It was amazing how near the end, he was still able to summon enough energy to sing some of the final tracks, you never would have known he was sick from just hearing them. Probably was the reason he went downhill so fast, it took everything out of him.
I was acquainted with a very quiet, kind man when I was younger, who sang backup for some very well-known artists, Chaka Khan and many others. He contracted AIDS back when it was a fairly rapid death sentence and cause for complete social ostracism. I didn’t really know he was gay at the time, but should have suspected, he wasn’t exactly effeminate but he was empathetic and soft.
His singing was his existence, really, outside of that apparent sexual compulsion, that I knew nothing of until afterward. AIDS took his voice first, some sort of paralysis of the vocal chords, it began as almost a stutter but progressed to not being able to speak at all, quite a few motor function disabilities followed in the wake of that.
The last time I saw him, he had turned into an ashen, wooden figure, hollowed out with empty eyes. He didn’t seem to be in there anymore, and it was if his ravaged body had been taken over by something alien. Not long after that, he left here as his immediate family wanted nothing to do with him in that state, they were afraid of the disease and uncomfortable being associated with it or with him. This was back in the late eighties, when AIDS was a very rapid death sentence, and in fact it was, all this occurred over about a years’ time.
A very fundamentalist Christian aunt in Houston paid to fly him down there, and she cared for him and ministered to him until he died in bed, in her home. She wanted to get him right with God and to save his soul. I didn’t really understand at the time but I do now, having found or actually returned to God myself, and I hope she succeeded.
He was an exceedingly kindhearted and gentle person with a beautiful voice. It’s a pity that such carnality took him over and destroyed him, but that’s what it did. Utterly destroyed him, took away everything he ever valued in life in as cruel and embarassing manner as possible, reduced him to a hollow stick figure, made him dependent as a baby while simultanteously making him an outcast.
It’s a very grave sin that provokes such a punishment, imho.