Today, December 1st, is World AIDS Day—a day for us to acknowledge and grieve for our losses, to look back at where we came from, how the epidemic unfolded, where we’re now headed and share personal stories.
My made my first post here on World AIDS Day in 2006 after lurking for a couple of years, then becoming sfbob in July of 2006. Since then I think I’ve posted a World AIDS Day diary/post/story every year. May have missed one year.
I wrote about Mario in 2011 but this coming Monday will mark the 25th anniversary of his death due to complications related to AIDS and I think it worthwhile to write about him once again.
Mario was born in Pittsburg, CA, a suburb of San Francisco, on August 6, 1951 (less than three months after me) and spent his childhood in the nearby city of Antioch, a working class community with a large Latino population. His mother was born in the US of Mexican parents; his father was born in Mexico. Mario’s actual first name was Frederick. Only his family called him Fred. When he graduated high school in 1969 he immediately (the next day, I think) left home and came to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, arriving there just a bit too late for the Summer of Love. Upon arriving he was asked his name. He’d had a crush on a guy named Mario when he was in school and decided on the spot to use that name. It sounded sexier to him. I can’t really disagree with him there.
Mario had a long history of alcohol and drug abuse. Another memory I have from our time together is of him telling me that when he was 15 years old he was arrested for public intoxication and attempted suicide. He still had scars on his wrists when we met 20 years later. He continued to struggle with alcohol and crystal meth for most of his life.
When Mario and I met he had recently ended a 14 year relationship with a man named Peter that began when he was 21. He and his ex moved from San Francisco to Santa Barbara sometime around 1975 and lived there for six or seven years. Not long after he arrived in Santa Barbara Mario went to his very first AA meeting but he didn’t stay sober. When we visited Santa Barbara in 1989 he showed me where that meeting was.
While he and Peter lived in and around Santa Barbara he attended Santa Barbara City College and received an AA degree in Hotel and Restaurant Management. He trained as a chef. Mario was a TERRIFIC cook; he loved doing it. If he acquired his taste for alcohol from his dad, his mother gave him a life-long love of cooking. He never told me the latter but it became obvious as soon as I met his parents for the first time.
Kitchen work isn’t easy. One of his colleagues introduced him to “black beauties,” a form of amphetamine once used as an over-the-counter appetite suppressant. At some point he graduated to snorting and then injecting crystal meth. This was in the late 1970s or early 1980s. Crystal meth became a problem within San Francisco’s gay community fairly early on. When I moved to SF in 1986 I don’t think I knew anyone on the East Coast who had actually taken it. I had friends who were clean and sober; none of them ever mentioned it as a drug they’d abused. Of course that changed later on and crystal meth became a problem pretty much everywhere. The toxic combination of crystal meth and casual sex has a long and scary history in San Francisco. It probably helped worsen the spread of HIV here. Mario was never really sure whether he contracted HIV from having unprotected sex or from sharing needles.
Mario continued to abuse both alcohol and drugs. One night he was driving to LA and was pulled over. He was clearly intoxicated and didn’t have ID. When they asked he gave Peter’s name; I’m quite sure the police didn’t believe him. The result was that he spent six months in jail and some time on probation afterwards. He never did get his license back. When they decided to move back to San Francisco he had to get permission from his probation officer.
I met Mario just a couple of weeks after I moved to San Francisco from DC. We socialized but didn’t begin dating for several months. This was a new thing for both of us; we both had had a habit of getting involved with people very quickly.
When he and I met, I knew I was HIV-positive but Mario hadn’t been tested. I actually used to tell my friends who asked me about it not to bother getting tested until there was some sort of viable treatment available. In retrospect that was a dubious strategy and in any case not one I had the luxury of practicing since I already knew far more than I really wanted to but, at the same time I was able to enroll myself in a couple of non-medication-related studies.
Mario decided to get himself tested for HIV sometime in August of 1988. Although we were officially “broken up” at the time I went with him the public health clinic in the Castro when he had his blood drawn and again two weeks later when he returned to get the results. Not only did he test positive, his immune system was seriously depleted. In the early days an AIDS diagnosis required that one actually have one of a number of opportunistic infections. Later on one received an AIDS diagnosis if one’s CD4 count dropped below 200. A CD4 count of 450 or higher is considered normal and healthy. Mario’s first tested at 150. He started treatment with AZT immediately; I put it off for another three years until my own numbers began to slip. I am very fortunate. My numbers never got very low. With the benefit of long-term treatment and, I suspect, good genes, my CD4 count is now over 1300 (the highest it’s ever been).
Mario had had a long history of relapse with alcohol and crystal meth despite continued and ongoing attempts to get and stay sober. He had just recently come out of treatment when we met and had a slip not long before we became serious. I was actually surprised his AA sponsor didn’t counsel him to stay single. After that he stayed sober for almost two years, then broke up with me simply so I wouldn’t watch him slip again. In a way I appreciated it, in another sense it seemed pointless. I changed my opinion early in 1990. This time he didn’t break up with me first. He just disappeared. After a few days I got a call from him. We met for dinner; he was intoxicated. It was the only time I ever actually saw when he wasn’t sober. At the time I said I didn’t know who was more miserable—him or me (I had gotten sober in 1988 after realizing I’d become addicted to prescription medications). Clearly he was in more pain than I was. Fortunately he put himself into treatment once again and stayed sober for the remainder of his life. Later on while we were in couples therapy he came to the conclusion or at least the admission that he had been trying to kill himself with alcohol and crystal meth.
In spite of the issues we both faced our relationship was for the most part a very happy one. As we were both in recovery we had a common language; this is (we were later informed) not an unmixed blessing but it never presented a problem for us. Not long after we began seriously dating he stopped doing restaurant work. There was the constant temptation to take illegal substances to keep himself going but more than that was the fact that the restaurant business is a precarious one. He told me that he’d gotten fed up with his paychecks bouncing. He took an office job but continued to do catering work on the weekends. That sort of work isn’t nearly as stressful as working in a restaurant kitchen full-time.
Mario and I became a live-in couple in the fall of 1990 after he completed his substance abuse treatment program. We found a nice place in the Castro that wasn’t too expensive. Mario had wanted to live in a proper San Francisco Victorian. We found a flat in what had been a group of three townhouses (probably dating to the 1880s) that had been converted to flats. Ours was on the upper floor of the unit in the middle. There was a back yard with a garden. A stairway took us from the kitchen to the yard.
While he was still in treatment Mario had gone to work with United Way of San Francisco. He always felt that he was in the closet in some ways. So he joined an LGBT group at work. At the time there was a move afoot to have United Way stop giving funds to the Boy Scouts because of their policy (now recently ended) of excluding gay kids and leaders. Somehow he became the one to spearhead the movement. SF’s United Way became the first local chapter to defund organizations that discriminate against the LGBT community. It was one of the accomplishments Mario was most proud of.
On Valentines Day, 1991, San Francisco’s domestic partner ordinance went into effect. At the time those relationships had little more than symbolic significance and no validity whatsoever outside San Francisco and West Hollywood. But when we woke up that morning we decided we wanted to be part of it since there were special things going on at City Hall. Arriving at around 4:30 we were among the last couples of the day to be given a domestic partnership with a commemorative certificate. It was very different from getting married but it was a start.
March, 1992 I went off to DC for a week of work-related training. I left a couple of days early and spent the weekend visiting friends in New York. Last day of winter it snowed for the first time all year there and since I had not been in falling snow since I’d moved west I was enthralled. Mario and I had a practice, when we were apart, of calling each other to check in. Actually even when we were home we’d call during the day. First day in DC I couldn’t reach him and started to be worried. Before bedtime I got a call from his AA sponsor. He’d been feeling a bit under the weather before I left but assumed it was allergies. He must have explained the details to me later on. He called in sick that morning and went to the doctor. The doctor took one look at him and had him admitted to the hospital. He pneumocystis pneumonia, an opportunistic infection that killed many people with AIDS back then.
I was still in the closet at work so even though there were people around at this conference who I knew, I suffered in silence. In any case there was no such thing as family leave back then and it’s certain that such leave would not be granted to a a same-sex partner. I got home and went directly to the hospital. He was there for a couple of weeks. The hospital sent a social worker and an attorney to his room. He wrote a will and also made me responsible for his health care decisions in the event he was unable to make them for himself. Once he got out of the hospital he went on permanent disability.
Throughout our time together we did a fair amount of traveling. Boston in 1988; a trip down the coast as far as San Diego with stops at Big Sur, Santa Barbara, the San Diego Zoo and Disneyland in 1989, Philly and DC in 1990 and a trip to Mendocino and Eureka in 1991. Before he became ill we’d planned and paid for a trip to Hawaii. Being home from the hospital and being retired he seemed to get better and his doctor declared him able to travel so off we went. Our trip north the previous fall had ended the day of the Oakland Hills fire. We departed for Hawaii the day the Rodney King riots began and returned, conveniently, after they had ended.
We had a wonderful time on the trip. It was sort of a honeymoon and sort of a sunset tour as well. A few weeks after we came back from Hawaii the pneumonia returned. Our place was up two sets of steps. The first step took you to the front door, the second set, which was the longer one, took you upstairs to the flat. One afternoon I heard the front door open. He called for me to come down to the entryway. He had barely made it up the first set of stairs. We sat there, held each other and cried.
Around his birthday, in August, he was feeling better. We celebrated his birthday at his parents’ house.
After that he became sick again. The medication used to treat pneumocystis pneumonia turned him diabetic temporarily. This was a dilemma: having syringes around the house made him anxious. At some point he no longer needed to give himself insulin injections. He handed me the remaining syringes and told me to take them far, far away. Septra, a sulfa drug, can be used to control and prevent pneumocystis pneumonia. I took it for a number of years until the stronger HIV medications came along. Mario was deathly allergic to it. An experimental medication specifically intended for pneumocystis didn’t have any effec
t on him.
Mario’s mother more or less moved in with us. She took care of him while I was at work, kept the house clean and kept us fed. I don’t know how I would have survived without her.
In October he was hospitalized once again. We had gone to the Castro Street Fair for a while. I went home, he went to an NA meeting. While I was waiting for him to return I received a call; he’d collapsed during the meeting and had been taken to the ER, then admitted. One of his lungs had collapsed and when I arrived he was hooked up to some sort of awful machine with tubes going into and out of his chest. His doctor told him that his lungs were now very far gone. He was now housebound. Getting him to medical appointments was an undertaking. The last time he went out for anything other than a medical appointment was a few days before Thanksgiving. He wanted to see the ocean one more time so we got him bundled up and down the stairs. Getting to the car (parked in the garage right under us) took over 30 minutes. But he did get to see the ocean.
We had our families over for Thanksgiving. It was a lovely experience. They had not met previously. It was in a way an affirmation of our relationship and a repudiation of the closet. Mario supervised the cooking from the bedroom or sitting in the kitchen. The following Tuesday we had to call an ambulance to take him to the hospital. That night he told me he was refusing treatment.
Mario was raised Catholic but vehemently rejected Catholicism. However we had a friend who was gay and a Catholic priest. There he was, providing pastoral counseling and support for an ex-Catholic and his Jewish male partner. Truly and only-in-San-Francisco experience. Father John was in the room with us that evening. Despite his issues with Catholicism Mario asked him to administer last rites.
Thursday evening I was late getting out of therapy and even later getting to the hospital. He’d been put on morphine and lost consciousness about fifteen minutes after I arrived. His family was around. They left me to sit with him by myself for a while and I said goodbye. We stayed with him through the night; he died at around 6 a.m.
Mario has been dead more than four times longer than we were with each other. I sometimes find it perplexing that I should still have very strong feelings about his death after all this time. I have spent the past few days writing this but also scanning some of the numerous pictures I took during our time together. A friend said it was a labor of love. And so it was. Love is a very powerful emotion. I don’t think it’s something that can be controlled although the way it is expressed is most certainly a matter of at least some choice. When I find myself in the place of wondering why I still think of him after so long (I think of my previous partner as well; Bob died only four months after Mario did) I am reminded that to be touched by another person means that they make a permanent impression on you and you’ll never be the same again. That evening when Mario told me he had essentially chosen to die he also told me that he would haunt me. I have the memories of him. I am not a person who believes in heaven or hell. What I do believe is that to the extent that someone is remembered by someone, to that extent that person is immortal.
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this. If you would like to do something concrete by way of helping me remember Mario I will remind you that I participate every year in AIDS/LifeCycle, a week-long bike ride that raises money for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the Los Angeles LGBT Center. Here is a link to my donation page. I keep riding in order to remember Mario and others, to express my gratitude and frank amazement at still being alive and well myself, to raise money for the services provided by the SF AIDS Foundation which go towards both treatment and prevention particularly among lower-income and marginalized people and finally, to fight homophobia and AIDS-phobia by being public as someone who is gay and who lives with HIV.