On a trip home to Mississippi, I sat with my family on Christmas Day. I asked one of my brothers, in whose den we had gathered if he knew anything of Edwin Alexander. He had been on my mind, and I thought I might try to contact him.
David told me that Edwin had died years ago, maybe twenty. Hadn’t I heard? AIDS, he thought it was. Back when nobody talked about it. Back when it was a death sentence. He was sure he had told me.
I wrestled to conceal my emotions, yet deep within, it seemed as though a crucial keystone had been forcefully displaced, causing my fortress of denial to collapse into a heap of dust and rubble.
I met Edwin when we represented our respective high schools in a statewide band and shared a room during a summer concert tour. He was a junior, and I was a senior. In my youthful arrogance, I saw Edwin’s inability to hide his sexuality as a curse. In hindsight, I realize it was his salvation. While we were both gay, I could pass as straight. Edwin couldn’t hide who he was. Throughout his life, he had been an easy target for ridicule and discrimination. Despite his slender frame and delicate features, Edwin possessed an indomitable spirit. He was one tough, effeminate son of a bitch.
Naturally, I monitored the witnesses to our friendship. Whenever people whose opinions I feared were nearby, I treated Edwin with a detached indulgence. I’m sure he noticed, but he never seemed to mind.
Two years later, Edwin followed me to college. By then I had joined a fraternity known for its good-looking members, collectively called the “face men.” I was pledged primarily because of my high grades. In return, they gave me the imprimatur of manhood. I immersed myself in dating women and bonding with my fraternity brothers, took my first drink, and was accepted as a regular guy. I had no time for Edwin. Sure, there were encounters with certain fraternity brothers, but we were drunk and horny, and by mutual agreement, we couldn’t remember a thing the following morning.
But then, after college, I called Edwin late on a lonely night. He never demanded more than I could give. He was there, and then he would vanish before dawn, allowing me to characterize our connection as my drunken mistake.
That was the extent of it. There were no dates. I never asked Edwin to dance. I never gave him a flower. We never walked together, touching. We didn’t have a song. I had no words to describe what Edwin meant to me. Our relationship never even demanded that I say goodbye when I moved a thousand miles away to Minnesota.
Thirty years later, after I’d played corporate hardball with the straight guys, sobered up, done my therapy, slayed my monsters, and become angry, gay, and proud, my brother told me that Edwin was dead.
The day after Christmas, I set out to find Edwin’s grave. I drove the two hours to his hometown and searched through the red-dirt cemetery where his uncles, grandparents, and father were laid to rest. But there was no trace of Edwin. On my second time through, it suddenly dawned on me with a chilling certainty. This was the Bible Belt, a town of less than a thousand, filled with devout Baptists and strict fundamentalists. Edwin’s family didn’t want his body here.
Later, back at my parents’ house, I told my mother where I had been, but I couldn’t bring myself to answer the unspoken question of why a sixty-year-old man would embark on a two-hour drive to seek the grave of a presumed casual acquaintance.
“You could ask his mother where he’s buried,” she suggested casually.
I hesitated, contemplating the idea. “But wouldn’t that be awkward?” I responded. “Besides, it might upset her. She probably resented that he was gay and wants to forget about it.”
“Johnny, he was her son. If I lost my son and someone knew him—” Her abrupt silence accused me in a way that made finishing her sentence unnecessary. You should know this, her expression seemed to say.
“A mother always wants to talk about her children. Always. Go see her.”
On the way back to the airport, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I owed Edwin at least this.
The voice on the other end of the phone sounded fragile, as if condemning me to hell would require more outrage than she could muster.
“Is this Mrs. Alexander, Edwin’s mother?”
“Yes,” she said, drawing two syllables from the word. “But Edwin has been gone now for a long time.” She said this carefully, as if she didn’t want the news to cause me pain.
“Yes, ma’am, I know. I was a friend, and . . . I cared about him deeply. I just wanted you to know that he was an incredibly special man.”
My voice shook, and my eyes burned hot. This was the closest I had ever come to talking about my feelings for Edwin. “Are you gay too?” she asked.
“Ma’am?”
“Are you gay too?”
“Yes, ma’am. I am,” I said cautiously, ready to hang up at the first Bible quote.
After a brief pause, she asked, “Do you have somebody special?”
“I had someone,” I said. “We broke up last year.”
“I’m so sorry.” It seemed like she meant it.
“Edwin,” she continued, “lost his special friend, Dale, a few years before he died. We never met him in person, but Edwin was always talking about him when he came home to die. We got to know his friend’s parents real good. Both of us losing our boys to AIDS and all. They came to the funeral. And they helped us scatter Edwin’s ashes down by the pond like he wanted. Can you believe that? If you knew Edwin, you remember how stubborn he was. No graveyard for him, he said. He wanted to blow around down by that old cow pond. Since he was itty-bitty, that was his favorite place.”
She told me about Edwin’s life in New York City with his special friend and about Edwin’s touring the country with a group of classical musicians he had formed. She described the corner grocery Dale had opened in Brooklyn and how, at Christmas, she would mail a dozen pecan pies that “the boys” would give to favorite customers. She spoke of Edwin’s hospital stays and his eventual death at home.
“We live in Purvis, Mississippi, you know,” she said, “and you can be sure they didn’t want us talking about gays and AIDS down here. Now, as for me, Johnny, I’m proud to call myself a Christian, and I believe every word in that Bible. But I loved my son. And I didn’t see anything wrong with putting how he died of AIDS right there in the paper for everybody and his cousin to see. I know for a fact there have been others. But I was the first mother and the last one ever to come out and say it. Of course, some didn’t like it.
“But shame kills, did you know that? That’s what Edwin always said: ‘Shame silences and silence kills.’ He would get so mad at small-minded people. I ought to show you the letter he wrote me when he found out I voted for Reagan that second time. Lord, did he let me have it! Called me complicit. You believe that?” She laughed. “But the long and short of it is, I’m not ashamed of my son or how he died. There’s no part of him that has to go hidden as far as I’m concerned.
Then, out of the blue, she asked, “What are you doing now? This very minute.”
“I’m on my way back up north.”
“Honey, I want you to drive down here to my house so we can talk more about Edwin. Will you do that?”
After driving through a cold winter rain for three hours, I arrived at the little house in the country where Edwin had grown up and eventually passed away. Mrs. Alexander greeted me at the door and pulled me into a warm embrace.
She guided me to a seat, poured me a cup of coffee, and began to tell stories about Edwin. Engrossed, I listened to an eighty-year-old mother who had preserved every detail about her son’s life—his favorite expressions, funny retorts, and childhood achievements. My mother had been right.
We spent the rest of the rainy afternoon going through photographs, letters, and newspaper clippings. Mrs. Alexander painstakingly pieced together the life of the man I had missed knowing. As the grand finale, she played a videotape recorded for a New York cable program a few months before Edwin’s final battle with AIDS.
Oh my God, he was beautiful! The same mischievous smile. The sparkling eyes. Now athletic, he was a dedicated runner and swimmer.
The interviewer, whose English was rudimentary, asked uncertain and sometimes awkward questions. Edwin had just revealed that he and his partner had AIDS, and his partner had passed away two years prior. The interviewer asked if Edwin had ever considered the possibility that he had transmitted the disease to his partner, implying that he might have been responsible for his death. I braced myself when I saw the flash in Edwin’s eyes. Then he smiled gently and spoke of love, loss, and the inevitable guilt of being the survivor, the one left standing.
His mother must have noticed my sadness. And as many Southerners do when they sense you are in emotional turmoil, she saw an opportunity to witness her faith.
“Are you a Christian, Johnny?”
Oh, how I detested that question! But to maintain politeness and prevent an uncomfortable sermon, I offered my standard response: “I have a relationship with God that works for me.” Anticipating her concern, I added, “God knows I’m gay, and he seems okay with it.”
She nodded, seemingly accepting my words, but then said matter-of-factly, “You know the Bible says it’s wrong.”
I was on the verge of citing the social and historical context from which those few verses had emerged, but at that moment, I chose not to engage in a fight.
“I know,” I said finally. “I was brought up under the same Bible.”
With a thoughtful expression, she posed a question devoid of ulterior motive. “Have you figured that out yet, Johnny?”
“No, ma’am. I haven’t figured it out.”
And then she smiled at me, leaned back in her rocker, and crossed her arms over her chest. “Me neither, honey,” she sighed. “Ain’t God a mysterious thing?”
We both knew that would have to be enough for now.
