By John Lewis–
When I was a senior in high school back in the 1970s, I played classical piano and was invited to perform the difficult Mendelssohn Piano Concerto in G-Minor before hundreds of students and their parents at our school’s annual holiday concert. I prepared for months on end. The morning of the concert was a sunny and crisp early winter day in Kansas City where we lived. But by afternoon clouds moved in, and soon it began to snow. I remember my mother was so nervous about my performance at the concert and how difficult it might be to get there through the snow, she baked the ham we were having for dinner with the plastic wrapper on it, yielding a completely inedible gooey mess.
And it just kept snowing and snowing. The roads became nearly impassable. We made it to the concert, but few others did. I performed the concerto that I had worked on so hard before a very small audience.
I was crestfallen, but years later at my 40th high school reunion I saw my old music teacher, who also still remembered that night decades ago. Seeing him made me feel something very different: how marvelous and nourishing it was to have played so much music together with him and my fellow students from grade school through high school graduation. (I also played clarinet and tenor saxophone in many different bands, ensembles, and orchestras.) Despite the fact that I never got to perform the Mendelssohn concerto as I had imagined, I had completely immersed myself in the music for all those months I had practiced. In fact, I had been very fortunate. I’ve never again played as much music as I did during my senior year of high school.
The experience gave me a taste of one of life’s most basic truths: things don’t always turn out the way we expect them to. Several years later I confronted that truth again when I came to terms with my sexuality. I had known since I was a small child that I was attracted to people of the same sex, but one reason that I didn’t come out until my 20s was because I simply could not conceive that there was anything different or out of the mainstream about me. When I finally connected the dots late one evening while riding my bike in front of the iconic mosaic at the heart of the Stanford quad, I remember stopping in astonishment with the realization: “Wow, I can’t believe it! I’m gay!” Things weren’t the way I expected them to be. It was also the beginning of my realizing, in fact, how lucky I was to be gay.
We in the LGBTIQ community are perhaps particularly familiar with the truth that life can turn out other than planned. For instance, during the heady days of San Francisco in the late 1970s, no one could foresee the havoc that the HIV/AIDS epidemic would wreak on the community just a few short years later.
As we popped the cork to ring in the New Year 2020, neither I nor anyone else I know imagined that less than three months later in the face of a new deadly virus, we’d be sheltering in place at home, doing everything we could to keep six feet away from any other human being except those with whom we lived—and, of all things, fretting about whether we had enough toilet paper.
It’s not surprising that many of us in the LGBTIQ community who lived through the 1980s and 1990s in San Francisco are experiencing varying degrees of PTSD these days. But our community learned a lot about life, death, how to truly care for each other, and how to fight back and stand up for our lives during the darkest days of the AIDS crisis and beyond. We hope some of that wisdom is proving useful amidst the COVID-19 outbreak.
Life’s unexpected turns can be wonderful, too—like when 33 years ago as I was preparing to leave a party because none of my friends were there, I turned around and met Stuart and we ended up being the last guests to depart and have been together ever since. Or the morning of February 12, 2004, when then-Mayor Gavin Newsom surprised the world and burst open the doors of San Francisco City Hall for LGBTIQ people to marry, igniting the marriage equality movement.
None of this negates the value of planning for the future and anticipating it as best we can. Indeed, the balance, skills, and stability we can bring to life before something unexpected takes place can help us when it does. Reminder to self: We really need to update and upgrade our earthquake kit!
Although Stuart has been working harder than ever at his job in health policy at UCSF during the shutdown, we’ve also enjoyed slowing down, spending more time outdoors, seeing neighbors (six feet apart) to and from walks in the park, and living life much more simply. We hope to maintain some of these things when life eventually returns to so-called normal.
And we hope to have learned something more about the vicissitudes and unpredictability of life—and to experience and appreciate each present moment and each loved one here and now. Please take good care of yourself and others during these unexpected and challenging times.
Stuart Gaffney and John Lewis, together for over three decades, were plaintiffs in the California case for equal marriage rights decided by the California Supreme Court in 2008. Their leadership in the grassroots organization Marriage Equality USA contributed in 2015 to making same-sex marriage legal nationwide.
Published on April 9, 2020
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