I can’t help but feel like I’m letting Barbara down.
It started rather benignly over the weekend. I received a message request on Facebook:
Sir, my name is Ellen, my sister was looking online for today for my brother’s obituary and found something from your website came up. Could you please contact me about that? I would greatly appreciate it.
Ellen also sent me a “friend” request.
I’m guarded on Facebook and don’t accept friend requests from people I don’t know or haven’t met personally. I did not respond, figuring Ellen could reach out via the Michigan LGBTQ Remember contact portal if she wanted. She did and asked me to contact her.
When I responded, she wrote:
[W]ell my family was shocked to see this when my sister was looking for my brother’s obituary. First can you tell me how you got his information? I don’t understand that. But my brother would never accept someone writing about his AIDS NEVER, let alone put it out there for the world to see. My brother was a beautiful soul and I’m asking you to take that off your website. But please explain to me how you got his information. Thank you for getting back with me.
In my reply, I explained that for those on Michigan LGBTQ Remember who passed from HIV/AIDS, I have drawn from a range of sources, including obituaries in mainstream dailies, obituaries in gay publications, the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, a Remember My Name ceremony, death certificates (which are public records), friends and relatives of the deceased, and in a few instances personal knowledge for people I knew. I also noted that of 884 people on the site, 147 individuals had died due to AIDS and, without knowing which of the 147 she meant, I couldn’t be more definitive.
Ellen replied with her brother’s name and then, rather insistently, asked what right I had to include him and directed me to take him down. Her messages then ratcheted into all caps On Tuesday, she wrote:
TIM YOU DIDN’T ASK PERMISSION TO PUT MY BROTHER ON YOUR WEBSITE BUT I HAVE ASK YOU TO TAKE OFF. SO PLEASE DO THAT.
She followed up later that day with:
TIM, I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY IS SO IMPORTANT FOR YOU TO HAVE MY BROTHER ON YOUR WEBSITE, YOU NEVER KNEW HIM. I’M ASKING YOU YET AGAIN TO TAKE HIM OFF OF IT.
I was bullied as a kid, so all of this was quite distressing. And all of this prompted me to dig in my heels. I didn’t reply further, instead rehearsing in my head all the reasons for not removing him from the site.
Why would I need anyone’s permission? And why should biological family have any particular say, especially given the horrendous history of parents and siblings shunning people with AIDS.
As Katie Batza outlines in her recent book AIDS in the Heartland, the experience of many people with AIDS returning to Kansas to rejoin family was disheartening: “some were welcomed only if they kept their identities and illnesses hidden from local community members, and others were forced back into the closet as they hid their identities in exchange for palliative care.”
Further, as my dissertation advisor George Chauncey shows in his book Why Marriage?, many families rejected their sons and surviving same-sex partners, and often overlooked their dying wishes, situations that helped reveal the need for marriage equality.
How did I know her claim about her brother’s wishes were not actually her own wishes to protect the family reputation?
What right did I have to include him? Let’s start with freedom of speech and freedom of the press and throw in academic freedom. It’s kind of my job, as a historian, as a professional historian, to seek historical truths.
If her brother was not important to include, what of the other 883 on the site?
Whose prerogative should win out?
To talk through some of these concerns, I phoned my friend Barbara Murray, who for twenty-five years headed AIDS Partnership Michigan and who, for this blog’s World AIDS Day 2018 post, kindly discussed twelve people she knew who had died from HIV and AIDS.
Barb understood the ramifications of both the pressure Ellen was exerting on me and the need to battle AIDS-phobia and homophobia. She offered her moral support and gave me confidence to stick to my guns.
I have spent years on Michigan LGBTQ Remember to combat, not facilitate, stereotypes and ignorance about LGBTQ+ people. The whole project is intended to show that queer people, including those who were PWAs (People with AIDS), were real people from all sorts of backgrounds and all sorts of places across the state. Taking him down would only perpetuate the stigma of AIDS and serve to erase LGBTQ+ history.
These were all general considerations. Also very much on my mind was who Ellen’s brother was. I’ll call him Garrard.
Contrary to Ellen’s presumption, I knew Garrard. I knew him more as an acquaintance, but enough for him to have an impact on me. Garrard was the first person I ever saw in the casket who died from AIDS-related causes. As I’ve written about here before, seeing Garrard laid out brought the reality of the disease home to me in a new and palpable way.
His cause of death was not a secret. Someone, someone who loved him, submitted his name to be said aloud in a vigil held at the state Capitol in June 2000.
For Garrard’s sake, I wanted to resist the censorship, to resist any self-censoring. Plus he’s been dead for thirty-four years. When does the statute of limitations run out on keeping silent?
Then Wednesday came the kicker:
TAKE MY BROTHER OFF THIS WEBSITE TODAY.
A polite request had shifted to a screeching demand.
I stewed about it all day. That Garrard died from AIDS in 1992 at age 34 is an injustice. I thought how if Garrard had been slain in an anti-gay hate murder, his cause of death would almost certainly been publicly disclosed. It also occurred to me that, in a way, because of Ronald Reagan’s indifference and neglect the first six or seven years of the pandemic, his death, in fact, could be considered an instance of anti-gay murder. How could I possibly acquiesce?
And yet…
I am also confronted with the reality of the moment we’re in.
This is a moment, three years after a gunman killed three people at Michigan State University, when I am grateful that MSU administration now conceals our classroom assignments from the general public.
This is a moment, too, when my friends Patrick and Erica have been witnessing firsthand the ICE crackdown and protests in Minneapolis, in which lesbian mom Renée Macklin Good lost her life to a masked ICE agent.
It is perhaps not incidental that my clash with Ellen is taking place the same week that the Trump Administration directed to National Park Service to remove the rainbow flag flying at the Stonewall National Monument.
It’s impossible not to be apprehensive, aware of extremists or the unhinged who will do whatever they can to ensure their version of history holds sway. I do not know if Ellen fits this description, but why take the risk?
As Esther Newton has said, our first imperative as queer people is to survive.
In the midst of a sleepless night, I caved. I removed H’s last name from Michigan LGBTQ Remember and from Queer Remembering. I kept all other details intact.
Alas, this is the moment we’re in.
And then…
As I was proofing this blog post for Queer Remembering, a comment came in on Friday from Linda, a second sister:
my sister has ask you numerous times to take our brother off your site. Instead you put a black mark across his eyes and you removed his last name. This isn’t good enough for us. When we were writing his obituary he ask for us to not put that he died of AIDS. We respected his wishes NOW you need to respect my brother as well.
To be sensitive to what may have been Garrad’s wishes, I decided to remove him from the gallery of the main website, and to identify him only as Garrard on Queer Remembering.
Minutes after Linda’s message, Ellen wrote, all-caps:
TAKE MY BROTHER OFF WEBSITE.
BLACKING HIS EYES AND LAST NAME OUT ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH. TAKE MY BROTHER OFF THIS WEBSITE.
I feel like I’m capitulating, that I’ve committed an act of cowardice and betrayal. I’m sorry Barbara.
Before closing, I’ll note that there’s nothing stopping someone from learning Garrard’s identity from earlier versions of the site on the Wayback Machine. Nor is anything stopping someone, once they learn his name, from spending $34 to get a long-form copy of his death certificate from the Michigan Vital Records Office. And there’s nothing to stop someone from sewing a panel for Garrard to include in the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt.
Whether he would have wanted it or not, Garrard deserves to be remembered, not forgotten, not erased. Real people died from AIDS. He was one.
Queer Remembering 