Peter answered my ad. We met one night at Paradise, a gay bar in Cambridge. We sat on their tiny stage and talked for hours. Somehow the conversation turned to HIV tests and I volunteered my HIV negative status. We talked about how nerve-racking the HIV test can be, and I asked if he knew his status. That's when he told me he was HIV positive.
Believe it or not, as a 25 year old openly gay man in 1990, I still hadn't met a person living with HIV. When Peter told me his status, I had an out of body experience. Immediately I saw from on high the two of us sitting on the stage and I thought, "Well, here it is."
In the preceding hours, I had developed quite an affinity for this personable, handsome, conscientious and sexy man with the wonderful light in his eyes and the great sense of humor. Part of me wanted to run, but the rest of me just took a moment to let the news sink in.
How would he feel if I rejected him? Pretty shitty, I imagined.
What must his life be like? Well, I imagined it must be a little scary, having (what was then) a terminal illness.
Did I want to see him again? Definitely.
So, I put my arm around him and rested my head against his shoulder and decided then and there that his HIV status wasn't going to affect my relationship with him.
We
dated lightly at first, but in two month's time, we were seeing each other
exclusively. Well, not exclusively, because Peter demanded that
our relationship be non-monogamous.
Up until meeting Peter, there were plenty of things I had never done. For instance, I had always dated men who demanded monogamy, so this non-monogamy stuff was new. Dating Peter was like that---I was always learning something new.
In 1990, when Peter and I fell in love, he was a spokesperson for ACT UP/Boston and he was on a first name basis with Ray Flynn, the Mayor of Boston. In my presence, he called the Mayor's Office and threatened an action, and two days later I was at a podium, along with others from ACT-UP/Boston, with Ray Flynn while he made a declaration of some sort. This guy meant business!
Being with Peter was exciting. He was a man of action, a man of convictions. He believed that things could be better, that ideas were worth fighting for, and that every person could be a catalyst for change.
Peter was the first person to see potential in me. At the time, I was recently single and depressed, a cog in the large machine of a computer company. I actually wondered what he saw in me and why, with his good looks and outgoing personality, he didn't go find someone more like himself.
He never did tell me what he saw in me. Instead he demonstrated what life was about, and he included me, hoping I would catch on. He took me on his rollercoaster ride. It was high highs, and raucous lows. He goaded me and provoked me, he shouted at me and made me shout back at him. He challenged me and laughed at me. He loved me and grew with me.
And all of this in 6 months.
At the time, Peter was doing community consulting work for a large oil company. As part of their community outreach program, they had Peter go to various cities to show communities how to organize and build coalitions with their local governments. One of those cities was Atlanta, GA, and he invited me to come with him on a trip.
I had already visited Atlanta several times previously. I had even entertained the idea of someday moving to Atlanta, but had put it off, basically because I was afraid to pick up and leave. Instead, I had allowed myself to become entrenched in New England.
While on this trip with Peter, I fell in love with the city all over again. When I mentioned to Peter that I had considered moving to Atlanta a few years before but had put it off, he encouraged me to pursue it if I really wanted it. So when I got back to Boston, I sent my resume to a friend, who sent it to a team leader in digital, and I had a new job inside of two weeks.
When he suggested that I pursue it, neither he nor I thought I would get a job so quickly. It was like a dream. From the moment I made the decision to follow it, everything seemed to fall into place effortlessly.
Instead of separating, Peter and I stayed together for the three months I took to move. Even though we both knew I was leaving, we spent more time deepening our relationship. He even came with me on my househunting trip to Atlanta.
I moved with digital before the serious cost-cutting and downsizing started, so I was one of the last employees to benefit from digital's wonderful relocation package. Among other things, digital paid for two househunting trips.
Peter played softball each weekend with
a team sponsored by Paradise, a gay bar in Cambridge, MA. Petey and I scheduled
the househunting trip to coincide with a gay softball tournament in Atlanta
the same weekend. We got a room in the tournament host hotel, on the same
floor as the rest of the team.
While he and his team were playing in the tournament, I was seeing condos around Atlanta with a real estate agent. At the end of the day I met him on the softball field, where we would talk about the various places I saw that day. At night, we partied with the rest of the teams.
Unfortunately, his team lost both of their initial games, immediately eliminating them from the rest of the tournament. The team decided to go to 6 Flags. Peter bowed out of a day at the amusement park with his teammates to see the condo I eventually bought.
I was able to arrange a starting date in Atlanta three months away. That gave us three months to separate emotionally from each other. Instead I received nothing but support from Peter. He made the last three months special, and the last two weeks extra special.
I arranged a start date in Atlanta of September 9th, 1991. Peter rented a condo in Provincetown for the two weeks preceding my move, which included Labor Day.
The condo was fabulous. It was the third floor and roof of a big house,
with a pool down on ground level. We read and sunned during the day, and
partied into the night. Knowing it was going to be our last weekend together
before I moved, we emptied several rolls of film taking pictures like this,
this and this.
The last night I was there, Peter took me to one of the nicest restaurants in Provincetown for a special dinner. Earlier in the week he had surreptitiously determined that I liked chocolate and raspberries, so he called ahead and spoke with the chef and explained that it was our last weekend together and asked him to make a special dessert for me, a raspberry covered chocolate torte.
The next day I had to go back to Boston. I spent the next week preparing to leave for Atlanta. I closed on the condo in Atlanta. I called Southern Bell (as they were called then) and got my new phone number. The packers came and packed up all of my stuff.
The movers came and took it all away. They even brought a truck and drove my car into the back of it and drove it away. They left me with my two cats and four pieces of luggage. My room was completely empty -- all I had was a one-way ticket.
My roommate Todd took me to the airport. We checked the luggage and the cats, and then waited for Peter. He drove back from P'town to see me off at the airport. We were both in a daze -- none of us could believe that this was really happening.
At the security checkpoint, Peter gave me a small gift and told me not to open it until I was on the plane. I gave him a big hug and a kiss at the metal detector, and then tottered off down the concourse to the plane. When I looked back, Peter was there, waving to me.
When I got on the plane I found I had been assigned a seat in the very last row of the airplane, with no one else in the entire row. I got settled and allowed the reality of the moment to sink in: I was really leaving Boston and Peter and Todd and everyone behind. Then I remembered the gift. I pulled it out and unwrapped it. It was a small photo album that contained pictures from our entire relationship. It even included pictures taken the previous week in Provincetown.
That pushed me over the edge. I started crying as we pushed away from the gate. I cried as we taxied out to the runway, and I cried during the take-off and during our ascent. Fifteen minutes later, as we reached cruising altitude I pulled myself together and spent the next 45 minutes captioning the photos, remembering all of the names and places that Peter captured in our relationship so I wouldn't ever forget them.
Another thing I learned from Peter was how to live and die with power. Peter's death had a power that changed my views on death, suicide and control forever.
After I moved to Atlanta, Peter's health began to decline. Like an idiot, I was too preoccupied with all the fun and joy and blossoming I was doing in Atlanta to ask him about his health when I talked to him, and he never volunteered it. Personally, I think he liked listening to me blather on about how much I was enjoying Atlanta. I was one of the few people who took him out of his disease for the duration of a phone call.
A few months before his death, digital sent me to Boston for training and I made a point to visit him. I had a clue that his health was in decline, which was confirmed when two friends of his pulled me aside before I saw him. They didn't have to say anything -- I could tell from their tone that it was serious.
When I went into his bedroom, he was in bed watching TV. He was very thin and looked like every AIDS patient you've ever seen in documentaries about people dying of complications due to AIDS. I quietly freaked until he started ordering people around. Once I heard his booming voice I snapped out of it and remembered that it was still Peter.
He wasn't eating a lot so they had to supplement his soup with protein powder. And because of constant nausea, he wasn't holding much of that food down. He had been taking Marinol®, a marijuana derivative, for his appetite, but it made him too loopy, so he was smoking a little pot from time to time to calm his stomach and keep food down.
Other than being a little stoned he was completely lucid. He had mounted
his television up in corner over the door and he idly flipped the channel.
He mentioned that he was thinking about taking his life, but he wanted
to wait until his book was published.
Peter had always talked about quality of life issues with regard to HIV, so I was only a little surprised when he mentioned taking his life. It was clear that he wasn't getting better, and it seemed a shame for such a vibrant man to spend his days in a marijuana haze, sipping soup and watching tv until he died. And it was probably going to get worse -- he had been diagnosed with a disease that results in dementia.
So, I literally knew when the deadline was. I went back to Atlanta and stayed in touch, talking to the circle of friends that was his support team who were running interference when he was too weak to talk on the phone.
As the publishing date approached, I decided not to fly to Boston to attend the death and memorial services. His friends there thought I should have, but Peter and I talked about it and he understood and urged me to not feel bad about it. (Would I do the same today? I don't know.)
When the book came out, he had a book signing in Hartford on Thursday, and one in Boston on Friday. Friday night he had a party. His friends came over and they ate ice cream and licorice and watched Harold and Maude.
I wrote him a letter. His Support Team told me that he couldn't read at this point, and that his attention span wasn't very long, so I knew I had to keep it short. It's tough crystallizing someone's impact on you to just a few paragraphs. I was happy with the result, and his good friend Tollie told me he cried when she read it to him.
He took Saturday to meditate and reflect, and on Sunday, with his friends right upstairs, he took 60 Seconals® and washed them down with two glasses of gin. He slipped into a coma shortly afterwards and died the next day.
Peter's death affected me profoundly. Up until
then, the only person significant to me to die was my grandmother, which
is a story unto itself. Her death had been at a great distance and came
on slowly. She had lived a long life and I was able to accept it and integrate
it.
Peter's death left me deeply saddened. It felt like the world had suffered a tragic loss because Peter had left it. I would cry spontaneously if I thought about it unexpectedly, or for too long.
Yet I learned about power. I subsequently saw other people die and realized that people choose the way they live and they also choose the way they die. Some are surprised when it comes for them. Others see it coming a long way off and prepare. Some cower and hide.
Peter greeted it head on. He took stock, decided what he was going to live for and hung around until he accomplished it. Then he gathered his friends around and said goodbye. Could you do that? Could I do that?
Peter's death, along with a near death experience of my own, awoke my mind to questions I had been ignoring. Questions like "What is the meaning of life?" In short, that's when I became a spiritual person.
I think of Peter often. I credit him as being the person who grabbed me by the shoulders, spun me around and pointed me at the light. He told me it was there and argued with me when I told him I couldn't see it. He showed me how to clear the haze and see it for myself. He gave me the courage (en-courage-ment) to do it.
I miss him still.