In the last weeks before Paul’s death, he insisted to Terry Weisser that horses were running loose in the bathroom of their home.
Terry remembers the hallucinatory horses with some fondness — they brought a touch of lightheartedness to his lover’s days and to his own. Bedridden and in diapers, Paul was suffering progressive brain damage during the final stage of his 15-month-long bout with AIDS. He was 27.
By then, he had fought off a variety of AIDS-related ailments, including three attacks of pneumonia, and both he and Terry had dropped out of classes at the University of California’s campus here — Paul because his declining health prevented him from attending class, Terry because he had decided that Paul should spend his last days at home, rather than in a hospital, and at that point Paul needed round-the-clock care.
Now, eight months after Paul’s death, Terry has returned to class, seeking to complete undergraduate work that was interrupted first by a career as a restaurant manager and then by Paul’s illness. He has also volunteered to serve as a public speaker in the university’s AIDS-education campaign, answering questions from students, faculty members, and others on the campus who are worried about the disease and telling — against the wishes of Paul’s family — both Paul’s story and his own.
“His father said to me after the funeral, ‘now, don’t go talking to the press,’” says Terry, who has himself experienced some minor symptoms that his doctor says may be AIDS-related. “But there’s an enormous amount of negativity and fear. That needs to be balanced. I want to talk to as many people as I can.”
Terry is 31. He was raised on a farm in Minnesota, but was attracted to Northern California by its reputation as a mecca for homosexuals — he has lived with male lovers, he says, since he was 18. At the university, where he is now a senior, he is studying the economics of natural resources. He supports himself by working in a local restaurant, and relaxes by playing bridge with friends and working out at a gym.
Paul, on the other hand, was of Mexican-American Roman Catholic descent, and was raised in Redwood City, one of the towns strung out along Highway 101 between San Francisco and San Jose. At the university, he studied architecture. He had, Terry adds, an enormous number of friends.
Terry and Paul met about three years ago, at a time when Terry was unsure of what he wanted to do with his future. “I had enrolled in the Peace Corps, but they were really dragging their heels. When Paul came along, and we became lovers, he was a retail-clothing manager, and I was a restaurant manager, but we were both college dropouts. He had decided to go back to school, and he’d been accepted at Berkeley. So he suggested I apply, and I was accepted, too. We moved to Berkeley at Christmas in 1982.”
If, as homosexual lovers returning to college together, they were in some ways atypical Berkeley undergraduates, in other ways they were not — they attended classes, studied for tests, and worried over assignments. In the crowds of students crossing Sproul Plaza at noon, neither would have seemed at all out of place — not in that first year, at least.
“The whole thing happened so fast,” Terry says. “To this day the rapidity of it all amazes me. The next December, around Christmas, Paul started really freaking out. He wasn’t a moody person at all, but we started fighting a lot, and he started staying out all night, and getting drunk and being really abusive. I knew something was wrong, but it wasn’t until later that I learned that violent changes in mood can precede an AIDS condition.
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“One Sunday night he went to the free venereal-disease clinic at Berkeley’s gay-men’s center, and came back totally distressed. He had a yeast infection that a lot of people with AIDS get — white patches in the back of your mouth. The doctor gave him a prescription for vaginal suppositories. That’s how you treat it — you suck on vaginal suppositories. We thought it was pretty funny.
“In February, though, Paul couldn’t get out of bed for something like six weeks. He lost his appetite, and he was sweating all the time. He hadn’t been diagnosed as having AIDS yet, but I knew he did. I don’t know what he thought. He didn’t want to talk about it.”
Paul consulted a doctor at the university’s Cowell Hospital, Terry recalls, but it wasn’t until he contracted first cytomegalovirus — which can produce symptoms similar to those of mononucleosis — and then a type of pneumonia called pneumocystis carinii that Paul’s doctors at Cowell and at nearby Highland Hospital were certain that he had AIDS.
“In April, he was in the hospital for two weeks with the pneumonia,” says Terry. “That’s when his father found out. Then he recovered, and he was perfectly healthy for five or six months. We went to Minnesota during the summer, and he met my family. We more or less forgot about it.”
Late in 1984, however, Paul’s health began to worsen, and his outlook worsened, too. “I never let him go to the doctors alone,” says Terry, “and I wouldn’t let them do anything to him that I didn’t approve of.
“But he started to rebel against my advice. The problem for Paul was not how to fight the disease, but how to accept the notion of dying, the sense that it was inevitable. That’s the way he perceived it, although I don’t think that’s the case at all. But we both believed that our lives had been tragedies, and he thought that getting AIDS was the final scene in his tragedy. The only question was how to die with grace and some sense of style and with a peace of mind.
“Paul never wanted to tell anyone that he had AIDS. None of his classmates knew. He was ashamed — he had a horrible time accepting the fact that he was gay. If it had been me, I would have told more people, but I told very few. I felt that if this was going to be the final scene of his life, I was there to make it happen the way he wanted it to.
“Ultimately the church gave him his greatest comfort. A priest came once a week, and when he left Paul always had this glowing smile on his face.
“We had heard all the horror stories, but we only had one bad experience, when a nurse at the hospital wouldn’t come to his room when he had a fever. He had to call me in the middle of the night, and I went over. I complained to the director the next day.”
“But Paul’s friends didn’t desert him, and our landlady didn’t know until after he died that he had AIDS.”
“After his third bout of pneumonia, I decided to keep him home, and eventually I went into the medicine cabinet and threw all his drugs away. He had wonderful doctors, but they couldn’t really do anything. His doctor from Highland Hospital came out once a week or so, and she was on call anytime and would come over, basically on her own time. The visiting-nurses association sent someone over once a week, and his doctor from the university’s health service, even though he was technically off the case after Paul went to Highland, came by to help.”
“School became a very separate thing for me,” Terry continues. “People encouraged me to stay in class because of the distraction it provided, but finally it became too much.”
A sympathetic professor helped him extricate himself from his classes for the semester, he recalls.
“Paul’s last months were very content,” Terry says. “The only thing that bothered him at all at the end was when he started to get confused. And I had an enormous amount of help — Paul’s illness had a powerful impact on dozens of people. They were incredibly helpful, and were more than willing to offer their services. The amount of care and love he got from total strangers amazed me. He was at home at the end for several months, and the house was filled with friends. You knew there was death happening, but there was also this incredible vitality.
“He died of dementia. I had seen that happen to old people over a couple of years, but in six weeks he went from a lucid, intelligent person to this vegetable lying in bed.”
“My father and my sisters and brothers came out from Minnesota for the funeral,” Terry says. “They gave me a tremendous amount of support.” His relations with Paul’s family remained good, says Terry. “They think of me as a kind of second son.”
“Certainly it was tragic that a 27-year-old had to die of this. There was a lot of grief and a lot of pain, but the good things that have come out of it have been remarkable. Death doesn’t have to be a horrible thing, not if you don’t let it.”
For the sake of Paul’s family, Terry wants to avoid publicizing Paul’s last name, but otherwise he is looking forward to making whatever public appearance the university’s AIDS-education program schedules for him in the coming months.
Already he has been asked to appear on a panel at a university-sponsored AIDS forum, to speak to a group of counselors, and to speak at a seminar on death and dying. He is not worried about the possible consequences of having a high profile, he says — the managers of the restaurant at which he works are aware of his situation, and AIDS-related hysteria doesn’t seem to be as much of a problem.
“Obviously, I’m a prime candidate for the disease,” Terry says. “I take care of myself and I’m perfectly healthy, but I’ve tested positive for antibodies, and the doctors tell me, because of some minor things that have happened, that I have ARC” — the acronym for “AIDS-related complex.”
The test for antibodies verifies whether an individual has ever been exposed to the AIDS virus, but cannot predict whether an individual will develop the disease. Over all, researchers at the Federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta say that between 5 and 25 percent of those exposed to the AIDS virus will contract the disease eventually.
ARC, on the other hand, indicates that the person has developed symptoms associated with the first stages of AIDS. The doctors say that an as yet-unknown proportion of those with the preliminary symptoms that lead to an ARC diagnosis can expect to develop AIDS.
Terry, however, does not expect to develop anything of the sort. The past two years have changed some of his attitudes, he says — for the better. He now intends, he says “to be the first person ever to test positive and then negative.
“My own self-hatred about the fact that I’m gay has had a negative effect on my health,” Terry says. “And I’m just now working that out. I’m trying to get away from the notion of tragedy. I’ve had enough of that.”
