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Full Day in the Windy City

The heroism of the gay community during the worst years of the AIDS Pandemic was nothing short of miraculous. And it is in danger of being forgotten so soon, only three decades later—just as I have forgotten the last names of the amazing Chris and Andy. If this rings a bell for anyone reading it, please do get in touch! And at any rate—enjoy this treasured memory of meeting them in Chicago in 1993. That was three years before the HIV “cocktail” finally began changing our lived reality of unstoppable deaths.

Passing through Chicago for a 24-hour whirl in 1993 was a good decision. Thank God for those “friends of friends” who you can maybe stay with. If I had spent the whole weekend in Milwaukee, then I’d never have met my Wisconsin hostess Stacey’s friend from Kenyon College, Andy. Or his gay once-lover Chris.

Andy is not at home when I cold-call but his roomie Chris answers and says, “Sure, come stay if you want. My brother died of AIDS yesterday. And the wake is Sunday. But I’m free all day tomorrow.” He even meets my train at Union Station and immediately his story begins coming out in jerks and starts, a sort of comunicatio interrupto as we walk through the Loop, Chicago’s city center.

We’re speaking in those tentative and short pieces of revelatory conversation that strangers pass back and forth to check each other out. He shares stories about his father, a working-class Norwegian steelworker who put up the basic structures on many of the high-rises we are passing now. Chris offers an appreciation of an amazing Frank Lloyd Wright lobby almost obscured by current renovation. For my part I mention the lecture I gave yesterday about literature and adolescence at a Children’s Hospice meeting in Milwaukee. He points out Mies van der Rohe chairs inside a big black building’s lobby. We mention people we’ve each lost. And families who forbid speaking the words “gay” or “AIDS” at their funerals.

And the whole while I follow his funny staccato commentary on all the people we pass. He maintains this running travelogue out loud, his own personal soundtrack. For example, of a man inside the Mies lobby: “That’s right, get up and move to that other chair. You know you wanted to!” I love talking with and listening to this man.

And through it all his facial tic becomes more and more noticeable, as often as 20 times per minute. I have known friends to develop nervous tics after a death or other crisis, but never to this degree. Having become used to them by now, I am able to watch his unusual face movement, but am not yet comfortable enough to ask about it.

Chris saves me the trouble. “I was born with Tourette’s Syndrome,” he explains. “It’s a faulty epinephrine/dopamine balance at the level of nerve transmission. Too many impulses get through— it is a primitive disease in a modern world.” This gives him his tic and makes him talk a lot. As in, a lot. It “made a mess of my life” until he told the researchers at the teaching hospital to stop all their experimental treatments, that he could live with his tic as is.

All his life people had tried to help Chris to stop these extra movements. So, perhaps out of pure perversity, he became a dancer. And indeed his Tourette’s symptoms don’t manifest at all when he is performing! Of strict Scandinavian Calvinist stock, he went to college with the Buddhists and beatniks at Naropa Institute, the school gay poet Allen Ginsburg helped to start in Colorado. When Chris returned to the world it was as a dance therapist– one who also does Performance Art.

I can attest to his kinetic skills. We spend late Saturday and the early hours of Sunday at Berlin, an alt-music gay bar in what was called “Boys’ Town”. Carrying on, getting so wild on the dance floor that we were attracting certain not-unwanted attention. Yet we are out to dance, not to take anyone home (sleazy but not slutty, for now). His brother’s wake will be at noon, only nine hours away. “But,” as Chris cheerfully points out , “he would have gone out dancing!”

Later I awake to the sound of tires below on E. Belmont Ave. This is a European immigrant neighborhood not far from the gay district, and now mostly Mexican. (Well, where might you wind up if you had just crossed the border– one way or another– and English train signs north listed places like “Minn-e-a-polis” or “Chica-go”?) Belmont still has the Country-Western radio station WNDY where a new Dolly Parton movie is being filmed. And old ethnic shops like the Polish deli where I bought a two-pound poppyseed strudel—for about the price of a slice at any new yupscale café in San Francisco.

Andy, the roommate and ex-boyfriend of Chris’, is already awake and dressed. He will soon be off to work at Barbara’s, a bookstore in the “good” Lakefront District– where all the big department stores and museums are. I ask if he’ll attend the wake for Chris’s brother later.

“I haven’t decided yet. I’ve been asking myself that since I woke up.” In counterpoint to Chris, Andrew is the type who thinks a lot each time before he speaks, and then doesn’t raise his voice. But he responds to my questioning gaze. 

“Chris’s brother never liked me. Ever since the first time I met him nine years ago, when I apparently said something that he didn’t appreciate. He kept those feelings to himself, but you could tell….”

It sounds like he was a difficult person? His answer, as the door from Chris’ room opens, is even more in sotto voce. “He was always mean. He was mean to Chris all his life, too.”

Chris is now in the living room where my guest bed is. We all engage in some early morning small talk. After a few minutes Andy mentions, in proper Midwestern style, “Chris, I don’t know if I should come to the wake or not. What do you think?”

“I can’t tell you whether you want to go or not. That’s up to you!”

“Well, considering how he felt about me. He really didn’t like me.”

“What do you mean? He didn’t like me either!” was blurted out in Chris’ ever-truthful manner. “You could come for my sake, you know. Or my sister’s”. He is referring here to his kid brother, the third of the three gay male siblings in his Nordic family.

Andrew goes out. Chris prepares to dress for the wake. The other surviving brother calls on the phone to fill him in on the latest, which sets Chris’ tic going double-time. It seems the ex-wife from the deceased’s marriage prior to his coming out will try to block any money at all going to the current male partner of ten years. This despite the fact that the lover has been paying all their joint bills including funeral preparations and monthly checks to wifey for child support, even during the last months of his terminal illness.

Chris shuffles this new information, with appropriate indignation, into his dance of getting dressed. Moments of righteous anger intersperse with his usual mixture of good humor and brazen hussy-hood. His head makes jerking moves that should mean No, while his body moves through the apartment saying Yes. And he is blazing! My guess is that his participation in the wake will not be quiet, at all.

Have I mentioned that Chris, even when alone, talks to himself, or maybe to his world, using voices from classic black-and-white movies like ones starring Barbara Stanwyck. I can hear him now, from the bathroom next door, as he is addressing his clothes closet: “What do we wear today? You know, I always get in trouble when I’m with you. No, not the grey one, we wore it to Mom’s didn’t we? Someone’s sure to say we wear you to all the funerals. Can’t have that now, can we?”

He settles on a speckled sport coat set off with a loud yet tres tasteful ‘40s tie. This man shuffles through his closet with all the grace of a gay brother I never had, while singing out loud all four verses of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Then we wave adieu to each other as I cross Belmont, and he continues on to the wake.

I am jotting this all down at Leona’s on the Near Northside. (“Good Food. Good Attitude. Since 1950”) as their CD player shuffles between Ray Charles crooning “Crying Time Again,” Howling Wolf’s guttural, iconic Chicago Blues and the flamenco moans of Paco de Lucia. The waiter is a really cute youngster from Mexico and I have eaten my fill, half of the deep-dish pizza he brought to my single-set-up table. But more than that, I am full of thoughts about Chris and Andy, who invited me into their lives as family during a shared epidemic, on a moment’s notice, and without modifying themselves in any way.

Already these memories are finding their way onto a personal list I could call Reminders of Why I Love Gay Men and All the Ways We More than Cope.

[The Platters’ “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”]

Photo of the “Bean” sculpture, taken 18 years later during a return visit to Chicago in 2011, now with my partner Ken.


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