The Men Missing From the Photos

 

Pride month is over, and I keep thinking about Fritz’s photo albums.

I was thirteen or fourteen when I first saw them.

At first, they looked beautiful to me. Young men smiling at parties, in apartments, in bars, in places I didn’t know but immediately wanted to understand. They looked alive in a way that fascinated me. Handsome, free, secretive, close to each other. Like they belonged to a world I was only beginning to realize might also be mine one day.

Then the photos changed.

There were fewer of them.

The faces looked different.

Tired.

Thinner.

Some were in hospitals.

Some had scars.

And then there was one photo of Fritz with his boyfriend.

They were both still handsome. That was the part that stayed with me. Even tired, even marked by what was happening, they still looked like themselves. Before that photo there were many of them together, and I loved looking at them because they looked so happy. Then suddenly there was this last one.

I kept looking for more.

There were none.

That was the first thing I asked.

“Why are there no more photos of him?”

My father gestured for me to stop talking, but I had already asked.

That was how I first understood AIDS.

Not as a statistic.

Not as a history lesson.

As a man disappearing from a photo album.

As a boyfriend who simply stopped appearing.

As happy pictures turning into hospital pictures, and then into gaps.

Fritz was the first openly gay person I met when I was a kid. He was my mentor in a way. He taught me about gay history, gay art, gay culture, and about a world I was hungry to understand before I even had the language for all of it.

He was my father’s age. I met him through my father. He was polite, kind, funny, calm, and a little secretive. Usually he had this joyful energy, like somebody who had seen too much but still knew how to laugh.

But he hated talking about AIDS.

Whenever he did, something in him changed.

He would start drinking. A glass of whiskey, sometimes a beer. He smoked much more than usual. His fingers kept playing with whatever was in front of him. He avoided eye contact. His eyes got red. His voice became low.

It was like watching life being pulled out of him.

Still, he answered me.

I think he understood that I needed to know.

He told me about his partner, the one from the photos, who died in the early 90s from AIDS-related complications. They had been together for six years.

Six years.

That is a whole relationship. A whole private language. A whole rhythm of life. A whole future forming quietly between two people.

And then it ended.

He told me he lost five close friends. More than a dozen friends in total. Men he knew from the gay scene in Cologne and other places. Men who had been there, dancing, laughing, flirting, making art, making jokes, making each other feel less alone.

Gone.

He also told me about two friends who killed themselves because of the fear of having it.

I was a kid, and I was horrified.

I had watched a documentary that mentioned AIDS, but the documentary was not what scared me the most. The photo album did. The confirmation did. The moment I realized that the beautiful men in the photos were not just older somewhere, not just living different lives, not just out of frame.

They were dead.

And the few who were still alive had not simply survived untouched.

That is what I mean when I say there is a hole in gay male history.

I don’t mean a small absence.

I mean a black hole.

A void.

A break.

A place where people, stories, bodies, lovers, jokes, apartments, bars, songs, paintings, friendships, sex, knowledge, and whole possible futures were swallowed.

When people talk about AIDS now, they often talk as if it is only a medical subject. Numbers, treatment, prevention, awareness. All of that matters. Of course it matters.

But before it became information, it was grief.

Before it became something people could explain calmly, it was panic.

Before it became a poster about testing, it was men watching their friends disappear.

It was partners sitting in hospitals.

It was chosen families becoming nurses.

It was funerals.

It was phone calls.

It was silence.

It was people being left to die in shame because the world had already decided their lives were less valuable.

This piece is about gay cisgender men.

About our history, our sex, our fear, our missing elders, and the wound AIDS left inside gay male life.

Not as a medical case study.

Not as a statistic.

As something I inherited.

As something I still feel.

Gay pride should not only be about glitter, slogans, and generic equality. I like beauty. I like glitter. I like celebration. I like men being loud and alive and impossible to ignore.

But Pride also has to be memory.

It has to be a kind of memorial.

It has to teach history to the young men who think freedom appeared by itself.

It has to teach history to the people who wave a rainbow flag once a year and still know nothing about what happened to us.

Because without history, Pride becomes decoration.

And I do not want decoration.

I want remembrance.

AIDS was not the first erasure of gay male history. It was part of a longer pattern.

Before AIDS, there were arrests. Laws. Raids. Killings. Camps. Criminalization. Men forced into silence. Men punished for desire. Men whose lovers were called “friends” after death because families could not bear to tell the truth. Men whose lives were cleaned up, edited, softened, and made acceptable for people who never loved them properly in the first place.

Gay men have disappeared many times.

Sometimes through violence.

Sometimes through law.

Sometimes through shame.

Sometimes through families rewriting the story after the body was gone.

AIDS became another rupture in that history. Another wipe out. Another place where gay men vanished, and then the world tried to move on too quickly.

What was lost?

People, obviously.

Bodies.

Faces.

Names.

But also hope.

That is the part I keep thinking about.

Hope was lost.

Artists were lost. Activists were lost. Lovers were lost. Mentors were lost. Elders were lost. Knowledge was lost. Beauty was lost. Men who could have taught younger gay men how to live were gone before they had the chance to grow old.

I think about that a lot.

Gay men today should have had more elders.

Not only survivors who could teach us how to survive.

Men who could teach us how to navigate the world.

There is a difference.

Survival is not the same as living.

Survival teaches you how to stay alive.

Navigation teaches you how to move.

How to love.

How to choose.

How to protect yourself without becoming only fear.

How to build a life that is not just a reaction to danger.

I think we lost many of those men.

Not all of them. Of course not all. Some survived. Some are still here. Some carried the memory for all of us, even when it was too heavy.

But there is still a hole.

A large one.

I have felt it in strange places.

Sometimes my friends and I watch old gay porn or old horror films from the 80s, and if someone looks gay and hot, we look him up. It sounds stupid maybe, but it becomes a strange little ritual. You see a face. You wonder where he went. You wonder what happened to him.

And then the internet gives you the same sentence again and again.

Died of AIDS-related complications.

After a while, it becomes depressing in a way I don’t know how to explain.

A man is beautiful on screen.

Alive.

Young.

Desired.

And then you search his name and find the ending already written.

Died.

Died.

Died.

At some point it stops feeling like individual tragedy and starts feeling like a pattern too large for the mind to hold.

That is the thing about generational trauma. You do not have to personally live through the original disaster to inherit something from it.

I was alive during part of that history, but I was too young to understand it.

I did not live through the worst of it as a gay man.

I did not watch my lovers get sick.

I did not bury my friends.

I did not sit in those hospital rooms.

But I still inherited something from it.

A fear.

A shadow.

A doom feeling that sits somewhere behind sex.

Not always loudly. Not always dramatically. Not enough to stop desire. Not enough to stop gay men from being gay men. We still flirt. We still hook up. We still want who we want. We still make bad decisions because somebody is too handsome and our bodies are faster than our brains.

But the fear runs in the back.

What if he is lying?

What if he thinks he is negative but is not?

What if the condom breaks?

What if I trust the wrong man?

What if wanting someone makes me stupid?

What if one moment of sex becomes a life-changing thing?

These thoughts are not always fair. They are not always medically current. They are not always rational.

But inherited fear is not rational.

It does not disappear just because treatment improved.

It does not disappear just because you know more than people knew before.

Today, HIV is not what it was in the 80s or early 90s. Treatment has changed everything. A person with HIV who is on effective treatment and has an undetectable viral load cannot sexually transmit HIV. That matters. It should be said clearly, because stigma kills too.

I do not want to write a post that makes HIV-positive men sound dangerous.

They are not.

Many HIV-positive men today are healthy, careful, informed, and probably more responsible than many men who never think about their status at all.

But the emotional history is still there.

The stigma is still there.

The association is still there.

The old fear still appears in new rooms.

I have felt it in my own sex life.

I try to be safe. I hate that I have to think about it every time. I hate that even when I am horny and want a man, another part of my mind has to become careful, calculating, suspicious.

Once a condom broke.

I think I would have completely freaked out if he had not freaked out first.

He was young. Eighteen. It was his first time and it showed. He was topping me. He was clumsy and scared and crying, asking why this had to happen on his first time.

The strange thing is that his panic made me calmer.

I was scared too, but suddenly I was not only the person afraid of risk. I was also the person being feared.

He knew I had been with a lot of men. So in that moment, I was not only thinking, “What if something happens to me?”

I also saw him thinking, “What if something happens because of him?”

That is gay male sex sometimes.

Desire and suspicion in the same room.

Want and calculation.

Heat and fear.

It is not the whole story, but it is part of the story.

And then there is the stigma from outside.

The stupid, ugly, quiet kind.

The kind nobody admits to directly.

I once came out of an airport toilet. There were several closed toilet cubicles in a row, maybe five or six. I had gone in, peed quickly, and came out.

There were men waiting outside.

One man was standing in front of my cubicle, waiting to use it.

Then he saw me.

He saw that I looked gay.

Immediately, he moved away and started waiting for another toilet.

Then the others followed.

My toilet stayed empty.

They kept waiting for another one to open.

Nobody said anything.

They did not have to.

The message was obvious.

It was like I had contaminated the space just by using it.

I have also heard people ask if you can catch “the disease” from sharing a toilet after I came out of one. Behind my back. As if I was not a person. As if being gay made my body suspicious by default.

That is what I mean by residue.

People may not say the old things as openly anymore.

They may know better words now.

They may be more careful in public.

But something remains.

A smell of old stigma.

A hesitation.

A silence.

A step backward.

A toilet left empty.

For millennials especially, I think HIV still hangs somewhere over gay male life. Not always consciously. Not always in a way people can explain. But it is there.

A lingering essence.

A memory we did not choose.

A fear passed down through stories, images, warnings, jokes, sex education, documentaries, older men’s faces, and photo albums with missing people inside them.

And this is why Pride cannot only be about the present.

If Pride is only about being accepted now, it becomes too shallow.

Acceptance without memory is fragile.

Equality without history is empty.

Visibility without grief becomes performance.

I do not want gay male history polished into something painless.

I do not want the past cleaned up so it becomes easier to consume.

I do not want the men who died to become background.

I do not want lovers to be called friends.

I do not want partners to disappear from obituaries.

I do not want gay men to be remembered only when we are useful to a campaign, pretty enough for a poster, tragic enough for a film, or funny enough for someone’s entertainment.

I want the raw reality remembered too.

The fear.

The bodies.

The desire.

The hospitals.

The bars.

The sex.

The art.

The grief.

The rage.

The men who survived and the men who did not.

When I think about Fritz, I do not only think about sadness.

I think about awe.

He made it.

He carried it.

He stayed standing somehow.

He had lost his partner, his friends, and a part of his world, and still he was kind enough to answer the questions of a horrified kid who kept asking why there were no more photos.

I understand now that maybe I asked too much.

But I also think he knew why I needed to ask.

I was trying to understand where I came from.

Not biologically.

Historically.

Spiritually.

As a gay man.

I was looking at the album and realizing that I belonged to a history full of beauty and loss at the same time.

That is a strange inheritance.

To know that your world is full of desire, humor, art, sex, tenderness, glamour, danger, and grief.

To know that men before you loved each other so hard in a world that kept trying to punish them for it.

To know that some of them were arrested.

Some were killed.

Some were sent away.

Some were erased by their families.

Some died in hospitals.

Some died at home.

Some died with their lovers beside them.

Some died with nobody saying what they really were to each other.

And some survived, but carried the dead with them.

That is our history too.

Not only rainbow flags.

Not only dance music.

Not only pride slogans.

This too.

The missing men.

The gaps in the album.

The photo that becomes the last photo without anyone knowing it at the time.

I keep thinking about Fritz and his boyfriend.

I keep thinking about how I looked for more pictures and found nothing.

I keep thinking about that question.

“Why are there no more photos of him?”

Maybe that is still the question.

Why are there no more photos of him?

Why are there no more stories about him?

Why do people not know his name?

Why did he not get to become old?

Why did he not get to become someone’s elder?

Why did so many gay men disappear, and why are we expected to move on as if the disappearance did not shape us?

This is not about nostalgia.
It is about making the history of gay cisgender men visible.

It is about refusing to let the past become decorative.

It is about remembering that Pride is not only a celebration.

It is also a memorial.

It is also a protest.

It is also a promise.

A promise that we will not let gay men disappear from the album again.