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Nobody Gets Out of Here Alive

Patrick Gourley has seen enough death from AIDS. Now it�s time for rebirth.

A A A Comments By Steve Jackson Thursday, Mar 2 2000

"My love and gratitude, Harry Hay."

Gourley notes that conservatives in the state legislature last week won their battle to ban gay marriages in Colorado, an issue on which Gourley isn't sure where he stands. In some respects, he worries that anything so hetero-imitative may cause gays to lose their edge. On the other hand, anything that upsets the Christian right so terribly can't be all bad. And the mere fact that the Republicans had to struggle to ban gay marriages would have never occurred thirty years ago.

Fifty-one and counting: Patrick Gourley, head of nursing at the Infectious Diseases Clinic at Denver Health Medical Center.

Queer theory: Patrick Gourley (right) with Harry Hay, from whom he got his "Ph.D. in Queerdom."

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Still, there is much work to be done. That was clear to Gourley on New Year's Eve, when he and his lover were leaving a party downtown and encountered six obviously intoxicated young men. "Hey, faggots," one of them yelled, his friends laughing. The comment caught Gourley off guard. He and his lover weren't holding hands or swishing down the sidewalk. After all he had seen -- all the death and suffering faced with courage by "faggots" -- it seemed unfair for the term to be used in so derogatory a fashion. Gourley's boyfriend, who is ten years younger, was upset and wanted to confront them. Even Gourley, for just a moment before prudence overcame the better part of valor, thought about yelling back, "That's Mister Faggot to you!"

Looking at the photograph of the smiling men in front of the San Juan Pueblo bed-and-breakfast, Gourley notes that AIDS taught a lot of valuable lessons. Most important, it answered the question about how they would prove to the world that being gay was more than a sexual act. How many hundreds of times had he seen a man stick by his lover, clean up vomit and diarrhea, spoon-feed an invalid for months, even years, long after there was any sort of sexual relationship?

He had been there himself. It wasn't about sex. It was about love. Maybe at last the world had seen the meaning of true gay love. All it took was a few hundred thousand lives.