When I saw Gary, my brother Danny’s partner, wearing this t-shirt, I got it. It was a political message and an outcry. Reagan, the press, and the country in general did not talk about AIDS, funding was not made available, motivation to deal with it was absent, and people died.
Including my brother, Danny.
But I find myself confronting a different silence. In our family we didn’t talk about Danny. He was not outcast or rejected. But his homosexuality was a kind of unfortunate issue to be glossed over.
And by the time we knew about his HIV, I was living in Israel.
In 1991, when my parents arrived for their annual visit, my father asked me to go for a walk. This was unusual. He asked what I knew about Danny’s medical condition. I said, What, does he have AIDS?
I was right.
I didn’t talk to my parents or my sister about it. I don’t know if it came from them or I just sensed that was the right thing for them. Or maybe it just felt right to me. Maybe I felt safe in silence.
And now, decades later, I don’t want to keep quiet. I want another chance. I want to shout. I want to make noise. I want people to know about Danny.
A couple of years ago, my cousin Jennie went on a search for her two gay uncles who died of AIDS and whose existence she only learned of when she was in her thirties. She managed to track one down. He died as a John Doe in a hospital on the other side of the country.
I want people to know about the thousands of men who died alone, without their families.
I want to shout for my friends and hundreds like them who became infected with HIV around the same time as Danny and somehow survived.
Yes, Silence = Death.
The world has made serious progress against the physical death caused by the silence of the plague years.
But what about the other kind?
Note: Gary died of a stroke, HIV-free at the age of seventy-three.
Thank you for continuing the conversation. Eloquently.