Brett Averill June 1982 Photo by Stanely Stellar

It's now been 20 years since I met my lover Brett Averill.

This is what Brett looked like the day we first met at a NYC karate school called SAFE.

Though he'd come, at my repeated urging, to do a story on a lesbian and gay self-defense class that I was promoting, I wasn't expecting anyone even remotely as handsome as Brett.

Brett was then the editor of the gay paper in NYC, and, long before we met, I admired and respected him deeply. The paper, the NY Native, was at the time, and due to Brett, without question the liveliest journal of ideas in America, and as a long-time gay activist, I was very aware of what a remarkable job Brett was doing in balancing the conflicting needs and demands of New York City's and the nation's quarrelsome and besieged lesbian and gay community while producing a paper of remarkable intellecutual depth.

For it was the age of Reagan and Falwell and the onslaught of AIDS, and we were everywhere under attack.

While straight politicians and institutions of both the right and left attempted to exploit the Gay community for their own gain, while mainstream publications alternately ignored and pilloried us, while violence, disease, and state-sanctioned persecution broke over us in waves, Brett had to rely on free-lance writers and part-time reporters who were pathetically underpaid (as was he) to accurately and fairly apprise us of the news, all the while fighting for the attention of a largely apathetic gay audience which was mired in self-hate.

It was a Herculean task, requiring, at its center, a person of both god-like strength and Apollonian clarity and calm.

That was Brett.

From his first year of high school, he had trained in journalism, and, long before he reached the Native, although then only in his twenty-third year, he was a professional. But there was a strength of character that Brett brought to the Native that no amount of training or experience could account for. He had an integrity and undeviating commitment to truth and fair play that were invaluable and irreplaceable, and it was those qualities, along with his intelligence and political acumen, that shone through every issue of the Native that he edited, and that brought me, week after week, long before I'd met him, to devour every page.

And yet, because of the very quality of the paper, which suggested many year's experience in journalism (of itself then quite rare in the gay press), I assumed, before meeting him, that Brett was in his 40s at least, and like most journalists, not very attractive.

I was wrong. He was both young -- just 24 -- and extraordinarily handsome.

A physical beauty, moreover, which reflected the moral, intellectual, and spiritual splendors within.

For Brett was the first and only person I've known whom I could call noble.

While by no means a prig, and indeed someone who enjoyed life to the utmost, he was consistently high-minded, and I simply never saw him do or heard him say anything mean or base.

That quality of sure moral purpose, along with his easy air of command, imparted to him a nobility and, under the circumstances, heroism that I've experienced elsewhere only in books -- it was as though he'd just gotten up from a seat at the Round Table or was about to embark with the Argonauts.

He was extraordinary.

We met, and though very attracted to each other, assumed that each had a boyfriend (which indeed we did), and so didn't see each other again until an accidental meeting in a Chelsea bar six months later propelled us into bed and into love.

And from that moment in October of 1982, we were never apart again.

Those two qualities of Brett -- nobility and sex -- are combined, without conflict, in this picture.

As they were in life.

I took the picture, and, years later, realized it was the quintessential Brett: completely unposed, just standing there, looking noble, with his dick out.

I don't know anyone else who could do that.

The statue known as the Apollo Found at Piraeus was created in 525 BCE.

Brett liked it because it showed us, as we always were, happy together.

But when I look at it now I think, well, at least the Statue of Liberty is still there.

Both Brett and the people who died in the WTC were killed by fundamentalist hate, and we need to be clear that there's no difference among the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic varieties.

They're all deadly.

Of course Brett and I were well aware of that.

We were both activists, and our years in NY were spent in confrontation and conflict with politicians, policemen, publishers, preachers, and other thugs, some on the street, and some vertiginously high above the city in well-appointed but sterile offices.

So after Gay Pride each year we spent as much time on Fire Island as we could.

Brett wrote those words in 1990, five years before he died.

He wasn't being melodramatic though -- it was just the reality of AIDS in those days that he could have died, or, more likely, become desperately ill and then died, literally at any moment.

That being the case, and since he wanted one, we got a dog.

I've written about her in Hadrian: A Memoir

She became a very important part of our lives, and these pictures I think suggest something of the elegiac tone of those last five years.

Of course "elegiac" romanticizes a period of gruesome disease and steady decay.

Yet when the illness didn't leave Brett wracked with pain and me with anxiety, there was a certain idyllic and elegiac feel to our lives.

After all those years of anger and activism in New York, living in retirement in a little cottage with our dog in San Francisco.

And too Brett bore his illness well. He didn't complain.

At least not unnecessarily.

He just said that he didn't want to die because he didn't want to be separated from me.

So he became even sweeter and more loving, and, without any outward show of religion, more spiritual. The bookshelf beside his side of the bed was lined with religious titles, and I knew that, faced with an inevitable parting, and while not talking about it, Brett was quietly putting his faith in a re-union in the life to come.

And so, under the pressures of the disease, and able to do increasingly little, Brett became more and more reclusive and spent more and more time in our garden with our dog.