Roy B (a remembrance)

By Tom O'Leary
Client Relations Specialist
Project Angel Food

In the 1930's screwball comedy My Man Godfrey the society swells are competing in a scavenger hunt to find one forgotten man. Carol Lombard finds a down-and-out William Powell and a wonderful comedy unfolds. I often thought of the character of Godfrey when helping a client here at Project Angel Food. For confidentiality reasons I will call him Roy B.

Roy B acquired HIV due to IV drug use. He was a shy man who spoke softly, but really fast. He had tattoos on his hands. Roy's eyes always seemed to say that he just had a really hard fall or was about to have one.

Roy would go off service for our meal delivery program due to stays in Rehab or due to being incarcerated. Project Angel Food volunteers would deliver his lunch downtown in his SRO hotel one day and Roy would be sitting in the lobby smiling. The next day Roy couldn't be found. He would disappear for weeks at a time.

But Roy would always turn up again at the Project Angel Food offices, shyly asking to resume his service. I mentioned the forgotten man in My Man Godfrey because Roy often seemed like a forgotten man. He seemed to have no family and no real friends. He was going through life, as best he could, on his own.

In April 2006 I got a very sad call from Roy's case manager stating Roy had passed on. He didn't have any details but just wanted the staff and volunteers at Project Angel Food to know how much our service helped Roy. Roy was 58 years-old and had been a client for ten years.

Even though I know Roy passed on and is no longer dealing with HIV or addiction issues, I still expect to turn the corner coming into the office some days and see Roy standing outside waiting for us to open. I expect to look into Roy's haunted eyes and reassure him that I'll get him a hot meal right away. Reassure him that even if the rest of the world forgot him Project Angel Food never would.

Chris Brownlie

By Michael Weinstein

Chris Brownlie is one of those people who found his greatness after he was diagnosed with AIDS. In fact, the story of his struggle with AIDS became the narrative of an entire movement to improve the care of people with AIDS. I first met Chris and his close friend Mary Adair in 1973 at the then Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center on Wilshire Blvd. Chris and I were both impatient young radicals. We became fast friends and lived together in several houses in Hollywood but eventually our odd couple-I was the neat freak-arrangement ended. I left Los Angeles to go to New York and he to Boston and then Chicago. In these early activist years we were involved in integrating Studio One, the strike at the Center, which caused bitter divisions in the community and many other causes. After a separation of several years I visited Chris in Chicago with his new lover Phill Wilson in their swank apartment overlooking the lake. Shortly after moving back to L.A., Chris and Phill followed. Burned out on left and gay politics both of us started small businesses-mine was chocolate gold medals for the 1984 Olympics, his calendars of hot black men-and shared a factory space in East Los Angeles. In 1986, when Lyndon Larouche, the right-wing nut, put Proposition 64 on the ballot to quarantine people who had HIV Chris dragged me to a community meeting to fight it. We decided to form our own committee "Stop the AIDS Quarantine Committee" to organize on the eastside of town. We distributed 65,000 fliers for a "Torchlight March" on the Larouche headquarters on Sept. 15, 1986. To our amazement 4,000 people showed up. We went on to defeat the initiative in November. So we said to ourselves, we stopped something bad from happening can we make something good happen. At that time the average life expectancy of people with AIDS was 13 months and people were dying in the streets and in the hallways of the County hospitals. Meanwhile, In San Francisco they had a beautiful hospice. So we set out to get hospice care for Los Angeles. The rest is history. From this platform the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), the largest AIDS organization in the U.S. was born and has thrived. The very day of our first public event, a public hearing on AIDS care in L.A., Chris was rushed to the hospital with PCP. He languished on a gurney in the emergency room for three days and only got a room after I called Supervisor Ed Edelman myself. Chris lived long enough to see the dedication of the Chris Brownlie Hospice in Elysian Park and I remember when I introduced a hospice patient to Chris and the patient said, "I thought you were dead." Chris roared. In his final two years of life Chris, through his writing and activism found his voice and his power. It was a magnificent thing to behold. As a man who loved black men in particular and just in general I can think of no greater tribute to him then the 20,000 people AHF is currently serving in Africa. Chris we miss you and love you.

Remembering Chris Brownlie

By Phill Wilson

Chris was the smartest, and most passionate and most courageous that I ever met. He was absolutely fearless. And he was unbelievably just always present.

I remember the first time that I met him. It was in a bathhouse in 1980. Depending on how you think about it-I either had just come out literally or was in the process of coming out. I never had a sexual experience with a man before and this was literally within a matter of days of the possibility of being gay entered my mind. I found my way to this bathhouse because I found this magazine, and Chris was there. To this day I think it obviously completely changed my life. I think it was the clearly the luckiest thing that could have ever happened to me.

Now I'm sure there are people who think that's an odd thing because what happened to our lives after that-that also is how HIV entered my life. At that time, we didn't know it, but Chris was already infected and that's how I got infected and so there's certainly a lot of heart break associated with that.

But Chris taught me how to be a courageous and honest gay man and how to do that with integrity and how to integrate my sexuality into my humanity. There are people who kind of run away from their sexuality and there are people who allow their sexuality to overwhelm them. And then there are people who say that their sexuality is just a part of who they are and they use that as a way to not live in their power. Chris was someone who understood that you are most powerful in the truthfulness of your humanity-embracing whatever that means for you. It is a lesson that I think has done me well over the last 26-27 years so since I met him. He died in Nov. of 1989.

Basically in those [early] days most of what we did came out of the personal and AIDS Hospice Foundation [now the AIDS Healthcare Foundation] in many ways was created because Chris was sick. We first got involved primarily because of the Lyndon LaRouche Initiative. It became really clear that Chris was sick-so that was certainly on our minds. And the founding of the AIDS Hospice Foundation was the literally a bunch of friends - Chris and Michael [Weinstein] were best friends and Michael's partner Albert and myself and Mary Adaire-who wanted to do something. And the first facility that we opened was the Chris Brownlie Hospice.

As is true for I imagine all of us who have lost someone to AIDS, for me when I think about or I'm troubled or I'm pondering, Can I go on? Or What should I do? - I think about Chris and the answer comes to me. And I'm completely confident in that answer.

Remembering Bob Craig

By Ivy Bottini

Bob Craig: publisher, and a founder of Frontiers Magazine; a Republican turned Democrat; a community mover and shaker.

Some people might sum up Bob Craig with the above description. Yes, he was all that, but he was so much more. Bob Craig was one of the most generous members of our GLBT community. He contributed money generously to a myriad of our organizations. He used his financial resources, as well as his journalistic clout, to help us to defeat right-wing initiatives and dangerous legislation being debated by the federal and state governments. He helped fund political campaigns for those politicians who supported our GLBT community. He hob-knobbed with celebrities and powerful government figures. His endorsement was sought by many in, or seeking, public office. Organizations turned to him to be a sponsor of events and projects. He was a constant and formidable fighter against AIDS, and all that the disease unleashed against us in the form of the right wing and homophobic beliefs. He used his magazine as a weapon against those who would attack or do us harm.

He was also a fierce and committed friend. His personal generosity to many of us who faced adversities, was probably his most rewarding characteristic. Many people have garnered the limelight and public acclaim, but fall short when it comes to quietly helping the individual who needs a hand up. Bob provided many of us with a job or financial assistance at times of personal hardship. He was a constant and generous friend

Our community was blessed to have had Bob Craig among us. Our lives are better because of his-the void that his death left can never be filled. There could only be one Bob Craig who was uniquely created to protect us.

Michael Callen

By Tim Miller

Michael Callen invented "safer sex." Sex wasn't making gay men sick, he said, it was all those sexually transmitted diseases that weakened the immune system. As an artist and activist, he took his message to anyone who would listen and became an "AIDS Diva" before the word "AIDS" was coined. AIDS shook him into fearless activism. He co-founded the People with AIDS Coalition and the Community Research Initiative (with Dr. Malthilde Krim) to empower people with AIDS to be their own healthcare advocates and shake off that enslaving gay shame. He wrote the book "Surviving AIDS" in 1990 when there was no hope and co-wrote the song "Love Don't Need a Reason" to inspire people to love, even in the face of death. He last sang that song, holding the high note longer than Barbra Streisand, at the 1993 March on Washington, despite having lungs filled with Kaposi's sarcoma and a skeletal frame the wind could blow away.

I continue to hear Mike's voice so often in my life. Of course, I hear his four vowel bel canto riff on the word "loathsome." I can't forget that. But mostly I hear his songs like a comforting wind, a breath that I want around me. His voice is with me. Like a present to be opened long after Christmas is over. I keep hearing Mike's voice as a guide to how to be a queer man and a faggot artist. I hear his words on the bits of paper and margin notes that he wrote in some of the books that are now on my shelves. I keep discovering Mike's thoughts in thse books he loved as I read them. These scribbled thoughts in the margins of the many books I inherited from Mike (Judy Grahn's Another Mother Tongue or Anal Pleasure and Health, just to name two). Remind me of something Mike told me once.

After feeding me a huge meal that maxed my fat content out for weeks, Mike told me that when he was a little kid in Ohio, there were these two men who moved in the neighborhood that seemed "different." He watched them very carefully to guage what this "difference" was. Being a proto Michael Callen at the time, he took action. He told me he wrote on many little pieces of paper "I am different. Are you? Can you help me?" and left them around these guys' house. "I am different. Are you? Can you help me?" I don't remember if he ever got an answer. And it doesn't much matter to me. Because I know Mike Callen would end up answering so many young queers' little notes left on the ground. These answers keep coming through his music, his writings and his life and Mike keeps passing them on to faggot Hansels and Hansels and dyke Gretls and Gretls there in the scary forest so that they can find their way home.

Maybe, finally, this is how we become part of the weave of this queer life we're in. How we live on. Somehow, like Mike, we need to keep our eyes open to those notes asking for help that are scattered under our flower pots or in our faces. Through his life as a gay artist, an activist and a lover, Mike put forward so many pathways and possibilities for all of us to live more fiercely and sing out loud.

(Tim Miller is a solo performer and the author of the books Shirts & Skin, Body Blows and 1001 Beds. hometown.aol.com/millertale/

Remembering Brad Davis

By Michael Kearns

Many things "killed" Brad Davis, including the ravages of AIDS and the reverberations of Hollywood homophobia. Whether Davis was gay or not is irrelevant. He took his own life at the age of 41, in part because of the blatant hypocrisy of the town where he worked and lived.

His death in 1992, five years after Rock Hudson's, was proof that Hollywood-in spite of the illusory image the town projected at uncountable glossy AIDS benefits-remained an unsafe place for anyone perceived to be gay and/or HIV-positive. Whether factual or not, Davis was perceived to be both at the time of his death even though the official explanation for his contracting the disease was intravenous drug use.

Because I was labeled "Hollywood's first openly gay actor," the media wanted me to respond to Davis' death, as I had to Hudson's in 1985. What had changed about me, however, was my HIV-status. How could I go on Entertainment Tonight and talk about the claustrophobic Hollywood closet without acknowledging my newfound positive status? I couldn't.

I remembered an interview I'd done with Davis in 1982, shortly after he got clean and sober. He was appearing at the Mark Taper Forum in an adaptation of Kafka's Metamorphosis, playing a beetle caught in a monstrous web, perhaps foreshadowing the life-mirrors-art motif that would mark Davis' existence. About the art of acting, Davis told me, "It's not a job. It's my life, my identity, who I am. It's how I live." Brad's personal life-what he feels about himself-comes from the fact he's an actor. "My world is very, very large, limitless. There are no boundaries in my life and that's because of the way I relate to what I do on this planet.

"I should have realized a lot earlier--I didn't need to take drugs to get high because I get real high when I act. I go places I could never go as Brad. When I act, there are times I leave the earth."

His star-making film role, playing real-life Billy Hayes in the decidedly fictionalized The Midnight Express (1978), included a smoldering shower scene that pumped new meaning into the notion of homoeroticism on the silver screen. Like many overnight sensations, Davis' career and personal life spiraled downward after his lauded achievement as an actor with chops.

His return to the screen in Werner Fassbinder's Querelle confirmed Davis' ability to catch the screen afire with his sexually charged insouciance. Since you don't have to be one to play one, perhaps Davis was drawing from his thespian's imagination when creating one of the most authentic queers ever to slink onto celluloid.

Davis' diagnosis, while kept top secret, coincided with his stage appearance in Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart. In retrospect, it becomes difficult to untangle reality from fiction, considering that Davis was playing a version of Kramer who would also, eventually, seroconvert. His performance was breathtaking in its truthfulness. Certainly Davis' ability to capture the essence of a gay man's soul fed the relentless rumors of his bisexuality. He appeared to be the real ticket, unlike some of his phony-baloney peers (Tom Hanks, William Hurt) who played gay characters with a wink that announced, "This-isn't-really-me." Davis taunted and teased us, making us believe, like a good screen siren should.

In 1989, while having his HIV meds covertly delivered to the set, Davis played a blazingly hetero character in Rosalie Goes Shopping; in the film, he is all kinds of sexy, playful, and lovable, proving that the art of acting, in its purity, is the art of revelation-no matter who you're fucking in the wings.. Whether playing gay or straight, Davis generously gifted us with his complex humanity.

"Hollywood is an industry that gives umpteen benefits and charity affairs with proceeds going to [AIDS] research," Davis wrote shortly before his suicide. "But in actual fact, if an actor is even rumored to have HIV, he gets no support on an individual basis. He does not work ... There are so many others like me, who are healthy and working, but who live lives of paranoia and fear because they can't tell the truth."

Thanks to the spirit of Brad Davis, I refused to be paranoid or fearful and told the truth. Within days, I got an acting job on television.

Gary Dowd

By Joseph S. Amster

Have you ever met someone, and the minute you laid eyes on them, knew they would change your life forever? It happened to me in the summer of 1979, and his name was Gary ("Akbar") Dowd. We were never lovers-yet I loved him with all my heart and soul. We had that sort of relationship where we didn't really need to talk to communicate-there was a deep connection that has never broken even though he died 12 years ago.

Gary is responsible for me becoming an activist. When I found out he was HIV-positive in 1989, he told me about ACT UP. I decided I wanted to become part of it, because I thought it might help save his life.

Gary would have been 44 on March 31. Although officially he died from complications of AIDS, the anemia and lymphoma that ultimately claimed him were the side-effects of the high doses of AZT they were giving people living with AIDS in the early '90s. He died the day before the Northridge earthquake-a fitting departure. At the end of his life, he was a high school teacher in east L.A., where he founded a Project 10 chapter to help the gay and lesbian students he was teaching. Four days before he died, he mailed off his submission for the book "One Teacher in 10" from Alyson Publications. Just before he died, I asked Gary if he wanted a panel in the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Without a second thought, he jotted down everything he wanted on it: iguana lizards (he had a beautiful tattoo of one), fountain pens, Nancy (as in and Sluggo-an obsession we shared), red Volvo PV cars (he owned one at the time of his death, toasters (he collected them and cemented one into a park in Irvine), Citroën 2CV's, (he was obsessed with cars, computers, Shadow (his dog), growth (as in personal), individualism, queerness, travel, talk/words/expression/communication.

I've never made that quilt panel, probably because I don't want closure. I've tried to write about him for years, but this is the first time I've been able to. I remember the day before he died, leaving his apartment, and knowing he would die the next day. His mind was absolutely clear, and I kissed him for the last time and said, "Baby, you're the greatest." I cried all the way home. Every year for his birthday, he'd have all of his friends climb Mount Hollywood in Griffith Park, and a few of us kept the tradition up for a few years-I haven't done it in about five years though.

I felt his presence a lot for the first few years, but less and less as time goes by. Still, I miss him terribly, and it doesn't get better as the years go by. I miss calling him and talking for hours. I miss laughing with him at something terribly rude. I miss riding around in one of his cars all over L.A. to some obscure destination. I miss smoking cigars and drinking Johnny Walker Red together. I miss his scent and the feel of his skin. We always imagined we'd be two old men (people always told us we were "born 50"), sitting on a porch, watching all the cute guys go by. That'll never happen, and I doubt there'll ever be someone else like Gary in my life. Still, I consider myself lucky he was a part of it for as long as he was-a lot of people don't get that.

David Durnside

4/16/62-2/9/95

By Thomas De Lorenzo

In the summer of 1988, I decided to give my career a boost by studying Shakespeare at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. I knew of no one else attending the seminars nor did I have any existing friendships in London. The adventure and the chance to study with London theatre greats attracted me and I could not wait to begin.

I purposely arrived a few weeks before classes started to give myself time to acclimate and travel around Europe. There was a museum exhibit at the National Gallery-Leningrad (as it was called then) allowed their stellar collection of French impressionists to go on tour. The exhibit was only going to be around for another week, so I made plans on Sunday to see it.

As I approached the exhibit entrance in the museum, I was struck by something I saw. This very good-looking blond man walking toward me had the most amazing blue eyes I had ever seen. Shame he was hanging out with his two aunts, I thought. I also thought that I would never get a chance to meet him.

I turned around for one more glance and he was looking back at me-and best yet - those two aunts had gone in another direction. We played this little dance of I walk closer, you walk closer, until we were near the same painting. Both of us take credit for speaking first.

His name was David and he was originally from Scotland but living in London, running a bookstore. He told me that the line to the exhibit was far too long but instead he offered me a tour of his favorite paintings in the gallery. I accepted. We ended up having dinner at a place called Café Pasta and caught the movie Wings of Desire. After that, not a day went by that we did not speak. A few days later, David joined me in Paris, where we spent our first weekend together. He told me our first night there that he was HIV positive. I told him that it should be no big deal because I am already in love with you.

David eventually moved to Los Angeles to be with me. We ended up spending the next seven years together. David passed away on Feb. 9, 1995, and he still remains a strong part of my life.