Ground Zero/Islands in the Sunset
© 2025 by Bryan R. Monte. All rights reserved.
The desire to be of service to the LGBTQ+ community and to return to the place where I founded my literary magazine, No Apologies: a magazine of gay writing, was the reason I drove from the East to the West Coast the summer of 1987. I wanted to recover the momentum I’d lost while at graduate school and the year thereafter that I taught high school. I thought I knew what I was doing. However, I would soon realize I had underestimated the physical, psychological, and economic toll of driving into ground zero of the US AIDS pandemic.
I was certainly aware of the pandemic. I’d kept up with the news and knew about HIV’s rapid spread among gays in San Francisco, New York City, and even where I lived in exurban New England. I had mentioned to friends it might be safer for me to stay there. They strongly disagreed. They felt that the rates of infection in outlying regions would soon catch up with those in New York and San Francisco, and the best places to be would be where the first new drugs and treatments would appear.
I returned because I thought I could do my part and help inform people about AIDS prevention and care through writing and editing newsletters and pamphlets such as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence had done with their safe-sex pamphlet, Play Fair!. I had distributed it along the June 1982 San Francisco Gay Freedom Day parade route, and it just might have saved my life.
However, even though I was informed about the pandemic and wanted to help fight it, I was still regularly shocked by its scale and how much it had changed LGBTQ+ culture. The two, weekly, gay newspapers, the Bay Area Reporter and the San Francisco Sentinel, instead of featuring adverts primarily for gyms, masseurs, barefoot gay cruises, and dance parties, now had double pages of AIDS obituaries along with adverts for estate planning, wills, burials, cremations, and legal and bereavement services. When I mentioned this to someone, they said: ‘Oh, you’ve been away for a while.’
Former flatmates, partners, and friends also confirmed this radical change during my first weeks back. San Francisco City and County Supervisor Harry Britt, my former flatmate and domestic partner, told me that Bill Kraus, his campaign manager, had been diagnosed with HIV in late 1984 and had died after going to France for treatment in 1986. Britt also advised me ‘to assume that everyone was anti-body positive until you know otherwise,’ because statistically the infection rate in the city was then one out of every two gay men. ‘So, if it’s not you, it’s the person you’re with.’
A few days later I went running in Golden Gate Park. I thought I saw Mike Belt, the designer of No Apologies’ cover, run by. I ran after this man, calling Mike’s name, but he didn’t stop. I eventually lost sight of him. Later that day, I called my friend, Roberto Bedoya, to tell him I’d seen Belt in the park. Bedoya told me I hadn’t because Belt had died while I was gone. It was then that I began my list of those I knew who had passed away from AIDS. It would eventually reach 33.
My first visit to the Castro was also shocking. At Café Flore at 16th and Market, a hub for gay writers, I was surprised by how thin and aged some men looked in just three years. I tried to speak to one, a former boyfriend whose hair had gone grey. However, he couldn’t seem to remember me and he spoke with a tremor. Someone at the café told me: ‘Oh, yeah. The virus must have crossed his blood/brain barrier.’ While at Flore, I also overheard one man ask another where a third man was. The second man quietly answered: ‘He’s gone.’ Then I walked from Flore to Castro and Market and passed the Names Project at 2362 Market where inside men and women sat behind sewing machines making quilts for their AIDS dead. Thousands of these quilts would be displayed on the DC Mall near the Washington Monument just a few months later in October.
Walking down Castro Street, among the usual gym-fit men, I also noticed an occasional man with a cane or a walker. At Star Pharmacy at 18th and Castro, I saw a triple row of white prescription bags sitting in the Will Call window, waiting to be collected. At the 33 MUNI bus stop outside of Hibernia Bank, I noticed more thin men waiting for the bus, which ran from Pacific Heights through the Haight and the Castro and terminated in Potrero Hill. This bus connected UCSF and San Francisco General Hospitals, the main AIDS research and the in- and out-patient treatment hospitals. Walking back to the Castro from the Mission on 17th and Prosper Streets, I’d sometimes see men sitting in cars, outside the Castro-Mission Health Center, gripping the steering wheels and staring ahead, either afraid to go in and get their AIDS test results or trying to pull themselves together after they had.
In addition, there were people I had rarely seen in the Castro before: parents. As their children’s illnesses progressed, a few arrived to assist them with their treatments and hospitalizations. Two parents were most memorable. The first was a mother and her adult son walking across the street together at the intersection of Castro and Market. They wore matching sun bonnets with broad brims and holes for ventilation. As I looked closer at the son, I noticed the brim and the holes helped to partially mask a face freckled by Kaposi sarcoma. A second was a father wearing a green, John Deere cap above a sunburnt neck and his pre-teenage son sitting in a restaurant. As the son enjoyed a slice of chocolate cake and a glass of milk, his father rubbed his tired eyes and creased brow and silently drank his cola. I imagined the boy’s mother was with an older sibling either back in hospital or at his/her/their flat.
As I said previously, I was prepared for the severity of the AIDS health emergency. I had kept up with it in the news. However, I was unprepared for rents that had doubled in the last three years. From 1982 to 1984, I had rented a two-bedroom flat in the Mission for $450 a month. Now they were $900 a month. So, the salary increase I had anticipated obtaining with a Master’s degree would be wiped out.
In addition, San Francisco was experiencing massive corporate restructurings such as Joan Didion wrote about in Where I Was From. Companies were downsizing and reorganizing, shedding jobs and employees and/or moving to ‘lower wage regions’ in the American South and Midwest. I discovered the previous promises of employment, through my university alumni networks the winter before, were no longer valid.
Fortunately, I still had health insurance through my former employer’s COBRA plan for 18 months and a place to stay for a month with Dennis Green, a friend from my UC Berkeley days, so I had the time and space, physically and psychologically, to get my bearings. I also had contacts in employment agencies where I had worked previously.
In the meantime, I checked in with other friends from my first stay in the Bay Area from 1980 to 1984. I drove up to the Berkeley Rose Gardens with Greg Murphy, where he took some photos. I also cycled with Bedoya from the Panhandle to the beach and back and we had a BBQ at his house. From Bedoya’s I called Tobey Kaplan, who I had published in No Apologies, (and many years later in Amsterdam Quarterly). Kaplan invited me to come teach a poetry class with her at an East Bay high school. The class went well and she asked if I’d like to teach part-time in the prisons, a job which offered health and dental benefits.
Then, I found a two-month stay in Pacific Heights with a Brown alumnus. He offered me a room in exchange for housesitting while he went on holiday. It was good that I did because one afternoon I came home from work early and saw two men in the back garden trying to break in. When they saw me, they hopped over the back fence. I called the police and two policewomen came right over, chased the would-be burglars, and then took my report.
Finally, a break came in October at a San Francisco insurance company, where I’d been sent by an agency. On my first day, I heard one of the underwriters sighing as she pressed keys trying to get one of the office’s only two PCs to work. I went over and asked her if she needed some help. She said she wanted to work on a policy rating, but couldn’t get the computer to start properly. On the screen was the message, ‘Insert a system disk and press any key’. I looked in the diskette caddy next to the computer for a DOS disk. I inserted it and pressed a key to get a prompt. Then I asked her what type of program she was trying to use.
‘Was it for word processing or a spreadsheet?’
‘What?’ she asked.
‘Was it to type words or numbers?’ I added.
‘Numbers’, she said.
I took the operating disk out of the drive and looked in the caddy again. I saw various program names with which I was unfamiliar. However, one was called Lotus 1-2-3, so I thought that would probably be for spreadsheets instead of the ones with ‘Write’ or ‘Word’ in their titles. I looked in the disk’s file directory for the .exe files. There were two: one was Lotus and the other was 1-2-3. I tried one of them and brought up the program. Then I asked her to put her data disk back in the drive, I did a directory search, and loaded her most recent file. She beamed at me happily as if I was an Egyptian priest privy to the secrets of the afterlife.
‘Would you like a job here?’ she asked.
Next, I had to find a permanent place to live. Through newspaper adverts, I looked at places in Silicon Valley, whose rapidly expanding tech companies I’d heard so much about in the media. I placed an advert in one of the gay newspapers. After looking at about a half dozen places, I chose a flatshare in Mountain View for six months. After that, I shared a house in Cupertino for two years. During this time, I commuted up to San Francisco on Caltrain to work in San Francisco or later, drove or took the bus to the company’s San Jose office. After work, I’d run on a local high school’s dirt track or along a trail in Palo Alto.
I also attended the weekly, Stanford Gay and Lesbian Alliance meetings, at the Firehouse, near campus. Here I met men and women from the surrounding suburbs, who I sometimes also saw at weekend house parties. Many of them were electrical or mechanical engineers, computer programmers, architects, and copywriters, who had studied at Berkeley, Caltech, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc. They worked in Silicon Valley’s large aerospace, computer, defence, and intelligence industries or at their own small start-ups. Many belonged to High Tech Gays, an IT professional group that met monthly.
Some of them had already tested positive for HIV due to the big, mid-80s, AIDS prevention campaign to get tested. Unfortunately, many who discovered they had seroconverted also realized statistically they had a life expectancy of one to three years due to articles in the press and what had happened to their friends with HIV. One man, an Ivy League graduate, told me he felt like he’d been given a death sentence because there were no drugs in the pipeline to slow down let alone stop the progression of HIV. In addition, in 1988, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) still insisted on strictly run, double-blind, drug test trials and forbade experimentation with more than one untested drug on patients, even for people, many of whom had few years to live, who were willing to volunteer to take the risk of testing multiple drugs simultaneously.
During this first, full year on the West Coast, I did have time to visit and get to know another gay company employee, Ken Blaylock, in San Francisco, who was antibody positive. He mooed to break the tension when he returned from receiving his experimental cowpox shots. We occasionally went out to dinner, and/or to a film at the weekends, drove up to the redwoods or out to the beach, sent each other holiday postcards, and spent one New Year’s Eve together.
I also visited gay poet and Manroot Press publisher Paul Mariah in Agua Caliente in Sonoma County. He was grieving the loss of his partner, who had passed the previous March. Mariah had cared intensively for his partner during his last months, even setting an alarm every four hours, so he could get up and move him to prevent bed sores. When his partner died, Mariah was angry that the county newspaper wouldn’t identify him as the surviving partner in his partner’s obituary.
However, even though I had returned to the Bay Area and found a job, I still had little time to help the gay community and to write. Once I started working full-time for the insurance company, I was required to attend weekly night school courses to learn insurance concepts and formulas and apply them to case studies. I was also required to pass three general insurance exams within two years. (That gave me only one chance to retake one of the three, semester-long courses’ three-hour exams.) Otherwise, I was told I would be required to repay the company $2,000 for the classes and I would be fired. (At that time, I also had $7,000 in student and car debt).
During the next year and a half, I passed my insurance exams. I transferred up to the corporate headquarters in San Francisco. I found a flatshare through Paul Roth, a pianist at a Nob Hill hotel, who told me about a friend who was looking for a flatmate. This flat was coincidentally in the same block in the Mission where I had lived before I had left for Brown.
After working in three offices, I finally felt I was coming into my own at the company. I was in charge of the installation, maintenance, networking, and backup of 32 PCs and their data. Through my work I was exposed to the latest operating systems and software even though I sometimes had to buy them myself before the company adopted them. For example, I bought and installed Windows 3.1 on my computer. My boss noticed its iconic, flying-windows screen saver and remarked, ‘It’s just a fad.’ Six months later I had installed Windows on every PC. Nonetheless, I was happy to be working and living in San Francisco again. From my desk many floors up, I could sometimes hear the clang of the California Street cable cars’ bells.
I also finally had the time to start my first writers’ group. Through adverts in Poetry Flash, I soon had a group of five or six writers who met weekly in my living room, though they didn’t always attend the same weeks. The core of this group were three writers: Ronald Linder, Donna Kreisel Louden, and Andrea Rubin. We discussed and critiqued poetry, fiction, and other prose. Other writers came and went, but these three stayed in contact with me and shared their work for at least a decade. For example, I assisted Linder with editing and typesetting two poetry books: his Animals on the Roof in 1991 and Dancer Stay Out in 1993. Poet Ed Mycue also occasionally stopped by. He’d entertain my students with saucy tales about my ‘former life’ as I referred to it, when I first lived in San Francisco, before my graduate scholarship to Brown. Some students would attend the workshop just in the hope of catching Mycue again.
Around that time, I met writer Marc Dulman at the Walt Whitman Bookshop in the Castro. Through him I came in contact with a gay radio group at KPFA-FM in Berkeley. Their news reporter had taken a leave of absence to care for his partner, who had AIDS, so I offered to do the weekly news and bi-monthly interviews. I covered mostly LGBT legislation, new AIDS treatments, AIDs protests, and cultural events. My interviewees included John S. James, editor of the AIDS Treatment Newsletter, about new AIDS drugs and treatments, Eric Rofes, director of Shanti Project, about housing assistance, Stan Leventhal, publisher/editor of Heat Publications, about gay books, and Heiner Carow and Dirk Kummer, the director and the star of the ground breaking East German film, Coming Out, among others. I also covered the Left Write! Writers’ Conference where I spoke with Allen Ginsburg and James Broughton.
One of the last and biggest stories I covered was the Sixth International AIDS conference in San Francisco, which also coincided with Lesbian and Gay Pride Week in June 1990. There I witnessed its thunderous conclusion. LGBTQ+ and AIDS activists flooded the conference hall to protest President G. W. Bush’s administration’s slow response to the pandemic. US health secretary, Louis Sullivan’s short, concluding speech was interrupted and sometimes drowned out by protestors with air horns, a hand-cranked police siren, and chants of ‘Shame, shame, shame’ and ‘Turn your back’. Some also threw pennies and paper airplanes at the podium. It was the most important story I ever covered.
It had been almost a three-year wait to get back to what I wanted to do since my return to the City, but now I was back in my element. As I wrote in my previous memoir, ‘Write/Right to Speak’, I had hoped that one day I would report on a cure or at least a successful treatment for AIDS, but that wouldn’t happen for another five years. By then, many of my friends and acquaintances, such as Blaylock, Leventhal, and my childhood friend and artist, Jerome Caja, would be too weak for the new drugs to save them.
Running a writers’ workshop and gathering the news and interviewees for my portion of a weekly broadcast also placed significant demands on my time: about an hour for each minute of airtime and about 30 minutes outside of workshop for each student’s submission. Unfortunately, this left very little time for my own creative writing, which was largely confined to journaling.
Unexpectedly, in the summer of 1990, there was a very disturbing change in my Mission neighbourhood: four homicides in four months within four blocks of my flat. My funky, artistic, multi-cultural neighbourhood had not improved as residents had hoped. Instead, it had become dangerous, so I had to move for my own safety and that of my students’.
Fortunately, I heard about a flat share out by the beach, just down the street from Golden Gate Park. Months before this, I’d dreamed of an ocean-view flat. So, after a brief interview with my prospective flatmate, I moved from the sunny, warm Mission to the cooler, foggy, wind-torn, seemingly abandoned Avenues in the Outer Sunset. Here, blown sand that accumulated in the gutters was periodically scooped up by the City and returned to the dunes. From my third-floor living room window I watched the dune grass wave in the wind and saw and heard the ocean’s breakers. My students also liked the new location. It was much easier to find parking under those windows and they no longer requested an escort to their cars or to the bus stop, both of which I could see from above. Some nights I would even make it home from work in time to watch the sun set behind the Farallon Islands, 40 kilometres from shore.
Then in February 1992, the pandemic literally struck home. Eight months previously I had met and fallen in love with a man. Within a few months, I moved him into my flat (my original flatmate had moved out months earlier). This man seemed strong and healthy when we met. He could pop doors off their hinges and move furniture without straining. He told me he practised safe sex and that his last HIV test was negative. However, around Christmas he developed a persistent cough.
Two months later, I came home from work to find a note from one of my partner’s friends saying he been taken by ambulance to hospital with pneumonia. A few days later his official diagnosis was Pneumocystis carinii (now referred to as Pneumocystis jirovecii), indicative of HIV. I was shocked. However, while my partner was in hospital, I paid the bills and held down the fort. When he was discharged from hospital, my partner’s parents and siblings snubbed me, perhaps blaming me for his illness, and his friends moved him out one Friday while I was at work. They left so much rubbish it took all weekend and three, large bin bags to clean it up.
Then, my downstairs neighbour died and his partner lost his mind. He built troughs of water in his living room, which he tried to part as Moses did with the Red Sea. This water leaked into the garage below, causing the ceiling to turn green from the mould. He’d also sometimes switch off the building’s electricity at the mains. Next, the guy down the hall with HIV went home for Christmas and never came back. ‘Another abandoned apartment’ my landlord remarked, and I wondered how many there had been in my building.
I couldn’t mention any of this with my department colleagues, all of whom were straight. Once my boss had asked me if I was ‘One of those people’, after a gay friend, an employee in another department, dropped off some documents at my desk and shared some news of his recent weekend. To my credit I replied, ‘You mean one of those people protected by a city and county anti-discrimination ordinance?’ and we left it at that. I also called my mother to see if I could come home on unpaid leave for a couple weeks to recover from all that I’d been through recently. She said, ‘Don’t’—and I didn’t for the next 12 years. A few weeks later, driving home on the coastal motorway from Silicon Valley, my car was suddenly enveloped in fog and I couldn’t see more than a car-length ahead. Frustrated at not being able to really navigate, I suddenly thought: ‘What does it matter if I drive off the road and/or crash?’
Thankfully, as it became increasingly likely I was going to lose my day job before I found a new one, it was my writer friends who kept me from ‘checking out’. To keep myself busy, I joined the Gay Macintosh Users Group (GMUG) with Linder. Through this group I was aware of the newest Mac advances and even those still in the pipeline. In addition, through Rubin I got a tip on free-lance jobs evenings tutoring Russian emigres in English. Lastly, I taught a once-a-week, technical writing course every other semester at the UC Berkeley Extension.
Unfortunately, in April 1993 I was made redundant by my company. With only a $640 unemployment cheque and an additional $400 at most from three, part-time free-lance jobs, I soon realized I’d quickly burn through my savings to pay my $1,400 a month bills. It was then I knew my future lay elsewhere. Here I could no longer help others. let alone keep my own head above water. Finally, I stopped struggling to stay where I was. I conceded I’d soon be moving far away from ground zero and my view of those islands in the sunset. AQ
