Important: Everything Is Stories is created specifically for listening and is best experienced audibly. If you have the means, we highly recommend listening to the audio version. It captures the emotions and emphasis that cannot be conveyed on the written page. Transcripts are produced using a mix of speech recognition software and human transcribers, so there may be some errors. It is advised to refer to the accompanying audio for accurate quotes when using this content in print.
MARK OLMSTED: Because of the war, my mother’s teenage years were interrupted by the Nazi occupation of southern France. Her life has always been divided in three: before, during, and after.
I’d always been so enamored with stories of the French resistance that I heard growing up, false IDs and forgeries and secret panels. And I remember seeing the great escape when I was maybe 11 or 12 and just all the forged identity cards. I just loved that part of it. I thought it was just fascinating. The whole idea of having a second ID was just super cool to me.. So for me to be able to live that, there was a creative rush from that angle.
As I got older and got to talk to my mother more and more about the war, I realized how deeply it affected her. There was that nervousness about things in general, this feeling that you could be a refugee at any minute or taken hostage, or the way she would just walk fast in the streets. I was amused by her being so affected by something that had happened so long ago.
When I got older, my mom told me thoughts that had haunted her for years. That she had breathed the same air of the people who had died in concentration camps. That she was eating and working and sleeping while they were suffering. It took me longer to start to realize that I had inherited a lot of that baked in anxiety.
She managed to pass along a lot of trauma onto me. I finally realized what a horrible traumatic event the war had been for her. I thought I’d never experienced anything like what she went through. In fact, I thought that my generation and even my subculture was gonna be the happiest and most liberated of the century. I certainly never imagined we could go through anything similar to what my mother went through, that my life would also be translated in three: before, during, and after.
My name is Mark Olmsted, I’m a gay writer who lives in Los Angeles and I have quite a past.
I grew up in, mostly in Rockville, Maryland, but also Mount Vernon, New York. We moved to Rockville in 1963, and at the time it was very much Camelot, Kennedy-esque, a new development with beautiful houses and all these grounds to play. It was very Wonder Years, and I was very Kevin.
AUDIO CLIP: Growing up happens in a heartbeat. One day you’re in diapers, next day you’re gone. But the memories of childhood stay with you for the long haul.
MARK OLMSTED: There were five kids. I was the fourth of five. My eldest brother was older by four years to my brother. And then there was my sister and then me and then my little sister who all came – boom, boom, boom, boom.
It was a very big, happy family. People who blame their bad detours in life on an unhappy childhood, I cannot claim the same. My childhood was really idyllic. I did very well in school. I was always at the top of my class, the apple of my mother’s eye. And then we moved from Rockville, Maryland to Mount Vernon, New York when I was in the sixth grade. And Mount Vernon was the first town over the border from the Bronx.
AUDIO CLIP: New York is almost broke. And you know why? Because too much money is going to the suburbs. They’re killing us.
MARK OLMSTED: In many ways it was a very New York vibe and it was an intense culture shock. It was also very, very integrated.
My parents were always super liberal. That was really very easy in the D.C. suburbs where we didn’t actually know any people of color. And suddenly we were enmeshed in this very integrated neighborhood and school, and I started to become streetwise much sooner than I otherwise would have been.
We still have debates in my family as to who was best looking when we were younger, because we were all super cute. Luke was debatably the cutest. He’s tall compared to me, he was like 5’11. He was darker, darker hair, very strong blue eyes and just very handsome features. He was one of my greatest fans. He also had a good sense of humor as far as laughing at my jokes. Not so great at making them. And just a very particular and a little eccentric kind of guy. He was two years older than me and very much a big brother in some ways.
So the four younger Olmsted kids would hang out a lot and play a lot together. We’d play house in the basement, except we put a twist on it and decided to play white trash family. And we did that by asking my father for one of his airplane liquor bottles that he would bring home from flying, and we filled it up with tea.
Luke would play the alcoholic father who would be swilling down this liquor, the scotch. And my sister was the long suffering wife pleading with him not to drink. I would be the son who tried to fight back against the mean father, and then my other little sister was just the spectator who wondered why we couldn’t play regular house. This tableau that we created was like being in a horror movie, which we weren’t allowed to see. And we loved it.
There was another game I remember playing in the basement with my best friend, Mel Lewis, which was Time Tunnel. That’s when I became really super aware there was some energy between me and him, and even then I knew it wasn’t quite the same kind of crush that other boys had on other boys.
I really have wonderful, idyllic memories of that time that are sort of informed by, around 8 or 9, being extremely aware that I was inordinately preoccupied with my best friend, Mel. Mel was a year older, but he was just a beautiful, blonde, little Robert Redford. All the women would gush over him, such a handsome son and I was madly, instantly in love with him, and there was something sexual in a pre-pubescent way about it.
I wanted more than anything for him to want me to be his best friend. I knew even at that age this had to be kept a secret. And on some level that it was one of the worst things I could possibly do. I couldn’t really articulate it because I was really still too young to grasp it. Say what you want about children who aren’t supposed to have sexuality until puberty, but it wasn’t the case for me.
The thing is that I didn’t directly relate it to sex, or there wasn’t a conscious desire to touch him. There was just this fascination with masculine things, like the voice of my best friend’s dad and his hairy arms, and the way my best friend wore his football shirt. And the way, when we wrestled, the way his chest felt, and how I just wanted to play time tunnel with him really badly, and more than with his little brother who was not as cute. But he was my age, so he’s the more logical friend.
So, I also knew that was a big secret that I couldn’t tell anybody. It was nothing that was shareable. And somehow, even though I never heard anything about homosexuality consciously, I just knew that whatever this thing was, it was very wrong, and I wasn’t supposed to be feeling this way.
I started out by thinking I had the worst secret in the world and it was horrific to be gay. And I remember every night after I jerked off, like all boys do at that age, I used to go through this sort of, ‘that’s it, tomorrow you think about women, girls only, that’s who you’re going to fantasize about. You should not think about this at all.’ And I did this for about two years. And it’s funny, that’s a very short period of time for the era for most gay men, who usually went through a decade or two of this sort of thing. But for me at the time, I remember thinking that was my dark night of the soul.
When I was 15 there was this one Italian immigrant in my class and he had just one of the most beautiful Florentine faces you’d ever want to see, and he actually wore a leather jacket and a white turtleneck, which is just a combination for me. And I remember one night jerking off over him, and after I came I couldn’t do the sort of self reproach. It felt like a kind of beauty. There’s nothing wrong with finding it beautiful, and I remember that was the key. Every day, a little bit more, a little bit more. I was like, a little bit more okay with it. That opened it up.
Once I stopped beating myself up over him, I said, ‘You know what? Maybe this is not something that makes you the worst thing in the world.’ After that, I slowly came out. I mean, not to the whole high school, but to certain individuals, one by one.
Luke was really the older brother of us four. He was two and a half years older than me, but we were all like, one after another in high school. So, he was in 10th grade, I was in 9th, and Erica was in 7th. He wasn’t an easy older brother. He wasn’t affectionate, but he wasn’t physically harsh with me. He just had this sort of tendency to have this dominant and somewhat arrogant superiority. If we got close, he almost would, like, push me away before we got too close, and he could be verbally kind of rough, but he didn’t beat up on me at all. And I didn’t hero worship him at all either. We got along pretty well. He could be very difficult and a little harsh.
So in 1970, I was 11, Luke was 14, and my eldest brother, Steve, went off to Vietnam at 17 and never really moved back to the house after that. Luke took on the little father replacement role. Luke was contemptuous of my dad, and when he wanted to drive and to get a learner’s permit, it required us to have extra insurance that allowed him to drive at night and my father wouldn’t pay for it. And my brother refused to talk to either parent for three weeks until they gave in. He had a bit of a cruel streak.
There was a point in 9th grade when I got on the swim team. And we were both on the swim team together. I was a pretty good backstroker, and they called me Little Luke. It kind of annoyed me, and I kind of didn’t mind it, because I had a little nickname with the jocks.
By then, I had already been in the drama society the year before. In my high school, there was a very cool drama society. And suddenly, one of the actors in a play got sick and they asked if I could step in, and there was no way to do rehearsals and be in the play and still be prepared for the first meets.
And so I quit the swim team for the drama society. I got a lot of grief from Luke for that. And I remember standing up to him. And it was kind of important. And I said, ‘You know what? I like this better. I like it better than swimming.’ And I love swimming, but I hated the meets. It just made me so tense. I learned to be unapologetic about my choice. And that was good, because after that he wasn’t able to bully me.
AUDIO CLIP: No one knows exactly how many homosexuals there are in the United States. There’s no reliable way to find out, for most of them are unwilling to acknowledge it. This much is certain. Male homosexuals in America number in the millions, and their number is growing.
MARK OLMSTED: Homosexuality in general was starting to be talked about in the 70s, and I remember I was watching TV with my extremely liberal dad, and I grew up in a house that never used the n word, and if I had, it would have been the only reason I can think of that my father or my mother would have smacked me. So we were ultra liberal, and yet this Vidal Sassoon commercial comes on.
AUDIO CLIP: Quite simply, we feel there are four steps to beautiful hair.
MARK OLMSTED: And after it’s done, my father says, ‘Faggot’. And it was just shocking, and he knew it the second he said it. And I turned to him and I said, ‘Why did you say that?’ And he said, ‘Well, because he is.’ I actually had a friend who was pretty gay acting and I said, ‘My friend Eddie’s bisexual.’ Because it was almost safe to say that about another person. You could get away with that as long as you didn’t say gay.
AUDIO CLIP: I’m Vidal Sassoon. If you don’t look good, we don’t look good.
MARK OLMSTED: So I turned to him and I said, ‘I don’t appreciate it, Dad.’ I remember him feeling extremely shameful about that, and I think he had said it because he thought he owed it to me to show me that he was one of the guys and didn’t like gays.I was 15 when that happened. And the subtext of that whole conversation was me really wanting to say, ‘I am one of those faggots.’ And him in some way wanting to push that away by saying that you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that I was gay.
In the drama society it was kind of understood without being articulated that most of the boys were probably gay. One of the guys who particularly stood out was a guy named Eddie Hudson, who was black and he had come out very early, and he had his eyes on me immediately. He was a little bit effeminate, so it wasn’t really a secret that he was gay. And in fact, it was politically a little difficult for me to be friends with this effeminate black guy in high school amongst my friends. So the friendship with Eddie was mostly confined to the drama society, and he didn’t peg me officially as gay.
I don’t really remember him saying the words, but he portrayed himself as experimenting and did want to experiment with me. He finally got me into my basement, and that’s where we had sex for the first time. It was entirely forgettable, but the veil had been pierced. I was only 15, but he was going to make sure that I learned everything he learned.
It became very clear within the next few days that he had a lot of experience, and he had been screwing around with older men for a couple years and was very intent on showing me the ropes. He had already been going down to the bathrooms of Bronx subway stations at 13, 14, picking up older men.
AUDIO CLIP: Most Americans are repelled by the mere notion of homosexuality. The homosexual, bitterly aware of his rejection,responds by going underground.
MARK OLMSTED: And within a few months, he had brought me into the city to the apartment of this 30, 35-ish guy.
AUDIO CLIP: They frequent their own clubs and bars and coffee houses where they can act out in the fashion that they want to.
MARK OLMSTED: I remember he was not bad looking, but he had a bit of a belly and I wasn’t really attracted to him. But this guy obviously liked having these 15 year old boys visit and that’s when I gave my first blowjob. It was intriguing, but even then I realized that I wasn’t just gay, I was attracted to handsome men, and this guy wasn’t handsome enough.
The next time we went into the city was when I said, ‘Let’s do something different.’ We started going down to Christopher Street, where we knew that was the big gay area. It was just immediately intoxicating. There’s so many gay men around. And then, the next time we went down to the city, I said, ‘Let’s go in.’ And we went into my first gay bar, which was called Ty’s. And this is still the 70s, so this is pre-AIDS, and I’m just 16 at this point, and I was home.
I was surrounded by all of these guys. I’m also super grateful that I had the late 70s because it was post Stonewall, it was sexual liberation. There’s just no reason not to have as much sex as you wanted.
AUDIO CLIP: Can you tell me what you feel about the homicidal movement? ‘I think it’s great, I think it’s really dynamite, and I think the only way to achieve it is through force and marches like this. If straight people can do it, why can’t we? No, really, if straight people can do all this carrying on and holding hands and kids in the park, why can’t we do it?’
MARK OLMSTED: God forbid I should have had the slightest inkling that I was perhaps a little young emotionally. I just would think nothing of going in on a Saturday night, going to the 9th Circle, which was a bar for young guys, picking somebody up and going home with them, and then just going home the next day. I was in absolute heaven and I found it very, very easy to say hi and talk to them and go home with them. I was very much the seducer because these guys were like, ‘Man, I can’t believe this. You’re what? You’re 16? You’re still in high school?’ It was like I’d been doing it all my life.
Of course, when I think about it now, all I can think of is that 90 percent of the guys I was there with probably died of AIDS. But this was all before AIDS, and so obviously that was the last thing on anyone’s mind.
In order to be able to go out to the bars on like a Saturday night, I had to tell my mother something. So I invented this fictitious circle of friends, you know, went to Juilliard, had apartments in the city. And I would tell her that I was going to stay over at one of their places. They were trust fund kids who had apartments. And when I wanted to go out, I would say, ‘Let me just stay in the city tonight.’ And she would say, ‘Okay, just leave a number where you’re going to be.’ And I would just put a made up number on the refrigerator and she never suspected anything, and she never had to call because I’d always reappear the next day. She completely trusted me. She couldn’t imagine her angelic straight-A student son would lie to her.
In 1975, that was the summer before I was scheduled to go to France for a year and a half. My mother was French and her dream was that her kids were bilingual, but we didn’t have the money to send all the kids to France every year. So then in ‘75, ‘76, she sent me to France To spend a year in a French high school because she really wanted one of her kids to be very fluent, and that had a big impact on my life.
That’s when my lying became sort of amazing. By the time I was due to go to France, I was relieved. I’d been slipping into the city for a year. I tricked up a storm. I even had a boyfriend. And the lies were just getting too much. I knew that any day now, everything was gonna come out. In my mind, that was disaster.
I go to France, and within a month or two there I’d already made some friends. They were cousins of cousins, and we moved into an apartment in the center of town, and I asked them if they knew any gay people, and they said yes, and they were a little shocked. But, they introduced me to someone that turned out to be René, and we fell really instantly, madly, head over heels in love. And I had no idea that he was borderline manic depressive. Not a good person to be your first great love. He was 29, I was 17, and I was not at all ready for an adult relationship. But, in retrospect, falling in love, having bad times, and little breakups and getting back together, was very good for my French.
So, when I went to France, I wrote to everybody several times a week, but especially to my mother. It was very important to her, and she kind of lived through me, and she loved that I was learning French, and I wanted to be able to share something like that with her. I obviously couldn’t. I wrote back home that I had fallen in love with a 28 year old woman. And his name was René, so I just made her Reneé with two E’s. And for me, changing René to Reneé with two E’s was a way of maintaining the intimacy with my mother. Of course, trying to stay as close to the truth as possible, I also made her an older woman, and that managed to shock my mother a lot. But I was like, ‘Phew, I got through that. I’m just gonna pretend heterosexual for the whole year and I’ll be fine.’ And then she announces to me she’s coming to visit. And I’m in an absolute panic.
I try to convince them using very weak arguments why she shouldn’t come, and my parents are pissed. My father’s super pissed. It’s like ‘Your mother wants to see you. There’s no reason not to.’ He couldn’t understand my attitude, and I knew they wanted to meet this woman who was shockingly 10 years older.
Back in the United States, one of the first people I came out to in my teens was a distant cousin named Bernadette. Bernadette had a very big personality. She was in her early thirties, she was this cool, young mom who lived in New Jersey and we went out and I was her manny and helped raise her kids. I came out to Bernadette when I was like 15, 16. She was like the cool cousin and she was fine with it.
When my mother announced she was coming to visit me in France, Bernadette was really afraid that I would just dump this revelation on her as soon as she got there. She imagined that I was going to tell my mother as soon as she got off the plane. So she took it on herself to drive to my parents house and tell them that I was gay. In her head, she thought my mother should really be prepared. Which turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because she had two months to prepare. My father was not surprised, he’d figured some stuff out. But my mother, it was a total, total shock. She just said, ‘Tell me it isn’t true. Tell me it isn’t true.’ And then she didn’t write to me for three weeks, which was unheard of, because she used to write almost every day. And when she did, she just said, ‘For my generation, this was so taboo, it’s hard to describe. And my hope is that you will be willing to go to a psychiatrist.’
When she arrived in France, it was a lovely reunion for a week. But we launched into very lengthy conversations, and as soon as she found out I was gay she also knew that I had been lying about living with this woman named Reneé with two E’s, R-E-N-E-E, and that it was really a man named René with one E, and he’s gay and he’s been lying so much. And that was very hard for my parents.
There was a sense that my family was invulnerable, that bad things happened to other families and nothing would happen to mine. And I think my mother felt the same way and was like homosexuality was just not something that could conceivably happen in our family. I reacted to her suggesting that I have therapy, telling her ‘I’m not gonna change. The ball’s in your court. I understand that it’s hard for you to accept. Here’s a book I recommend.’ Consenting Adult by Laura Hobson, which was very helpful. The journey here is your acceptance, not my change.
AUDIO CLIP: I wish there were an easier way to say this. Just say it. Mom, I’m a homosexual. I’ve been fighting against it for years. And it’s true and it just gets truer. How do you know it’s true? What do you mean it gets truer? I just feel it.
MARK OLMSTED: That was very good because I didn’t give them any space, like a lot of gays do, to suspend the idea that the solution to you being gay is that you’re gonna change.
AUDIO CLIP: If I’m gonna go to someone, I want someone who will help me. Oh, he’s had such wonderful successes. I know about his famous cures, Mom. Well, he can’t cure me because I’m not sick. What’s going on here? We’re starting the new year, Dad, by facing the truth.
MARK OLMSTED: I’d seen too many friends come out to their parents and give them hope, and the parents would take that little inch and put so much energy into it. And that was the best thing I could have done because my parents went from 0 to 60 in the acceptance department.
But after the revelation from my cousin that I was gay I got a letter from Luke, and the first page, three quarters of it was really excoriating. ‘How could you tell mom? I can’t believe you.’ It was the harshest words he’d ever had for me. And then the very last paragraph. He said, ‘And little do you know, all along, I’ve had the same feelings as you. Luke.’
It was the most shocking reveal you can imagine. I was like, ‘What does he mean? Is he coming out to me? Is he saying he’s gay?’
I immediately wrote him back, and basically it was one big question mark. It was like, ‘what did you mean, Luke? What did you mean? Because if you meant the first part of the letter, where you just basically hung me out to dry and called me everything you could imagine. then we can’t be brothers anymore, but if you were really trying to tell me the last part of the letter, then we need to have some serious discussions.’
When I got back that summer, we spent most of the summer up at my parents cabin in the Berkshires and had a lot of opportunities for Luke and I to walk around this sweet little lake, and to spend time together. We came out to each other more thoroughly, but his version of homosexuality was so intellectualized and rationalized. He wasn’t the same kind of gay I was. Yet, he still thought he could think his way through it, and he even ended up having a girlfriend for a while after that before he finally just said, ‘Okay, I’m gay all the way.’
The thing is, my gayness has always been super traditionally gay. I’m very attracted to men. I wanted to have sex with them and I wanted to maybe have a relationship and fall in love. And his was, it’s all about male bonding. He psyched himself into thinking that it was something much different than it was.
I’ve never quite understood why he had a reluctance to come to terms with being gay. I think he naturally was more masculine than I. When I was 17, I had a girlfriend for the summer who I had sex with. It was a girl named Patti who was quite beautiful and buxom and she clearly took to me, and we had a discussion at a picnic table, and I said, ‘Patti, I can feel the chemistry between us, but I just have to tell you something, I’m gay. I’m going to be gay at the end of the summer, but if you want to have a thing with me this summer, I’m willing to experiment. But I just want you to understand from the beginning, it’s an experiment for me.’ And she was like, okay with that.
I remember going into a bar with her and all of the energy I got from other men who were envious of me being with this beautiful woman. I never forgot that, and I realized that for so many closeted straight men and regular straight men too, that’s an incredible reinforcer. And a lot of men who stay in relationships they’re not that happy in. But if they have a particularly attractive girlfriend, they get the support–this energy from other guys. Luke understood how powerful that was. He definitely enjoyed and got off on that energy from other guys when he was with girls or when he was with his jock friends on the swim team.
And I said, ‘I don’t understand, explain this to me.’ And he said, ‘You call it homosexuality, it’s just male bonding. It’s just getting off on the male energy.’ He thought that part of the sexual attraction with a man and a woman was that energy that you were getting from other guys and that rush. And it was a weird theory and I was scratching my head. I was like, ‘What are you talking about? No, you’re attracted to men. You want to have sex with a man.’ If you get married or you have a girlfriend, yes, there is that reinforcing energy from other men, but they’re two completely different things.’ He was not ready to make that leap yet.
I really was so anxious to be an adult with my own apartment in New York, and I just was so emotionally precocious, but you can only be as old as you are at that age.
I come back to complete my college. I go to Stonybrook for a year, and then I want to be a film screenwriter, so I transferred to NYU film school and I’m lucky enough to get an apartment in the East Village, a sixth floor of a walk up, right next to the Hell’s Angels.
AUDIO CLIP: It’s another subject that always pops up when people start talking about the Hell’s Angels. Violence. The no bullshit, take care of business kind of violence. Most learn real fast that they should have minded their own business.
MARK OLMSTED: There were like two completely different New Yorks in the 70s. In the public imagination it was high crime, people were leaving, the city was broke, that famous drop dead to New York headline. And then for gays, gays were moving into the city, they were getting lofts in Soho and the art community. And they were opening up gay bars all over the place because it was right after Stonewall. The police weren’t busting us anymore. So, I came of age and started coming out in ‘75, ‘76, right in the middle of it.
AUDIO CLIP: The subways are crummy, and they’re dangerous. You get pushed, you get shoved. Sometimes you get mugged in the subway during the daylight.
MARK OLMSTED: New York was going to pot in the 70s. It was not in good shape, but for gay life, it was a little slice of paradise.
I had 250 places to choose from every night, and I must have gone to every one of them. I was 18, 19, 20. I had an enormous capacity for alcohol at an age where I didn’t get hangovers and I thought that was the way it was going to be forever. I could go to any bar any night and go through that whole pickup. ‘Hey, how are you doing? What you doing?’ Hone my flirting skills. And I was a good looking young guy and I had no trouble meeting men. And each time was a little bit of a conquest, and at the same time the fact that we were marginalized made it deliciously taboo.
There were these backroom bars like the Mineshaft, or the Anvil, that stayed open until six in the morning. And it was decadence and debauchery. It was the best time of my life, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. And of course, looking back, it didn’t feel like you were innocent at all during that time. It felt like the opposite, like you were decadent, like you were just guilty as possible. You’d go with your friends, and you’d arrive at one or two, and everyone would do drugs, and they’d all hit at the same time, and at three and four, you’d be dancing under the lights, and in this music, and feeling that sense of tribal communality that was–it’s just very gratifying. And the amount of sexual tension and energy that was there because men on men is like sexuality squared.
But I can still conjure up the smells. There was a smell that came from going up the stairs of a gay bar, because there was the whiff of beer and sawdust that would come out of the bar, and then there would be two guys coming out laughing with their arms on top of each other and another guy coming out and you look him and exchange glances and you’re like, ‘Damn, I can’t believe he’s going.’ And he’d come back and follow you in. And then that would be the guy you went home with. It was just magical. That’s the only way to put it.
AUDIO CLIP: Can you tell me what you thought about Charlie Brown, the Sodom and Gomorrah guy carrying the American flag? He’s a closet queen and you can find him in Howard Johnson any night. And what color underwear did he wear? Pink. Thank you.
MARK OLMSTED: It was the sexual revolution in general, but for gays it was a sexual explosion, because the sense that we had complete freedom was really strong once you got into the subculture lifestyle. There were so many gays in New York. We could recognize each other pretty easily, and even though very few people were out to their families, and coming out was still a big deal, and most people were in the closet at work, that just increased the sense of we were this marginalized community who were keying into each other and feeling very cool about being marginalized. We had so much fun and we were going so fast that it almost felt like something or another was going to stop it because it was so crazy. It was like the train was speeding so fast.
At first I was very guilty, and then I realized that all the things that are taught you,not only by society, but by psychiatrists, are just to fit you in a mold. And I just rejected the mold, and when I rejected the mold, I was happier.
I have no moral judgments about promiscuity whatsoever. But it feels like, in retrospect, you could only have so much hedonism before it became destructive. I just wish the universe had come up with a different way to slow us down than AIDS.
In 1979, Luke moved to New York to study for the MCATs and lived with me. He moved in for about six to eight months and he drove a cab mostly at night while he studied for his MCATs. He often did a very late shift or the night shift, so we weren’t mostly two on top of each other.
Luke didn’t come out the way I came out for a few years. He didn’t tell my family. He had a girlfriend for a while named Ruby. So when he finally came back to New York, he was ready to be out and consider himself gay. Even when he finally came out, the volume on Luke’s gayness was just like, at a one or two, and on me, it was always up at a eight or a nine. And I don’t mean a feminacy like that kind of gay, I just mean the promiscuity was just, mine was off the charts, and his was extremely low key.
We would go out occasionally, and our styles were different. I was a much bigger drinker than he was, and I sort of felt self-conscious about my level of drinking, because it did bother him a lot. We would go to the bars and I just kept waiting for him to be like me, but he would have one or two beers to my six or seven. I was just like, ‘Don’t you understand that the goal when we go out is that we each pick somebody up?’ And he was like, ‘No, I’d rather just have interesting conversations.’ So, our styles didn’t really mesh. And I slept with a lot more men than he did.
I don’t remember the sexual encounter that led to it, but suddenly, in late ‘82 or ‘83, I had a fever and a giant bump at the back of my head and my neck. It was like a golf ball. And my neck’s lymph nodes were huge. So I first went to my brother, the doctor, and his reaction really alarmed me. His eyes went wide, and he immediately took me up to see Tim.
So Luke had to do his rotations in medical school, and one of them was at Jamaica Hospital in Queens, and Tim was doing his surgical residency. And then they became friends. Tim couldn’t give me a really strong sense of whether it was evidence of HIV. This was before the AIDS test. I could tell my brother really wanted him to tell me it was HIV definitively because my brother wanted to scare me into having safe sex and less sex and partying less, and he basically wanted to corral me into behaving, being lower risk. He seemed to want him to confirm that this was definitely an AIDS diagnosis. And Tim, who had a wonderful bedside manner, was trying to do the opposite and just reassure me and say, ‘We don’t know anything.’
There was a lot of resistance, which was a form of denial among a lot of gays until sort of ‘83, ‘84. My form of denial was thinking, ‘Oh my God. I have a brain tumor.’ I did a little mind trick with myself by pretending it was a brain tumor. Like, that was less upsetting to me even though I was just as upset in the sense that I really thought, ‘Oh fuck, I have six months to live.’ But there was no social stigma.
AUDIO CLIP: All over the country, homosexuals are reporting increased discrimination. Landlords, they say, are turning them away. Some dentists won’t treat them. Some ambulance drivers won’t stop to pick them up. Sometimes the police, they say, don’t respond to their calls.
MARK OLMSTED: So I think that that is one of the reasons my brain went toward that.
I don’t remember the lymph nodes being inflamed for more than a week. And it’s kind of amazing how quickly everything went back to normal, nothing changed in my behavior. I was still like 22 and hormones are raging, so I was extremely relieved.
Every gay I know who survived from then remembers what they were doing when they first read the article, and that was on June 3, 1981.
AUDIO CLIP: It was a rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals. A mystery disease known as the gay plague has become an epidemic unprecedented in the history of American medicine. Today from the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta topping the list of likely victims are male homosexuals who have many partners and drug users who inject themselves with needles.
MARK OLMSTED: We all read the article and we were all immediately talking about it. And for the first two months or so, it was more sort of morbid bar talk. We would be like, ‘Watch out, you could have the gay cancer.’
AUDIO CLIP: Scientists at the National Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta today released the results of a study which shows that the lifestyle of some male homosexuals has triggered an epidemic of a rare form of cancer.
MARK OLMSTED: We were all in complete denial that this could possibly turn into something that it turned into.
AUDIO CLIP: The condition severely weakens the body’s ability to fight disease. Researchers know of 413 people who have contracted the condition in the past year. One third have died and none have been cured.
MARK OLMSTED: It was just inconceivable. Maybe a few hundred mostly gay men would die. They were going to find out the cause. It was going to be like legionnaire disease.
We did become acutely conscious that it wasn’t on the news, except when I attended the 10,000th death, which was about six months in. I went to a candlelight vigil with my friend Paul, and the first person we actually saw with AIDS was talking. It was still very rare to see anybody in public who looked like a scarecrow, and it was awful. We went back to my house to see if it was on the news, and we listened to the speakers again on the news, and it was like, good, they’re covering it.
AUDIO CLIP: There’s a new HIV infection every single minute, there’s a new AIDS death every half hour. There are 212 new cases every day of full blown AIDS. In New York alone, the cases in straight women has gone up.
MARK OLMSTED: And Paul turned to me and said, ‘We’re all gonna die.’
When he said that, I couldn’t argue with him. Because there was no reason to think that he was not telling the truth. That, I remember, is a big gut punch of how serious this thing was. He and his boyfriend did die, one after the other, in the late 80s.
AUDIO CLIP: Blamed for encouraging high risk sex were shut down by the city a year ago, but most had already closed for lack of none of these clubs wants their clientele to die and no gay man in this city wants to die, nor does he want his friends and lovers to die. One contact now is as dangerous as ten contacts were four years ago.
MARK OLMSTED: The worst and most dramatic moment was Christmas 1983 or 4. Luke was home for the holidays and we decided to go out to the bars together, and my mother grabbed my hand, and she said, ‘Be careful, it’s a terrible thing to die young.’ Her reaction to me being gay was very dramatic, but as soon as AIDS came along, all she wanted was for both of her sons to survive and not to get it. And for me, that was the most heart clenching moment, especially in retrospect, for her to say something like that. She was living with such fear already, and it was legitimate fear. And that feels awful to me. And, you know, it’s a terrible thing to die young.
I remember distinctly the night that he went out, and I was always encouraging him to go out and have a good time. Go to the bars and pick somebody up, and it’s so much fun because I was just so into that whole process.
Luke was visiting from medical school and he came down to the city for the weekend. We went out and we got separated, and he went home with one guy and I went home with another. And then I got back home and I waited for him. I remember starting to get worried because he didn’t show up. And then when he finally showed up, I was like, ‘So, did you have a good time? And why didn’t you call me?’ Or whatever it was. And he just sort of grabbed my wrist and he was blanched. I was like, ‘What’s wrong?’ And he goes, ‘The condom broke. The condom broke.’ And he was one of the very first first people to even use condoms. Safe sex was not really talked about yet because this was like ‘83, but he had the guy use a condom and the condom broke, and he was sure that he was infected. The way he said it, the way he experienced it, it was clear that in his mind, this is it. I just got AIDS.
There was nothing reassuring I could say. The irony that he would wear one and then it would break and that he was so un-promiscuous next to me. I mean, yeah, I became positive also. I earned it, so to speak. I don’t really believe in life is fair or unfair or it’s so unfair, but that part was a little unfair. That was a lot unfair.
I also have had dreams about that night, and we’re always looking for each other in the street and we can’t find each other. I don’t know if there’s any reality to that. I was like, one of us had the car, and the other one didn’t, and I was supposed to meet him on the corner. I don’t know, it feels so real, but I definitely have haunting dreams, or memories around that night.
The worst part was that he didn’t want to go out that night and I dragged him out. I think that’s why I feel really crappy. He didn’t want to and I was like, ‘Why not?’ And I just wish I just said, ‘No, stay home. Don’t worry about it.’
I’m not quite sure when he tested, but I waited till 1988 to get tested because as I continued and stayed healthy in the 80s I was like, ‘Maybe I did get lucky, maybe I am somehow HIV negative.’ And I finally said, ‘Better to know.” And so I got tested and by that time, it was almost anticlimactic. I was so ready for the doctor to walk in and say, ‘Yes, you’re positive.” He didn’t do the, you better pack up your stuff and arrange your affairs, you’ve got six months to live, like some doctors seem to have done. He was just, ‘Anything you want to know?’ And I was like, ‘No, I’m very well informed.’ It was just confirmation of what I already knew.
I was HIV positive since the beginning of the 80s, certainly from the beginning of the crisis. You could know that because from whatever your t-cells were, you could calculate backwards, because you usually lost about 50 t-cells a year. So,I knew that I’d become HIV positive in ‘81 or ‘82.
I’m not being under melodramatic when I said I was completely ready for it, and I didn’t have a strong emotional reaction. Most people did, but I didn’t. I had had a strong emotional reaction in ‘82 when I got the lymph nodes explosion even though it was because I misdiagnosed myself as a brain tumor. I still had that, I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die panic. I think it was easier for me to imagine that than it being from AIDS, but now it’s very common and people know that if you have these symptoms of fever and lymph nodes. But we didn’t know back then it was a symptom of early infection.
When I got the lymph node explosion, I remember laying down on my bed and saying, ‘I can’t handle this fear. I can’t handle this fear.’ And making a conscious decision to stop resisting the fear, to just be as afraid as I could be. I just laid there and let myself be incredibly afraid, washed over me. It was bad, and then it didn’t kill me I noticed. And then after a little while of laying there you get bored, and I finally say, ‘Okay, all right, guess what? Being afraid is not going to kill you.’ And that was a very healthy thing to be able to function. But I think it was also the beginning of my getting over the fear by going with it almost too much. I lost the fear of death a little bit too much as I went ahead because I see how that lack of fear ended up fueling some bad decisions in my future.
By 1988, I’d moved to Brooklyn and Luke was visiting me from San Diego, and I can’t remember actually having a view from my window to the street, and yet, I have a distinct memory from an aerial point of view of seeing Luke cross the street and being shocked by how thin he was. He had a big sweater that just hung on him.
He was very upbeat, like, ‘No, I’m on this great macrobiotic diet and I feel so good.’ And I was like, this can’t be right. He was just too thin. And it was very clear from one quick look at him that he lost something like 25 pounds. And unbeknownst to me in California Luke was also getting tested. It was in my apartment that I asked him, I said, Luke, ‘What’s going on with the weight? And it came out that he had finally tested positive.
The weird thing is that I tested positive by then. I think I’m almost sure. I can’t remember ever telling him and I can’t remember his reaction. It’s like, he always knew, but we had to have had a conversation, and that’s one thing I never will understand how I don’t remember. I don’t remember telling my mom that I was HIV positive. I don’t know if my brother told her for me just like I told her for him. That seems the most logical explanation ’cause it was too hard to tell her directly, but I couldn’t swear on any of it.
PRODUCER: Do you think there’s a reason you can’t remember when those things happened?
MARK OLMSTED: The writerly thing to say was that I blocked it out, or it was so painful, but the event for me was the breaking of the condom and how really upset he was about it. And that I couldn’t really reassure him. That for me was the sort of emotional understanding that he may have had HIV. When he told me about himself being positive, I think that I had already somehow assumed it. And so it wasn’t a shock. And so the conversation, the moment didn’t stick in my mind. Plus, those of us who were positive in the 80s, it was such bad news, we tried to put up a brave front and you didn’t want to react to someone as if it’s a death sentence, vice versa, you didn’t want them to react.
That was when I had the world spinning moment that I should have had when I got my test back from me. Maybe that’s why I have this strange aerial remembrance of him walking across the street. Because there was something out of body about it, that experience. Because I knew that I was positive and then my brother was positive and it was like a double disaster. One of us was definitely going to die, and probably both of us. And maybe it was because of the idea that both of us were going to die and what it was going to do to my mother. My mother is going to have lost two sons to AIDS. Losing two sons would have been horrific no matter what, but losing two sons to AIDS.
Luke didn’t have that reaction that I had, he was like, ‘No, I’m going to beat this thing.’ And he had all these plans and all these projects he wanted to try. And he was grandiose enough to think somehow he was going to actually figure out the cure to AIDS. He really had a bit of a messiah complex.
He was a doctor and so he was always trying these experimental therapies, including one which was a typhoid vaccine to stimulate the immune system that he was doing underground study of in San Diego.
It was the late 80s. There is nothing. There is a little bit of AZT, which he thought was too toxic, which he was partially right, but in lower doses. Garlic. He loved garlic. He believed in garlic being the cure-all for everything. Drinking your own pee. How’s that? Drinking your own piss. He did that for a year or something. And so, yeah, those were the two most shocking ones.
There was certainly no logic to the fact that my brother got sick and I didn’t. There’s no logic to the fact that I had some friends who also, like me, never got sick or progressed very mildly after ten years, and then some people who died, relatively quickly. I had more friends who lived with it for maybe five, six, seven years before they got sick. And that’s very common with HIV, but then once they got sick, it was two to three years.
I had a theory that if you treat your body badly, you’re also treating the virus badly and depriving it of nutrition, etc. That was a theory I told the doctor. He kind of laughed and said, ‘No, I don’t think that’s true.’ But that was a little pet theory I had for a while to justify the fact that I was treating my body like shit.
If there’s a psychological element to it that was in my favor, I think it could have been to my advantage that, because unlike many of my friends who were like, ‘I’m gonna beat this thing, I’m gonna beat this thing,’ I buried all of them. I was like, ‘I’m not gonna beat this thing, this thing is gonna kill me.’
To the extent that you help create what you resist, that you can feed the beast by resisting it, The fact that I didn’t resist it at all, that I was very much in acceptance, might have, in ways that I don’t understand, but there are some schools of thought that can explain it, that I gave less energy to the virus. Whereas my brother was fighting it, fighting it, fighting it, try this, try this, try this–could have been giving more energy.
That’s just a theory, and I’m so wary of doing anything that in any way, shape, or form blames the victim, or culpabilizes those people who got sick because they didn’t do this or didn’t do that. I think maybe it was a good thing that I rode in the direction of the river instead of against the current, but I wouldn’t draw any rock hard conclusions about that.
He was in San Diego and I was in New York and I was working a regular job. By 1988, he actually invited me to come live with him in San Diego. He was starting a clinic in San Diego to do plasmapheresis, and plasmapheresis was a new treatment in which you take the blood of healthy HIV positive guys and then inject them into much sicker AIDS patients, and the idea was to boost their immune system with whatever was keeping the healthy HIV positives from getting sick, which he thought was going to be, like, the great treatment. And he said, ‘I need you out here, Mark. I need you out here to man my front office.’ And I had always known that for my screenwriting, that it was a better place to be on the West Coast. Luke was always a big fan of mine. Now, why he thought I would be a good administrator for a medical clinic, that was Luke.
So we lived together in San Diego for a year and a half. He moved to the Bay Area to a job in industrial medicine, and within three months he hated it. He said, basically, the cold in San Francisco is making me miserable. And, so he moved back down to LA and he got a job in an AIDS practice. And I moved from San Diego to LA.
He wasn’t even there six months before the coughing started and the weight loss soon after, and that was it. He got too sick to work. But that time we had together where he was working there and I just moved to LA, I remember those as a very lovely six months before he got really sick. That was really a nice honeymoon.
He never really shook the cough that he brought with him from San Francisco. And it just started to get worse, and worse, and worse,until his colleague said ‘You sound sicker than the patients.’
By then, we had a rhythm and an understanding, and on some level, we knew both of us were gonna die. And so, it was like, I’ll take care of you, and if you die first that at least I won’t have that on my conscience, and vice versa. We just understood as brothers, and as gay brothers, that whoever got sick the other one would be there for him.
Everyone expected I would die first because of the kind of life I led. We openly showed concern, but most of the concern was for me, for him, because he was getting very thin and I seemed to be one of those people who was within the ten year dormancy period, which was mostly theoretical at the time, but they were starting to realize there were slow non-progressors.
When he finally got sick, he was in bed for, like, two days. And I went into his doctor’s office to see one of his colleagues, and I said, ‘You need to come to the house, and you need to get him into the hospital.’ And they were wonderful, and immediately came to my house and said, ‘You need to be in the hospital.’
It was around Christmas of 1990. He got out of the hospital and was on disability. I was working and I’m just like, ‘Is he going to get better? Is he going to get worse?’
I remember one really bad moment where he was coughing a lot and I wanted to go to the gym. He asked me to bring his beeper. I said ‘Why.?’ It’s like because I’m afraid of having a coughing fit and bursting a blood vessel and drowning in my own blood. I was just like, ‘I didn’t know what to do with that information.’ He cried and I sat there with him. We were not physically effusive. I didn’t hug him. I didn’t hold his hand. It just was never our style, but I was there for him. Finally, he stopped crying. He said, “Go, go to the gym. Just take my beeper.’ So I took my beeper and he finished that by saying, ‘I don’t want to die alone.’
I remember going to the gym and just keeping an eye on the beeper and trying to figure out, was he being melodramatic? Should I go home? I didn’t know what to think. It turned out he wasn’t being that melodramatic because three weeks later he got so sick we sent him up to Seattle. He flew up to Seattle to be at my sister’s, and my mother could visit, and that’s where he died.
In the two weeks before Luke died, he had a series of conversations with my sisters in Seattle that they taped.
AUDIO CLIP: About two weeks ago, I had, real, real briefly,I had dreams where we took class photos of everyone I knew, and then took class photos of everybody I ever worked with, that kind of thing. And it was just, uh, I was the photographer. So I woke up in the night and said, well that’s pretty obvious what that means.
I do believe that the mind is, the slate is wiped clean once you expire. And, and, and it’s the soul that needs all the care and love. Once you expire, not your mind, just get rid of your mind, just leave it, you know? Know that you’re not gonna bring it with you, it’s not that valuable, it’s just garbage that helps your body move, and helps you function in a very raw world.
Whereas the place that we’re going is gonna be very beautiful, and you don’t need all those, you don’t need thoughts like anger and, and revenge, and things like that, which you do need in this world because you need, you need to protect yourself. It’s very, you know, so imagine that we’re going to go to a place where we don’t need our mind and we can discard it. And you’ll be better off. Because to claim is very painful.
MARK OLMSTED: I always felt guilty because I should have taken care of him to the end. But everyone agreed that I shouldn’t have to see what was likely to be my future. Because it was very likely it was going to happen to me.
The other awful moment was when I dropped him off at the airport to go to Seattle. And I did say I love you, and he did say I love you too, and we hugged a little bit. I watched him go through the doors and on some level, I just wondered if that was the last time I was ever going to see him. Even though I knew the chances were that I’d never see him again, to have a moment of a long hug or something that felt like a goodbye, officially, felt like I was making it more likely that he would die.
We had to hide behind the fiction. He was going there for a couple of weeks. And then he’d be back, and he’d be better. There’s a lot of weird mind games you felt. If I scripted it in a movie I would have had to pull over and start sobbing there, but you just had to function. I had to drive home from the airport. That was an awful thought.
I’m grateful that in life, most of the times that you see someone for the last time. You don’t know it because it’s hard when you know it. People say, ‘Oh, I wish I could have said goodbye.’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know about that. I don’t know about that.’
Once Luke really understood that he was going to die, he was pretty accepting of it. It was almost like it was so painful to die young that he had to just race through to acceptance. And when they hooked him up to morphine, he didn’t die like he was supposed to. And he woke up at one point and he said to my sister,
‘Please make sure I don’t wake up again.’ And he didn’t. That’s all I’m comfortable saying about that.
I was still in L. A. when he died. That night I went out because I didn’t know what else to do. I went out and drank and partied on some level. Psychically, I think I was trying desperately to delay, delay, delay, really feeling how awful it would feel. So I did it by drinking and drugging a lot. I used alcohol and drugs and men to the point of insanity.
I see my whole grief over Luke having been parceled out over many years in small bits, because you can try to numb your grief, but it’s still there and it just comes out in different ways. And considering my outrageous acting out, I see a lot of that as misdirected grief now.
He died in 1991, and the next five years I lost someone close to me, once every three months. Boom, boom, boom. I didn’t want to feel any of it. I would cry, I would write a eulogy, I was very good at writing eulogies. Sometimes I’d fly back to New York for a memorial service for a friend, really being with my grief, I felt like it would kill me. And I’m not sure it wouldn’t have. I mean, people say you don’t actually die of grief, but yes, some people do. Some people do. People die of broken hearts all the time.
After he died, the doctor he was working with showed me a charge against him in the local journal and he would have lost his license. There were like seven or eight things and he kept trying them. The typhoid vaccine was the only one that he brought in other men suffering from AIDS and that’s who he got sued by, one of the parents of one of the guys who eventually died and then felt that Luke was responsible for having made that happen faster. But he never answered the charge or went to court because he had died.
So, when I think about what if he had lived, he might have ended up losing his medical degree. I mean, it was crazy to do your own non-FDA approved drug trial of this totally unproven treatment. But that was him. That’s who he was.
After he died, I had just started a new job. I was living with him in a two bedroom in L. A., and I had my very modest 19-5 salary, and I couldn’t afford to keep that apartment. But he had $10,000 in his bank account, which I should have shared with my sisters, but one of them didn’t need it, which was my rationalization, and the other one I gave his car to, so I could rationalize it. Mother always said you can rationalize anything, and I have to be really honest that AIDS was the ultimate rationale.
So when I had the idea, I did need the money if I was going to keep his apartment and not immediately get just any old roommate. I couldn’t afford the rent on my own. And so for a few months I used the money in his bank account to pay both rents. And then his disability checks kept coming in. I had his checkbook and his checking account was still open and the disability checks were coming. It was very easy to keep depositing them by mail.
What if I just deposited this one? And I meant to then tell them that he had died and hope that they didn’t ask for it back. Then it was so nice to have that. And I assumed that there was some sort of computer information that tells state disability that a patient is dead and they cut it off. But they just kept coming month after month.
When he was in the hospital and sick, I had to pay the bills. He just said pay the bills. He authorized me to write the checks by total happenstance. He had kept his bank in San Diego. He never opened up a new account in Los Angeles, so all the deposits were by mail. I thought that was really weird and I couldn’t understand why he did that. But he says, ‘Oh, I like them. It’s a credit union. I know them.’ But it meant that I never had to go into a bank in L.A. and be recognized as not him. It was sort of an intellectual understanding that provided the rationale for me to do what I wanted to do. And the fact that, mathematically speaking, I probably wasn’t going to survive.
I’d been positive for quite some time. Finally, a letter came that said you have to reassert your disability at the doctor’s, you know, a checkup. And I just didn’t answer it. And then the checks just stopped coming, and that was it, there was no consequence. One of my first non-alcoholic, non-drug addictions from all this was the rush of getting away with things.
The first credit card fraud was very simple. It was one of Luke’s credit cards. He had like three credit cards. I remember cutting up two of them or not using two of them, something like that, but there was one I just said for emergencies, just in case, and it was just so tempting. I used it for little things here and there and the credit card company just kept sending these cash checks that you still get that I could just deposit in my account. So for about a year, the balance on his credit card kept rising because I kept, I think it was up to $7,500 or something like that. I realized a year into it, on one of the statements, that there was an option to have his balance paid off in the event of his death by insurance. But obviously there was a problem if he had died a year before and I had kept using the credit card. And then when the year anniversary of his death came up, I had this idea, what if I forged the death certificate and just added a year? It seemed like such a small thing. It was a very slippery slope.
The first thing was not closing his bank account and then writing checks in his name. He had already allowed me to do that when he was in the hospital and he had that money in his account. and it felt like a small thing. It felt much bigger for me to keep depositing his disability checks. That was definitely blatant fraud. So by the time I came up with the idea of forging his death certificate to pay off his credit card it felt justifiable because it would all be paid off by the insurance, credit cards and all that stuff. To be honest, it felt like a victimless crime.
I realized that I couldn’t do the forgery on my own. This was all pre-Photoshop, don’t forget, early 90s. I had a very close friend who was a graphic designer, and I bridged this possibility with her. And she thought it was a fabulous idea. She thought it was so cool. She had her own subversive psychology about a whole bunch of other things and that’s one of the reasons we were very close friends. And she very happily changed the ‘91 to the ‘92. I just couldn’t see any risk to it. I sent it in to the credit card company, reporting the death of my brother, Luke, with the enclosed death certificate. And boom, the insurance paid it off. And so I was like, ‘Wow’. And I got my first rush of getting away with things.
It had allowed me to do these things like fly back to New York, go out to dinner with friends and just live a much better life than $20,000 a year allowed me. But what happened is that because he had great credit, they kept sending cards. I paid off all my credit cards with his money and his credit card and my credit started going way up and I got offered more cards.
So, whenever I wanted to do something in the early 90s, if I didn’t have the salary, which of course I didn’t, I used one of the credit cards. I always assumed that as soon as someone dies that all the banks and credit card companies magically know it, that they’re sending each other the info. It was a flaw in the system that I sort of discovered. If you don’t tell them, it’s amazing how they don’t know.
Now, I don’t think any of this would be possible in the age of the internet now, because these things are double checked. But in the early 90s it wasn’t the case. I felt weirdly justified because society was making us diseased pariahs. People with AIDS were just shunned. Now in LA and New York you were less shunned, but in general the feeling of being like fuck you society, yeah, I’m gonna use credit cards and yeah, you’re all gonna pay a little bit, because all the fraud that goes on adds a tiny bit to everyone’s credit card, but it’s like you’re gonna marginalize me, I’m gonna marginalize you. It was the rationalizations of someone who wanted to do it anyway. Who just wanted to live much better than he was able to live on what he made, and so certain that I was gonna die and get sick. My t-cells kept going down, I was like, ‘Alright, you’re on the clock now.’ So there was this perfect storm of circumstances that no one could have predicted.
We were gay brothers, both HIV positive. We lived together. He dies, I am responsible for him–for settling his affairs, I use the card and I do that initial fraud and then I’m going to just close everything out. And suddenly his license comes in the mail for renewal. So, I went to the DMV and handed in his old license and she looked at it, tossed it aside and said, ‘Okay, go get your picture taken.’ And I got my picture taken. So I had a license as my brother with my fingerprint and my picture on it. And that started 10 years of a double life.