On survivor’s guilt, and remembering the boy we lost

My friend David gets a bit tetchy when I write about death, especially when that death was caused by AIDS. David is a survivor of the eighties and knows all about it. He lost a lot of friends. He feels guilty because he escaped while some of them didn’t.

I’ve never quite grasped the scale of the devastation the 1980s brought, or how an entire generation could be so cruelly diminished.

AIDS did not discriminate against anyone.

“It was always the beautiful boys who got it. Still, it gave the rest of us a chance,” David says, with his customary dark humour.

Perhaps it goes some way towards explaining why he can sometimes come across as an arrogant son of a bitch.

One of those beautiful boys was James Allen Rideout Jr., from Waterville, Maine (1965–1988).

At eighteen, Rideout moved to California, where he attended college and worked as a computer programmer in San Francisco. To help pay his way through college, he adopted the name Kurt Marshall and began appearing in gay pornographic films. There were only four: Sizing Up, The Other Side of Aspen II, Splash Shots and Night Fall.

The website The Closet Professor describes him as “one of the most stunning and lusted after blondes to ever hit gay porn”.

He was fortunate, in a sense. Unzipped magazine noted that the films in which he appeared were noteworthy. But there was more to Marshall than his good looks, blond hair and buff body.

He was also an advocate for gay rights.

“I think to be gay is to be blessed. We have so much freedom, so many choices. This isn’t our moment to party or to think we’re going to stay young forever…maybe it’s our time to find someone to be safe with…to be happy with…”

How incredibly tragic those words seem now.

Marshall tested positive for HIV in 1986. That same year, he came out to his family and entered a drug rehabilitation programme. He later moved into the construction industry.

In October 1988, aged just twenty-two, he died at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center. His official cause of death was kidney failure attributed to substance abuse and AIDS.

Twenty-two.

Sometimes a number is all it takes to bring home the sheer waste of a life.

There is a memorial to Marshall on the Find a Grave website. It is an extraordinary, if rather heartbreaking, tribute:

Dear friend, while the time discolors the vanity of our old pictures, you can instead be an immortal guardian angel for all us, just for the fact you are in eternal life of your young rest, because what I believe is that where you are now, the time will not pass and so it doesn’t consume your face anymore forever… and ever.

The words may be imperfect, but perhaps that makes them all the more affecting. Someone wanted to preserve the young man they remembered, untouched by time, his face no longer subject to the ravages of age.

His photographs remain. His movies remain. And somewhere, in the memories of those who knew him, there is still that beautiful boy.

David remembers what happened to so many of them. I can write about it, but I can never really know what it was like to be there, to watch friends disappear and to wonder why you were spared.

Perhaps that is why we should keep telling their stories.