Ruth Coker Burks

May 22, 2021 12:57 PM

For about a decade, between 1984 and the mid-1990s... Ruth Coker Burks cared for hundreds of dying people, many of them gay men who had been abandoned by their families. She had no medical training, but she took them to their appointments, picked up their medications, helped them fill out forms for assistance, and talked them through their despair. Sometimes she paid for their cremations. She buried over three dozen of them with her own two hands, after their families refused to claim their bodies. For many of those people, she is now the only person who knows the location of their graves.

David Koon writing in Arkansas Times in 2015.

I got a login popup screen that I thought was a paywall, but at the upper left was an X to close it and get to the article.

posted by hippybear (30 comments total)

Damn. That's both horrible (because it fell to her) and lovely (because it fell to her).

(here's an Ark-Ive version to avoid the pop-up, which kept me from seeing the story on my phone).
posted by chavenet at 1:13 PM on May 22, 2021 [4 favorites]

It’s been a while since I broke down sobbing, but here we are. It’s hard to focus on this remarkable woman through the litany of hatred, cruelty, and fear, but it’s a story I needed to read.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:18 PM on May 22, 2021 [13 favorites]

A few more with extra links about her and her work:

Ruth Coker Burks previously (RIP HuronBob) and previously (including the Arkansas Times link).
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 1:19 PM on May 22, 2021 [11 favorites]

Thank you, hippybear. She's a g-damned secular saint, and her example of being a decent human should be presented often. And you're pretty awesome yourself.
posted by pt68 at 1:24 PM on May 22, 2021 [8 favorites]

Ruth Compassion Burks. The Cemetery Angel [4 mins]. There's a more recent story in the Guardian. I left Boston in 1983, but my bestie from graduate school did similar bedside work for the next several years.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:25 PM on May 22, 2021 [4 favorites]

This comment (from someone who knows David Koon) is quite something.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 1:26 PM on May 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

Her book is showing up for me on Amazon UK as a special offer at £0.85 All the Young Men.
posted by Azara at 2:21 PM on May 22, 2021

I recently read All The Young Men and, when I described it to my spouse, he called it the story of a "compassion heist" which totally sums it up.

When her work with AIDS patients started, Burks was selling time-share vacation homes. And she brought that same persuasiveness, resourcefulness, and stubbornness to her volunteer work. No one willing to draw blood for tests? She learned to do it, and literally came through the back door into the government health department to drop it off for anonymous testing. She weaponized her straight-white-Southern-lady privilege whenever necessary and possible to get her guys treated fairly by landlords, doctors, and bureaucrats.

And after the federal government finally started funding work, Burks started getting pushed out. Agencies wouldn't hire her because she didn't have a college degree, and of course out of sexist discrimination as well.

I'm a little bit used to the story of scrappy activists raising money with drag shows and concerts and bake sales -- the exemplary depiction may be the film Pride, and if you haven't seen it, you're in for a treat. But the next act of the story, where institutional funders start to show up but bypass the folks on the ground -- if there are movies about that I'd like to know.

Most of All The Young Men isn't about that. It's about carework, love, witty retorts, raising a daughter with a found family of drag queens as her uncles, battling stigma and prejudice, and Burks calling on her huge network of neighbors and friends to get things done. Recommended.
posted by brainwane at 3:29 PM on May 22, 2021 [31 favorites]

“I said, ‘If you hang up on me again, I will put your son’s obituary in your hometown newspaper and I will list his cause of death.’ Then I had her attention.”
posted by Mr. Yuck at 3:31 PM on May 22, 2021 [20 favorites]

I worry about those names in her book. Are they digitized somewhere, their graves marked or labeled? There should be a memorial in that graveyard, all the names, and the story, on some plaques. If there was a GoFundMe it would raise the money.
posted by emjaybee at 3:38 PM on May 22, 2021 [4 favorites]

Growing up in the 80's you'd hear (I would at least) of stories like Ruth's, and it always felt like, where did these people go after the crisis abated? Gay ppl can use a fair amount of help, still, just fighting social mores.
posted by kfholy at 4:01 PM on May 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

Recently the subject of an episode of This is Love.
posted by dobbs at 4:05 PM on May 22, 2021 [3 favorites]

This is an authentic saint, not some old nun who did nothing but sit in a convent and praise God.
As to the parents who would not bury their sons they can rot in any hell their might be. Thanks, Hippybear.
posted by mermayd at 4:15 PM on May 22, 2021 [8 favorites]

I wish I knew how people like this were able to turn on what looks like an ever flowing stream of compassion. I've met people like that; it's humbling.
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:18 PM on May 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

“If it hadn’t been for the drag queens, I don’t know what we would have done.”
posted by jim in austin at 5:36 PM on May 22, 2021 [5 favorites]

This was just as wrenching to reread as it had been to read the first time.

As one of the articles mentioned, there were a lot of people doing caregiving work -- but so few of them survived and so many of their stories have been lost.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:52 PM on May 22, 2021 [5 favorites]

Heartbreaking and beautiful. What a lovely soul.

I have to say, this level of pettiness brings me quite a bit of glee:

When Burks was a girl, she said, her mother got in a final, epic row with Burks’ uncle. To make sure he and his branch of the family tree would never lie in the same dirt as the rest of them, Burks said, her mother quietly bought every available grave space in the cemetery: 262 plots.

While this level of petty, on the other hand... unbelievable. WWJD?

I’d bury them and we’d have a do-it-yourself funeral. I couldn’t get a priest or a preacher. No one would even say anything over their graves.
posted by Serene Empress Dork at 6:13 PM on May 22, 2021 [10 favorites]

emjaybee, you'll be happy to read this comment from when this very article was covered previously:

I'm friends with David Koon, the writer of the Arkansas Times piece. I just wanted to add that he got a note from the principal of the local Catholic boys' high school who offered his and his students' help to clean up the cemetery, and that offers of donations for a memorial have been pouring in. As David said on his Facebook page, "The worm turns slow, sons and daughters, but it does turn".

posted by aniola at 7:41 PM on May 22, 2021 [8 favorites]

Burks hung up the phone, trying to decide what she should tell the dying man. “I didn’t know what to tell him other than, ‘Your mom’s not coming. She won’t even answer the phone,’ ” she said. There was nothing to tell him but the truth.

“I went back in his room,” she said, “and when I walked in, he said, ‘Oh, momma. I knew you’d come,’ and then he lifted his hand. And what was I going to do? What was I going to do? So I took his hand. I said, ‘I’m here, honey. I’m here.’ ”

I've read this before and it just absolutely lays me out every. single. time.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 8:42 PM on May 22, 2021 [16 favorites]

When Burks was a girl, she said, her mother got in a final, epic row with Burks’ uncle. To make sure he and his branch of the family tree would never lie in the same dirt as the rest of them, Burks said, her mother quietly bought every available grave space in the cemetery: 262 plots. They visited the cemetery most Sundays after church when she was young, Burks said, and her mother would often sarcastically remark on her holdings, looking out over the cemetery and telling her daughter: “Someday, all of this is going to be yours.”

“I always wondered what I was going to do with a cemetery,” she said. “Who knew there’d come a time when people didn’t want to bury their children?”

What. There is some weird fate thing going on here too; in addition to her choices and her compassion.
What an amazing woman.
posted by gt2 at 8:43 PM on May 22, 2021 [16 favorites]

All the Young Men is an incredible read, and if anyone wants to go further down the rural-American-AIDS-experience rabbit hole I can also strongly recommend My Own Country by Abraham Verghese.
posted by terretu at 1:07 AM on May 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

When I remember them I think of the poem by François Villon, "Où sont les neiges d'antan...?"
posted by Jane the Brown at 2:03 AM on May 23, 2021

she sometimes wonders if her choice to help AIDS patients as a young woman, and the ostracism that brought, may have kept her from being everything she could have been.
posted by Hypatia at 5:14 AM on May 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

It's strange reading this after the AIDS denialism thread of the other day. I was in my mid twenties in the late 80s and early 90s. I moved to San Francisco in 1989. Fear of AIDS was palpable. African American women like myself were also dying from AIDS. There was a lot of fear and resentment regarding Black men who were on the "down low." There was a lot of shame and secrecy.

The first person I knew to die of AIDS was a guy I grew up with in Kansas City. He was a neighborhood kid who was hilarious. His mother asked mine if she'd go with her to his doctor. He was coming home from the hospital and she wanted my mother to help her remember the instructions for how to care for him. Then our favorite hairstylist died. My hairstylist in San Francisco also died.

I lived next door to David Pasquerelli, an ACTUP SF activist and HIV/AIDS denier who eventually died. I've never asked my former neighbor about David and what he thinks now. He's happily married to a new guy.
posted by shoesietart at 8:51 AM on May 23, 2021 [4 favorites]

A young Arkansas governor named Bill Clinton directed the State food banks to help her bring food to men too sick, too poor, and too dying to fend for themselves. It was simple acts of human decency like this that self proclaimed real Christians reframed as a culture war against them and Republicans exploited to destroy the Democratic Party in Arkansas.
posted by interogative mood at 8:17 PM on May 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

I sometimes wonder what happened to those parents, especially as they saw America move towards far greater acceptance of LGBT people, so that their peers ended up attending their children's middle-aged same-sex weddings. I assume a lot of them tripled and quadrupled down to avoid losing their minds. Did any of them repent? How could they live with themselves?
posted by praemunire at 10:15 PM on May 23, 2021 [4 favorites]

When she arrives in heaven there’s going to be one heck of a parade.
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 1:45 PM on May 24, 2021

From my own anecdotal observations of the kind of right wing evangelicals who disown their gay kids — they blame someone for making their kid gay and see themselves as having made great sacrifices and gone to great lengths to save their kid. Disowning was the final sacrifice they made — one final act of tough love to try and get them to repent. They started mourning the death of the kid at the moment they disowned them. They didn’t witness the suffering that comes in the final months. They never saw how cruel it was to let anyone die like that. So they never feel any regret over it. Their regret is that they didn’t take stronger measures to stop their kid from being recruited by the gays.
posted by interogative mood at 2:40 PM on May 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

They didn’t witness the suffering that comes in the final months. They never saw how cruel it was to let anyone die like that.

I mean, their kids still died. Let's assume there's a hard core of pure sociopaths there; not hard to do, with evangelicals. But--you didn't have to be a death cultist to disown a gay child in the 1980s. In the Midwest in particular, it just wasn't as much of an outlier as it would be today. For people of even slight thoughtfulness, the death of their child would still have been a loss. The long-term effect must be like being the parents of the last person to die in a particular war. Except that you shot your own damn kid.
posted by praemunire at 2:45 PM on May 24, 2021

It was a loss for them but they think their kid was killed by their homosexual lifestyle, something they tried hard to get their kid out of. It is the same to them as if their kids were junkies or alcoholics and died of an overdose after as parents they'd paid for rehab and other interventions to help the kid. Lots of parents of people with substance abuse problems end up walking away when they don't think the kid will ever get better, a kind of tough love approach, let them hit rock bottom and come back for redemption.

To be clear I'm not saying that homosexuality is like being a junkie, I think this notion is absolutely horrible and an evil myth. I'm only explaining that this myth is widely accepted as truth for those parents.
posted by interogative mood at 5:22 PM on May 24, 2021