A Message to Sam Pancake From a Gay Elder: Thank You!
By: Ken Gault
Tags: AIDS, Advocate, Memoir, LGBTQ, Ageism

O n behalf of geezers everywhere, thank you. Though I think of myself more as a gayzer — a gay-geezer — that came out before Stonewall.

I am very aware of the gay agism you reference and try not to buy into it. That’s one reason I live in South Florida: businesses cater to my demographic. Even so, I would limit references to gaygism (gay+agism). The double-entendre might not be taken well. A bit over the top, or more likely over the bottom and under the top. But I digress.

Nevertheless, bravo for having the courage to come out, with all it cost you. And kudos for your bravery in coming out when you did, having to deal with all the mess that you had nothing, nothing, nothing to do with. I appreciate your anger with the young man who doesn’t want to grow old or grow up. Consider the possibility that his fear and your anger are two sides of the same coin. You have faced your fears, he is young. And to both of you, I say:

I’m sorry.

The article says you are 51. Men are so cute at that age. If my math is correct, you were born in 1969, the year I graduated high school as well as the year of Stonewall. When I was 51, I had already been positive for 20 years. I had survived the terror and suffering of the epidemic years and entered into the detente brought by the protease inhibitors.

Perhaps the graph below will help put it into context. I do not want to minimize anyone else’s pain, but since we know more about the Vietnam Veterans than HIVeterans, perhaps it provides a baseline for PSTD. The war on AIDS was fought on our own soil, hidden in populations no one wanted to look at.

But the enormous, indispensable and invisible part of that war was how we fought and how we took care of each other.

We fought non-violently in hospitals and sick-beds. We fought non-violently in streets, in marches and demonstrations, in community forums and board rooms. The war was taken to concert halls and playing fields, where we raised consciousness and supported our spiritual, psychological and physical health. Like the Gray Ladies of WWII, we brought coffee and donuts to the troops. We helped each other live, as well as helped each other die.

When the new drugs were available in drug trials in 1994, I was 43 and tested them on my body.

Too numb to think, I just went home, exhausted, hoping the drugs would work, wondering what kind of future I had. We all did. That was my world of AIDS and one of the most difficult times in the epidemic. We had been through the storm. Now we crawled from the water, hopeful and recovering on the shore, while others, too weak to crawl, drowned around us. The drugs were in short supply and they did not work for everyone. Who will live? Who will not?

But the war on AIDS was neither won nor lost. It just became manageable. There was never any closure. We never got to celebrate, honor, mourn, or forgive. We walked away, looking for peace.

I am so terribly sorry. That is not the legacy I wanted.

In many ways, this manageable war on AIDS is like the cold war of the 60’s.

It was not intended to be won or lost. The foot soldiers don’t matter, civil discord doesn’t matter — just get over it! The economy is great so what are you complaining about? The big winners were those who profited from war, the makers of guns and ammunition. Today’s big winners are those who manufacture drugs — the same drugs I tested in the 90’s. Drug-maker or gun-maker, they don’t care about Pancake’s anger or young men’s fear of growing up. There’s no love there.

The elephant is still in the room and its getting bigger.

We are acquiring HIV, syphilus and gonorrhea at alarming rates, not to mention mental health issues and suicides. The fear and anger that Pancake describes are commonplace.

If we chose to close this chapter in our history, and I firmly believe we can, we must take it up ourselves. We must mourn for those who died and those who live half-lives with unbearable sadness and depression, or those trapped in the vagaries of SSD and Medicaid.

We must forgive those who died and those like me who survived — and especially forgive those who fell short and those who turned away. Forgive their guilt, their anger and fear. They, like us, were doing the best they could.

We must celebrate and honor our heroes, remember our miracles, and be grateful for the goodness of our lives. We can grow again and become the men we are meant to be. When we learn to heal ourselves, we teach others.

That’s the kind of men that David Goodstein, the publisher of The Advocate, envisioned in the late 70’s. Together with Werner Erhard and Rob Eichberg, Goodstein created a workshop for gay men called, The Advocate Experience and later The Experience. It was designed to help men come out, to understand coming out as an act of love — to become what we can be and know what a blessing it is to be gay. This act of coming out was so important that Rob later went on to establish National Coming Out Day. That is who we are. That is what we do.