(I feel it important as real history gives way to legends and rewrites -even in my own personal experience- it is important to remember historical moments no matter how seemingly inconsequential)
After I moved to the West Coast I joined the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angles.
It was in the mid-eighties, and at the height of the AIDS Epidemic, and in the time before the Reagan administration abandoned the misguided idea that AIDS was God’s way of punishing the
Gay Community not for who we actually were, but because of what the religious right, Reagan’s base, wanted people to believe we were.
The very people who extolled the love of one person for another, who promoted the importance of relationships, the ones who advertised their relationships in pictures, posing as couples in the media, having children and claiming that was a sign of their love which evidenced the importance of sex as an expression of love, were denying the same to the Gay community whose members had to find ways of addressing their need to express their love for someone without being mistreated for it.
These were, and continue to be, those who claim Gay people cannot form lasting relationships while doing everything possible to prevent them.
Being new to the chorus, and not having known any other members until I joined, I had neither the bonds that the more senior members had with each other, nor those they had with others in the wider Community.
Many had lost loved ones and close friends to AIDS, and ,when I shared time with them, were helplessly watching more of the people in their lives being taken, and knowing, sadly, in the ensuing years that many of them would be part of that number. A year or so after I left that chorus to join one closer to where I lived in Long Beach, I was aware when attending one of the Los Angeles Chorus’s concerts that I knew very few of the members. The ones I knew, many at any rate, were gone.
They had been dealing with the deaths, the rejection of medical services, the actual proposal by conservative politicians and morbidly joyous conservative Christian leaders of being moved to internment camps to live out their last days, and they had not had a chance yet to grieve publicly or as a group without rejection and without judgment.
And so it was that on a particular Sunday in the mid-eighties a memorial service was held at a church in Santa Monica to be attended by anyone who had experienced a loss and at which the chorus was to provide the music during the liturgy.
The liturgy as moving along smoothly, and then the chorus began the song by Dan Hill “Sometimes When We Touch”.
With the first singing of the song’s chorus,
“And sometimes when we touch/ The honesty’s too much/ And I have to close my eyes/ And hide/ I want to hold you till I die/ Till we both break down and cry/ I want to hold you till the fear in me subsides”,
and with the verse that led up to it being such a true description of the relationships of those who sat in the pews and those singing in the chorus who had lost someone close people began to quietly sob. With more people growing silent in the chorus it became impossible to continue.
The presiding clergyman, the Episcopal Bishop Malcolm Boyd, having the sense to do so, calmly announced that the liturgy would take a short break so that people, who had been denied such a moment, could openly grieve.
All of us in the church went outside into the church’s court yard.
Not knowing the members of the chorus beyond rehearsals and performances, I decided I would quietly move off from the group and not intrude on their grieving.
From a distance I saw some of the most masculine men I had ever met break down in tears, some hugging others to support them or to give them the hug society would not give them. I saw a grief deeper than I had ever seen even among family members who had experienced a loss. There were tears as people expressed their grief or exchanged remembrances.
As I walked around the corner of the church into another section of the courtyard I saw a lone elderly gentleman sitting quietly on a bench against a far wall. He was dressed as an older Gay man might with a hint of past fashion with a Greek sea captain’s hat on his head and a rather large, I thought almost too large, Turquoise medallion hanging from his neck. Recognizing he might be an “outsider” like me, I went over and sat next to him, quietly for a bit, until he made a comment about the scene we were witnessing.
He spoke of the difficulty these men had experienced and would in the future. He spoke of his sadness that the political and religious leaders were using AIDS for political reasons. He mourned that just as progress was being made to accept the Gay Community, a disease came along to threaten it. He spoke as someone who knew so much and had experienced so much.
There was grief in his words and in his voice.
He then spoke of his hope in the future and his belief that this would be overcome, making the Community stronger, and that that strength would bring about the necessary changes. I just sat listening as he just seemed to need someone to listen. He seemed content that someone had come over to sit with him.
It became clear from the movement of the people reentering the church that things were about to resume, and I rose to go back in. Not wanting to be an unnamed abstract, I turned and belatedly introduced myself.
“I’m Joe”. I said.
“Morris”, he said.
We shook hands, and I walked back inside, and as we began singing, this time making it through the song after the catharsis in the courtyard, I saw him come back into the church and sit in the back by himself, and old man grieving.
After the church services as we headed toward the parking lot, one of the long time members of the chorus ended up walking with me, and as we talked he mentioned he had seen me talking with Morris.
“You know Morris?”, I asked.
“Everyone does”, he replied. “That’s Morris Kight.
It turned out that the quiet man sitting alone, an old guy of no apparent consequence who had only hinted at having a history, and seemed dressed in an outdated outfit as if to remember past times, was THE Morris Kight the founder or co-founder of many Gay and Lesbian organizations, among them the Committee for Homosexual Freedom in the 1950s, which in October1969 was renamed the Gay Liberation Front in solidarity with New York City, the Gay Community Center in 1971, which later became the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center by the time I had gotten there, the Christopher Street West Gay Pride Parade in 1973, the Stonewall Democratic Club in 1975, and AIDS for AIDS in 1983.
I had heard of Barney’s Beanery in West Hollywood from people I had met in Long Beach, who told me never to eat there because it not only had a misspelled sign above the bar that said “Fagots Stay Out”, but also had printed up matchbook covers with the same saying, and here I had had a conversation with the man who, along with Troy Perry, founder of the Metropolitan Community Church, and 100 activists, had protested outside the place, an action with which I was familiar.
This is the man with whom I spoke, that old guy sitting alone quietly on a church courtyard bench bringing no attention to himself. A man with a history who could have been assumed to be just some old guy with retro taste in clothing wearing overstated jewelry, that old guy sitting alone at the far corner of the bar. A man I could have ignored to my own loss.
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