AIDS Victim Was Able to Find a Family Outside His Own

Steve Barto was a family man by nature. Maybe that’s what made it all so tough.

In those last days, when the pain mixed with morphine started playing with his mind, Steve would call out to his father, talk to him, only his father was thousands of miles away with no intention of coming to his dying son’s side.

His mother did come, once, but she couldn’t talk about her son’s illness or even mention its name. She said she had no intention of coming back and she couldn’t cry, or at least not in front of him, but Steve cried a lot.

Then he felt bad. He didn’t want his mother to see him as he lay sick, but he didn’t want to let her go either. He loved her, and Dad.

Susie King is talking at a fast clip now, almost in a stream of consciousness, about her friend, her “brother” Steve. Maybe this might not sound so politically correct, she is saying, but knowing Steve has showed her, once and for all, that being gay is not a “choice” that anyone makes.

She says that if he could have chosen, Steve would have been straight. He wouldn’t have lived in a “closet” all his life, he would have had kids. And when Susie finally called his parents and told him that their son was dying, maybe his family would have embraced him then.

Instead, she told them the truth, for the first time. Steve was a gay man dying of AIDS.

Susie and I are sitting in the small apartment that she shares with her husband, Bill, and their 6-year-old daughter, Laura, in Anaheim. This is where Steve--Uncle Steve around here--lived until he couldn’t any longer.

He finally left in an ambulance a week before Thanksgiving. The paramedics took him to a hospital in the middle of the night and saved his life, for a few more months.

He died on Jan. 30, at the age of 38.

The last time Steve was up and about was on Election Day. Bill came home from work, and there was Steve, dressed and waiting, so that he could cast his vote. He knew it was important, to Susie especially, and he didn’t want to let her down.

Around here, there are so many stories about Steve, happy, touching, everyday stories, family stories, that you can still feel him in this room.

Laura’s face lights up when she talks about dancing with Uncle Steve at Pizza Hut and about how everybody was staring at them, even this one man who kept looking at them after they sat down.

On a collage of photographs and drawings that Bill and Susie made for his memorial service there’s a picture of Steve with his arm around the television set, only the close-up image on the screen is Steve again. He was a contestant on “Jeopardy!”--a dream come true--and he won a trip to Aspen for second place.

Bill shows off a plaque that the company Steve worked for had given him. He had been store manager of the year in 1991, even when he was so sick but, of course, nobody knew about that because that is how Steve was.

He would arrive an hour before anybody else, then take that time to gather strength before starting his day. Six months after Steve went on disability leave, the same company fired him.

Susie knew Steve for 16 years. She had auditioned for a play he was directing at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kan., and she got the role. They’ve been close friends, through graduate school, different cities and different jobs, ever since.

Even still, it took Steve 10 years to tell her that he was gay. She was the only person he told when he tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS.

“He was in deep denial,” Susie says.

Steve lived here for three years, not because he couldn’t afford to live on his own, not because, for a time, he couldn’t take care of himself, but simply because he was a family man. The Kings, now, were his family. Their friends were his own.

But Steve made many others too.

At Flagship, the skilled nursing home in Newport Beach where he would die, Steve met Kim Moore, an 18-year-old college student and receptionist who had never known anyone with AIDS. But she had heard horror stories at school and from her friends.

“If I believed everything I heard, I would have never gone in there,” she says.

Instead, Kim took to visiting Steve every night, chatting about everything and nothing, and just being there. When talk turned to his parents, however, Steve didn’t want to speak.

“I knew they turned away from him,” Kim says. “That hurt me more than anything.”

So she wrote a poem after her new friend had died. “We love you,” it is called.

Can’t you see beyond the sunken eyes and drawn expression?

Is his hollowed body so repulsive that you can’t look upon him?

Do you fear talking with him will make you a member of this club?

Can you no longer touch him?

Well don’t worry.

He doesn’t ever want you to feel like this.

He doesn’t ever want you to have his pain.

He wants you to remember the person, the friend, the son,

Whose heart yearned to be loved and accepted.

Whose body ached to be held and consoled.

Whose last days with strangers were peaceful, joyful, and yet lonely.

He wants you to remember that being an outcast hurts,

That being forgotten is a death all its own.

He wants you to remember he loves you.

On the afternoon that Steve Barto died, a package arrived for him. It was a teddy bear and a valentine card that his mother had signed. Only Steve never knew.