Living is complicated

April 20, 2016 10:23 AM

Last Men Standing. The stories of eight men who aren't supposed to be here. Diagnosed with HIV in the 1980's, when that was a death sentence, they are now living lives they never expected to have.

KQED recently devoted an hour-long segment to the project. Interviewed:
* Erin Allday, health reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle
* Harry Breaux, has been living with HIV since 1980.
* Jesus Guillen, has lived with HIV for 30 years.
* Vince Crisostomo, Program Manager for the Elizabeth Taylor 50-Plus network; has lived with HIV since 1987

An accompanying documentary, "Last Men Standing" was screened on April 8th at San Francisco's Castro Theater, to a standing ovation. The movie will be featured at film festivals during the coming months. Trailer.

CJR: What the San Francisco Chronicle hopes to accomplish with its first feature documentary.

"The project was the result of a year of work by reporter Erin Allday and a team of photographers, editors, and designers, and the investment of time shows. The moving, bittersweet main story—“They had the remarkable luck to survive AIDS, and the brutal misfortune to live on,” reads its tagline—and its sidebars ran to 12,000 words. Online, video vignettes and photo slideshows highlight each of the primary subjects. In print, “Last Men Standing” ran as a 20-page section..."

posted by zarq (8 comments total)

Wow, this is amazing. Thank you. Most of my friends who were diagnosed in the 80s are long gone. One friend who is alive and healthy today, Michael, went through two support groups where he was the lone survivor. He chose not to go to a third group.

One of my favorite quotes from Paul Monette's Becoming A Man: “But the fevers are on me now, the virus mad to ravage my last fifty T cells. It's hard to keep the memory at full dazzle, with so much loss to mock it. Roger gone, Craig gone, Cesar gone, Stevie gone. And this feeling that I'm the last one left, in a world where only the ghosts still laugh. But at least they're the ghosts of full-grown men, proof that all of us got that far, free of the traps and the lies. And from that moment on the brink of summer's end, no one would ever tell me again that men like me couldn't love.” ― Paul Monette, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:58 AM on April 20, 2016 [7 favorites]

One of my best friends has been HIV positive -- maybe not since the 80s, but at least since the early 90s -- and according to him there's a study going on at Harvard of people, like him, who have never taken any drugs to control or combat the disease but are still asymptomatic. He's a strange bird, though, and has told me repeatedly that as much as he'd like to help, he is just not prepared to let them draw spinal fluid.
posted by janey47 at 11:07 AM on April 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

From the trailer:

"People are saying, 'oh, here's your life back' - I'm not sure that I want it back. Why am I still alive?"

I've had this thought in my head for a while (not sure if it was mine originally or got put in my head from something I read) that the people who were the survivors of the AIDS crisis remind me of nothing more than the Lost Generation coming back after World War I. Even if you lived, your life was so completely up-ended and scarred that there was absolutely no prior experience that could prepare you and everyone around you for what came next.

I literally cannot even begin to fully imagine what it must have been like to find out you were HIV+ in the 1980 and I have at least some framework for it. In 2004, it was life-changing and frightening, and though I felt like my life was over, damn near everybody with any experience in the matter tried to tell me otherwise. And that's the difference. It's one thing when you're being told "you'll be fine/it's just like a chronic condition if you take care of yourself" but I can see how living surrounded by the death of others and the idea of your own impending one would make "living" not seem like all its cracked up to be.

Those who survived and those who fought are the reason why many people (me included) are alive today and able to live a life where their terror is our background noise. I can't wait to see this documentary and read their stories.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 11:13 AM on April 20, 2016 [21 favorites]

I remember a couple of firms in the 90s who were buying off gay men's insurance policies, allowing them to get some much-needed cash when they were sure they'd be dying within a few months or years, for so many cents on the dollar. While part of me fervently hopes that a great deal of those men spent that cash, got the correct antiretrovirals and are living happy, healthy lives now, I do wonder how many of them prepared for an end that didn't come, and can't recover from staring death so closely in the face, and losing all their friends.
posted by xingcat at 11:24 AM on April 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

I have an in-law who is a survivor from this era, though he probably came a little later than these men -- diagnosed at the very end of the 1980s when there was just beginning to be a faint glimmer of hope that AIDS/HIV was not a death sentence. He attributes two factors for his particular situation.

A. he got his diagnosis in Vancouver, so found immediately found himself at the cutting edge of research, understanding, informed action etc

B. he was very young, ran away from home in his early teens, so he wonders if the fact that he was still growing had an impact on how his body dealt with both the infection and the various cocktails he was consuming to fight it.

Worth noting. He's doing great now, runs his own successful business, one of those people that everybody seems to love. But he does have to make a serious trip to the hospital every few months.
posted by philip-random at 11:29 AM on April 20, 2016 [4 favorites]

I have a dear, older friend who is a survivor from this era, diagnosed in the late 80's/early 90's, around the same time he lost his partner to AIDS. He got quite ill himself, which is how he came to be living in his current situation at a chronic/end-of-life care facility. It's not exactly hospice, but most people who move in are not there very long, if that makes any sense. He held on long enough for some the advanced treatments that came along in the 90s, and got better. But he still lives in a tiny apartment in that facility.

He's been there more than 20 years now, and I see a little bit of him in each of these mens' stories, and vice versa. He's on disability and despite having been relatively healthy for years he's never gone back to work, which was something I never understood very well until this article put put it into words for me. He's social and has a good network of friends who care about him, but in many ways I feel like he keeps himself at a distance; he lives a very different life now than he did when he was young and living in large cities with strong gay communities.

His personality has a sometimes maddening quality of arrested development - partly due to growing up in a shitty family and leaving home at a very young age, but I now I realize also because a part of him was ready to check out 20+ years ago, and where do you go from there when you've lost so much, and have to start from scratch? Thank you for sharing this, I need to go drop my friend a line, and give him a great big hug the next time I see him.
posted by usonian at 12:12 PM on April 20, 2016 [6 favorites]

There's apparently footage of me in the film; I haven't seen it yet.
posted by gingerbeer at 2:06 PM on April 20, 2016 [5 favorites]

Fantastic post, thank you.
posted by ellieBOA at 6:47 AM on April 21, 2016 [1 favorite]