After Peter

In memoriam, Peter David Kelloran

17 December 1961–10 May 1994

 

I slept but my heart was awake.

—Song of Songs 5:2

 

 

I AM A MINOR character in Peter’s story. Peter David Kelloran—Peter D. Kelloran, as he liked to appear in print—was a painter. He died in his bed at the age of thirty-three on the afternoon of May 10, 1994, at the Maitri Hospice in San Francisco, where he had been admitted after deciding he could no longer care for himself in his apartment at the edge of town. There was a solar eclipse that day, and his passing occurred during it. He had spoken with his mother that morning on the phone. His dementia had parted enough for him to tell her that he loved her. “And then he started to go,” his friend Laura Lister says. The room was full of women friends of Peter’s and they laid hands on him in a circle. Laura recalls the phone ringing, and she took her hands off him to answer it. “He lunged up off the bed.” He went slowly. “I begged him to go, begged him to let go at that point. He needed to go. He wouldn’t go, though,” Laura says. “And then one of the male volunteers came in and he took Peter’s hand in his. You could see the change. Like a light came over him. And he was gone.”

“All the people there with him at the end, I can never thank them enough. They were all so beautiful, so strong,” his mother, Jill Kelloran, says from her home in Chicago. “They did what I physically could not do. Peter’s death was tearing me apart and I literally could not be there. They cared for him to the end. And I will always be grateful to them for that.”

“We were there until he grew cold,” Peggy Sue, a friend who was present, says. “Maitri being a Buddhist place, you lie in state. So we sat with him.”

 

 

I FIRST SAW HIM when I worked in the Castro at A Different Light, a gay and lesbian bookstore that in those days doubled as a reference library and community center. I was twenty-two years old then. Peter was twenty-eight, tall and broad-shouldered and thin. He had a wide Irish frame and usually wore leather: a motorcycle jacket, boots. A dyed blue tuft of hair glowed across his forehead. I’d seen him walking through the Castro, and I’d seen him at demonstrations. A year would pass before I’d hear his voice, speaking to me.

The store was the first in the country to have a section devoted entirely to AIDS/HIV issues; it was located at the front of the store, beside the cash register. I supposed, the first day I saw Peter, he’d either seroconverted recently or had recently decided to do something about it. I saw many people in this way, on their first few days, and I was forever inventing some story about them, never mentioned to anyone, simply to fill the hours. I was often the first person they had to deal with after being diagnosed, a bookstore clerk who would show them the short shelf of books, expanding weekly but still short.

That day he just ran through the books and selected a few on strengthening the immune system, and then paid when someone else was at the register. I saw him leave. His blue eyes had a searchlight intensity, and it seemed clear what he saw and what he didn’t. He didn’t see me. I felt called and commanded by him immediately, and to this day I cannot say why it was, only that it was immediate, and thorough. I was surprised by how much I wanted to be seen by him.

That day in the store, after he didn’t look at me, he moved quickly back out onto the bustling sidewalk, the afternoon sunlight making long, crowded shadows. I didn’t know his name or anything about him, except that he was handsome in a way that made me lose my breath, and he was hurrying away. And that he was possibly, probably, positive.

In fact, when I first saw Peter he had been positive for three years. “He wrote to me from Morocco,” Laura says, of a trip he’d taken in 1986. “And he could only write about how sick he had been. And after he got back and he tested positive, that was when we figured out, that was his onset.”

He would keep it a secret for years, not telling anyone besides Laura, who kept his secret as well. “A lot of people were angry at me for that,” she says. “But people thinking about your death, that’ll put you in the grave. And besides,” she adds, “if you didn’t get your business dealt with when someone dies, that’s your own fault. You had every day before then to deal.”

I was not part of the group that was called when Peter died. I found out three months after his death, in New York, with my friend Choire, who had also moved east by now, and we were speaking about our friends back in San Francisco when he said, “Well, after Peter died . . .”

I felt like he had been cleaning a gun and it had emptied into me.

“Sorry,” Choire said. “Thought you knew. Hate that, when people don’t know.”

 

 

WHEN I ARRIVED IN San Francisco, there was no way to find the Castro on any map. People were forever calling the bookstore for directions to the neighborhood. In my group there was the sense that we were a wave arriving on the West Coast from the East: postcollegiate youngsters seeking and finding a paradise of cheap apartments and thrift stores bursting with the old athletic T-shirts and jeans and flannel shirts we all prized. I remember when I put the empty clothes together with the empty apartments, on an ordinary sunny afternoon walking down the sidewalk to work: there on a blanket stood a pair of black leather steel-toed boots, twelve-hole lace-ups. They gleamed, freshly polished, in the light of the morning. As I approached them, feeling the pull of the hill, I drew up short to examine the rest of the sidewalk sale. Some old albums, Queen and Sylvester; three pairs of jeans; two leather wristbands; a box of old T-shirts; a worn watch, the hands still moving; a pressed-leather belt, western style; and cowboy boots, the same size as the steel-toes. I tried the steel-toes on and took a long look at the salesman as I stood up, feeling that they were exactly my size.

This man was thin, thin in a way that was immediately familiar. Hollowing from the inside out. His skin reddened, and his brown eyes looked over me as if lightning might fall on me out of that clear afternoon sky. And I knew then, as I paid twenty dollars for the boots, that they’d been recently emptied. That he was watching me walk off in the shoes of the newly dead. And that all of this had been happening for some time now.

I lived in San Francisco for two years, arriving right after I left college in 1989. When I say I was part of a group, I mean I was part of a group of activists who divided our time and energy among a number of organizations and affinity groups: ACT UP and Queer Nation were the seeds of a great deal of what happened there, and what happens there to this day. We engaged in direct-action protests, spent our free time discussing new protests and the ways in which our past protests had been perceived. We thought about politics and its relationship to our personal lives, to the point the personal was political, because that was all there was. We had bitter feuds and disputes, we had angry meetings, we had raucous celebrations. We had vigils and parties, made mistakes and made amends. The average member was twenty-three, HIV-negative, white, and college-educated, usually gay or lesbian and from another part of the country.

I was twenty-two, HIV-negative, Amerasian, college-educated, and from another part of the country. Pictures of me at the time show a thin, dark-haired young man who seems inordinately happy for someone who spent a good deal of his time wanting to be dead. They all show me smiling. This young man I was drove a motorcycle, worked at a bookstore, hung out with drag queens who didn’t attend meetings of any kind, and was known to dance on a bar or two. He was a member of ACT UP/SF before the bitter split of the group, a member of Queer Nation, and a pesky intern at Out/Look, a queer academic journal. He was on the media committee of ACT UP and had a reputation at first for dating no one, and then for having dated everyone. He hollowed his desire to die with the knowledge that other people were dying who wanted to live, and this was the single strongest motive for his participation in direct-action AIDS activism. Being an activist meant, among other things, never being alone, and being alone was when he got into trouble. And so he made sure he was never alone.

 

 

AT THIS TIME IN San Francisco, it seemed that the world might either go up in flames or be restored in a healing past imagining. The world seemed ripe for fixing and rescue. I think now, twenty years later, this feeling might always be true. Those of us who were in ACT UP and Queer Nation then were accused at one point of “gay Zionism,” and if it was true, I think it was true only in that, in a way similar to Jewish thought, we believed we could repair the world and do it by staying together, working together.

Why am I telling this story? I am, as I’ve said, a minor character, out of place in this narrative, but the major characters of all these stories from the first ten years of the epidemic have left. The men I wanted to follow into the future are dead. Finding them had made me want to live, and I did. I do. I feel I owe them my survival. The world is not fixed, and the healing is still just past my imagining, though perhaps it is closer than it was. For now, the minor characters are left to introduce themselves, and take the story forward.

 

 

MY NEXT CLEAR MEMORY of Peter is seeing him at five in the morning on Market Street, under the giant Safeway sign there in the middle of the city, where our ACT UP activist affinity group had gathered in the parking lot for a “non–ACT UP–related action,” which is to say, we were some of the same people, just acting under a different name for this occasion—if you couldn’t reach consensus on an action, an affinity group could do what the group itself would not. I was a participant in a handful of these sorts of actions. This morning, we were going to wrap false newspaper fronts over a thousand copies of the San Francisco Chronicle. 9,000 DEAD IN THE CITY, read the headline on the false front page we’d created. Clever group members had imitated the font and layout, and the false front wore the name San Francisco Chronic Liar. Anyone reading closely would see that 9,000 was the number of people who had died thus far in the AIDS epidemic, but the cover photograph, a shot of the city from the sky, was meant to evoke a natural disaster or terrorist news story, which, to us, the AIDS death toll story was. The action’s purpose was to increase the accurate coverage of AIDS in the media.

About thirty or forty of us were gathered there, and we split up into groups, dividing the bales of false fronts. Each team was assigned a neighborhood. The plan was to wrap the false fronts over the papers after sneaking them into our cars. Each car had a squad of three. One of us had coins to get the newspaper boxes open, one of us drove, one of us was on lookout. As we took the bales of papers from each box, we felt we were doing something dangerous. But when we wrapped the fronts it only seemed tedious, or silly, or funny. My team, after we wrapped the last one up, sat and waited for twenty minutes to see the effect of our work. Finally a pedestrian came up to the paper box, opened it, and read the headline. This person puzzled over the paper and walked off to catch the train.

Was it all just for that quizzical look? In the morning dark, the action seemed both ridiculous and necessary. There’s nothing else you can do other than everything that might work, I told myself that morning, and I often told myself that in those days. These kinds of actions were about resetting long-standing frameworks, ways of seeing the world that didn’t include us or our deaths. We had to be sure people couldn’t ignore us. We knew ordinary ways of protesting—blocking traffic, marching, getting arrested—were often misrepresented in the media, cost taxpayers money in police overtime, and could result in criminal records and police brutality. We weren’t vandalizing the boxes that morning, for example, and even paid for one paper to open them. A quiet, quasi-legal way to do something loud. We didn’t know what would work, so we tried anything we could think of. That someone wouldn’t do any or all of this is what seemed extraordinary to me then.

 

 

I DID NOT MEET Peter that morning. Instead, I ached as he walked in the parking lot, oblivious to me, his leathers shiny in the dark, his blue hair flashing occasionally above the perfect white of his scalp. I asked my friend Choire about him. Who was this man?

Peter Kelloran, he said. Dreamboat. Jason’s boyfriend.

Jason was another member of our activist family, and a friend. He also took part in the newspaper action. He reminded me of a soldier in a poster from World War I, the same ethereal good looks, but gone punk. Jason had always had what seemed an enviable sexual success, but never more than that day. He felt to me like the blond boy I was always losing out to, and it was hard not to resent him for it. In any case, I drew a line through the possibility of ever getting Peter’s attention then.

 

 

PETER FELT BEYOND ME for other reasons besides Jason: too handsome, too adult, too cool to want me, and, certainly, unapproachable. But for all I tried to believe I had no chance with Peter, my desire for him was like a private horizon line, hidden inside every view I had of that morning. And after that, it seemed there was nowhere I might not see him. His electric-blue Mohawk, the blue eyes carrying the light like a filament, the way they flashed through me every time they met mine. The sight of him on the back of a friend’s motorcycle, or at the wheel of his VW Thing, his head settled low as he drove by.

The next time I saw him, we were protesting the filming of Basic Instinct. It is not widely remembered that a leaked version of the script sparked protests about the misogynistic antilesbian story line. We had no way of knowing, of course, that in the future, the film would become a cult lesbian classic, and Sharon Stone’s vehicle to fame. Peter joined me and Faustino, my boyfriend at the time, under the overpass where the crew was filming, and together we let out a discordant three-way yowl. Peter and I had both been in boys’ choirs; Faustino couldn’t carry a tune, but he was quite loud. The resulting sound was haunting, but it also filled us with joy, and I remember Peter’s smile in the San Francisco night as the tone climbed the bridge’s belly and flew everywhere around us.

Our shriek apparently caused so much distress on the set that Michael Douglas hit a bank of lights with his car. He was not harmed but filming was halted. A few days later, another affinity group I was a part of used fake passes and got on the set during filming. Riot police hidden inside emerged, handcuffed us, and took us all down to the precinct house, where we were held. Peter and Faustino both avoided arrest, I recall. They were technically legal observers and waited for us as we left the police garage. I remember sashaying out of the garage to the howls and whistles of my waiting friends, and that may have been the first time Peter saw me. He was standing at street level, talking to Jason. But I saw his eyes find me, smile, and go back.

Some weeks later, on a morning after we had eluded arrest for a Gulf War street action, I was having brunch at the Baghdad Café when Peter came to my table and asked for my phone number. He waited as I wrote it, grinning a little. He walked off after I handed it to him, looking over his shoulder and waving at me, more or less ignoring my table mates.

He never asks for anyone’s number, my friend Miguel said. He’s still hung up on his ex.

People change, I said.

I said this with the bravado I often felt back then. And Peter had asked in a manner so calm, so at odds with my reaction, it didn’t seem like desire. It was courtly and calm.

I don’t know how Peter saw me. I’ll never know. How I saw him: Peter at Café Flore, sitting in a sunlit window, surrounded by friends; Peter walking a dark sidewalk, wheat paste in a bucket in his hand, putting up flyers; Peter at meetings, standing in the back of the room, scowling slightly; Peter shining, naked, in the reflection of the mirror in his apartment as he approached his bed.

 

 

ON OUR FIRST DATE, Peter took me to see a concert. He picked me up at my apartment on Market Street, we went to the concert downtown, and we drove back to my place afterward. I don’t remember the music. That whole night I was aware only of Peter. I asked him in, and he said sure. In my room he sat down on my bed, a lumber-and-cinderblock affair that I’d made with a friend. I did not turn on the light.

San Francisco nights are always more vivid than the days. The sunlight, for all its color and clarity, added to my sense that the city was an illusion, and the nights are when everything seems its true self and color. Peter felt much older than me that night. He wore his leather jacket, a coat I loved, and it was one of the few times when I knew him that his hair was blond, his head nearly bare. All night he’d been taking drops of astragalus, and he did again as we sat on my bed.

So, he said, as he tucked the dropper into his jacket, I normally take boys home and tie them up and whip them. He smiled as he said this.

Do you want to take me home and tie me up and whip me? I asked.

Do you want to be tied up and whipped? he asked.

No, I said, not really. Part of me thought he was joking. Part of me knew his reputation.

He lay down next to me. The two of us were in our coats and boots, and I felt alone with him for the first time. That’s fine, he said, we don’t have to do that. And he reached his arm around me.

Can you do me a favor? I asked him after we had lain there awhile, silent and still.

Yes, he said.

Can you lie on top of me? Just, you know, lie there?

He rolled on top of me, in a light embrace, and the weight of him pushed the breath out of me.

Am I crushing you? he asked.

No, I said. This was exactly what I had meant. The weight of him pressed me out. I felt covered, safe; something dark in me retreated and, for what felt like the first time in the arms of a man, I felt safe. I was still me—the switch was not flicked, but the terrible feeling haunting me then didn’t reach me. Which is one of the things that love can feel like. Peter stayed there for some time. He may have fallen asleep at some point. And so it is that when I hear stories of how thin he became, I can’t reconcile them with the weight of the boy who pinned me to myself, made me feel the place in me where I attached to the world.

Eventually he got up to go home. We made a plan to see each other again. I was with him in a way that I had been with no one else, and from what I understand, this was also true for him. It isn’t just that you fall in love with someone—you each allow yourself new identities with each other, new skins, almost like a cocoon to who you’ll be next. Strange to ourselves and to each other; only the feeling of the room, the silence of it, was familiar. All over the city, people were strung into slings, dancing on tables, walking down alleys following strangers, but on my doorstep it felt like we were a young couple out of Happy Days, out of the fifties, mild as milk. I watched him go and then turned and went back upstairs to bed.

I wouldn’t know until years later that he had just told his mother of his illness. He had shaved his head after returning from his sister’s wedding, for which he had grown out his hair. In pictures from that day, “he looked gorgeous,” his mother says. But his grandmother Paula Morgan thought otherwise. “He’s sick,” she said after seeing him. She knew before he had told them what was wrong. “He was a very special young man,” she says of him now. “It seems to me this happens to special young men.”

 

 

I WAS BREAKING UP with Faustino at the time I met Peter, or, really, what we had was falling apart.

I was as in love with Faustino as I had ever been with anyone. Once, when I told him I had trouble sleeping, he made me a ring with zzzzzz circling the band—he was a metalsmith. No one had ever made anything just for me. We both drove motorcycles and used to cruise the long avenues at night, then lock them up together at home. But once we were inside, undressed and in bed, it seemed like a switch had been flicked, turning off the lights. I would freeze, and feel as if I were replaced in the room by someone else. I didn’t know how to stop what was happening to me; I didn’t know what the problem was. I was at the age, I would one day learn, when memories and feelings related to childhood sexual abuse usually return. I thought it was peculiar to me, but it was all too ordinary; I just didn’t have anyone to explain it to me.

In any case, I’d asked Faustino for a break while I figured it out. During that break, he found Jason.

This felt like another failure to me. It was not lost on me that in our circle of activists, we were the only couple composed of two men of color. All of the other gay men of color in our activist group were with white men. All of them had a tendency to date white men and had even commented on it with each other. I still remember one young white man at an activist party who came up to me and asked what it was like to date his future husband.

Want to see the ring he made me? I said, and flashed it at him.

Faustino had driven his motorcycle out of West Texas for San Francisco. Shortly after, by his account, he had walked into the bookstore where I worked. I remember it distinctly: the sunlight on the backs of his legs, the shy smile on his face as we locked eyes and fell in love. Our first kiss was at a Queer Nation kiss-in, at a straight bar downtown. Our whole story together was, before this, about dreams come true and the pursuit of justice. It was love at first sight also, but with someone who had fallen for me, too. I didn’t want to lose it. But I didn’t have any way to stop what was happening to me either, and I didn’t know how to explain.

It may be that Peter approached me that day because he knew Jason had started seeing Faustino. This kind of drama wasn’t really like him. But it doesn’t mean it wasn’t true. I could have been a point he was making.

Jason and I were otherwise opposites of a kind, me the dark to his light, or, as I experienced it, me the invisible to his visible. That we would end up having not one but two men in common was strange. That I would feel I had lost both of them to Jason—this was what I had always feared would be the story of my life. That I would always lose in love to any blond white man.

Faustino eventually asked me for the ring back, and I did return it after I moved away to New York, by then in love with someone else. And Jason and Peter got back together and had a commitment ceremony, before breaking up again.

After their next breakup, Peter, in the grip of his dementia, would sometimes believe, right up until his passing, that Jason, who visited him regularly, was still his boyfriend. No matter what I’d said to my friend Miguel, Peter had not changed: he still loved Jason, and would until he died.

Peter would die first; Jason, shortly after I interviewed him to write this. Faustino remains alive, but we don’t speak. I hope someday we can.

I left this tangle. Peter’s story continued without me, to its end.

 

 

HERE IS EVERYTHING I never knew about Peter:

He was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and had grown up in Washington, first on Mercer Island and then in Bellevue, where he went to Newport High School. He was a skier and a swimmer in high school, but “not competitive in that way people wanted from athletes,” his mother, Jill, adds. Intelligent, quick-minded, he never had to study hard and school came easily to him. “He used to love to bug me,” his sister Lisa says of him. She remembers that when she would come downstairs in the morning in what he considered inappropriate clothes, he would take her back upstairs to re-dress her. He could get away with a great deal of mischief. “He used to leave the house undetected all the time,” Jill recalls. “I didn’t know for years that he would get out of the house through his window and go out all night. He started doing it as a child.”

He graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in graphic design and left for Europe, where he lived for a year in Spain and Portugal. He had been a kind of art prodigy, good at ceramics, drawing, design. In college he had made a ceramic relief so large there was no kiln big enough to fire it, so the relief stayed at his home in Washington until his father, Tom, sold the house. Jill still has a set of plates he made in the shapes of fishes, and one Christmas, she recalls, he sent her copper candlesticks that had once been table legs; he’d wrapped each one in brown paper and arranged the group into the shape of a star. “I didn’t want to open it,” she says. “It was like, that was the gift itself, it was so beautiful.”

He worked as a bartender at the Paradise Lounge in San Francisco and made all its event posters, using a psychedelic style that soon became its trademark. They were the kind of posters people stole to take home. “So beautiful,” says his friend Laura, who bartended there with him. Peter created images for ACT UP’s Marlboro boycott, and was proud to see earnings reports that showed Marlboro had lost money in the quarter the boycott began. He also wanted to be a musician, and before he became too ill to do so, he had plans to record. “He had a beautiful voice,” Lisa says. “Yes, he had a beautiful voice,” his mother says.

He is remembered as consistent by all who knew him, steady with everyone, but still a study in contradictions. He was immensely private, and yet he would say, without provocation, to anyone, “I’m a homo.” Serious and grave, he would give in occasionally to a jig, a little hopping dance. Extremely quiet, he could, when he wanted, be the center of attention. “I was called to school by the principal when he was in the fifth grade,” his mother recalls, “for a show. A talent show by the students. And out came this little boy, my boy, so self-possessed. And he emceed the entire show from start to finish, totally confident, a little Johnny Carson.” Peter attended his high school prom in a black tuxedo he splattered with shocking-pink paint to match his date’s pink dress and the pink shirt he wore with the tux.

In San Francisco, after college, he became part of a punk-rock scene that centered on a place called the A-hole, where he befriended the painter Pasquale Semillion, whom he and Laura cared for until his death from AIDS. Peter had turned to photography but still painted abstract canvases. No one is sure who has what pieces of his art now. His sister has three of the Paradise Lounge posters framed in her home; his mother, the plates that he made and paintings and a sketch he had titled Three Dogs and a Pig, though it actually depicted four dogs. Jill likes to remember this as an example of his humor. Laura has paintings and pictures and tapes. Before he died, Jason had memories only, but only after he became ill. “I can’t really remember him from before he was sick, don’t really remember the art,” he says. “Isn’t that terrible?”

His favorite musicians: Yello, Adam Ant, and Einstürzende Neubauten. His favorite article of clothing: a belt buckle shaped like a bullet. His favorite author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr., in particular the story “Welcome to the Monkey House,” in which Billy the Poet, a lighthearted sexual rhymer, stalks a futuristic America with plans to make Americans enjoy the sex they now all deny themselves.

Jill has a picture of him, framed, that she looks at regularly: Peter on the beach in Portugal, waving from the sand in front of a tent he had made from debris—flags, old jeans, sails—where he lived for a good part of his time there. His father has framed a five-page letter that Peter sent from that Portuguese tent.

When an artist dies young there is always talk of the paintings unpainted, the books unwritten, which points to some imaginary storehouse of undone things and not to the imagination itself, the far richer treasure, lost. All of those works are the trail left behind, a path across time, left like the sun leaves gold on the sea: you can see it but you can’t ever pick it up. What we lose with each death, though, is more like stars falling out of the sky and into the sea and gone. The something undone, the something that won’t ever be done, always remains unendurable to consider. A permanent loss of possibility, so that what is left is only ever better than nothing, but the loss is limitless.

I can’t help but long for Peter still, the sight of him, as I once did, love-struck and young, a star in my eye. The top corner of it dyed blue. My personal pantheon of heroes from that time—Peter, Derek Jarman, and David Wojnarowicz—inspired me to be an artist, to protest, to live as queerly, as confidently, and as openly as I wanted. Their deaths, from AIDS, from intentional government inaction—we were not believed to be worth saving—took them from me, from all of us, far too soon. They still inspire me. And so I stand here and balance what I’ve learned from them on the tip of a crush two decades old, the only communication possible.

In some strange way, more than my other heroes, and more than my other boyfriends, Peter and I were alike. Both oldest brothers, both with family money, both with a sense of political responsibility. Both of us got away with all sorts of misbehavior as children, both of us liked to shock with the way we dressed, both of us liked science fiction. Both of us sang in boys’ choirs as children. Both of us studied ceramics in college. Both of us skied and swam and eschewed team sports, competitive behavior in general. But in the end I wonder if it is a mistake to think about what was lost. If it isn’t better instead to think about what he gave me.

 

 

WHEN I FELL IN love with Peter, I fell in love with what I wanted to be next. Peter was a member of what was jokingly known at first as the BART 9, a group of nine activists who had handcuffed themselves to the pole at the center of a BART train when the doors were open, stopping the train in the station. This same group had also disrupted opening night at the San Francisco Opera and blockaded the Golden Gate Bridge. They’d done a lot of protests like these over the years, and while many of them were in ACT UP, for most this was simply another in a series of protests designed to draw attention to the AIDS pandemic and the various ways in which companies were looking to exploit the dying. The BART 9 protest had ended quickly, with the group arrested and taken away. The train was delayed but still left the station. Peter missed his medication that day as a result of his arrest, Laura recalls. “It was a nightmare.” Missing their medication was a constant risk for AIDS activists who had the illness. The police who denied them their pills, out of whatever rules the jail followed, were murderous.

Peter felt the risk was worthy. We have nothing to lose, the HIV-positive contingent of ACT UP would say in those days. We have nothing to lose, having lost everything. Understand that in 1989 there was AZT and that was basically it. Understand that those of us in my generation who lived in San Francisco had to overcome the false impression that no one like us had ever existed before, because the ones who might have greeted us when we arrived were already dead. We lacked models for bravery and were trying to invent them, as we likewise invented models for loving and for activism. While writing an article about love and HIV, I interviewed many young gay people who would say, I can’t imagine getting older. Most of the people who might have shown them what it would be like to be gay and alive even at age forty or forty-five are dead. What happened to me is happening again, ten years later.

In The Odyssey, Homer describes Poseidon Earthshaker as having blue hair. He is alternately “blue-maned Poseidon” and “Poseidon of the blue brows.” Peter, now returned to the sea, makes me think of that, his blue hair a mark across his brow from the ancient god.

Peter D. Kelloran, resident of San Francisco, a town ruled by earthquakes and inhabited by people who understood some of the value of what the Greeks left for us. Peter the blue-maned, now in the arms of Poseidon Earthshaker—he belongs to a time that already we can’t imagine even though we lived through it, when there was one drug, and hope was hidden so it wouldn’t die.

I like to imagine him as one of the science-fiction characters he favored, in flight through the sky, roaming the night in a nimbus of blue light, a smiling rogue punk-rock angel, his wings dyed blue to match, from a heaven where everyone dresses well and mercy means love and a man you don’t know will hold your hand for you when you die. A heaven where, when there’s injustice, you chain yourself to a train because you know that somewhere someone feels it. Somewhere along the spirit-chain world-mind oversoul. Someone somewhere who maybe thought there wasn’t a thing called strength feels how you care enough to stand in front of the passage of a train.

As children, we thought Superman was brave to stand in front of a train. That’s not brave, though. Superman never stood before anything that could destroy him. Peter did.

 

 

DURING HIS LAST TWO years, when he was very sick, he became so thin his pants would fall off him. He went in and out of dementia, regressing. He started smoking again. He would ask Jason, “Does my father know we’re boyfriends?” Or he would say, “I met you during high school, right?” One day at the hospice he went out with Janet, his aunt, to get cigarettes and burgers, and he looked around on the street and said, “These people, they’re all homosexuals! Every one!” He was so thin at that point that even in the Castro, where people were accustomed to the sight of wasting, Peter attracted attention.

“He had wanted,” Janet says, “to be at Maitri. And so we went and there was no room, and it looked like he was going to have to go somewhere else, and then I called and found him a space there, which was good. It was where he wanted to be.” Janet had rented an apartment for Peter to spend Christmas with her down in Carmel, and it was shortly after, upon returning, that Peter called her to say, “It’s time. It’s my time.” He had been living at home until then, getting meals delivered and having home care, and when he called Janet, he gave as his reason, “I can’t take care of myself anymore. It’s my time.”

Imagine yourself as a pool of light and sound altering as all your days run through you, and they pass again and again. From moment to moment, you are every age you have ever been, but in no particular order. Time courses through you, the time you lived, a flume of your days. This was Peter’s dementia.

“I always knew where he was,” Laura says of his dementia. “God, he would say something and people would say, ‘He’s crazy,’ but he wasn’t. No, people thought it was sad, and it was, but it was beautiful, really, because he was back in the days that he loved, just all at once. I remember he said once, ‘I have to give Laura a baby!’ and the people at the hospice really thought he’d lost it, but I knew. We used to talk about having a child, and then, well, he got HIV, and he never talked about it again. And so he mentioned the baby again there, and I said, ‘No, remember? You got sick. And so we didn’t have it.’ And he got quiet again.”

Jason remembered him saying, “I am supposed to tell you something, Jason. They want me to tell you something.” So Jason waited, and then Peter said, “It’s about love. I am supposed to tell you, they want me to tell you, it’s about love.”

“He was so angry at the end,” Laura recalls. “Before Christmas we went out to dinner for his birthday, and he had chocolate. And it made him all warm, as he wasn’t eating any sugar and hadn’t for a long time. And so we took him home, and I stayed with him and it was then I knew, we’d lost him. That he was going to go. He was very lucid then, very disappointed. He was talking about how he’d never been properly loved by a man, and how he wouldn’t be now. He spoke of everything he wouldn’t do, the music, everything. And when I heard him talk like that, I knew he wasn’t going to make it.”

 

 

BEFORE THIS PETER HAD wanted to live at least until 1995. Research that he and Laura had done in astrology said that 1995 would be an important year, and it would be. It was the year of the advent of protease inhibitors, the year many people mortgaged their deaths. Laura had done so much research into trying to keep Peter alive that she was awarded a full scholarship to Mills College to study microbiology. She received the letter notifying her the Monday after he had died. “It got me out of bed,” she says. She had taken to her bed for a week after Peter’s passing and would later in the year be hospitalized for two weeks for severe depression. “I’ve had a number of breakdowns since,” she says. “I just felt that I had failed him. That I wasn’t able to keep him alive. And it hurt too damn much.”

Laura divorced her husband later, in part because without Peter she felt her marriage reduced, and she likewise gave up her research. She has lost more friends than Peter to the epidemic, but more than that, she lost the one she loved best. “If I thought for a second,” she says, “that I could love like that again . . .” Her mother and Peter’s mother both had not so secretly wished the two of them would marry—Laura was a Lister, as in Listerine, and Peter was a Morgan, of the banking family, on his mother’s side—but eventually both accepted the situation for what it was.

Laura and Peter were closer perhaps than if they had married. They had divined several important concordances in their astrological charts, but for Laura the most significant was that he was Aries moon at twenty-seven degrees, and she, Aries sun at twenty-seven degrees. “Your moon sign is your relationship to yourself, how you talk to yourself,” Laura says. “The way he talked to himself, that was me. And your sun, that is how you greet the world.”

Peter was not buried. He was cremated and his ashes were spread on a sunny day from a catamaran that sailed out under the Golden Gate Bridge. “There’s no marker,” Jill says. “Just our hearts. We know where he is.”