GAY REALITY : THE TEAM GUIDO STORY Read Online Free

I mean we are good. So, we kept working our plan, while at the company things were clearly disintegrating.
    “I couldn’t bring myself to play ball and I pushed the C.E.O.’s buttons, the wrong buttons. In December of 1997 I got fired. It was certainly no surprise to me.
    “But things were good for us”, offered Bill. “I’d opened the real estate business and we owned multiple places. It certainly wasn’t great being gay in Utah, but we had each other and that was plenty good enough. We’d both been through a whole lot before we found each other and we had few complaints, if any.

THE SCOURGE  
    WE ARE together in the magnificently decorated condo in Laguna Niguel, California. It is Joe and Bill’s place which they bought in 1994. It is evident that they could be successful doing upscale interiors.
    On this August night I sit comfortably, pad and pen in hand, on a lush couch. Across from me, on a matching piece, sit Joe and Bill. Behind them and off to the side, Michael Isom looks down at us from a bar stool. Joe is gently rubbing and scratching little Guido’s head and ears as I ask the three longtime friends for their first recollection of the emergence of AIDS.
    Michael : “It was about the early 80’s. Except for San Francisco, in the West it took longer to hear about it and get it. There were all sorts of rumors. ‘It’s airborne, you get it from touching, from kissing, from tears, from poppers.’ There was even a wide-spread story circulating that it was a Reagan administration plot to eliminate gays, blacks and even Haitians.”
    Bill : “In 1979, in New York City, I heard about Gay Cancer. A friend from the Center for Disease Control, in Atlanta, said ‘you’d better start using condoms. It seems to be sexually transmitted and really is a mystery.’ Not long after that, at a party in San Diego, I saw a guy who was really gaunt. It wasn’t much after that that I heard he had died.”
    Joe : “About the same time for me, I was in Sausalito. It seemed to be centered in New York and San Francisco. They referred to it as Gay Cancer and there was serious discussion as to whether all the bath houses in San Francisco should be shut down.
    “I was totally in favor of doing that. I got into a very loud argument with a guy in a real nice restaurant. He thought closing them would be a horrible infringement on the personal rights of gays.”
    Michael : “I had someone, who I was intimate with, who died. We’ve talked about this and I can tell you that Bill and I reacted immediately. Joe took longer to accept it.”
    Joe : “In ‘83 or ‘84 a friend of mine, a gay activist, told San Francisco Mayor Diane Feinstein that this was lots more serious than anyone could imagine. He had learned that from a much respected medical team. About that time STD’s (Sexually Transmitted Diseases) were very common in the gay community, but some penicillin could easily remedy anything like that.”
    Michael : “In the 70’s it was completely wild. Out of control. We were having sex everywhere. In bars, in bath houses. It was crazy. And a whole lot to overcome.”
    The three of them had lived through so much. How had they survived?
    Joe : “At first it was like a rumor. It seemed real, but what was truly safe? Was it just from intercourse, or kissing, or toilet seats, or what? There was total confusion.”
    Michael : “Education is everything! Unprotected sex is crazy. You are asking to die. Yet, there are still people today who are in the dark ages.”
    Bill : “I was trained and educated on how to avoid AIDS. Some are either uneducated or they just don’t give a damn. They don’t want to do anything about it, but they must know. To me, it equates to people who keep smoking.”
    Michael : “In the beginning it was horrible. When they were identified they were shunned. It was terrible. No one would even touch them! Scams were everywhere. Some responsible medical people tried all kinds of things, but there were