6.16.15

Hi folks,

Okay, so maybe I got a little excited and started posting this project too early, but I just couldn't help myself. Inspiration is a fickle mistress, and sometimes you have to roll with it. This is me rolling with it.

This story was inspired by a documentary called 'We Were Here'. If you want to know more about the beginning of the AIDS crisis, I highly recommend it, although I will warn you, it's upsetting. For the sake of realism and historical accuracy, this Prologue contains word-for-word excerpts of several interviews from that film. I have woven them seamlessly into the dialogue, so of course, credit where credit is due. I have no desire to plagiarize content.

Alright, well, here we go! I look forward to hearing from ya'll. Tell me what you think!

Peace,

-Rex

reference material: Milk (2008); We Were Here (2011); The Normal Heart (2014)

summary: The year is 1980. Fresh out of nursing school, Santana Lopez moves in with her relatives in the Bay Area and accepts a position in the ICU at San Francisco General Hospital. The California coast is bright and exciting, it's populace still celebrating the triumphs of the sexual revolution, but her wonder is short lived. A storm is brewing under the surface. A rare form of skin cancer, Kaposi Sarcoma (KS) has made a sudden, disturbing appearance amongst the young, male populace of San Francisco's gay community, and men are dropping like flies. The media is calling it gay cancer, but nobody has any answers. SFGH is a warzone, the list of obituaries in the Bay Area Reporter grows every week, and everyone is scared. In the middle of it all, Santana finds herself inextricably involved in the lives of her patients, in particular,Tyler Pierce, and his enigmatic, eccentric younger sister, Brittany.

Prologue

"Mr. Anderson?"

"Yes."

"Are you alright?"

"I…need a minute."

"We can stop here for today if you're tired. Maybe pick up where we left off tomorrow?"

Blaine closed his glassy, red eyes and resisted the urge to turn away from the camera. His fingers twitched in his lap, but he held them there, locked together, steady and tight. He had already rubbed his stage makeup away twice, forcing them to stop the taping and do touch ups. The room collectively held its breath as he struggled in the stiff, leather armchair. They would wait for his signal. They had been very understanding so far. After a few moments had passed he straightened up, cleared his throat, and blinked furiously to hold the moisture back.

"I'm okay."

"Is the light too bright?"

He sucked in a shuddering breath and composed himself. "No, it's fine."

Across from him, the reporter scribbled some notes in her spiral-bound notebook, a tall, waify redhead with a rash of freckles stamped across her nose, wearing her hair in a styled messy bun and thick, horn-rimmed glasses. "Are you ready to continue with the interview."

Blaine cleared his throat again. "Yes."

"Are you sure?" She smiled kindly. "Do you need any water?"

"Maybe a little," he admitted, shifting awkwardly, crossing his legs first one way, and then the other, without managing to find a comfortable position.

She signalled to her crew and a moment later a cold, plastic bottle was pressed into his hand.

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

"I'm sorry, I'm not normally a crier…" He unscrewed the cap.

"It's alright." The reporter, Erica, smiled. "In case you haven't noticed, my cameraman has been sniffling all morning." She glanced over her shoulder at a chubby fellow in a red polo who appeared suddenly very interested in his equipment. "I know you know don't have a cold, Barry."

"Allergies," the man replied smoothly.

Blaine chuckled and drank his water, running fingers that were just a little bit tougher through slicked back, salt and pepper hair. She waited for him to finish, as he placed the bottle on the persian rug, next to the chair, waited for him to adjust his bow tie and straighten the collar of his blue, oxford shirt. It was a ritual of his. It calmed him, and all these years later the routine had become so ingrained that his hands strayed toward his neck whenever he was nervous, regardless of his chosen attire. He often remembered only as his fingers were brushing bare skin around his clavicle that he had worn a tank top or a t-shirt that day.

"Where were we…?" Erica tapped the end of a blue pen against her lips, eyebrows furrowed, scanning quickly through her notes.

Blaine cleared his throat, and knotted his hands again, waiting patiently.

"Oh, we were talking about your partner."

"...Yes."

The reporter glanced up from her notebook. "He died."

Blaine cleared his throat. "He did."

Something flickered behind her eyes, just beyond reach. "I'm sorry."

"Me too."

Erica chewed on her pen for a quiet moment, eyes drifting back and forth across his face as though she were reading words on a page, line by line. She brushed an errant lock of strawberry red hair over one ear and seemed to make a decision. The pen tapped against her notebook.

"Let's talk about you."

"Okay." Blaine's smile was tight. "What about me?"

"You moved here from rural Texas after you graduated from high school."

"I did."

"What made you choose California?"

He sucked in a quiet breath. "I guess I always knew I was gonna come out to San Francisco. I think a lot of us came out here because we didn't quite fit where we were. I mean, how do you explain to your father, the good Christian man who's lived in Abilene his whole life, that you don't want to take a girl to the high school prom? That you'd rather take the ranch hand he just hired?" Blaine grimaced. "You just...you don't. You don't tell him that. You move to the city, and you don't tell him that."

"Were you scared?"

He settled back in the chair for a moment, deep in thought, expression scrunched up as he clasped his hands around one knee and chewed on his bottom lip. Erica just waited for him to continue. She had such a good sense for him, for his rhythms. It was comforting.

"I was…" he began, thoughtfully, "but I was also excited. It was the 70s, you know, and there were more gay people coming here, more love children... anybody. Back then, if you had a bus ticket it had better say San Francisco because this was the place to come." A small, secret smile flitted across his lips. "People often say of my generation that we came to San Francisco to be gay. And I think they're right. I think that's accurate. We came to San Francisco so we could fit."

The reporter's head tilted to one side. "How would you describe it?"

"It was...oh, it was like stepping out of a black and white movie into a world of living color. I almost couldn't believe it." Blaine's laugh was breathy, incredulous. "Here I was, this small town boy, with my dungarees and my boots and the haircut my mother had given me in our kitchen just two days before, and I'm walking down Castro street and there are men stopping to check me out. All kinds of men." He grinned, and his eyes were far away. "I just couldn't even believe it."

Erica giggled. "What did you do?"

"Well, you know, of course I did what any grown man in my situation would do." He winked.

"Oh, yeah?" She leaned a bit closer. "What's that?"

Blaine straightened up in the chair, and the leather groaned and squeaked as he laid his hand on his breast. "Why, I ran straight back to my room with my tail between my legs and hid for a week."

The reporter laughed with delight. "Did you really?"

"Of course, of course!" He waved her off. "It was intimidating! It really was. I mean, even then, there were already cliques forming. I was still in the closet, of course, and it seemed like everyone else already knew what was going on, what was hip and fashionable, just what to wear and…" He huffed. "Well, you know, there was the military look, and this sort of outdoorsman look, the western look, the preppy look, and even the leather look, and I just didn't quite fit anywhere. There wasn't like... a dapper, small town, farm boy look."

"I see." Erica covered her mouth to stifle another round of giggles. "Well, I hope it got better."

"It did, it did." He nodded. "As you know, I am quite charming, and I made friends."

"A little more than friends, it sounds like."

"Well, yeah, but like, I tended to be the type that always had a partner. I mean, I tried. I would go and pick up guys and bring them home and they would wanna go from 0 to 60 so fast. I couldn't do it. I was terrible at anonymous sex." He rolled his eyes almost fondly. "I just, I couldn't do it. I wanted to introduce myself and talk, get to know them. It didn't click." His gaze dropped briefly to his lap, where he toyed with the gold band on his finger. "Guys were going to the bathhouses. I can't quite remember the names of all the places, but there was like, Dave's and Club San Francisco and the Ritch Street Health Club. I remember the signs and the newspaper ads, and you know." He waved his hand. "I tagged along with my friends a few times. It was fun, but it wasn't really my scene."

Erica hummed and twirled her pen. "What was the dating atmosphere like? You know, when you first got here. How would you describe it?"

"Well," the corners of his mouth turned up mischievously, "let me just put it this way. If you took a bunch of young men and said 'have as much sex as you can', how much sex would they have?" He arched his brow, which the redheaded reporter matched with a smirk of her own. "The sense was, if gay is good, then gay sex is good, and more gay sex is even better."

"Hm."

"It's not like that anymore. Not like it was back then. Guys were having sex to have fun, having sex to find love, having sex to...to rebel against people who said that you couldn't have sex. All of America was feeling very confident that you could be much more sexual and that was okay. Sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, all of that was curable with a shot, or a pill, or something like that."

He reached up to his collar, again, and unconsciously adjusted his bow tie.

"I arrived in the late 70s," he said, and the teasing lilt in his tone was gone. "I remember when Harvey Milk was murdered. I was there for the riots when they handed down the sentencing for Dan White. Voluntary manslaughter. He only got 8 years." Blaine paused, frowning. "We were all angry. We felt betrayed by the government and by the establishment. There were beatings, and people burned cars, a lot of animosity with the police. I went to this rally with my friends in May of '79. They had closed off all the streets, and it was packed, and I remember that Anne Kronenberg was there giving this angry speech, and at the end of it she started a chant. 'Welcome to the 80s! Welcome to the 80s!' That night, it felt like something had shifted, likes things were changing. Of course, something had. We just didn't know it yet. AIDS was already there with us, even then."

"When did you know?"

Blaine licked his lips. "The first time I heard anything concrete was in 1981, and by then, about 1 in 5 gay men were already infected. Just in my group alone, there were a few who we guessed probably had it already. They got sick, and none of us knew what it was. By the time we got a test, you know, so we could actually get tested, 1 in 2 people had it."

His throat bobbed, and his hands came up to his face in spite of himself. When his voice emerged again through his fingers it was lower, and thicker.

"I remember looking in the window of the old Star Pharmacy one day. There was this homemade flyer taped up there with the words 'Gay Cancer' written on top, and a note that said 'watch out, guys, there's something out there'." He took a shuddering breath. "And on the flyer there were these little polaroid photographs that this young man had made of himself. There were at least three, maybe four of them. In the first one he had his mouth wide open, like he was at the doctor's office, and inside there were these big, purple splotches, and there was another picture where he had pulled up his shirt, and on his chest, again, there were these purple splotches everywhere, all the way up to his collar." Blaine pulled his fingers away from his face. "It made such a huge impact on me. For the next few weeks, everywhere I went, it just... it stayed with me."

He sighed, and again, Erica waited patiently for him to finish. There was more to be said, but he didn't want to be the one to say it. It had been such a long time, and it was nice to forget and move on. Blaine cleared his throat.

"I went home one day and Sebastian was complaining about this red spot in the middle of his eye. I hadn't really noticed it until then, but it had apparently been growing, and it was starting to freak him- to freak both of us out. I told him about the flyers, and we went to see the doctor later that week."

Erica's mossy green eyes were dull, and her pen had all but stilled against the page as she watched Blaine struggle to utter his next sentence.

"It was Kaposi Sarcoma. KS. He had cancer in his eye." Blaine shuddered. "I tried not to panic, you know, but the next week Jerry went into the hospital for pneumonia, and he was dead 5 days later. 5 days. Just...gone. Like, I can still remember seeing the newspaper at the coffee shop around the corner from our apartment. 'Rare cancer diagnosed in 41 homosexuals.'" The words left his lips with a tremor. "There wasn't even a name yet for the disease that was killing my friends, my partner, but there was this, like, this dread in my stomach, like a stone, because I just knew that we were in trouble."

Blaine wiped his eyes and noted that an eerie silence had fallen over the room. Even the cameraman and the sound guy had stopped to listen, frozen mid-motion over their machines. Birds sang outside on the windowsills, sweet, clear songs overlapping and intertwining. Like mourning songs. He sniffled, and looked away, and Erica waited patiently for him to gather his thoughts again.

"I'm sorry," she said, softly.

Blaine swallowed around the lump in his throat. "It's alright."

"You weren't infected, correct?"

"No."

"How did you handle all of this?" Her teeth clicked together as she chewed on her words, seeming to debate something in her head. "As a couple, I mean? How did you both handle the illness?"

"Well...it was a death sentence back then. We knew nothing. There was nothing we could do. The doctors were afraid, and the hospital didn't want us there, and the chemo just wasn't working." Blaine's hands trembled, and he balled them into tight fists in his lap. "He kept wasting away. He was so, so skinny, just skin and bones, and in the meantime there was all this prejudice. I remember thinking, it was- there was all this fear. So much suspicion. There were people, like Pat Roberts, I remember him in particular, talking about how we were reaping the evils of our sinful lifestyle. I was so angry. I wanted to scream at people, like, I would sit and scream at my television set. It wasn't just about sex. We weren't some disparate network that comes and then goes. Our community was tested in a way that few communities on Earth have ever been tested, but we survived, and we overcame, and people weren't able to see that."

Blaine heaved a sigh, allowing his eyes to close for a moment.

"Sebastian died three months after his initial diagnosis" he said, wiping away fresh tears. "I don't know what else to say about it. I thought it was the end of the world. He was just gone, and there were no answers. I can't even tell you what that feels like."

Erica nodded, eyes growing red around the edges as she swept more strawberry hair over her ear. She was just listening now. The pen sat idly between her fingers as she leaned ever closer in her chair, at rapt attention. The cameraman was wiping his eyes into his shirt, and it inspired a small, watery smile on Blaine's face.

His voice was low when he broke the silence again. "There's nothing extraordinary about the fact that you lose the people you love, because it's gonna happen to all of us. It's just that it happened in this small community of people who were disenfranchised and separated from their families. When I talk to people, and young people in particular, who ask me what it was like, I say that it was like a warzone. I mean, none of us have ever lived in a warzone, but, well… none of us ever knew when the bomb was gonna drop."

"Did you feel isolated?"

"Sure, yeah. Of course, we did, but it wasn't like that for long, because people started stepping up. People who- well, I don't know who, just anyone started volunteering, and pretty soon there were a whole bunch of us joining new organizations and trying to find ways to help. I think that's what saved me."

"How so?"

"Well, you know, none of my friends are around anymore."

Blaine clasped his hands together again in his lap, and his eyes slid off to the side, rooted in some past, faraway place. The lines in his face seemed deeper now, his body heavier, as though the the telling of his story had dredged up old poison that had begun, again, to afflict him. Even his voice, bright and playful in the beginning, now seemed weighted, leaden, like a boat taking on water.

"I kept a stack of obituaries on my desk at work, and it eventually got so big that I had to move it into my drawer. There was so much tragedy around me. I needed something good to work for. I needed to make a difference. It's why I joined the Agapi Project."

His words had grown so quiet that they seemed just a murmur, almost as if he were talking to himself, as if he had forgotten entirely that the reporter, and her crew, were there with him in the room.

"I still walk through the Castro and I see them," he said, "these hungry ghosts. It's like they've experienced so much death that they can't get back to the land of the living. I could have been one of them." Blaine shivered, and his voice grew smaller still. "That easily could have happened to me."

/ / /