We used to talk about getting all of our friends together, but that’s when the AIDS epidemic started. Everybody died. Everyone in Los Angeles died with the exception of one friend. Then all of our friends from San Francisco died except for one. We lost everybody in the nineteen eighties.

It was a slow, horrible death. There was nothing to do for them at the time. There was no AIDS cocktail. These amazing people turn into living skeletons and I had never seen anything so horrible. This was a huge life changing thing for me. I stayed in Santa Cruz; I never went back to a major city and never pursued my career. I hid out and licked my wounds for years. I didn’t deal with a horrible, horrible loss of all my friends. I became closed off and more and more bitter; more and more hurt. We lost everybody.

That changed my life. It changed friendships and changed how I interacted. I had a friend tell me that I had become callous, and I had. It hurt. It became so incredibly painful to experience these losses that I became numb. You can’t process the sorrow; you can’t process the hurt of scattering yet another set of ashes at sea or going to get another memorial service.

I watched people that I loved waste way over and over and over again. These people had become like family. I had such a connection with these people, particularly from that time. So many friends were rejected by their families when they came out as gay men. They lost their families, so their friends became their family.

The losses were hideous and slow over years. I had been harassed as a kid so I was already sharp and nasty but during this time I became completely closed off.

Living, as I was, with a TV journalist, I would read the Santa Cruz Sentinel, the San Jose Mercury, and the San Francisco Chronicle. I read them cover to cover. I turned Tony on to many, many stories, and he would go cover them. That’s when he got into television.

One morning I remember reading an article about how often men cry. The article said that the average man cries once every three weeks, or three months, I don’t remember exactly how often but it was quite frequent. And I remember thinking that I had never cried for the last fifteen years. I had completely shut down and was not in touch with my emotions. I didn’t have any close friends. I lived a superficial life.

I wouldn’t let anyone into my life, but I realize that I had some pretty superficial relationships. About five years ago I met someone who was experiencing something very similar to what I was going through. We had a lot in common. For some reason that person got in and we became so extremely close.

This was a good friend of mine; a guy named Michael. But at one point we had a falling out. When I lost his friendship it brought up every loss I had ever experienced. I started to cry and I couldn’t stop. I thought I was having a nervous breakdown and I guess I was having a nervous breakdown!

I went to a therapist, and it turned out that I had never processed the loss of so many friends. I had never let myself experience any negative emotion and once I let myself cry I just lost it!

I would literally hide for hours and sob. Tony would come home from work and tell me that my eyes were all red and I would explain it away as an attack of allergies. He never knew. I didn’t know how to deal with emotions; I just didn’t know. I had held them inside for so long.

I’ve probably spent the last four or five years in therapy dealing with this stuff. I’ve completely changed as a person. Now I feel more comfortable with people. I’ve made some amazing close, close, close friends. My life has turned around. It has come full circle.

I’ve talked to other gay men about the AIDS epidemic in the nineteen eighties. It was so devastating. I have a very wide range of friends. I have friends in their sixties, and I have friends in their twenties.

One night I was sitting at the bar in a restaurant. I began pointing at people around the table saying imagine if he died. Then I’d point at another guy and say imagine if he died and another guy imagine if he died…

Then the bartender dies, and the waiter dies and eventually the restaurant closes because the owner dies.

With the AIDS epidemic it was like that. Perhaps eight out of ten guys died. My young friends can’t imagine this. They just can’t imagine it. AIDS changed so many lives. For those of us who were left, we didn’t know why.

I’m a single 49 year old gay man. They’re not that many gay men in my age range when I go out. My generation of gay men was devastated; they’re gone. I have one good friend who is about a year and a half older than I am, and we discuss this. He tells me that he lost 200 friends.

So when I go out I have a lot of younger friends because that’s what’s left!

The hardest yet to lose was my best friend. He and I were soul mates. This was my friend Jim. We had been friends since we were sixteen. We were best buddies. We always used to joke that we would be a couple of old fags together. We’d die our hair blue and get a couple of cats. We had laughs about that.

But we had done everything together. We dropped acid together. We were best friends.

When I lost him, he knew everything about me. I lost my community; I lost my history. Nobody knew anything about me. There wasn’t anyone left who really knew who I was.

The one thing I always wanted when I was growing up was community. I knew I was gay, and the other kids perceived it. I always wanted friends. I finally got to have my community and my friends, and then they all died.

The triumph was coming out the other end of this experience. I learned to deal with loss. Alone to get in touch with myself and who I am. I learned to be comfortable with myself. I learned to be vulnerable again. And learned not to care about the opinions of others. I gathered community about me. I have friends, wonderful friends. I have an outlet for my spirituality and truly have magic in my life.

My business is doing well. I’ve done events that have been attended by the Hiltons and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

My mother was horrified. You’re doing flowers for Republicans?

I’ve been featured in Sunset magazine a couple of times. My new partner is a great person, a wonderful human being. We can’t live together, but we certainly get along better since we don’t live together.