Reaching Ninety by Martin Duberman

Author:Martin Duberman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2022-11-18T05:28:23+00:00

Ken Dawson, sweet souled, classically handsome, took the helm of SAGE (Senior Action in a Gay Environment) a decade after Stonewall and built it into a major organization that provided a wealth of services and social opportunities for the gay community’s often-isolated elders. He was one of those rare leaders—Ann Northrop and Tim Sweeney are two others—who go about their business with maximum efficiency and minimal theatrics, shrugging off personal praise as overblown or as needlessly distracting from the organizational mission. I’d met Ken through Eli, who Ken had asked to serve on the SAGE board (which Eli ultimately chaired).

Ken’s forty-fifth birthday party illuminated his character. He was hospitalized at the time, so seven or eight of us gathered to celebrate the milestone in his hospital room. One friend brought a cake, Eli and I party favors, and the others assorted gifts, including Silly Putty that we gleefully threw against the walls. Throughout, Ken’s spirits were good and he talked of going home “soon”; in fact he didn’t have long to live. I wondered what he told himself, whether he was consistently able to allow himself the comfort of denial about his own condition. He took solace in religion, but his valor was grounded in character more than gospel. The homophobes, with no trace of irony, describe homosexuality as “a character disorder”—what they don’t mean but should is that courage isn’t an everyday human trait.

Three days later, when Eli and I went back to visit him, Ken suddenly couldn’t hold back the tears and in strangulated words told us that he couldn’t hang on much longer. For the next few months he was in and out of the hospital. At home Ken was still living with his ex-lover Todd, who became his devoted primary caretaker. When some of Ken’s support team failed to show up as often as promised, Eli pitched in to make sure that he had at least one visitor a day. By the fall of 1991, Ken was clearly failing. He developed an undiagnosed infection, complete with fever, diarrhea, rectal CMV, and then, more seriously still, a collapsed lung already severely damaged from pneumonia. Ken focused on the “treatability” of the CMV and even talked about how “lucky” he felt. When let out of the hospital, he started doing psychotherapy with the openly gay Father John McNeill (whose 1976 book, The Church and the Homosexual, had led to his expulsion in 1987). The therapy, in Ken’s words, helped him “to deal with issues relating to spirituality and dying.”

As Ken awaited lung surgery at 7:00 AM one day in mid-November 1991, the brutality of the hospital system kicked in and he was kept waiting—no explanation offered—until midday. The surgery revealed extensive damage, and when I visited that night, Ken lay immobile in his bed, his few words coherent but muted. I got him to take a little tea and accept a gentle massage, but I felt anguished and inadequate. Two days later—the doctors “suspected brain involvement”—we had to help maneuver him through the ordeal of a CAT scan.

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