I lost several of my painting stretcher customers who lived in the Castro around '86 or so, and two really good friends who were in the Early Music scene in SF. One of them was Ken Johnson who went to school the same place I had, only a few years earlier. He ran a store called Musica Antiqua at California near Fillmore. I was in the shop visiting with him the day we heard the horrible news about Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk.
A few years later I made a bedroom set for him and his lover John. They lived around Duncan and Church St./Noe Valley area. They passed from aids in the early 90's. Ken closed Musica Antiqua, and they took a boat trip up the Nile together before returning to San Francisco where they both died about 6 months apart. It's strange how things are connected, because just a few days ago, I was checking ebay to see the harpsichords that occasionally come up for auction, and was surprised to see an instrument that I actually knew and had played. The seller said he was selling it and his deceased relative had gotten it at Musica Antiqua sometime in the mid 70's, and I started thinking about Ken and that life I lived then.
I lost a lot of friends then too. My landlords told me in 1985, two years into the epidemic (after we actually were told about HIV-Aids) that they had lost 79 tenants in that year to aids. They had properties up the ying yang, but 79 tenants in one year... it gives a number and a sense of scale to the devastation. I remember that rents dropped way down for awhile all around my area, because suddenly around where I lived, there were a rash of sudden vacancies and no one to take them. This was in the area from Market and Duboce to the Castro District. I'd go to a restaurant, or maybe drop off some stretchers to someone, and they would have the spots on their neck, which we knew was a death sentence, but they would seem fine. Then see them again and they had wasted away to nothing and were just barely functional... then, gone. Reagan wouldn't even mention the word or the epidemic. He should roast for that alone. I'd pump the bellows and stir the coals. The great communicator.
That whole era is so visceral for me. The die off was so vast. I wrote about it in my AIDS piece many moons ago, going to visit my grandmother in the hospital and the whole place overflowing with the young and dying. And throughout it all, Reagan's hideous mug on the television . . .
A few years later I made a bedroom set for him and his lover John. They lived around Duncan and Church St./Noe Valley area. They passed from aids in the early 90's. Ken closed Musica Antiqua, and they took a boat trip up the Nile together before returning to San Francisco where they both died about 6 months apart. It's strange how things are connected, because just a few days ago, I was checking ebay to see the harpsichords that occasionally come up for auction, and was surprised to see an instrument that I actually knew and had played. The seller said he was selling it and his deceased relative had gotten it at Musica Antiqua sometime in the mid 70's, and I started thinking about Ken and that life I lived then.
I lost a lot of friends then too. My landlords told me in 1985, two years into the epidemic (after we actually were told about HIV-Aids) that they had lost 79 tenants in that year to aids. They had properties up the ying yang, but 79 tenants in one year... it gives a number and a sense of scale to the devastation. I remember that rents dropped way down for awhile all around my area, because suddenly around where I lived, there were a rash of sudden vacancies and no one to take them. This was in the area from Market and Duboce to the Castro District. I'd go to a restaurant, or maybe drop off some stretchers to someone, and they would have the spots on their neck, which we knew was a death sentence, but they would seem fine. Then see them again and they had wasted away to nothing and were just barely functional... then, gone. Reagan wouldn't even mention the word or the epidemic. He should roast for that alone. I'd pump the bellows and stir the coals. The great communicator.
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