When the man on the other end of the phone identified himself as Glen Pike's brother, I knew instantly why he was calling.
My friend Glen Pike died of AIDS at approximately 7:10 a.m. on Monday, Dec. 17, 2001.
I'd known for several years that Glen's health teetered on the edge of collapse. Recently, I'd suspected things were bad, as my phone calls and e-mails remained unanswered for the past several weeks.
But however anticipated, however expected, news of death is always jolting. Glen's was particularly jarring for several reasons.
First and foremost, Glen was a close friend, and it's always hard to lose those you love.
But Glen's death was also a bitter reminder. As I sat at my desk still holding the receiver that had delivered the bad news, I struggled to remember the last person I knew who had died of AIDS. In the post-protease-inhibitor world, where much of the media and just as much of the gay population treats AIDS as little more than a manageable, long-term illness like diabetes, Glen's death was a stark reminder that people continue to die from this dreaded disease, that AIDS is not over.
In his final years, Glen tried to make sure that people understood that point. While the media was awash in stories of people with AIDS almost coming back from the dead, Glen would talk about how the protease inhibitors weren't miracle drugs for everyone. I remember when, just last year, he finally decided to end his own tortured regimen of cocktails, having exhausting the many possible combinations without success. Sure, the lab results indicated that the drugs were "working." His T-cells were climbing and the level of HIV in his blood was dropping.
But the medications were taking too high a toll. He was throwing up frequently, and he was too exhausted to live the life the drugs were supposedly winning for him. "What's the point of having a longer life if I don't have any quality of life?" he asked.
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I met Glen in 1989, while I was a graduate student at Penn State University. Glen, a human resources manager for a small computer software company, was one of the few people I knew who wasn't affiliated with the university.
Glen's most immediate characteristic was his height. At 6'-5" he was a towering presence. The fact that he was lean and slender seemed to accentuate the affect he had of looming large. I remember once when Glen and I were shopping together at a department store, and a little girl, no more than 5 years old, saw Glen approaching. The closer he got, the bigger her eyes grew, until finally she ran screaming, "Mommy! Mommy! A giant!"
Glen was a giant of a friend, as well. I can count with the fingers of one hand the number of people in my life who have always been there, no matter what. Glen was one of them. It's hard to grasp that he is no longer there.
Central Pennsylvania is a terribly conservative place, and at the time I met Glen, even the university was not a particularly safe or welcoming environment for openly gay people. I had just recently come out...appropriately, in a column for the campus newspaper...and was full of lots of young idealism, particularly when it came to fighting the good fight for gay rights causes.
Glen and I had a lot in common...a distaste for religion, a liberal political view of the world, a skepticism of commercialism, a love of architecture. Though we held similar opinions about gay rights, we diverged on tactics. At times, our differences threatened our friendship.
I believed in being out and loud. At the time I thought that anyone who wasn't out was hindering "the cause." I was terribly judgmental. I probably considered people who weren't out to be cowards.
Glen was not out.
Sure, his friends knew he was gay, and at work it was easily surmised, if not spoken about. But he hadn't told his family, and he never said so publicly. In fact, one year a local magazine listed him in its run-down of the town's "most eligible bachelors." I wanted Glen to come out precisely because he was well-known and active and respected in the community.
But he wasn't ready.
I was self-righteous in my disappointment, and Glen and I would frequently have heated arguments over it.
What I didn't know at the time was that Glen was private about a lot more than his sexuality. By the time I first met him, Glen knew he was HIV-positive. But it wasn't until four years ago, when he started getting seriously ill and had a few brushes with death, that Glen told me he had AIDS.
My self-righteousness turned to hurt and even anger that Glen felt he couldn't have told me his secret earlier. Glen protested it wasn't shame that kept him from divulging his HIV-status. He simply didn't want to be treated differently, he said.
When he did come out...about both his sexuality and his HIV-status...he did it in a big way. He held a meeting to tell his family, where he said he expected their respect if not their love. Luckily, he got both. He began going to local schools and talking to kids about HIV and AIDS prevention. He gave interviews in local papers. And he organized seminars for local businesses about dealing with HIV in the workplace.
These things may seem matter-of-fact to those of us who live in big cities with thriving gay populations. But in conservative small towns, like the one Glen lived in, they remain major struggles, and the people who battle them have a special kind of courage.
Glen was convinced that his years of quiet diplomacy had won him standing in the community that later allowed him to reach out to people who otherwise would simply have shut him out. Maybe he was right. Today, it seems meaningless to me to argue the fine points of being out.
What's important is how proud I am of Glen. When I think of him, I recall that little girl in the department store, and how she neatly summed up my feelings for him: He was a giant.
