Purple Golf Cart: The Misadventures of a Lesbian Grandma (19 page)

Keith was admitted into Baptist Medical Center. He died six hours later as Bonnie and I held his hands.

III. The Condom Commandos

Donna Zimmerman, my colleague and friend in the AIDS office, and I created what we called the Condom Commandos. Our after-hours volunteer job, we declared, was to protect as many young gay men as possible from contracting this killer disease. We spent many hours in the men’s restrooms at truck stops on I-95 and I-10 where we knew guys met for sex. We stalked Jacksonville’s parks, the ones we knew to be gay male cruise spots. We went to the gay beach and found guys together in the bushes. We didn’t try to talk men out of having sex. We just gave them condoms and, well, instructed them—on the spot—about how to use condoms correctly.

“Here. Be sure you use this. Roll it all the way down to the base of your penis, and don’t let your semen spill out of it onto the other guy when you’re finished. Have fun now!”

Coming from a couple of middle-aged lesbians, the moment was probably killed for those guys but we believed we were doing a good thing. We gave away thousands of condoms during the couple of years as the Condom Commandos, and frankly, we had the time of our lives in the no-woman places like men’s restrooms out on highways and sea-grape bushes at the beach.

IV. The Work

The first Northeast Florida AIDS services group began around the dining room table in my Springfield home in Jacksonville in 1987. Several of us from the Health Department—Ken Hunt, David Jones, David Andress, myself—and folks from the gay community—Marc Oswald, Dick Neiman, Michael Piazza, Tony O’Connor—designed what we believed was needed to provide both emotional support and specific physical care for people with AIDS. (Frieda Saraga was about to initiate the first support group for gay men with AIDS which she still facilitates today.) That small meeting at my house, and future iterations, eventually led to the development of what is now the Northeast Florida AIDS Network.

As an aside, another group also began around my dining room table—JASMYN, the Jacksonville Area Sexual Minority Youth Network. In 1993, the idea of a youth group was brought to some of us adult leaders in the community by a young man named Ernie Solario. Today, nearly 20 years later, JASMYN is the only organization in Northeast Florida that provides services for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth.

My work as an AIDS epidemiologist was to track the disease to determine how people became infected with HIV. I started that work in May of 1987 with the first wave of AIDS Surveillance officers in the U.S. I had many friends with AIDS, all but one of whom are now gone. I met so many wonderful people, mostly young gay men, and their families. It was a privilege to be of service to them in any way I could, and I made sure there were Health Department resources even if the resources weren’t necessarily earmarked for such assistance.

Strange cases were sometimes assigned to me. I recall the case of the man who went to a hospital in St. Augustine for gall bladder surgery. The surgery never took place because he was reported as having AIDS. I reviewed the medical record which actually read: We must not operate on this man. He walks funny and therefore must be homosexual. He should be sent to Jacksonville General for his medical care. It’s the only time I saw a diagnosis based on the way a person walked!

There were Catholic priests, Baptists ministers, Jewish rabbis. There were no closet doors tight enough to exclude someone from this horrible disease. The most insidious case involved a very popular twenty year old white male, Jason, the darling of his Baptist church and the one who every mother there wanted her daughter to date. A young woman from a nearby town filed murder charges against Jason, reporting that she had contracted AIDS from him. The accusation made the papers—From Mr. Clean-Cut All-American Boy???—complete with a photo of Jason. The Health Department issued a notice asking anyone who had been sexual with him to come to the AIDS office for HIV testing. Over 300 people showed up during a two-day period of time! Women and men of all ages, sizes and colors. Jason, it seemed, was indiscriminate regarding sex partners. He went to prison.

I remember Ron who was in the state mental health hospital but released as his disease progressed. He was sent to the hospice facility that was adjacent to the Health Department offices. His last wish was to “cruise the mall.” He was incredibly weak but I took him anyway and pushed his wheel chair around the mall. He was wildly obscene with every man we passed, but his voice was so weak that I was the only one who could hear him. Regardless, he was thrilled.

The truly difficult part of this work for me and for so many was the inability to fully mourn the loss of one friend before another died. In honor of dear ones lost, I did a tremendous amount of public speaking about AIDS and taught classes at both the University of North Florida for counseling majors and at the Florida Community College for health care providers who needed continuing HIV education. Regardless, it was yet one more time in my life when I stuffed my sadness down inside, left to linger for years.

~~~~~~

As a state employee, one of the many gifts I received from my AIDS work was a waiver of tuition to the University of North Florida, so I went back to school. I was hired by the Health Department with only a bachelors degree in music. I wanted a masters in counseling. In 1989, I graduated from the University of North Florida with a Masters of Education with a focus in counseling. By 1991, I was back in school as a doctoral student in educational leadership and organizational development, and graduated in 1996 with an Ed.D.—a doctorate in education. I was Dr. Sanlo.

It is truly ironic to me that the state of Florida, which took my children away from me because I was a lesbian, hired me and provided the opportunity to obtain graduate degrees that advanced my career—at no cost. Go figure!

23. The Dock

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1991

U.S. President
: George H. W. Bush

Best film
: Silence of the Lambs; JFK, Beauty and the Beast, The Prince of Tides

Best actors
: Anthony Hopkins, Jodie Foster

Best TV shows
: Blossom; Sisters; Rugrats; Home Improvement; The Jerry Springer Show

Best songs
: Everything I do I do It For You, Rush Rush, Rhythm of My Heart, Every Heartbeat, Emotions

Civics
: Persian Gulf War ends; Apartheid repealed in South Africa; Two Libyans indicted in 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland: Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment but U.S. Senate approves Thomas as U.S. Supreme Court Judge

Popular Culture
: Fox Broadcasting permitted to advertise condoms on TV; Connecticut, Minnesota, and Hawaii ban sexual orientation discrimination.

Deaths
: Miles Davis, Frank Capra, Leo Durocher

__________________________________________________________________

In 1991, five months before I was to begin my doctoral work at the University of North Florida, my partner Lea dumped me for a much younger woman. I was a mess. I was unexpectedly single again, and rebound-dating a beautiful but somewhat deranged woman. For the first time in years the colitis came back with a vengeance.

Several years earlier, before Lea and I became partners, we had been friends. I had attended her commitment ceremony with her partner Leslie at the Metropolitan Community Church. In the winter of 1989, Leslie had an affair with the new female lesbian minister in town and abruptly left Lea, who was devastated. Lea was active in the church and now felt betrayed by the two most important people to her, her partner and her minister. Lea often told me that she wasn’t really a lesbian, just a woman who happened to love another woman, namely Leslie. Leslie’s leaving hurt Lea deeply.

To cheer her up—and to make sure no other local lesbian had an opportunity to date her—I took Lea hostage. Well, not really, but in the big emotional picture, yeah, I did. I deliberately occupied all of her time. If she decided she really was a lesbian, I wanted to be the one she chose. I took her for rides in my jeep, out to the dunes where the Atlantic Ocean meets the St. Johns River. She loved to do that, though two years later when she broke up with me, she told me she hated my jeep. It “lacked creature comforts,” she said, like a roof. (I just never thought it needed one. When it rained, I simply raised my big blue-and-white-striped golf umbrella, rested it on the roll bar, and held it tightly in place until the rain stopped.) The lack of a roof didn’t seem to work for Lea anymore. But early on, she loved it.

In the spring of 1989, before they broke up, Lea and Leslie had reservations for a Caribbean cruise. With their untimely and unexpected dissolution, Lea now had an extra cruise ticket, so I bought it and went with her. The crazy thing about that trip was that it was with a group of women from Overeaters Anonymous. A cruise is nothing if not a feeding frenzy, so I suspected there would be many on-board OA meetings. It was indeed a food fest but it was also great fun, and the women, including Lea, along with the scenery and the fresh tropical air, were terrific.

Lea and I became lovers. In my own raging co-dependent self-esteem-less self, I believed that if I didn’t snatch Lea up—so to speak—she would start dating others and stop seeing me. I made myself completely indispensable. It worked, and we became a couple. With Lea, I felt like I had finally “made it” into Middle Class. I perceived myself to have been rather Bohemian for so many years, and now I had a partner who owned her own ranch-style home with a manicured yard, a big kitchen and comfy furniture. I finally looked like my siblings and their families—normal, whatever that means. Life with Lea was pleasant but very predictable. I was happy at first but a recurring thought took hold: I was bored. Was Lea also bored? We didn’t do a good job of talking with one another beyond the daily niceties. I was used to drama and chaos, and really didn’t know how to handle anything that smacked of normal. But I tried, retreating into my usual relational method of operation: silence.

During the winter of 1989 Kal came to live with us. Kal and his partner Bob had moved to Jacksonville from Oklahoma several months earlier when Bob was hired as a minister at a local church. Unfortunately, Bob was killed in an automobile accident on I-95 near St. Augustine shortly after their arrival. Kal was only 22 years old and knew very few people in town. Lea and I invited him to live with us. He was sweet and charming and goofy and fun. He was the son Lea never had and the one I never saw. He was a delight, worming his way into our hearts and our lives, fully with our permission.

Several months after Kal moved in with us, he became ill. He didn’t know he had AIDS and it took him quickly, as it did so many people back then. After his death that next summer, Lea and I didn’t speak about Kal nor about the circumstances of his death. Strangely, we simply acted as if he had never been there.

Being the HIV epidemiologist and dealing with the almost daily deaths of friends and clients of the Health Department, and living with the constant pain of the loss of custody of my children and their lack of contact with me, I once again became depressed. Kal’s death added to my intense sadness. It seemed that my friends—Lea included—and I were living in a constant state of mourning, never able to emotionally resolve the death of one friend before another friend died. I retreated deeper and deeper into my silent world, becoming neither a good friend nor much of a good partner for Lea.

By February of 1991, Lea was spending more and more time at work, the night shift actually, which was strange because she was the executive director of a very large social services organization. The night shift? She said she was doing evaluations of the night shift staff. In March, almost two years to the day that we had become a couple, and a week before my 44
^th
birthday, we broke up. Well, that’s when she dumped me.

“We need to talk,” Lea said that Monday afternoon after work. Oh no, I thought. That’s never a good way to begin a conversation.

“I’ve fallen in love with Kit and she’s moving in here on Saturday, so you need to get your things out by Friday.” It was Monday. I had five days. Shit!

What??? I was absolutely in shock! I hadn’t seen this coming, had no indication that Lea was having an affair. My own obliviousness and silence, I realized later, prohibited me from noticing what everybody else already knew. To make it worse, Kit was 20 years my junior. I bet she got a damned fine evaluation that year! I took an emotional nose-dive into a dark empty pit.

I became even more depressed throughout that summer. Dating a lunatic didn’t help. I was fascinated, in a strange way, about my condition. I wasn’t suicidal. I just couldn’t make a decision. Not about anything, like what to eat or what to wear. Friends came to my little rented house in the Riverside area of Jacksonville every day to help me select my food and clothing. I was a wreck. Making a decision about living or dying simply wasn’t in my realm of capability.

I met Frieda Saraga prior to that summer but I honestly can’t remember when. I feel like I’ve known her my whole life. Frieda is a straight woman, 15 years older than I, with five adult children, three of whom are gay or lesbian. She’s active in the AIDS community, and surrogate mother to many of us although I occasionally hold impure thoughts of her (apologies to her sweet husband Len). Frieda founded both the gay men’s AIDS support group and Northeast Florida PFLAG—Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, both of which are still active. She saved my life, gave me life really, when I had no visible means of humanity or soul. For that and so much more, I love her deeply.