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Guestwords: The Hamptons Pride Names Project

Tue, 11/26/2024 - 18:07
Quilts from the National AIDS Memorial on view in the East Hampton Presbyterian Church.
Tom House

This Friday through Sunday after Thanksgiving, a new chapter of Hamptons Pride history will be written in the First Presbyterian Church of East Hampton.

For the first time in over three decades in the Hamptons, and the first time ever in East Hampton, quilts from the National AIDS Memorial will be on display — in the sanctuary of one of the most storied and important houses of worship on the East End. Over 100 names are represented on these quilts, including those of local loved ones, yet they are a fraction of the more than 110,000 names on nearly 50,000 quilts so far in the national collection — a 54-ton tapestry, considered the largest community arts project in history.

The vast majority of the people honored in the Memorial, lost in the 1980s and ’90s, were a segment of the population the country’s leadership did not then prioritize or care about, gay men. Not until 1985, four years into the epidemic, did President Reagan say the acronym AIDS in public. By then thousands of Americans had already died.

Nor were churches rushing to the rescue where the government was failing. The Catholic Church’s hands are especially bloody with the lives of millions of Africans with its ongoing interference in the distribution of condoms, the surest method of protection from H.I.V. transmission, instead promoting its traditional teaching of abstinence. Meanwhile, 1,000 African infants are born infected with H.I.V. each day.

In the face of the darkest of statistics, there are courageous and humane exceptions. And this is not the first time local members of the Presbyterian Church have marched to the beat of a more compassionate drummer.

The Rev. Rob Stuart of Springs was a pastoral volunteer in the ’80s for the Long Island Association for AIDS Care, with support from his Amagansett congregation. In hospitals and homes in Suffolk County and New York City, he visited dozens of people dying of AIDS when few clergy would do so.

Stuart remembers the Hamptons’ last presentation of the Memorial in 1990 at the Amagansett Presbyterian Church and the healing services he led there through 1998. He adds that in those same years the Rev. Fred Schulz, pastor of the East Hampton church, was quietly in support of people who were ill.

In 2010, the Presbyterian Church USA began ordaining gay and lesbian ministers and, since 2014, has been marrying same-sex couples.

Fast-forward to 2022, and we find the Presbyterian Church — along with the Lutheran Church, the Unitarian Universalist Congregation, St. Luke’s Episcopalian Church, and the Jewish Center of the Hamptons — marching in the first Pride parade in the history of the Hamptons. Their unit has grown each year, and they plan to join us for our fourth annual parade on June 7, 2025.

Now they are helping us mourn those lost in the darkest decades, people whose untimely departures drastically changed the lives of East End families — biological families, friend families — and continue to be profoundly missed.

Thus they partner with us to buck another bias: That time has long since passed for survivors of AIDS victims to express their grief and loss.

David Kessler, a leading death and grieving expert and author of many books, including two co-written with the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, said, “We live in a grief-illiterate society, one that pushes us to move on with our pain when, in reality, all we need is for our stories to be heard. We wish to share the memories, love, and experiences we once had with those we loved.”

The need to tell those stories — with words or images, on Grecian urns or American quilts — is lifelong. We do not move on from our deepest losses; we continue on with them, ever-present and ever-affecting.

Here are five.

Deacon Susan Rossi’s brother Vincent was 31 at his death in 1984. The Hamptons Pride Names Project is an important way for her to “do something good for him.” A number of her friends and parishioners from St. Michael’s Lutheran Church in Amagansett have volunteered to monitor the quilt displays throughout the weekend. She thanked us, saying she’d thought “all of this” — the U.S. AIDS crisis and its victims — had been long forgotten.

Jay Langan, lost in 1985 at 31, was Jeannie Behrens’s “big brother and protector. He grew into a beautiful, kind, talented man who always stayed close to his family.” When asked if she would say a few words about him in a calling-of-the-names ceremony on Sunday, December 1, World AIDS Day, Behrens quickly said yes. “Jay is one of my favorite subjects to speak about.” His death in the early years of the epidemic, and the dearth of services available to him and their family, changed the trajectory of her career, leading to her present field of bereavement counseling, now at East End Hospice, for 35 years.

Dale Miller, lost in 1986 at 27, was the son of Chris and Yvette Miller of Amagansett, who insisted The Star give his cause of death as AIDS, the paper’s first obituary to do so. Dale waited tables at the Palm in East Hampton, and at its sister site in Palm Beach. His memorial service was at the church in Amagansett, officiated by Stuart.

“Speaking of the ‘ostracism’ that often greets those with AIDS,” The Star reported, “the minister said he hoped ‘Dale’s death will help other families dispel their fears and prejudices.’ “ The well-liked Dale, salutatorian of East Hampton High School’s class of 1977, was interred in Green River, the famed “artists and writers cemetery” in Springs that became the final resting place for many who died of AIDS.

Bill Selkin, an original owner of Blooming Shells gift store in Sag Harbor, passed away in 1988 at 56. Debbielou Houdek, friend and former employee, and the store’s present owner, created Selkin’s quilt, with the adage, “It matters not how long you live, but how.” Selkin was a retired science teacher, Houdek said. “He liked all things from the sea and was beloved in Sag Harbor for his kindness and unlimited patience.”

Ellen Dioguardi, also of Sag Harbor, and friend of Houdek’s and Selkin’s, said the quilt was made at a program partly coordinated by Cornell Cooperative Extension, held in the basement of what is now The Church in that village — then an actual Methodist church. Dioguardi’s experiences making quilts there with friends led her “to sign up to go to the AIDS Memorial Quilt display in D.C., the first one.”

Mark Preiman, formerly of East Hampton, died in 1989 at 37. A Navy veteran, he was a son of Ernie and Suzanne and brother of David. He liked to walk along Maidstone Beach and once discovered an amulet of the Blessed Mary that he gave to his mother, who has since passed it on to Reverend Stuart. Suzanne Preiman was active in the Amagansett Presbyterian Church in the years Stuart was pastor. At 97, she lives in Chicago, and was the first to reserve a paving stone to be engraved with Mark’s name in a proposed memorial path to be installed at Wainscott Green.

In the church, 98 more.

The idea for a local Names Project came to me while watching “Fellow Travelers,” a 2023 mini-series that emerged as a must-see for gay men. In the last episode (spoiler), the protagonist, Hawk, played by Matt Bomer, locates the quilt of his long-secret, on-again, off-again lover, Tim (Jonathan Bailey), in the National Mall in 1987. Tim’s quilt is emblazoned with the seminary-school motto “Beyond Measure” — meaning, on one level, the depth of God’s love for humanity.

Hawk’s grown daughter, accompanying him, remarks, “It’s beautiful. From what you told me, it really suits your friend.” He nods and, tears falling unchecked, corrects the euphemism with perhaps his first honest words to her about his personal life: “Sweetheart, he wasn’t my friend. He was the man I loved.” Then the camera pulls back, and quilt after quilt comes into view, of the mostly young men, who were, somewhere, at some time, loved. By other men. By friends, siblings, spouses, parents, chosen parents, children, nieces, nephews, uncles, aunts, neighbors, colleagues. By us. Beyond measure.

Crying again with Hawk for the many I knew who perished of AIDS, I wondered, would people come if we displayed quilts here this fall? The project would be perfectly in line with Hamptons Pride’s mission, to celebrate and commemorate the L.G.B.T.Q.+ people of the East End and their allies. I pitched the idea to board and committee members, including Barbara D’Andrea of Wainscott, also the leader of the Mission Committee of the First Presbyterian Church of East Hampton. Her eyes lit up immediately — this was perfectly in line with their mission, too. With the quick support of the pastor, the Rev. Jon Rodriguez, the rest will soon be history.

And we’ll have the answers to those questions: Who will come? Who will care? Whether few or many, it will be an opportunity to tell our stories. And add to the national story, gut-wrenching in its sweep: To date, over 700,000 Americans have died from AIDS. Globally, the number soars to 42.3 million. Another 39.9 million people worldwide were living with H.I.V. at the end of 2023, including an estimated 0.6 percent of teenagers and adults ages 15 to 49. The shadow of AIDS, gargantuan and growing, takes its place with those of the deadliest wars and pandemics in human history.

We can do our part — we, graced with the fortune to survive, remember, and honor.


Tom House lives in Springs.

 

 

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