italy but to move to Austin immediately after I returned to the states. I didn’t have time to go find the cemetery that year, but made a promise to myself to do so in 2005.
Well, February 23, 2005 came. It would have been Keith’s 42nd birthday. Ironic that I’d last seen him just before his 24th - a transposition of the numbers.
Weather reports all stated 75% chance of sever thunderstorms all day between Austin and Turnersville. Great. The thought of trudging through a cemetery in the rain, mud everywhere, had visions of corpses dancing in my head. Not of the corpses dancing, mind you, just popping up through the mud like in Poltergeist. But I promised I’d do it for Keith.
I drove, eyes wary of dark clouds. It was a beautiful, sunny day. Blue skies, light wispy clouds, temperature in the low 70’s the entire drive. Very surreal. So much for the meteorologist’s predictions.
I find the cemetery and start searching for Keith’s tombstone. It’s a rather small cemetery and within half an hour I’d seen all the graves - but not Keith’s. I stop and - feeling silly being all alone on such a beautiful day with nothing but the dead to keep me company - vocalize my thought. “Alright, Keith.
Where are you? Show yourself - wait, you don’t have to do that, just give me a sign so I can find you.”
Just then I heard a bird squawking at me to my left. I turned to see a mocking bird flapping its wings in the dirt, glaring at me like I had offended it somehow. “Go away, dumb bird. There’s nothing over there. Let me look again.”
Half an hour later I was back to that same spot. Exasperated, I once again spoke my thoughts out loud. “Keith, please don’t make me go into Turnersville to ask the hicks where you are. It’s none of their business.”
There had been no wind, not even a slight one, the entire time I was out there, but after I spoke, a gentle breeze blew aside a fake Poinsettia in a plant holder for a stone marker. I saw the letters “ITH” exposed. I walked over, stunned at the coincidence, and removed the plastic bouquet. There it was - Keith’s grave. I laughed - I’d been standing right next to it when the mockingbird mocked me. I had to chuckle more - if Keith were to come back as anything, that bird would have fit him perfectly.
I finally had the chance to say things that I hadn’t been able to before. I apologized for that hateful poem. I forgave him for infecting me and for sleeping around. And I told him I loved him, missed him, and was sad that he was gone.
I drove home with the sun still shining, not a drop of rain in sight. In fact, the weather almanac shows there was, at most, a slight drizzle in both Austin and Turnersville that day.
The mockingbird and the breeze and the sunshine were all just coincidences. We all know you can’t trust the weatherman, right? Maybe I hadn’t noticed the wind before because I was so focused on finding Keith’s grave. And the bird might have been arguing with a worm. But for me, I prefer to think that it was all because Keith was happy that I had finally come to see him, and did whatever he could to help me find where his ashes lay. That’s the curse of being a romantic.
Everything I do for the AIDS community I do for him.
Because of him. The person I am today was born the moment I opened my arms in his hour of need. When I transformed from a selfish child to a selfless man.
I still miss you, Keith. And yet, no matter the years that have gone, or the years yet to come, you will always be a part of my life. Part of me.
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... and many more...
