Nostalgia for Friends Lost

By CARLOS MARTÍN GAEBLER

“Our words are a kind of rescue team on a relentless mission to save past events and extinguished lives from the black hole of oblivion.” (Jón Kalman Stefánsson)

I have always wondered if my craving for friends has something to do with my being raised the only boy in a rather dysfunctional family. I bet it has. Friends have always played an essential role in my life; having loving friends has somehow compensated for my family’s shortcomings, a circumstance that not all of my friends have been aware of. Now that I have turned 60, I feel the time has come to look back and celebrate the lives of those loving friends I have lost. They were all very dear to me and they certainly contributed, in one way or another, to the man I am today. These few sketches are about their lives and about our friendship, seven unplugged friendships from the non-digital era, which are now going to live on forever in cyberspace. This is my own private Paradise Lost.

After spending my first two semesters at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Craig Dorm, a residence hall for graduate students, the time had come to look for alternative accommodation. A Portuguese colleague of mine at the Department of Romance Languages happened to know of a friend of his who was looking for a new flatmate at A7 University Gardens, and that is how good-natured, warm-hearted Ritchie Hazil Bennett (1956-1984) came into my life in late August 1981. We hit it off and became friends straight away. Bennett –he wanted to be called by his surname– was a nurse at the burn unit of Duke hospital. He would give me a ride to 42nd Street disco on Friday nights for our weekly socializing and dancing with other guys, as there was no gay club in small-town Chapel Hill.

One of the sweetest memories I have of our living together is sharing the luxury of reading The New York Times, which I had subscribed to, on Sundays. I remember waiting every Sunday to hear the familiar thump of TNYT being chucked against our apartment door. I now regret never having taken a picture of the huge bulk of all the supplements folded together lying on our doorstep (just imagine piling up four or five editions of the current The Guardian on Sunday and you will get the picture).

I never actually grasped how much we had meant to each other until, five months after I left the US for good, I received his first and only letter, which I have read several times over the years. His praise of our friendship made me hold out great hopes that Bennett would be a friend for life, someone who would always be there waiting for me on a holiday trip back or would visit me in Europe, but sadly my dream never came true. On 2nd February 1984, less than a year after we had parted, his sister rang me from North Carolina at 2am to announce that Bennett had passed away (it was the first time I had heard that deadly phrasal verb). He had suffered a thrombosis while having a shower and had collapsed dead in the bathtub of our apartment. I cried so much the following day that I had to call my superior to excuse me from going to work that day. I was only 25 years old, and he was just 28. I have missed him terribly every time I have returned to Chapel Hill ever since, and have always remembered the words he wrote in capitals on the second page of his letter: “… SO PLEASE HURRY UP AND COME HOME!!!”

Juan Vicente Muñoz Martínez (1960-2002) was a straight friend who never bullied me during my adolescence, as other straight boys had. We had met after the evening booster classes at the German School in the mid 1970s. We lived in the same neighbourhood, and we both shared a passion for tennis (he was a very gifted player) and art (Juanvi being a fervent admirer of Dali’s work and boutades).

His lifetime motto was: “Freedom is like the horizon; whether you approach it or you get away from it, it always remains at the same distance.” I was genuinely struck by his aura, as he was an uncompromisingly free individual, and a constant source of inspiration in my life at the time. He sparked in me the curiosity to read Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha and Steppenwolf. In our discussions (Juanvi was a quick-witted, incisive conversationalist), we enjoyed putting the world to rights. My anti-fascism must have started to take shape under his wing in those years. Juanvi was a victim of machismo, as he was shot dead in the street by a man after reproaching him for verbally abusing a woman. The killer was later arrested and convicted.

In resourceful Junavi I found a role model to look up to. Had I had the balls he had, I would have spared myself endless years of closeted suffering until I finally summoned up courage to come out at 22. In the spring of 1976, right before the end of my first year at university, I had the chance to spend an academic year in the US with an AFS grant program, just as Juanvi had done a year earlier in Pana, Illinois. I remember there was a young university student at the AFS suitability interview who might have been a couple of years older than me and had already spent a year abroad with the same program. At one point, he asked me maliciously if I preferred to look at an art book with pictures of classic male nude sculptures to a copy of Playboy displaying photos of naked women. Evidently startled by the question (it must have been the first time I had looked at institutionalized homophobia in the face), I answered with the truth and was proud of myself, but I wasn’t given the grant to travel to the USA at that time. I would still have to wait five more years for the biggest leap of my life.

I felt attracted to beautiful Dan Patrick Moseley (1960-1994) the second I met him in Seville in the summer of 1981, right after my first year at UNC. He looked like the quintessential good, all-American boy. I loved his eternal smile, presided over by his gorgeous long eyelashes, his charming southern accent, and his captivating aura. He was literally in love with life, and his ever-smiling face said it all. He was a modern-time Peter Pan given over to pleasures, so to speak.

He came from a hard-line, conservative North Carolina family to whom he was not out at the time. Straight-acting, self-conscious Dan was never comfortable displaying affection in public (he didn’t allow me to put my arm on his shoulders in this photo on the beach), but he was a knowledgeable lover indoors. I wish Dan and I had been proper boyfriends.

He showed real enthusiasm for my doctoral dissertation on American gay-themed fiction (which I dedicated to him), and he kindly sent me several books for my literary research, among them his own dog-eared copy of the classic The Front Runner, a story which I continue to find gripping and stimulating. When he visited me in Spain in 1991, he brought me a lovely framed print by Kip Gerard of the arts Varsity cinema in Chapel Hill, a gift I have always treasured.

He wrote me a very honest letter announcing he had been diagnosed HIV positive and he explained how he was trying to cope with it. As we know, there was no medical treatment for AIDS at the time, but Dan kept in good spirits notwithstanding. He died among family and friends in 1994 in North Carolina.

My friend David Franklin McCarn (1959-2000) belonged to a brilliant generation of young American scientists, writers, historians and artists who was literally swept away by the AIDS epidemic during the 1990s. He was a microbiologist, and between 1989 and 1990 he co-authored several research works (some while affiliated with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute).

When I was doing my field research on gay-themed American fiction at NYU, professor George Stambolian, who kindly guided me through the process, warned me of the fact that many of the writers I was interviewing in NYC that summer of 1987 would soon die, as they were all HIV positive, and that deadly premonition fulfilled itself a few years later. Today’s historians have a job ahead of them to document the lives of so many gay men of excellence who, like Robert Ferro, Vito Russo, Keith Haring or professor Stambolian himself, to name just a few, perished in their prime before modern medicine could help save their lives.

I remember meeting tall, butch-looking David at a social do in Chapel Hill, and we spent that same night together at my place. We took an instant liking to each other, and became good friends and writing pals after that. He was remarkably articulate, and his letters were beautiful pieces of writing, overflowing with honesty and tenderness. I still enjoy reading them immensely after all these years.

I truly prized my friendship with Julián Iñesta Mena (1965-1992). I met him on the dance floor of Centro’s, the local hip spot during the “Movida” years in Seville, on Saturday, April 14^th,1984 (on the anniversary of the Spanish Republic, one of my most cherished dates on the calendar). While dancing, he asked me if I wanted to have a sip of his beer; I didn’t hesitate a second. That sip inaugurated eight years of friendship.

I fondly remember once when we ran into each other outside the university office where I work, and kissing each other hello on the lips, right there, in front of everybody. I was so proud of him (and of us). How elegantly Julián carried himself. I also remember both of us having dinner together and listening to the radio on November 9th, 1989, the historical night the Berlin Wall fell at long last. What a relief we felt!

After his death, I was grief-stricken for months on end. I have never thanked you enough, James, for holding me that night after the burial. I still thank the gods for being in a loving relationship when I lost Julián. I remember going to the cinema with James, my boyfriend at the time, to see Longtime Companion, and bursting out crying at the end of the film when the dead protagonist “comes back to life” in a dreamy ending. I have never cried so much in a cinema in my life.

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I was recently shown a photo of Julián Iñesta Jr., his brother Eduardo’s son. His nephew is now 19 years old, and the spitting image of his uncle at his age. The wonders of DNA replication.

Looking back, in a way, by insisting that I get tested regularly for HIV, Julián saved my life, for I learned to look after myself and play safe. If I have survived the AIDS epidemic, it is partly due to him wanting to protect me. Thank you, babe.

It took me for ages to hear from my friend Keith Douglas Pruitt (1960-2008) again. For a long time, I just couldn’t remember where I had written down his surname. Until only just recently I remembered it was listed together with all the phone numbers of my old friends from North Carolina. I knew that, being such a distinctive surname, it wouldn’t be hard to find it online. And that is exactly what happened when I googled him, but tragedy took over the screen when I saw the word “Obituary” springing up next to his full name. I was in shock upon learning of the terrible news of his death at 47 in New York City. He had been found dead in his Greenwich Village apartment on November 12, 2008. Autopsy reports indicated that he had choked to death. He had been treated for esophagus problems stemming from a home fire in which he had been badly injured the previous year.

Keith and I became dancing buddies at 42^nd Street, the gay disco in the Durham area which we both attended every Friday or Saturday night during the school year. We would spend hours boogying bare-chested on the dance floor, sweating to the disco beat. Out on the dance floor, Keith was something to behold. He was all smiles, friendliness and good vibes, the all-round good guy. We would jump on the dance floor every time the hit Celebration came on. We were celebrating our freedom as two gay kids who had just recently come out and literally wanted to have the cake and eat it.

I remember phoning him for a farewell at his family home in Annandale, Virginia, right before leaving UNC in May 1983. After that, I lost track of him (there was no internet then). After he graduated, he started a multi-faceted career as a composer, piano player, and actor. I was blown away when I saw him on screen starring as the lead singer of The Lafayettes in John Waters 1988 production of Hairspray.

In 1994, while he and his boyfriend were holding hands on a Greenwich Village street, they were savagely beaten by three homophobes who shouted anti-gay insults as they beat them with golf clubs. Keith took them to court and participated fully in the prosecution of the criminals, which resulted in their being convicted and sent to prison. Sadly, they were released a while ago. May these lines be a celebration of his life, his talent, and his courage.

Wholesome, warm-hearted Anthony James Adinolfi (1951-2017), Tony for all of us, exerted an enlightening influence on me. I met this vocational nurse at the Carolina Gay Association, the place I timidly approached (I was still closeted) as soon as I arrived in North Carolina. And it proved the best option to start socializing among gay peers. As soon as we met, he took me under his wing, introduced me to the volunteers who made up the staff of CGA, and pointed out books to check out. Tony’s reading assignments included the book The Joy of Gay Sex. Co-authored by doctor Charles Silverstein and writer Edmund White, it advertised itself as a sex manual and sympathetic advisor to confirmed and neophyte gays, and I was certainly one of the latter. Here was a book at last about my own self, offering me the sexual education that neither my parents nor my country’s puritanical educational system ever gave me. Soon after gulping it down, I was in love with my first boyfriend, Bill Matlock. I was so overjoyed that I came out to my parents over a transatlantic phone call, ha, ha, ha!

I tried to track him down on the internet for years because I missed his vibes and his affection, but to no avail. Suddenly, I came across his obituary and was devastated. Luckily, I managed to find Tony’s husband’s name and was able to contact him after so many years and send him my condolences. I so wish the internet had existed in the 80s and 90s, which would have assured me the gift of his friendship across the Atlantic.

I reckon that, in a way, these are the memories of a survivor who was fortunate to meet a generation of men who cultivated their inner beauty, who had no need to customize their bodies, take steroids, tattoo their skin, shave their body hair, or pluck their eyebrows, to be beautiful human beings.

The greatest gift you can give anyone is your undivided attention, and that was the case among us. They were all articulate and honest expressing their feelings in writing, as their letters on paper show. We all used to communicate by telephone and by post, those nearly extinct forms of human communication nowadays. I have nostalgia for that era. I feel melancholy and lonely without them. I miss their letters and their conversations, I miss their brains, I miss their joie de vivre. I miss them all, because the friends I choose are family to me.

If there is an afterlife, we shall meet up again and have another dance or a few more laughs; if not, it was a pleasure meeting you guys. See you down the road. cmg2019