Xiva in San Francisco around 1979

Xiva (Don Wright) in a portrait from around 1979. He looks like a gangster. Actually, he was a gentle person, mildly effeminate in his speaking voice and body language.

Joseph Durant on Ivy Street in San Francisco around 1982

Joseph Durant in my apartment on Ivy Street in San Francisco around 1980. We met at Cafe Flore on Market Street a couple years earlier and became good friends. He began the Aids Quilt with Cleve Jones. The following fragments about Joseph are from an interview with Cleve Jones by PBS show "Frontline":

""I was with my friend Joseph Durant, and I remember saying: "I wish I had a bulldozer, and I'd knock these buildings down. Maybe if this was a meadow with 1,000 corpses rotting in the sun people would see, and they would understand, and if they were human, they would be compelled to respond." …

So the night of the candlelight march, Joseph and I had stacks of cardboard, lightweight cardboard placards and sacks full of magic markers. We asked everybody to write down the name of one person they knew who had been killed by AIDS. People were ashamed to do it. They would put initials or just the first name, and then finally one guy took two pieces of paper, taped them together, and in big block letters wrote, "Thomas J. Farnsworth Jr., my brother -- he's dead."

Then I hadn't seen Joseph in a while, the fellow who was with me when we were putting up posters for the candlelight march. I hadn't seen him in a few months, and I saw him on the street, and he was skinny, and his skin was gray, and his eyes were yellow. I asked him, "Are you OK?," and he said: "I don't want to talk about it, but it's time for you to get off your butt and start that quilt. It's a good idea." He was still working part time in I think a theater supply company, and he stole a couple of bolts of fabric, and I went down in the basement and found a box of spray paint left over from Ronald Reagan's last visit to San Francisco, and we went in the backyard, and we made the first quilt panels. I made mine for Marvin Feldman, and Joseph made his for a man named Edward Mock.

That's how it started. It grew slowly, because it was very difficult for people to visualize it, even though I had this picture in my head that was as clear as a photograph and drove me quite crazy for a long time, because I could just see it so clearly, but I couldn't communicate it verbally to people.

Dianne Feinstein, who is now a U.S. senator, was mayor of San Francisco at the time. At that point Joseph and I made I think 40 panels for friends of ours, and a couple of other people had contributed some, and we were permitted to hang those from the mayor's balcony at San Francisco City Hall during the Lesbian and Gay Pride Parade. I believe there were about a million people that day who saw it, and then they had the visual understanding of how this could work.""

Nude Taco

How I became a Gay Gringo

By Cal Avocado

 © 2017 Roaming Gardens Press

 

Foreword

I am a Gay Gringo facing old age and looking back on history through romance, especially one. I arrived in Mexico bursting with dreams for love after 25 years in San Francisco and New York as the AIDS epidemic began and burned through. Fulfillment came but not as I hoped. My conflict is not wanting boundaries for love and sex in a world of homophobia, disease, poverty and the nature of men. A world full of obstacles.

I planted my desires into Paco like a container that would take them. Each event between us leafed into possibilities and problems. My thoughts grew seeds of doubt and hope, and rained and shined over them. He might not recognize himself from my point of view and feel insulted as will others. These are my opinions. I’m not a camera. Names are changed to blur identities, to protect the innocent from my distrustful and hurtful speculations. Most people prefer a portrait of themselves as a flower or a god, myself included. I present details without vanity or consideration to hide ugly. I want the dirt of real history on my pages. We name streets after ideas we support, not diseases we suffer, but both are guides to living. The HIV crisis shaped my life. The empathy of biography smells like real bodies, fresh or stinking. Biography is musty paper crumbling apart in your fingers recalling original oils, delivering an unrepeatable, nostalgic experience fiction cannot.

Obsession

It blows around my mind like a trapped bird

Trying to fly out my eyes like windows,

Hitting the glass repeatedly.

Arriving in Mexico

An outsider arrives discovering strange boulevards and gardens in Mexico City and new pleasures like tasting orange papaya and yellow mango for the first time. And Mexicans to love. The one that stirs me today from a safe distance occupies the gaudiest memory from the list. When we were near, it got hot, and thinking about him mushroomed into uncontainable emotions and a desperate need for someone to hear me talk, to get him out.

Like one empty night in San Miguel de Allende, a small city north of the capital where I rented a room in the winter of 2002. On weekends, I traveled down to Mexico City hoping to meet him, but I was back. It was Monday and I went to a support group for the addicted and lonely, Alcoholics Anonymous. I wasn’t alcoholic but it was available and anxiety qualified me. Although the moderator was a straight man, a warning sign, I noticed he was friendly with a lesbian type so I took a chance sharing, misjudging his tolerance for confessions of one man’s loving addiction to another. Shortly into my release he cut me off ordering, Who wants to go next? A cold sweat and past insults ran through my mind. Foolish faggot, dicks are for chicks.[1] Perhaps he meant no harm, or wasn’t repelled by me, but he became a villain I resented. Usually I avoided inflaming homophobic prejudice by keeping silent.

I was testing livability in San Miguel for a gay man in the expat community and failing to find enough. In New York, it had been easy to find support in the gay community but no gay groups existed in San Miguel. So, I sought out an individual I'd met in his 40's like me, one partner of a newly arrived couple from rural California. It didn't go much better with him and I was convinced the time it would take to knit support in this town would not be worth it. He was out for a night time cruise in the vacant central plaza where gay men covertly hook up. He grew up in Texas where family had disapproved of his sexual orientation. His relationship was open, and probably sexless. He was starved for some. I had accepted an invitation to his house once. A laptop computer was conspicuously placed in the entry way playing a porn video as I entered, as a hook. But I wasn’t interested, somewhat annoyed, and ignored it.

Tonight, wasn’t different. I wanted his ear not the cock he was offering. I'd returned from Mexico City frustrated and Roger impatiently listened to me climb out of worry before rudely cutting me off, You need to get on anti-depressants! He was revealing his lack of interest. He didn’t want to listen but did want to tell his story. I decided to hear it rather than be alone. In a tense outpouring, he recalled a Prozac overdose in a California supermarket. He squalled in his pants before making it to the bathroom. Naturally he was embarrassed and it was dreadful, but I thought to myself how much worse it would be if caused by a disease he couldn’t control, not an optional medication he could dose down or exchange. He finished his story and left right away. It was clear after two meetings, he’s too self-absorbed to listen to anyone. He has scant potential to be a friend.

Becoming a Gringo

Every Friday I walked through colonial San Miguel to the bus station for an enjoyable ride to Mexico City. San Miguel always seemed delightful when I was leaving. I reluctantly returned on Monday mornings knowing I’d feel isolated again. In Mexico City, I spent the weekend at gay cantinas shedding 20 years of New York City striving. In New York, it hadn’t been convenient to go to gay bars. Work or distance interfered. Mexico was a long-crafted plan finally become reality. I'd left before to faraway places. After high school from Phoenix to San Francisco and eight years later, with just 2,000 dollars and a million in excitement, from San Francisco to Manhattan. I was splitting ready to move in each case but breaking off was excruciating. The fight for courage to go just a little stronger than fear not to.

During my last years in New York I took trips to Mexico that got longer and longer. It was so exciting, turning off to sleep could be hard. My favorite destinations were Mexico City and Oaxaca but I wanted the entire country and fantasized living where ever I happened to be. Being a foreigner was interesting for many reasons, including speaking Spanish, and the handsome men, a mixture of Spanish, Native American, and African. Apart from the different culture and people was new scenery and plants. Jungles as astounding as any northern forest I’d enjoyed. Mexico also offered the comfort of familiar landscapes from Arizona and California I'd grown up in, recalling home after two decades in New York. Finally, Mexico had low prices.

I'd lie awake in bed unable to sleep, Mexico City racing my heart, and get up tired the next day. It was a huge city, too big to understand, and mine to discover. I'd felt the same in New York and San Francisco each in its era, but they had gotten smaller over the years. Here, I had the money to choose where I wanted to live, not forced to last choices like in the former. If I had a tail it would be excited.

Mission Dolores Park and Downtown San Francisco

Mission Dolores Park, San Francisco