Ten years later, when the US Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage for good (or at least for now), Jeffrey and Rodney got married for a second time. I was surprised at how much it angered me." "I don't think I've ever been so angry in my life, holding that piece of paper that said our marriage was nullified," Jeffrey says. Then, about a year later, Jeffrey and Rodney, along with around 3,000 other couples, received a letter informing them that their marriage had been nullified after voters in Oregon, and then the state supreme court, decided that marriage could only be between a man and a woman. Things were good, and it felt like the world was finally making some progress. The next weekend, they had a little reception and potluck at their home in Seattle. The two men moved in together, fostered and then adopted a son, and in 2004, when Multnomah County in Oregon briefly legalized same-sex marriage, they drove to Portland and got married at the courthouse. "That was one of the worst dates I ever went on. He circled another one that was by a guy that I'd actually gone out with-and, I'll tell you what, I saved him a massive headache," Jeffrey said, laughing. He circled a couple of ads, including mine. "Rodney had just gotten into town, and he picked up a Stranger at Pagliacci Pizza on the Ave. Once here, he made new friends-some of whom later died of AIDS as well-and later met a new man, Rodney, through the classified ads in this very paper. Not long after Amador died, Jeffrey moved to Seattle. "It was so fucked up," Jeffrey says, shaking his head.
The family got the house and the cars and everything Jeffrey and Amador had owned together. They tried to convince a judge that the men hadn't been partners and that Jeffrey was a straight man just going after Amador's money. We liked to say that he stuck around for one more Cinco de Mayo."Īfter Amador's death, his family erased Jeffrey from his obituary and then fought Jeffrey in court over his estate.
"At one point, he was the head of the Association of Mexican American Educators, and he was very connected in that world. "Cinco de Mayo had been a very big day for him," Jeffrey says. Including Amador, who died at 12:30 in the morning on May 6, 1987. I'd go through there and I'd recognize so many people."ĭuring the 1980s, tens of thousands of people, most of them gay men, died of AIDS in the United States. There was a San Francisco paper called the Bay Area Reporter, and the obituaries started at like half a page, then it became a page, and then it was two pages, and then it was page after page after page. It was people I would pass on the street. Jeffrey doesn't know how many of his friends and acquaintances died from AIDS in those years. We didn't even know what it was called, much less what caused it. People were getting very sick, and they couldn't identify why. "There was this weird thing spreading through the gay community. "Nobody knew what was happening," Jeffrey says. When the epidemic first emerged, people thought it was a kind of gay cancer or was connected to poppers, a recreational drug common in the gay male community. "That really helped."ĪIDS first arrived in the United States in the 1960s and '70s, but it wasn't definitively identified as a sexually transmitted infection until well into the 1980s. Over time, however, his parents came to terms with who their son was, in no small part because they easily connected with his first partner, a charming schoolteacher from Laredo, Texas, named Amador. It was not comfortable, not comfortable at all." "I had some friends who were supportive," he told me. Three years later, Jeffrey came out to everyone else. He and his friend swore not to tell anyone else.
PFLAG had just been founded, and gay-straight alliances were still years away. They didn't tell anyone else, and how could they? Stonewall had happened less than five years before, and the gay liberation movement was still nascent. It was Sacramento, 1973, and he and his best friend confessed to each other that they both liked boys. Jeffrey, a Seattle-based humorist, artist, and storyteller who has performed across the country, came out for the first time at age 14.