I nod, and we walk in silence out of the cathedral. It’s nice to be outside. The exhibit was beautiful and awful, and it took all the air from my lungs. I need to just breathe a little.

Turk takes me across the street to a place called Huntington Park, which is sunny but windy. There’s a huge fountain in the middle — angels dancing on the heads of gargoyles who spit streams of water into stone seashells. We find a bench, and it takes him awhile to maneuver his wiry-thick frame down next to me.

Once he’s seated and comfortable, he turns to me.

“So once upon a time, there was a village,” he says. “It was hilly and sun-filled and all the interesting kids went there when they came of age. Through a confluence of many events — the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution — it just so happened that in the 1970s, these kids started to create a real community. A neighborhood formed called the Castro. In every way possible, they let their hair hang down. Men lived with men and women lived with women. They loved and danced and screwed and laughed and sang. It wasn’t just sex and drugs either. It was softball and square dancing and gardening and fixing up houses. They did it in ones or twos or sometimes even threes and fours. Never before in modern history had this been done, so there were no rules.

“And they were free — mostly — from the judgment of the outside world. The people who would have told them that they were going to hell for loving the wrong person were shut out of this party. They thrived on the outskirts, but they were not allowed in. The Castro was beautiful because it was pure. All these people, who had been alone in Iowa City and Spokane, here they were not alone. They celebrated their newfound freedom, and it was a joyous place.”

He turns away and I take in his profile. The weathered skin on his face looks like it’s been through a war.

“Then, one nippy day in the center of the neighborhood where they lived, a bunch of men stood in front of the pharmacy window, looking at photographs of a young man. These photos showed the purple blotches he had inside his mouth and on his chest. In Magic Marker he had written, ‘Careful, guys, there’s something out there.’

“Nobody thought much about it. Nobody knew what to think. Besides, only a few people were sick.

“But then, more young men began to come down with incredibly rare maladies. The florist took ill with a bird parasite in his brain that no medicine could touch. The first baseman for a softball team couldn’t keep food down and was told he had a cow parasite that normally would have required just a small course of antibiotics, but now was untreatable. The chef for a popular upscale eatery came down with a rare pneumonia that killed him within a week. A well-loved community theater actor contracted a typically benign cancer that invaded his organs. Soon, purple splotches covered his entire face. Then he died.

“Panic spread throughout the city where once there had been so much joy. How was it possible that so many healthy, beautiful men could age in appearance fifty years in two months, and die looking like concentration camp victims?”

I look at Turk’s face, and I realize he has it too. Something about his sunken cheekbones and those minus signs under his eyes. I saw it right away, but I didn’t know what it was. He’s probably had it a long time.

“Some people moved away, hoping to escape it. Some of those people died anyway. Others dug in and took care of the ill. The women, some of whom were friends with the men and others who felt excluded by them, came together and nursed their brothers.

“At first some of us decided it was only the most promiscuous who got it. That was just denial. A banker moved in with a painter in 1980, not knowing that one random night in 1978, the painter had enjoyed a perfectly delightful evening with an accountant and came home with a silent virus in his blood. The banker and the painter, monogamous and faithful, would perish within months of each other in 1986, and no one could make it stop.

“It tore us apart. The disease. The way people reacted to it. Nationally, there was no reaction. Only fear that it would cross over and start killing straights. Otherwise, it was barely mentioned in the media, and the president didn’t mention it at all. Six years went by and twenty thousand died before he said the word AIDS.

“Some claimed that AIDS was God’s punishment for being gay. That was particularly harsh, because many of the dying had been told all their lives that they were evil. They finally got past that only to be told, on their deathbeds, that God had decreed their deaths. Very cruel.”

“That’s horrible,” I say.

“Of course, other religious people came through and cared for the dying. It seems like the disease brought out the best and worst in people, and I sometimes wonder if that would be the case today, or if the world has changed. Do you think it would be different today?”

“Probably,” I say.

He smiles weakly. “Well, good. Progress. Can you handle another story?”

I nod.

“This one is about a man from Billings, Montana.”

“Right,” I say, looking back at the cathedral as if he’s still in there.

“His name was Russ Smith, and he was a tall, goofy man. Looked a lot like you, actually.”

I blush.

He smiles. “Russ was a religious man. He was also a man of music. He could hear a melody, and an hour later he would still be able to remember it and could create four or five different harmonies to it. And he knew scripture. Tons of scripture.

“But ever since he was a kid, he felt like a freak. Because it was the fifties, and he knew that other boys, not girls, interested him. And he lived in Montana, where those things were definitely not discussed.

“So he got married to a woman named Phyllis, and he had a son, and like many, many other men at the time, he coped with living the wrong life by drinking. A lot. Living the right life was impossible.”

I close my eyes and try to imagine a world in which I’m made to marry a guy. The idea is hard to fathom. I don’t think of guys the way I think of girls. Their bodies are just — not what I want to touch. What if I had to? Could I do it?

“So mostly he drank himself to sleep, and as the drinking got worse, he got mean. He yelled at his wife. He loved his son, but sometimes he ignored him. And because he was basically good inside, this tore him up further, and he thought about ending it all.

“One day in the mid-seventies, he heard about a choir director’s conference in San Francisco, and he convinced the pastor at his church to let him go. It was the first of several consecutive years in which he flew to San Francisco for a week.

“Those weeks were what he looked forward to through all the cold winters. The second week of April. A chance to be somewhere else. To be someone else. To follow his heart. And during those weeks, I feel strange saying this to you, but he —”

“I get it,” I say.

He nods and smiles. “You get it. Let’s just say he made many friends, friends he’d spend time with once a year.

“Sometime in the late spring of 1982, he was getting dressed and looked down and saw a purple spot on his shoulder. He rubbed it. It looked mostly like a pimple that had popped, but a little different than that. Over the course of the next few weeks, several more formed on his chest and one on his neck. He went to the doctor in Billings. The doctor had no idea what it was. He went for tests. They were worried he had skin cancer. The news came back good, in a way. It was a rare form of benign cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma. The only thing strange about it was that he wasn’t a sixty-year-old Mediterranean man. That’s who usually got the condition, and they’d put up with the unsightly lesions and die of something else, years later.

“Russ went to the library to do some research. He couldn’t find anything, until one day, a search turned up an article about Kaposi’s sarcoma cases in gay men. His heart flipped in his chest. He cried, because he knew that was him. He knew these things were related.