A Hug on the Other Side
Twenty-five years ago, I found out my friend, Luis “Louie” Rodriguez, came home to Rhode Island to die. Louie had AIDS. He knew the day was dawning. He didn’t want any of his friends to see him die. I didn’t get the chance to see him, to say goodbye, tell him how much I love him, and how he taught me to respect my gay self. I was twenty-six years old when he died, in college, and still living at home with my mother and stepfather. We hadn’t seen each other in a while–which wasn’t uncommon for us—because he moved to Atlanta in 1993. New Year’s Eve 1994–the last time we saw one other—I visited him with another friend of ours from Rhode Island where we’re all originally from. It was the first time I had spent a New Year’s Eve in a climate without ice, snow, or blistery cold temperatures. We rode around downtown trying to find a parking spot to go see the fireworks. The streets were jammed with cars. It was close to midnight and we were growing anxious about having to celebrate the arrival of 1995 sitting in a car stuck in traffic. When I look back, it is one of the best New Year’s celebrations of my life. I couldn’t have imagined in that moment how fun it would be in that car with Louie and our three other best friends blasting house music, laughing, singing, gyrating in our seats, windows down. Our friend Clarence hung out of the window throwing bouquets of compliments to men we found attractive while the rest of us smiled and squirmed with elation. When the fireworks went off, we didn’t care anymore that we were still in stuck in traffic. We got out of the car and danced in the street with others who put their cars in park and watched the display of brilliant colors flash across the night sky.
After that, Louie and I kept in touch through hours-long phone calls. I knew he had been living with HIV, which he got in 1996, but I didn’t know my friend was sick until his sister called and told me he died in his sleep taking a nap on her couch. My friend died of AIDS on May 25, 1998. It was the saddest, scariest day of my life, second only to having to euthanize my fourteen-year-old springer spaniel, Lady, in September 1995.
I remember at the wake/funeral when it was my turn to view Louie laying in the coffin. I stood there not crying but feeling him touching my heart, touching my soul, changing my life, and all of my goals. I held his hand and kissed his lips. We had shared our love and shared our beds, shared our clothes and shared our scents. I can still smell him and feel his hand in mine when I sleep, bearing my soul while kneeling at his feet. I can see our first time going to the Campus/Manray gay nightclub in the Boston area, spending the day shopping, buying new outfits, me changing clothes in the CambridgeSide Galleria bathroom and him changing clothes in my car parked in the parking lot. We danced so strong, we danced so close, sweat pouring, flinging onto each other’s faces. We laughed, we cried, and swore we’d never let the moment go, our spirits entering night’s consciousness. My memories were then interrupted with a whisper by his family.
Louie’s family didn’t want anyone to know he was gay, had HIV, and died of AIDS, which bothered me. He had gone through so much heartache to accept his sexuality let alone be comfortable in his Puerto Rican skin. My friend died as much from AIDS as he did the stigma of being a brown-skinned gay man. That stigma prevented Louie from getting the medical treatment he needed, and from taking the Antiretrovirals that could’ve saved his life. I believe he’d be here today if that stigma, which is rife in our country, weren’t there because the last time I saw him he looked well, but when I asked him if he was seeing a doctor, he told me he wasn’t. I followed up with if he was taking his medication. He responded with he was, but I accidentally came across a bag underneath his bed filled with full pill bottles. He said he was fine and didn’t need them, his T-cells were normal. But what his definition of normal was, I learned later was way below the average.
Restless waves of fear, doubt, and sorrow made me nauseous. I had so many friends being diagnosed with HIV. He was far more in control than I was. We talked more, and I promised him I would be there. He, in turn, tried to reassure me that he’d be sticking around. Still, I couldn’t shake the fact that AIDS would claim him. I loved him. I still love him. We were in tune every day; when we were clubbing we danced and were always laughing, and our laughter made people smile at us.
We never spoke again about status when we talked on the phone, but there was one conversation we had towards the end of his life where he told me that that time he saw the doctor, the doctor wore rubbers gloves, three masks, a shield over his face, and kept as far away as possible, refusing to check Louie’s glands that were swollen.
It wasn’t long after I started noticing Louie becoming depressed, and every time he sunk into a state of depression, he’d engage in some rather risky sexual activity, reinfecting himself with different strains. A few times a year, he’d go out and hook up with lots of strange men. Sometimes his behavior almost proved fatal, but we were able to get him to stop. The pattern didn’t stop, though. I never judged him for it because it was devastating for him to be Puerto Rican with HIV, to have his family pretend he wasn’t gay, and ever more difficult for him was to comprehend gay men discriminating against him. Many times we’d experienced white gay men hurling racial slurs at us over the loud music in gay nightclubs Avalon and Axis. Across the street from Fenway Park in Boston—gay only on Sundays—Avalon and Axis were separated by a wall with different entrances. The Avalon crowd was predominantly white, and the Axis crowd predominantly Black. Axis removed its glassware while Avalon offered drinks in glass to its white patrons, the implication being that us Black and Brown gays were dirty and violent and could only be trusted with plastic cups. Louie never went to Axis again. It was incomprehensible to him given gay men share the same oppressors. I’d repeat to my friend how awful it was to watch him slowly killing himself on top of the disease doing the same thing. When we were together he never engaged in risky behavior. We enjoyed each other’s company so much that the thought of hooking up didn’t even come up. Those alone times, particularly when he moved to Atlanta and was unable to find the same camaraderie as he had with me and friends in Rhode Island, brought out the stigma and shame. It’s that stigma and shame that I let stop me from carrying my friend’s dead body.
At the end of the wake/funeral, his sister asked me to be one of the pallbearers to carry Louie out to the hearse because they were a man short. I told her no. I was terrified to carry my friend’s dead body and upset at his family for hiding the person he was. He didn’t deserve that from the family he loved. Nor did he deserve my denying him the respect he taught me to have for myself. I feared carrying a body with AIDS. I feared anyone seeing me and thinking I was gay. I feared I’d get the disease myself as outrageous as that sounds. Because that stigma and shame made me believe I was next. I wondered for years if I’d make it to thirty-four, the age at which Louie died. And now that I have, and not gotten the disease, I spend every anniversary of his death asking him to help me fight the stigma and fear that I allow get in the way of doing the last loving thing I could’ve done for him.
I turn fifty-two July 10th and still struggle with the guilt of knowing that I let stigma stop me from carrying Louie’s body. As much progress that has been made, with HIV now no longer being a death sentence, it saddens me to see the continued division between HIV-positive and HIV-negative gay men, the continued racism between white and Black and Brown gay men, and the fragmentation of gay communities based along lines of perceived or actual HIV status. What saddens me more is that the last word he said to me at the end of our last phone conversation was Goodbye and my last word to him was the same. I just wish my goodbye had enough love in it to give him a hug on the other side filled with a soft, lightning of warmth that flows through the heavens and between souls.
Allen M. Price was a finalist for Passages North 2025 Ray Ventre Memorial Nonfiction Prize, and the 2024 Kenyon Review Developmental Editing Fellowship. He won Solstice’s 2023 Michael Steinberg Nonfiction Prize (chosen by Grace Talusan), Blue Earth Review‘s 2022 Flash Creative Nonfiction Contest, and Columbia Journal’s 2021 Winter Nonfiction Contest (chosen by Pamela Sneed). A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, his work appears or is forthcoming in Roxanne Gay’s The Audacity, The Missouri Review, Massachusetts Review, About Place Journal, Five Points, Michigan Quarterly Review online, Evergreen Review, december, Little Patuxent Review, Blue Mesa Review, Zone 3, Post Road, North American Review, The Masters Review, Terrain.org, Shenandoah, Transition, among others. He has an MA from Emerson College.
