Project Rebirth

by Dr. Robin Stern

  Charles liked the cargo truck because he could disburse large amounts of food and supplies quickly to as many people as possible. The instructions were clear in terms of what he had to do, yet vague about where he had to do it. He was told to pick an area he wanted to service, drive around to find people in need, then pick up the necessary supplies and deliver them. Repeat. Charles found himself making several trips a day to the warehouse and back out east along the coast, sometimes crossing over to Alabama, where he was originally supposed to be stationed.

  One day, as he drove back to the warehouse from a delivery far along Route 9, a woman flagged him down. She had a baby in her arms, pale and puffy like a marshmallow. Charles got out of the cargo truck and asked how he could help. She asked him to come over to her house.

  The woman showed Charles that she had no supplies left in the house, not even Similac for the baby. “I don’t have much in this truck right now,” Charles explained, then added in the most reassuring tone he could muster, “but what I have, I’ll give you. Now, you tell all your neighbors who have babies or who need anything else to come meet me here tomorrow at the same time.”

  The grief in their faces was unbearable. Mothers being unable to care for their babies really got to him. The scene there was worse than 9/11, for him, at least. There was nothing but devastation everywhere he went. Not even the rich had been spared. As he got back on the road toward the warehouse, Charles saw the remnants of a huge estate. Trees were all gone, the fence had been ripped out and lay near a body of water, and there were no houses in sight.

  The next day, Charles kept his promise to the woman with the baby, and the woman had brought many of her neighbors with her, all in dire need. Charles gave them all formula and teddy bears. “I’ve done a lot of things in my life,” Charles says with a proud smirk, “but nothing better than that . . . that was my shining hour.”

  When asked about what Tana would have thought of his volunteer work, Charles says, “She would’ve expected it.”

  Grandmother and grandson would often go out fishing in Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn. In fact, it was a tradition they continued well into her old age, bringing Charles’s daughter along as well. Tana was great at it. Whatever they caught on a given day, she brought back home in the evening to distribute to the neighbors. Charles, however, took note of what Tana did when no fish had made it onto their boat. On their way back to Manhattan, she would stop by the market and buy fish.

  “Now, don’t go telling anyone about this,” she’d warn Charles before handing out the fish in the neighborhood. Tana was as proud as she was generous.

  Helping others would become a form of healing for Charles. Psychologist Lorne Ladner, Ph.D., asserts that taking care of others is a way of taking care of ourselves. He says, “By developing deep, powerful feelings of compassionate connection with others, we can learn to live meaningful and joyful lives. Only such feelings can help us to learn experientially how to work for meaningful causes and give of ourselves without becoming exhausted or burned out.”

  Charles would certainly agree. As he shrugs off the idea of receiving anything in return for his help, he says, “We should pay them for the feeling they give us. It’s a good feeling, helping people.”

  Another New York City summer is ending, and the air this September morning at the park is a bit cooler and drier, making Charles cough repeatedly. He clears his throat and adjusts his Hogwarts baseball cap over his short-cropped, graying afro. He is glad that at least the piercing “sticky-glass” feeling in his lungs isn’t there anymore. He reflects, “Lord must have blessed me, ’cause I should be in a box by now. I see so many people sicker than me that spent less time down there.”

  “Down there” means Ground Zero, where he arrived on September 11, 2001, and stayed for the first 117 days, pouring his soul into the rescue and recovery efforts. C.C., a name familiar to subway riders during his last days as a conductor on the local C line (“C.C. on the C.C.!” he exclaims), was one of New York City’s angels on that day.

  With the tenth anniversary almost upon Charles, the words of the Mount Sinai doctors who examined hundreds of first responders like him have made the reality of his failing health feel more imminent. Some of the reports he has read state that inhaling the dust at Ground Zero during the first few weeks after the attacks may have cut his life expectancy by fifteen to twenty years. Charles might not feel old, but he accepts that his time will be up soon. “You come, you go,” he nonchalantly tells friends and family.

  His casual attitude toward his own death is perhaps possible only because he feels secure that his legacy, the legacy of his grandmother, has been continued in every teddy bear he’s pressed into the hands of a forlorn child, every bottle of water he’s delivered to an ash-covered emergency worker, and every brick he’s cleared from a disaster zone. Charles is a man whose grief is assuaged by giving, whose loss is honored by dedicated service to others.

  His service is remarkable and yet not out of the ordinary. Lao Tzu, the celebrated Chinese philosopher and author of the Tao Te Ching, teaches that there are four cardinal virtues: reverence for all life, natural sincerity, gentleness, and supportiveness. The last of these, it turns out, is the virtue that releases us from our own pain by allowing us to focus on healing the pain of others.

  When grieving a loss in our own lives, sometimes the most powerful action we can take is to forget ourselves for a moment and turn to others—connecting us to all of humanity. Charles has continuously done this, threading the loss of his beloved grandmother to the losses endured by his beloved hometown and his beloved nation. In the process, he has destroyed his body, but his heart is happy. He knows, as Lao Tzu also wrote, that “life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.” Charles ties his fate to the fate of his neighbors, his fellow New Yorkers, his fellow citizens, and so, in a sense, lives forever, just like his Tana.

  The Unlikely Activist

  Larry Courtney

  Larry Courtney excuses himself from his own New Year’s Eve party for a moment. He steps onto his large terrace and looks down at tens of thousands of revelers in Times Square, drunkenly swaying arm in arm, blowing kazoos, and squeezing past one another in an effort to get closer to the infamous ball. It will drop shortly. Larry wishes he felt even a fraction of the giddiness of these revelers. He envies their drunken kisses, their sentimental send-off to 2001, the year that’s just passed. For him, it can’t end soon enough. Though he is fifty-six, he feels one hundred years old.

  He takes a deep breath of the cold winter air and exhales, imagining a little bit of grief leaving his body. The lights shine ferociously. He misses his love.

  “I’m in love with you, Gene.” The words first came out of Larry’s mouth on October 30, 1987. It was, of course, an impetuous thing to say. After all, Larry and Gene had met only a few hours earlier at a Washington, D.C., piano bar. Even offering to give Gene a ride home after their few hours of electric conversation had seemed like a risk, but Larry was filled with a sort of audacious attraction. As he and Gene searched the D.C. streets for Larry’s car, he just let it fly.

  Eugene, thirty-three, flashed Larry, then forty-two, a “get real” smile and said, “You can’t be in love with me. You just met me.”

  “Just watch,” Larry said confidently. When Larry first laid eyes on Gene—this “gorgeous” African American man with a bright smile topped by a dark mustache, and graceful hands—he’d simply known they’d end up together. It was unusual for Larry to be so assertive, but there was something about Gene that made him feel courageous.

  Courage was important to Larry, as it hadn’t always come easily. For years, he’d lived the life that he believed he was supposed to live, the life that was expected of him and modeled for him by his parents and grandparents back home in rural Nebraska, all the while ignoring an unalterable truth in his own heart. He’d married and created a family with a woman, although he had long known he was gay.

  “It was an act o
f self-preservation,” Larry now explains. Having grown up in a very conservative, religious small town in the late fifties and early sixties, Larry knew from an early age that his gay identity would not be acceptable, so he buried his true sexual orientation and fell into step with his peers—dating, getting married, and having children, just like everybody else.

  Larry, his wife, and his three children lived outside Portland, Oregon, and, contrary to what one might expect, had a fairly happy life despite Larry’s secret about his true sexual identity. “My wife and I had a number of good years together,” Larry explains. “I really loved her even if I wasn’t in love with her.”

  They attended a strict Pentecostal Baptist church. At one point, the church organized a protest against an upcoming bill created to ban sexual orientation discrimination in the workplace. Larry did not participate in the march, but he didn’t make any public statements against the march either. His betrayal was getting harder and harder to bury.

  In 1979, the family moved to Columbia, Maryland—just outside of Washington, D.C.—to fulfill his wife’s desire to live near her childhood home. It was in Columbia that their marriage finally unraveled under financial and emotional stress. Larry asked for a divorce.

  After the dissolution of their marriage, Larry began going to gay bars in Washington and finally reckoning with his true sexual identity. When he told his ex-wife that he thought he was gay, she admitted that she’d always wondered and offered her loving support, not condemnation. They’ve maintained a good relationship over the years.

  By 1984, Larry was living in his own place in Columbia, working as an accountant in a gourmet food shop during the day and exploring the vibrant gay scene at night in D.C. He was torn about not living with his three teenaged children, whom he loved more than anything in the world, but he also knew that he would be a better father if he learned how to fully be himself. He was committed to seeing them frequently and he was committed to living his whole truth for the first time.

  “I finally felt that I was being honest with myself and living the life I should live,” Larry explains. “In fact, I felt doubly blessed—I had three children who loved me, which is not something that every gay man can say.”

  For a few years, Larry was content to explore his new liberation mostly on his own. His life was very full with frequent visits with his kids, an active spiritual and social life, and lots of work. But things shifted when Larry set eyes on Gene. Gene, who taught ballroom dance in his spare time; Gene, who could walk more gracefully in a pair of stilettos than most women could; Gene, who lit up every room.

  That beautiful, burnt-orange autumn felt more like spring. “That was it. I was just smitten,” Larry remembers. “His eyes, his smile; everything about him was just life.”

  “I would have to describe my childhood as ideal,” Larry says. “We had a very close family.” Albion, Nebraska, was a small, rural community, where the two thousand or so residents worked and worshipped with fierce commitment. Larry’s father was the quintessential selfsufficient Midwestern man of the house—an electrician, a carpenter, and a handyman. His mother reigned in the domestic realm—making shirts, canning food for the winter, and taking care of Larry and his six siblings. The family was tight-knit and very traditional.

  In retrospect, Larry now realizes that they were also short on resources: “We were very poor, but I never thought that.” Case in point: Larry was nine years old before his family had their first indoor bathroom.

  Larry fondly remembers dinners around his grandparents’ table and square dances. “When I was little,” he recounts, “the men would go on pheasant hunts on Saturdays in the fall, after the fields had been cut. They would bring back all these pheasants and we’d have feasts.”

  By six years old, Larry was already noticing that he was more attracted to the boys than to the girls at his elementary school. He didn’t think much of it, as he didn’t know it was wrong. The church he was raised in never mentioned the politics of sexual orientation, instead focusing on the idea that God loved all of his creations, no exceptions. It was as if homosexuality was so foreign to this congregation that it didn’t even warrant mention.

  But when fifth grade came around and Larry’s family moved to Oregon, he started noticing that the other boys seemed much more interested in girls than he was: “It was at that point that I knew that I was different,” he remembers. “I knew that being gay was being queer, and queer was not good. I kept my feelings to myself.”

  It was around that same time that Larry first heard his new ministers declare that God hated homosexuals. He puzzled at the contradiction: “That can’t be true, because he loves me.”

  With a child’s innocence, Larry reasoned, “God created me the way I am, so why would he hate me? I have always been a child of God.” But despite his intuition that the God he’d grown to love would never condemn him for liking boys, he knew that his neighbors and schoolmates would. He didn’t want to expose his family to that kind of shame, so he swallowed his secret, determined to create as normal a life as possible.

  But as famous writer and gay rights advocate James Baldwin wrote, “An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.” Larry’s extraordinary life would not lead him down a normal path. It would inspire his honesty, demand his courage in the face of tragedy, and shape him into an unlikely activist.

  Larry’s audacity paid off. By Halloween night of 1987, just one day after meeting for the first time, he and Gene had declared themselves an official couple. Larry took Gene out to dinner to celebrate, then on to the piano bar where they’d first laid eyes on each other. They talked and drank so long that they shut the place down, spilling out onto the street with the lightness of new lovers—oblivious to everything but each other.

  But their happy oblivion wouldn’t last long. As Larry drove toward home, Gene suddenly grew very somber and said, “There is something I need to tell you.” Recognizing the seriousness in his tone, Larry pulled over into a church parking lot.

  Once they were stopped in the comforting anonymity of the dark lot, Gene said, “I’m HIV positive.” He waited a few moments and then added, “I’m going to give you some time to process that,” before getting out of the car and standing a few feet away.

  Larry, overcome with emotion, leaned his head on the steering wheel and began to cry. He remembers, “I asked God, ‘Why? Why, after I’ve finally found the man I love, are you going to take him away?’ I thought it was an immediate death sentence.” In fact, the prognosis for HIV-positive Americans has continuously improved thanks to new treatments; according to a federal study published in the January 2010 issue of the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes, average life expectancy after HIV diagnosis increased from ten and a half to twenty-two and a half years from 1996 to 2005.

  But Larry, of course, couldn’t have known this at the time. Gene got back into the car and they immediately embraced each other, crying into each other’s shoulders. Larry knew, just as sure as he had known that he was in love with Gene, that he would never leave him. He didn’t care if his partner was faced with a death sentence. He wanted to live by his side. “I’m not letting you go,” he told Gene. “I’m taking you home.”

  In April 1988, Larry received a job offer in New York City that he could not refuse, as a bookkeeper for Banca IMI, an investment bank. He and Gene decided that, though neither of them had ever even been to New York City before, they would embark on the adventure together. They were head over heels in love and couldn’t imagine being apart. Within eight months they lived in Times Square and began exploring the “city of dreams” from its luminescent, twenty-four-hour center. “Gene came even more alive,” Larry reflects. “He was made for this city.”

  Gene’s personality mirrored the city’s: performative, nonstop, and endlessly creative. He loved to go to Broadway shows, squeezing Larry’s hand as the dancers wound their way across the stage in perfect formation. As the audience
spilled out into the streets of the Theater District afterward, Gene looked as if he was lit up from the inside, so inspired by the talent that he’d just seen onstage. They’d make their way back to their apartment, both buzzing with the high of witnessing an inspired performance.

  Gene himself worked in office jobs—first in publishing, then in the insurance industry—but he was a huge artistic talent. Larry often quipped, “He could dance like Tina Turner and he had better legs!” By the time he came to New York, he was no longer performing but had long taught dance lessons and performed in various small productions.

  Their shared life in the Big Apple was accompanied by a Broadway soundtrack. They loved to buy recordings of their favorite musicals on CD and belt them out as they spent time in their apartment. Gene had a beautiful voice. He drew inspiration from his extensive LP collection—Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, and others—and his favorite Broadway shows, Dreamgirls and Les Misérables.

  When they weren’t singing and dancing, Larry and Gene were among friends. They loved to have long brunches at their favorite diner, the Viceroy, in Greenwich Village, where Larry would order French toast and Gene would order eggs Benedict, or vice versa. When the pride parade rolled around each June, they got a big group of friends together and marched in honor of their hardearned liberation. It was wild fun, with people dressed up in costumes, elaborate floats, and, yet again, great music.