Today is World AIDS Day which used to be a celebration of all of the lives that had been lost to that disease. We organized the first one in Savannah back in 1989 in Johnson Square which is in the shadow of City Hall. It was a funny night because we held a candlelight vigil an hour before the City was sponsoring the lighting of the Christmas.
About 30 of us showed up with candles through hundreds arrived for the Christmas lights. So we had moments of silence and read the names of those who had died. As soon as we finished the town crier showed up dressed like Santa Claus and screamed to the top of his lungs, “ MERRY CHRISTMAS!” All of Savannah suddenly exploded with colored lights while a band played “Joy to the World.”
You just don’t see many AIDS vigils with endings like that! Most are quite depressing.
Back in the 1980s when HIV+ was sweeping the nation I was in Louisville, Kentucky in charge of a rag tag inner city church. We had turned a bunch of the Sunday School rooms into apartments so that homeless people had a place to live. So I had gained a bit of a reputation for helping people find housing.
His name Rod and he was rail thin because the HIV was devouring who he was. In those days, AIDS meant death. And no one knew how it was transmitted then so everybody was scared. When Rod came into my office that day I remember how my hand shook when I went to shake his. But I did.
A short while later I joined this group of eight that my friend Fr. Vernon Robertson dubbed “The St. Jude’s Guild.” St. Jude is the patron Saint of the sick and dying. I don’t remember voting on the name but Vernon was always quite clever at naming things. He ran a restaurant called “The St. Martin Afro-German Tearoom” and he had a sign made for our weekly lunch proclaiming “The Southern Baptist/Roman Catholic Coalition” (I got flown to Baptist Corporate Headquarters in Atlanta to be yelled at when they thought I had single handedly committed the entire denomination to an alliance with Catholics!).
Four of the eight were clergy and four were gay. We had lively meetings! But in no time at all we had raised a lot of money and opened “The Glade House” one of the country’s first residential facility for people with AIDS.
Naturally it got a lot of press and somehow I ended up being the spokesperson for the St. Jude’s Guild though I was by far the youngest member. So I was doing my first round of media management and was consistently being quoted in the paper.
One day the Louisville Courier-Journal called to ask me about Jack Kersey, a gay member of the group, who was very open about himself, was a very successful realtor giving lots of his own time and money so that The Glade House opened quickly. The reporter asked me what I thought of Jack.
“He’s one of the most Christian people that I know,” I fired back without hesitation.
What I remember next is the story had a large picture of Jack holding a cat. It was a nice picture. The story reported that a Baptist minister had called an openly gay man in 1986 “the most Christian man” he knows.
I was immediately flown to Baptist Corporate Headquarters in Atlanta where the Pharisees, Sadducees and men in three-piece suits told me that they understood. I cocked my head and narrowed my eyes. This is the first time that they had professed to understand anything and I hadn’t even offered an explanation yet.
“You were misquoted,” a man named Harold told me. “Just retract your statement and it’s all ok.”
Suddenly I understood the power of the media. I’d been getting a lot of press in newspapers and magazines. My first book was getting ready to be published and none other than Will D. Campbell (National Book Award finalist for “Brother to a Dragonfly) had written the preface. They wanted me to help with stories that promoted good Baptist press.
“Um,” I remember saying looking at Harold and Russell Bennett, “yeah…well…I can’t do that. Jack is one of the most Christian people that I know. He puts his money and his life where his mouth is and he is taking care of people who are dying…”
I don’t remember what else I said. I do remember them exploding and yelling at me. Then they sent me into a waiting room where I could hear them yelling at one another about me. Then they called me back in and yelled some more. Eventually they let me go.
I went to a Braves game and drank beer that night.
When I got back to Louisville though, Jack threw this tremendous party at the gayest mansion that I’ve ever been in --- marble statues of naked people spewing water from their mouths and such, though the food was great! I remember that Vernon didn’t go that night; nor did the other clergy representatives of the St. Jude’s Guild.
Just me.
And a hundred gay people all toasting and celebrating that the closet door had been nudged open.
