I was nervous. I am grateful.

What's the point of retelling painful stories long in the past?

I wait for it every year: The day that the AIDS sculpture goes up at Calvary Episcopal Church in downtown Memphis.  

Originally crafted in 1989, the white fabric waves that hang from the ceiling are a mosaic of patterns cut into the material, each opening signifying someone living with AIDS, someone who died of AIDS or someone whose life has been affected by AIDS.

We all fit into the latter category, even if we don’t think much about it any more. The scourge of HIV/AIDS — and the denial and shaming of gay people because of it — hollowed out plenty of families and communities in the 1980s and 1990s.

Including mine.

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It was a spring day in 1988, though if it was sunny, I wouldn’t have noticed. My mother had died days before, and I was reeling, trying to imagine how to move forward without her gentle, unconditional love. The funeral was over but I was still home, in the house in a suburb of Dayton, Ohio, where I’d grown up. My dad and I were the only two left at home; everyone else had gone back to their lives.

I guess I felt the need to be useful, so I began cleaning out my mom’s desk. I know now what a loaded job that might be, but back then, it didn’t occur to me what I might find among her papers and books.

What I found were her notes from recent therapy sessions. I didn’t look at them too closely but I wasn’t surprised; I knew that my parents felt that therapy had played a critical role in both their lives.

But these notes were clipped to information brochures about living with HIV/AIDS. Why would she need these? I decided to call my dad into the den and ask.

In a moment that shocks me still, I discovered it was my dad who was living with HIV/AIDS, which, back then, was a death sentence. The only question was when and how awful it would be. I had lived for many years at the corner of Christopher and Greenwich Streets in New York City, the epicenter of the gay community and the AIDS pandemic, so I knew what was coming. I had seen with my own eyes what was happening to my neighbors.

I also found out that day that my dad was gay, news that rocked my world yet again. Of course I was horrified at the prospect of him dying from AIDS. But I was angry, too – so angry. How could he lie to us like that? What else about his life had he kept hidden? Did Mom know? What was real about anything anymore?

I’m sorry to say that, even though it didn’t happen on that day — we actually went out for lunch together after this world-changing conversation — I didn’t speak to my dad, really talk with him, for a long time after that. I was angry, yes, but I was also piecing together my own story, looking again at things that had happened in our family through this new lens. My husband and I lived abroad later that year, and I was grateful for the distance as well as the pile of books about gay life and the AIDS crisis I had brought along. Even with my experiences in New York, my learning curve was steep.

When we returned, my dad had settled fully into his new life, with a partner who made him happy and a gig playing piano — his passion and his gift — in a downtown hotel bar.

We reconciled, some. I’m ashamed to say that I never heard him play again, though by the time he died in early 1993, my sister and I were both with him.

Later that same year, the first World AIDS Day celebration was held in Memphis, where my husband and I had moved in 1990. I had always been fairly open (I thought) about talking about my dad, though my new city wasn’t nearly as far along the learning curve — about AIDS or anything else — as New York or Chicago, where we had lived before.

That’s why, when my friend, the brave and compassionate Rev. Cheryl Cornish of First Congregational Church, asked me to be one of the speakers at a World AIDS Day event at her church that December, I said yes without thinking about it too much.

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I had begun to understand more about my father’s life and choices, but I also missed him terribly. I had realized that, despite everything, my dad was still my dad. He still loved homemade oatmeal raisin cookies. He wore a tie to church every Sunday.

As a closeted gay man who was married in 1952, I could see how much he had wanted to be someone different from who he was. How much he loved my mother, my sister and me and our Midwestern, suburban life. And how his shame and fear of losing everything had made him sick, long before he contracted HIV.

I also had seen the terrible toll that ignorance and shame about AIDS and homosexuality in general was taking. Families broken forever. Dangerous re-education programs that enrolled gay men who hoped (or whose families hoped) for a change that never happened. Seriously ill patients wasting away in hospital rooms cordoned off with what looked like crime-scene tape, not even getting the basics of the care they needed, much less a comforting touch.

So I agreed to be a World AIDS Day speaker, and talked to a newspaper reporter for a story that advanced the event.

The story ran on the front page of The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, along with a picture of Dad and me from my wedding day. It might as well have been a bomb, for the immediate effect it had on my life.

Dad and me, August 1987

I had wildly underestimated how controversial the idea of talking about my dad who was gay and died from AIDS would be. Close friends were supportive, though everyone was wary. And shocked, sometimes not in a good way. There were plenty of averted eyes and a few actual fag jokes in meetings where I was in the days after the story ran.

Remember: In 1993, AIDS was still mostly a death sentence. The year after my dad died, it was the leading cause of death in for all Americans between the ages of 25 and 44, though promising drugs were finally on the horizon. The way the virus was transmitted was still unclear to many people who didn’t want to know about gay sex, so being associated with someone with AIDS — even as removed as I was by then — made people physically uncomfortable around me. Worst of all was the blaming, as if being gay somehow meant you deserved to be dying of a fatal illness.

I guess I should be thankful that this all happened before social media could have canceled me completely.

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By the time I took the microphone inside the packed First Congregational sanctuary, I wasn’t sure what would happen. But as I looked into the glare of the lights that night, what I saw were hundreds of people who wanted to hear my story. These people understood, many better than I ever will, how deadly shame and fear and isolation could be. We were together, looking for hope.

I was nervous. I was grateful. It was a start.

A reminder of Memphis’s first World AIDS Day hangs on my office wall.

That’s the reason I’m sharing this story again. I want to remember how things were, share what really happened, and feel the feelings again. It’s why seeing the patterns of light through the openings in the Calvary AIDS sculpture never fails to choke me up.

We must not forget what came before, even if the memories are painful. We need to keep telling the stories so we can name the precious people we lost and remember the climate of fear, bigotry and ignorance that made a terrible epidemic so much worse.

HIV/AIDS is now a treatable chronic disease that you can take a pill to prevent. The UN said last year that AIDS could actually be eradicated by 2030.

If he’d lived, my dad would be 93 now. I am older now than he was when he died.

I think he’d be amazed at the progress we’ve seen. I hope telling his story would make him happy.