For Pride Month - Remembering My Oldest Friend, the bravest guy I ever knew

June being Pride Month, I want to remember my oldest friend, who gave me great pride, that we were friends.

David Faris and I first met the first day of Kindergarten in Mrs. Rice’s class at Washington Park Elementary in Denver, Colorado, where I grew up. He had the good taste, while sitting next to me at the art table, to comment favorably about the dinosaur I was making with clay. I told him it was a brontosaurus, a beast whose existence I had discovered the Sunday before, when my father took me to the first of many visits to the Denver Museum of Natural History. Moments later I had the first of my many run-ins with “educational authority” when Mrs. Rice told me I was supposed to be making butterflies. I glanced over at what David was doing - he was using multiple colors of clay to create a monarch butterfly. I responded to Mrs. Rice that I was much more interested in dinosaurs than butterflies, for which I received my first (of many) visits to the Ultimate Authority of the principal’s office, where I was informed that “good boys” listened to their teachers. When I returned to class, the dinosaur was no more, but David told me he liked it anyway, and that dinosaurs were more interesting than butterflies, even though his butterfly had been chosen by Mrs. Rice for display as the best.

That first meeting defined the nature of our friendship for the next twelve years. David went on to be one of the stars of my youth: winner of academic, sporting and social awards and the accompanying social acclaim. I came at times to have something of a love-hate relationship with him, since my mother was always holding him up as an example - “Why can’t you be more like David Faris?” No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get close to who and what he was. He was a member of the Cub Scout den my mother sponsored, and we later moved up to Troop 242, the Boy Scout troop that never let weather get in the way of a weekend out in nature. Surprisingly, in a social milieu in which someone like him being friends with someone like me was taken as a black mark on his social standing, we remained friends throughout all those years. Eventually, when the 12 year sentence to attend public school ended, David went off to Harvard on a combined sports and academic scholarship (he was captain of the South High School tennis team and valedictorian of the Class of 1962, from which I graduated 125 from the bottom of 930 without participating in any sports); I escaped Denver by enlisting in the Navy.

While our paths parted, I would get updates on the upward trajectory of David’s life in the newsletters sent out every ten years for our class reunions - events I always managed to avoid attending. And then, and then… at the 40th reunion, I learned David had shown up with his life partner, Fred. As with all other gay friends I’ve had, learning that fact was the equivalent of looking through a camera while one twists the lens to get focus, which suddenly pops in clear and sharp. Sexuality shouldn’t be one’s sole identity, but it’s such an important part of any individual’s life that it does provide explanations for many things.

I asked a mutual friend if she happened to have David’s e-mail. She did, and I dropped him a note, telling him how much I admired him for coming to the reunion of a group of people I knew weren’t supportive of someone like him. He responded quickly, telling me how much he appreciated hearing from me and mentioning that he had recently moved back to Denver and often thought of me when he drove through the old neighborhood past the house I’d grown up in. The previous 40 years telescoped to under 40 minutes, and our friendship took up again as if the last time we’d seen each other was yesterday. I always think that’s a sign of a real friendship.

Over the 17 years we had left with each other, I think this became the strongest friendship I have with anyone. And I learned how my oldest friend was the bravest person I ever knew.

David knew back when he was 10 that he was “different.” In those days, let me assure you that was a “difference” that - if it became known - could have been fatal. I’ve never forgotten the night in my sophomore year of high school when I got invited to go out “cruising” with some school friends, to discover that they were out to go “gay bashing.” It wasn’t called that then, but that’s what it was, and I spent the whole night in terror that they’d find someone; I didn’t know enough to know why I didn’t like that, but I did, and after a few later refusals, they stopped inviting me along, for which I gave private thanks. Had they known then what David knew about himself, they wouldn’t have thought twice about doing to him what they’d planned to do to a stranger, perhaps even worse since they knew him.

After a college experience that included time at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, David married a woman he met in graduate school, where both were studying to become psychologists, as did many gay men then. The marriage turned into a friendship since he couldn’t kindle the fire necessary for a romance, and eventually they parted in the early 80s. That was when he admitted to himself who he was, and came out to his therapist. Being the practical-minded guy he was, he got his therapist to start a group for men coming to terms with their sexuality in their middle years; the first other guy to attend the group was Fred. They were together for 30 years, longer than most straight marriages.

Over the 17 years David and I had together after we reconnected, there were long conversations, longer letters, and he wrote a memoir he asked me to read as a professional writer. He was painfully honest in it, and it was an education for me to read it. Since he had retired back to Denver and now lived in the same retirement community my parents had lived in, we both laughed about my mother having always held him up as the goal I should achieve. “Are you *really sure* about that, Mrs. Cleaver?” he once said to our mutual laughter. He ran the class newsletter and took great pleasure in using one issue to give all the others a detailed look at the life of “the member of our class who’s more famous now than all of us.”

David had health problems, and fought cancer successfully for nearly 20 years, despite several close calls. Talking about it, he said “I’ll fight any number of battles to live, but I won’t fight a minute to exist.” Two years ago this coming September, the cancer returned for a fourth time, and he was told the treatment would take a lot out of him and the result would be a diminished life. He turned them down, knowing that doing so he gave himself eight weeks. He and Fred took their annual vacation to a small village in the South of France they had visited for many seasons, and on return he used the time he had left to say good-bye to everyone, even as his decline steepened. That was the moment I knew he was the bravest person I ever knew, that he could so clearly make such a choice, and be at such peace with it.

There isn’t a day since he left us the Sunday after Thanksgiving, that I don’t think how nice it would be to see his name pop up in my in-box, or on my phone’s ID.

I’m so glad that one can say during this Pride Month that a contyemporary David Faris doesn’t have to live as he did. He triumped over all - he flew like a bird above us all, always, and it seemed so effortless. But it wasn’t. I’ll take that difference between now and 60 years ago as what President Obama called “change we can believe in.”