Stefan Lynch Strassfeld was raised by gay parents in the early eighties. Now 38, he came to StoryCorps to talk with his friend Beth Teper about growing up as AIDS began to spread.
Originally aired December 3, 2010 on NPR’s Morning Edition.
Transcript
SS: My family were mostly gay guys, who were my babysitters and the guys who you know, took the pictures at my birthday parties. And I felt like I had this amazing family. I called them my aunties. And it was a really wonderful, amazing world that came crashing down. Starting in ’82, the first person I knew, died of AIDS. Um, a young guy named Steve.
BT: And how old were you at the time?
SS: I was ten when he was diagnosed. I remember, I was on the beach and I saw Steve and he was covered in these purple spots and I remember asking my dad, like what’s wrong with Steve? And my dad said, “Oh he has this skin cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma.” And I said, well what is that? And my dad said, “Well nobody really knows, but there are some gay men that are getting it.”
And within I think 2 months, Steve was dead. And it was pretty much a succession of deaths of my family throughout the next decade. My step dad bill died in ’87, my dad died in ’91, after a really grueling six months of me taking care of him. You know, I was 19 and at that point, everyone had died except for a handful of stragglers who I now hold near and dear to my heart. My aunties. It was a powerful family. There was a lot of love. And they modeled for me how to survive an epidemic, even if you were dying while doing it.