For Robert Gentry, This Was a Year of Picking Up the Pieces : Profile: The Laguna Beach mayor saw his longtime companion die of AIDS, and he was continually asked about his own health.

LAGUNA BEACH--Mayor Robert F. Gentry fights the tears, but they keep coming.

“It happens every time I do this,” he says quietly of describing a year marked by misfortune, one in which his companion of 15 years died of AIDS. “How do I describe 1989? Grief, recovery, a roller coaster ride.”

Gentry, often called “Southern California’s most prominent openly gay elected official,” will step down as mayor today in a ceremonial changing of the guard. He will continue on as a council member until his term ends next year. He has not decided whether he will run again.

For Gentry, 51, this year of turmoil was made more wrenching by its being in the public eye. Further, 1989 was a year that saw much anti-gay sentiment in Orange County, a development that put him under an even hotter spotlight.

In June, the Orange County Board of Supervisors voted to reject an ordinance that would have made it illegal to discriminate against people with acquired immune deficiency syndrome. In September, the county’s first gay pride festival, in Santa Ana, was marred by a brawl between homosexuals and fundamentalist Christians. And in November, Irvine residents voted to remove homosexuals from the groups of people protected by the city’s human rights ordinance.

Of his difficulties this year, Gentry said, “Being the only openly gay elected official in Orange County--there’s a certain amount of personal stress.” Gentry publicly acknowledged his sexual preference in 1983, a year after he was first elected to the City Council. Of his companion’s death in particular, he said: “Not to have that unconditional love available to you 24 hours a day creates a certain tension. Whether or not that will subside the longer I am alone, I don’t know.”

Acceptance

Even in Laguna Beach, widely known for its tolerance of non-traditional life styles, Gentry has had a struggle to gain acceptance.

He attends all of the meetings of the Laguna Beach Chamber of Commerce, a group that he says once advised him to stop making public statements about a series of local attacks against gays because it was bad for business.

“It is important that they see me as a person without two heads who can do a reasonable job,” Gentry said. “It’s a liability to be the first at anything and to be an elected official.”

Chamber President Terry Neptune says that Gentry was the victim of “a little bit of anti-gay” backlash from the business community but that relations have since improved. “I think some of them have a tendency to go overboard,” Neptune said. Gentry “doesn’t have to show up,” Neptune said, “but he always does, and he always does his homework.”

“He’s taken a very hard job and handled it very well,” said Rich Jeffries, president of the South Laguna Civic Assn. “Some feel he’s a little too detailed sometimes, but overall he has a good method of dealing with people.”

Gentry believes, however, that his sexual preference will prevent his political career advancing beyond the local level.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “I’m not going to be a supervisor, Assembly member or member of Congress from Orange County, California. That’s not going to happen for two reasons: I’m gay and at this point in my life I happen to be a registered Democrat. We’re not going to have any openly gay representatives out of Orange County for a while. We will have. But it will be a while.”

Gentry has gotten high marks for his diligence and his attention to detail. Council colleagues credit him with achieving a continued moratorium on offshore oil drilling and for the success in his negotiations with the Irvine Co. leading to the first breakthrough in a decade-long battle over a controversial planned housing community at the mouth of Laguna Canyon.

The Irvine Co. is now, for the first time, considering an alternative plan to move the 3,200-home project out of environmentally sensitive Laguna Canyon and into Irvine.

“He has been the lead person, the point man in the negotiations with the Irvine Co.,” Councilman Dan Kenney said. “He’s had a lot of pain this year with the death of his lover, and it is really quite amazing that he has been able to carry on the way he has.”

Gary Burdick was 49 when he died of AIDS in late January. For Gentry, an ardent supporter of AIDS education and prevention programs, the occasion called for a public disclosure about the cause of Burdick’s death. There have been 150 AIDS deaths in Laguna Beach since 1982.

But that decision carried a price. “I think some of the worst letters I received were after Gary died and I was public about the cause of his death,” Gentry said. “I received some at home that were fairly ugly like, ‘One down, one to go.’ A sympathy card that said, ‘We really wish this were addressed to him instead of you.”’

For the next seven months, Gentry set about reassembling his life, amid being asked continually about his own health.

“The day after Gary died, the first thing the press asked me was: ‘What about you? Are you OK?’ ” Gentry said. “Every time we would come in contact on another issue, it would always be, ‘One more question, Bob: Have you been tested, and do you know the results?’ ”

Gentry learned three months ago that he was not infected with the AIDS virus. He had been tested in May, but he waited until late August to find out the results.

“I had to have a certain amount of personal strength to do that--just burying my friend--then all of a sudden being hit with the same possibility,” Gentry said. “I just couldn’t handle it emotionally, so I just erased it.”

Family Background

Gentry, a blunt but gentle man, might seem to some an unlikely candidate for the part of gay-rights activist.

He was born the son of fundamentalist Christians, and he grew up in Boston. Later, he moved with his family to Chicago, where they helped found several fundamentalist churches in the Midwest. (Gentry’s great-grandfather founded the Hollywood Beverly Christian Church, among whose members are Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy.) Gentry attended Hanover College, a small Presbyterian school in southern Indiana.

“I was raised Victorian, sexist, racist and heterosexist, and I was trained well in all those things,” Gentry said. “I didn’t deal with my being gay until I was in my 20s.”

Gentry moved to Laguna Beach in the mid-’70s. He met Burdick there, and the two lived together until Burdick’s death. The two also bought several homes together. Both had accomplished careers. Gentry is an associate dean of students at UC Irvine; Burdick operated a hair salon.

About 12 years ago, they took in a Vietnamese high school student whom they eventually put through engineering school at UC Irvine.

A client of Burdick had mentioned that the Vietnamese boy had no place to go for Christmas, Gentry said, “and Gary said, ‘Yes he does. He’ll come and stay with Bob and me. He had a little paper sack with his clothes; he came to the house, we had Christmas and a good time, and he never left.”

As for this Christmas, Gentry said: “I’ve been trying to get to Honolulu because Gary and I have a place there and it was a very special place for him and for me. But I started a little bit too late, so I may be here with friends. I’ll be lonely, but I won’t be alone.”

Meanwhile, Gentry hopes the day will come that his political actions are not overshadowed by the fact of his sexual preference.

“There is a lot of interest in me because I am gay,” he said. “You know, ‘What is this person doing in public office and how did he get there?’ But I do not want to be known as Bob Gentry, a single-issue candidate; I want to be known as Bob Gentry, who happens to be gay just like everyone else who happens to be gay.”