WHAT I KEEP LEARNING FROM MY BROTHER JOHN
who was gay and died of AIDS

Several years after our father's death, my brother John exclaimed out of the blue: "That's why he did it!"
"That's why who did what?" I asked.
"That's why Dad insisted we go to the city dump."
"Please explain," I said.
John had just figured out why, two decades earlier, our father insisted they go by the city dump in Brownwood in central Texas on their way to a fishing trip. At the time, Dad told him they needed to find an abandoned refrigerator to raid for a grill for their campfire. John pointed out they already had a grill in the trunk of Dad's old Rambler. Our father insisted, much to John's annoyance.
Now, years later, my brother realized Dad's motivation. "There was an old railroad caboose in that dump," John said. "Dad knew I loved trains, and he wanted me to see it."

That was the day I learned our stories keep getting written, even after the death of people we love.

When he was about four years old, John solemnly announced to our family, "Life is loveable," then broke out in a smile that wreathed his curls with gold. My brother's view of life never changed, not when at the age of six or seven he became aware of his sexual orientation nor, four decades later, when he looked his own death straight in the eye without flinching. That John was born gay in his time, culture, and family drama--1945 in West Texas with two wildly conventional older brothers, plus me--meant he had to work very much harder to continue to find life loveable. But he did--with creativity, courage, and commitment to the common good--right up to the end.

Because John was HIV-positive in the 1980s, he knew he would die early. Billie Letts in WHERE THE HEART IS reminds us that every year each of us lives through a day that will someday become the anniversary of our death. John's anniversary day is April 3. Shortly before he died, I said to him: "John, I can imagine your being sick. I can even imagine your dying. But I cannot imagine this world without you."
Now, years later, I realize I do not have to. I find myself thinking, "Oh, so that's what he meant" or "Yes, that's what John would have done" or "Well, he was sure right about that. Now on with the show."

I experience with joy and gratitude the many ways I continue to learn from my brother. Here are some of them:

1. John is still helping my children grow. Our son Matthew inherited John's boots and much of his taste and talent for public life. Matthew learned from John to treat secretaries with the same courtesy as superiors. He absorbed John's admonition that the purpose of acquiring power or influence is to help others who have neither. Our daughter Carrie, who had a special bond with John, has recently decided to go to law school. Reminded that she will be one of three lawyers in our family, along with her father and Uncle John, she remarked, "That is pretty good company to be in."
2. From my brother I learned practical lessons that help me every day. One of them is this: John believed that a good way to know how a straight man is likely to feel about gay men is to watch how he treats women. If a man sees women as equals and treats them as partners, he is probably secure enough in his own masculinity not to be threatened by the idea or fact of homosexuality.
3. John showed me how to give a party. His whole life was one of reaching out to others. He was the radiant spirit of any party, and he knew how to give one--more often than not for a good cause. A week before his death, one of his nurses was trying to insert a needle in his arm. While waiting for the anesthetic to wear off so she could try again, she spoke of how the nurses who were working so hard with AIDS patients had no health insurance themselves. I looked up to see tears in John's eyes. "That's not right," he said. "Now, what we need to do is organize a big fund-raiser to get this thing started."
4. My brother is still teaching me about politics, which he loved. He grew and changed, from serving as a political appointee in the Reagan Administration to fighting for small family farmers as a Democrat. John taught me, like Jefferson, never ever to give up on the Republic and, like Ben Franklin, to forgive the present every day for the sake of the future. While leading a trade mission to China, John sent a postcard with two observations: "Conditions change rapidly, and we do not all have to be the same to get along."
5. John keeps bringing me new friends. Shortly after his death I started looking for a writer to finish John's novel about gays in the Reagan Administration. A mutual acquaintance introduced me to Mel White, who as a friend and as founder of Soulforce has changed my life. Soulforce, an interfaith movement committed to ending spiritual violence perpetuated by religious policies against GLBT people, combines my passions for activism, faith, and commitment to the non-violent principles of Gandhi and King. Along the way I also met Dr. Rodney Powell, a leader as a medical student in the Civil Rights movement in Nashville in the 1960's and now in the Soulforce movement for gay civil rights. Rodney has become like a brother to me. As we were being booked in Cleveland for an act of civil disobedience protesting the anti-gay policies of the United Methodist Church at its quadrennial convention, Rodney smiled and said quietly, "John would be so proud of you."
6. My religious faith has been deepened and tested because I knew John as a gay man. I have lived with disappointment as my denomination hardens its policies against gays. Nowadays I am comfortable talking with pretty much anyone about matters of sexual orientation and religious faith. Dotti Berry and I once spent an hour talking with a high official in the Southern Baptist Convention about homosexuality and the church. He was horrified when I concluded, "Well, I've decided to follow what Jesus said on the matter." Missing my irony or maybe forgetting that Jesus never mentions the subject at all, he exclaimed in horror: "Surely you don't mean Jesus would approve of homosexuals!" I replied, "From the evidence we have, it looks like it."
7. I am a better teacher than I would have been without my brother. John's comfort with himself made me comfortable with raising issues about homosexuality when appropriate. Sometimes I point out that about 4% of the population are born left-handed, fewer than those born GLBT. A casual mention in class of my gay brother often brings students to my office to talk further. Gay or not, they are all hungry for perspectives different from those they learned at home or church.
8. I have a new research subject. As I watched my own family drama unfold with John's revelations that he was gay and later that he had AIDS, I realized the profound importance of sibling relationships in our life stories. Now I read the ancient Greek tragedies I teach with new awareness. They are all about families, which is where the good stories are.
9. Artist Corita Kent said that assignments are freeing because they mean there's so much we don't have to do. Many forms of ugliness surround us in this world. I cannot address all of them, even those that press most on my attention. But the fact that any human being can be hated for no reason other than a condition of birth, this is one ugliness I can fight. Further, because I am at home inside the church, I am comfortable confronting church-sponsored bigotry wherever I find it.
10. Finally, I have watched my mother grow, now into her ninety-fourth year, as she fights homophobia at every opportunity in the church and community. Lucile Davis Ford is fond of saying, "Sanctified ignorance is still ignorance." Some members of my home church, St. John's United Methodist in Lubbock, Texas, give my mother credit for its decision to become a Reconciling Congregation. "She made being gay respectable," said one. When she refers in any company to her son John, she never fails to add: "He was gay and died of AIDS."

* * * * * *

I love hot air balloons. They seem so quiet, so peaceful, so elegant. I have never ridden in one, but I love to watch them and to think about why they rise and ride as they do.

Nothing in the world keeps those balloons in the sky except air. Thin air. Hot air rises, which means that the air inside the balloon is thinner than the surrounding atmosphere. "Nothing" keeps hot air balloons aloft. It is absence, not presence, that causes those gorgeous works of art to sail through the sky, carrying in their gondolas the living weight of human beings now able to observe with new perspective the world around them.

My brother's life for me these days is like a beautiful hot air balloon. His presence seems not a figment of my imagination but something more like the mysterious power of physics to defy gravity. Like John in his delayed realization of his father's expression of love in the form of an abandoned caboose, I continue to receive gifts from my brother's life. These loving gifts keep lifting me up and moving me on.

Susan Ford Wiltshire
author of SEASONS OF GRIEF AND GRACE:
A Sister's Story of AIDS (1994)

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