AIDS Group Gets Help in Its Mission to Support Mothers

“I used to be the world’s No. 1 homophobic,” said Fran Carman, a mother of two grown sons--one of them gay.

Now Carman, who lives in Irvine, is president of the local chapter of Mothers of AIDS Patients, a national support group.

As one of the founders of the 18-month-old chapter, Carman was a busy hostess Saturday at MAP’s first fund-raiser, held in the Newport Beach home of Paul Vogel. But she took time from greeting friends and selling raffle tickets to talk about her homosexual son, Chris, who tested positive for the AIDS virus two years ago.

Carman said Chris, a 28-year-old bartender living in Houston, told her he was gay when he was 16. “But I didn’t really accept it at first,” she said. “It took me a couple of years to educate myself and learn that that’s OK.”

She said she and her son are now “very close--we talk on the phone all the time.” And she remembered one long phone conversation two years ago, the day Chris learned that his blood test showed antibodies for the AIDS virus--the first stage of the disease that has killed more than 58,000 men, women and children in the United States since the first recorded AIDS death in 1981.

“We talked the entire night,” Carman recalled. “Actually, he talked, I cried.”

It was shortly after that heartbreaking phone call that Carman decided to join a support group. What she found were local groups for AIDS victims and for victims’ “significant others,” but nothing “specifically designed to fulfill the needs of mothers,” she said. “The loss of a child is the worst thing a mother can endure. You’re never prepared for it. It’s out of sequence.”

Carman said 10 to two dozen of the local MAP chapter’s 50 members meet every Wednesday evening for a free group counseling session at the Tustin office of Irene Briggs, a marriage and family counselor.

Briggs was among the 91 guests who paid $20 each to join the early evening festivities, which raised $2,800. She said her counseling sessions often last beyond the scheduled two hours and usually deal at some point with members’ anger.

“There’s a lot of anger there, which may be masked as anger at a neighbor, or a friend, or a spouse,” Briggs said. “It’s really anger at this disease. Mothers are care-givers. Mothers take care of their kids. And here they are totally helpless, they have no control over this disease.”

Jean Johnson, who has attended the counseling sessions every week since November, said she has found that MAP members “can share things we can’t share with relatives or friends or anyone else. There’s a lot of unspoken understanding.”

Still, it wasn’t until Johnson’s 30-year-old son died in October that she joined the group. “What I get from this group of ladies is love,” said Johnson, whose fiance, Paul Vogel, opened his home for the benefit.

The same goes for Michelle Meyers, who attended the benefit with her son, Randy, and husband Leo. Randy Meyers said he had tested positive for the AIDS virus in 1985 but remained healthy until six months ago, when he began losing his sight due to an infection that his weakened immune system can’t battle.

“When I need a shoulder to cry on, I know I can get emotional support from this group,” said Michelle Meyers.

Lisa Lake joined MAP in the spring, when her brother, Paul Keller, was in the final stages of AIDS. Lake, a 32-year-old Laguna Hills mother of an infant, recounted her recent trip to Germany, where her brother had lived for a decade. She found him in a hospital, his 5-foot, 7-inch frame wasted to 70 pounds.

“I took one look at him and I just thought, ‘I can’t let him die alone,’ ” she said.

Lake and her husband brought Keller first to their home, then to a local hospital and finally to a hospice in Laguna Beach.

“The women in MAP helped me through this whole nightmare with love and support,” Lake said.