Let’s get this out of the way right at the start. No. I don’t know who he is. But that is not to say I don’t remember him. Knowing the incubation period for the virus, I can narrow it down to one guy. I call him “white SUV guy.” He lived in Larchmont, a trendy neighborhood just south of Hollywood proper and Melrose Avenue in the central region of Los Angeles (a.k.a. “the basin”). We met at Rage in West Hollywood, the famed nightclub at the intersection of San Vicente and Santa Monica – if you know LA, then you know the spot… it’s the “gayest” corner in the city. And Rage, the place to see and be seen.
And that is fitting. When I look at my life stretching out behind me – when I take it as a whole – I see a kind of poetry. In the midst of any one stanza, it seems discordant, disjointed, unrelated. But with the perspective afforded by time I see how each line, so barren on its own, contributes to the poetic meter and suddenly something that happened in 1983 echoes across the years and rhymes with one night in 1997.
It was an ordinary Friday night in 1983, and that meant “Youth Rap.” I had just begun my senior year of high school. To attend Youth Rap, you had to be under 18 and gay. Youth Rap gave us gay teenagers a chance to be gay teenagers in a time before schools (particularly Catholic schools like mine) had GSA (Gay-Straight-Alliance) clubs. We could flirt, pass notes, gossip… you know, like our straight counterparts were doing back at school dances and football games. It’s just that because we were boys who liked boys, we had to have a special time in a special place; the time was Youth Rap, the place was the LAGCSC (Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center) on Highland Avenue. The Center was founded in 1969 by gay rights activists Morris Kight and Don Kilhefner and was the first nonprofit organization in America to have the word ‘gay’ in its name. Historic, yes, but the place was a dump.
In those days, the building had no signage or rainbow flag to draw attention to it. It was anonymous and hidden, like we were. The first thing I learned about the gay community (as we called it then, we now call it the “LGBTQ+ community” as a sign of our inclusivity of different sexualities and gender identities and expressions) is that it hides in plain sight – it’s an enormous, thriving underground with rules and rituals and a history all its own. You had to be “brought in” by someone already in the know, by a kind of “sponsor” if you will. My sponsor was the computer science teacher from my high school (I wrote about Mr. Rodgers here).
Now I want to make something perfectly clear, because I know how bigots and Right wing nutjobs will twist that last sentence and turn Mr. Rodgers into some kind of “recruiter” and perpetuate the wholly unfounded and frankly insulting myth that gay teachers are ensnaring otherwise straight boys and luring them into the gay lifestyle. Nothing could be further from the truth. I already knew I was gay when Mr. Rodgers dropped me off at my first Youth Rap. I went to him and asked what do I do about this thing I’ve figured out about myself, and he introduced me to other gay teenagers asking the same questions at Youth Rap. Mr. Rodgers is a hero, not a villain. I credit him as being the most significant influence on me during the frightening, awkward process of “coming out” – that is, the process of publicly acknowledging that I am gay. But first, you gotta get in to come out, and Youth Rap was my way in.
I met a boy there. His name was Ross. We fell in love. There is nothing extraordinary about that. Teenagers do it all the time. I think the straight ones call it “going steady.” Friday night Youth Rap was the only time we could see each other. I really looked forward to Friday nights.
I was running late. When I got to the LAGCSC, I quickly ran up the staircase and down the narrow hallway with the threadbare carpeting that always smelled of cat urine to where Youth Rap met. I opened the door and anxiously surveilled the room for Ross. I found him sitting Indian style on the floor, looking so damn sexy in his 80’s parachute pants and Vans slip-ons, showing just enough bare ankle to send my flag to full mast immediately. I took up a spot next to him, and he reached out and grabbed my hand and held it firmly in his.
The format of Youth Rap was we had a topic each week, presented by a speaker who gave an hour presentation; then we’d break for bathroom and refreshments, and then spend our remaining hour discussing the topic. So I motioned up toward the guy who was speaking and whispered to Ross, “what’s she going on about?” He replied, “apparently there’s this new disease called AIDS that can kill us if we fuck.” I let out a skeptical laugh-grunt, and said to him, “yah right, like the nuns who told us we’d grow hair on our palms if we masturbated.” I took my right hand out of his left and turned it over, revealing my smooth, hairless palm, and triumphantly said, “you see?… either I’m doing it wrong or they made it all up to stop us.”
Annoyed, Ross shush-ed me and strained to listen more intently to the speaker. After Youth Rap, we piled in cars and made our way down Santa Monica Boulevard to West Hollywood, looking for a club to sneak into. There was an “under 21” club called Peanutz next to the old French Marketplace restaurant, but it was lame and we wanted the real thing – a true gay bar – so we set our sights on Rage in the heart of WeHo and hatched a plan.
Behind Rage is an alley and then a parking lot. It was about 10:30 at night. We parked our cars, crouched down, and hid in the shadows. Every once in a while, a Rage staffer would open the bar’s back door and emerge with bags of trash he’d take out to a dumpster, leaving the door ajar. The door opened… our cue. As the hapless bar employee dumped the bags of trash in the dumpster, we quickly scurried through the open door, quiet as church mice, thus avoiding the Id check at the entrance.
Success, we were in!
Ross put both his hands on my hips and maneuvered me through the crowd to the dance floor. It’s a night seared into my brain. They were playing “The Metro,” by Berlin.
There, surrounded by gyrating men, bathed in pulsating lights of all colors, we had our first dance. I can honestly say that I have never before and nor have I since experienced the sheer ecstasy, the freedom, the passion, the wild abandon, the joy, the contentedness, the “everything-is-right-with-the-world,” the feeling that things are going to be okay from now on that I felt that night in my boyfriend’s arms. It was bliss. We got in, and paradoxically, it meant, surrounded by strangers, we had “come out.” We were now a part of the community, a family.
Ross died, of AIDS.
You can probably infer from that what we got up to later that night.
1997 seemed a lifetime later. I was 31, and I’d lived a lot. I’m using “lived” as a euphemism. Flash me a smile, buy me a drink, light my cigarette, and chances were better than good I’d go home with you, especially if you were Latino and had a full head of jet black hair (okay, so I have a type!). I was standing alone at the bar at Rage nursing a Tom Collins, my drink of choice. I walked in through the front door; I did not have to sneak in this time.
My friends called me “easy;” I preferred to think of myself as “social.” So when white SUV guy suggested we go back to his place and be social there, of course I said yes. The only other thing I remember from that night, besides his white SUV, were the floors of his apartment. He had gorgeous, tongue and groove hardwood flooring. It was a dark walnut.
By July of that year, it had been six months since my last HIV test. By this point, all gay men had two codes to live by:
- Get tested every six months to know your HIV status
- Disclose your status to any and all sexual partners before engaging in sex
I decided to go to the new Center at 1625 Schrader Blvd. A far cry from that non-descript dump on Highland back in 1983 or even the original Center located in an old Victorian house on Wilshire Boulevard, the McDonald/Wright Building on Schrader was a shining symbol in the heart of LA of just how far we had come as a community – of the strides made in securing LGBTQ+ rights – with our name emblazoned on the front and the rainbow flag’s colors proudly displayed for all to see. We were no longer underground. We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it.
It was July 31, 1997. I parked my 1997 Nissan Maxima in Sage Green on the street, stared up at the rainbow colors fluttering in a light breeze, and thought of Ross. I always thought of him whenever I got my test results – call it “survivor’s guilt”… why was he positive and I negative, why was he dead and I alive? A handsome young nelly (meaning effeminate man) led me to a very serene room with one of those gently cascading tabletop waterfalls and overstuffed furniture that wrapped around me like a burrito when I sat down. The nelly said, “would you like some water?”, his voice cracking as he did.
And I knew. I heard it in the crack of the nelly’s voice.
I was positive. Realizing he’d let the cat out of the bag, he said, “I’ll get the social worker.” I could tell he’d said that many times before; I was touched that it was as hard for him to say as it was for me to hear.
It had been six months since I met white SUV guy…………at Rage.
It had been fourteen years since I danced with Ross…at Rage.
I walked into the McDonald/Wright Building that afternoon one man, I walked out another. So I drove to Rage, ordered a Tom Collins, and drank a toast to Ross and white SUV guy.