World AIDS Day: Witness to Compassion

December 1 is World AIDS Day--a day to remind the human family of the toll of the AIDS epidemic and take stock of progress against the disease.   It is, indeed, a global day that connects rich and poor, people of all races and creeds, and men, women, and children in a common understanding of our fragility, our responsibilities, and our compassion for one another.

For those of us personally touched by AIDS, it is also a day to remember friends and family lost--a sort of contemporary Day of the Dead.  In many ways, I was the last person one would expect to have been directly affected by the AIDS epidemic.  In the late 1970s, I was a student at an evangelical Christian college in California, a place known more for New Testament scholarship and mission trips than wild weekends in San Francisco. 

Yet the late 1970s were the heady days of the gays rights movement and Harvey Milk.  When Anita Bryant's anti-gay crusade came to our state, many of my evangelical classmates supported her movement.  But a few classmates did not.  Instead, they choose to come out. 

One was my friend Jeffrey Michael.  We were part of a tight group of people who formed a community of questioners at the college; we tended toward theological, literary, and political edginess in the midst of the evangelical environment.  In the safe embrace of youthful friendship, Jeffrey Michael told us that he was gay.

He was the first person I ever knew who had come out; the first person I ever knew who said he was "gay"; and the first person I knew who was seriously a gay Christian.  He was kind, funny, caring, faithful, and thoughtful--with a blistering theological intellect and a profound trust in God's presence in one's life.  He wanted to become an Episcopal priest (long before such things were openly discussed). While we were students, he was in a car accident, nearly died, and suffered brain damage. But, miraculously enough, he pressed through intensive therapy and graduated with honors in religious studies. 

But our friendship was not easy.  Of the questioning friends, I was usually the last person to change my mind on any issue; I struggled with Jeffrey Michael's confident sense of identity.  I had been raised to believe that it was wrong to be gay--socially, morally, and biblically.  Jeffrey Michael and I had blistering fights over scripture and theology.  Although I was loath to admit it at the time, his arguments shook me to the core.  And many days, it was easier to ignore him and escape to my own comfortable prejudices than to deeply engage the challenges he presented to my small world. 

I tried not to listen, but I had heard.  I heard his testimony of joy, of self-discovery, of pain, of fear--of all the complex emotions of a young gay man seeking to understand God and the world.  After college, he became a nurse to AIDS patients and poured himself out to the "untouchables" of the 1980s as a sort of "Brother Teresa," a priest without formal ordination, among those whom the church then wanted to forget.  Eventually, he died with them:  A priest who became a victim, the nurse who succumbed to the plague. 

If you googled him, you would not find him.  For all these things happened in the days before the Internet.  Jeffrey Michael's witness exists only in the memory of friends and family.  His name may be on the AIDS quilt.  Yet, in life, Jeffrey Michael heroically embodied three great concerns of our day:  faith, homosexuality, and AIDS.  By the way he lived and died, he showed that compassion is the foundation of true Christianity, compassion toward those who are outsiders by either identity or disease.  He taught me that the way of Jesus is marked by practicing hospitality--the act of welcoming the stranger--no matter how different or frightening the stranger may be--to the table of God. 

All these years later, evangelicals like Rick Warren take great pride in their involvement in AIDS issues in Africa and get "face time" on cable news trumpeting their compassion.  Yet Rick Warren still thinks it is appropriate to deny gay and lesbian persons basic human rights in both the US and Africa.  Apparently, his compassion only extends to people who don't "deserve" AIDS.  My evangelical hero is Jeffrey Michael.  As a young believer, he didn't just preach compassion or donate money to a cause.  He lived compassion.  And he lived it courageously by taking the risk to be fully human--just as God created him--and was willing to challenge his community in friendship and love no matter what the cost.  And Jeffrey Michael knew the cost of compassion.   On this World AIDS Day, I remember him.