Tim Courtney

Apr 16, 2014

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Tim Courtney

Ruby’s Rap by Ruby Comer

“Ruby, do you want to play doctor? This time let me be the doctor, okay?”

This childhood memory flashes through my noggin’ when I see an old chum, Tim Courtney, at an AIDS fundraiser in San Diego.

Tim and I used to be neighbors and one time during middle school, he accompanied me to the Sadie Hawkins dance. But before high school, he and his family moved away and I lost track of him. We hooked up again in Los Angeles in the nineties when an old boyfriend of mine, Greg, started dating him. Yes, I drove Greg gay! I learned then that Tim was a photographer so I connected him with A&U magazine, where he shot many covers. For nearly fifteen years we haven’t been in contact.

After the event, Tim invites me to his charming Hillcrest apartment and we catch up.

He has been HIV-positive since 1990 and, fortunately, has had no AIDS-related illnesses. Over the years he’s been an active volunteer, dedicating many hours to Los Angeles’ Project Angel Food (“I enjoyed working there and still use a recipe of theirs, pineapple sour cream pie!”). Several years ago he established his own nonprofit organization, Picture Me Happy, helping children who are afflicted with terminal illnesses.

Tim has been to hell and back with addiction; however, he’s been sober for nearly ten years. He offers to share his story since he feels it might help others, so straight away I pull out my trusty digital recorder from my cherry Fossil handbag. We huddle together on his balcony that overlooks a low-lit urban street and we bask in the bright glow of the dazzling la luna above.

Ruby Comer: Tim, do you remember when you first heard about the epidemic?
Tim Courtney: It was probably in 1983 when I was in college. I really wasn’t educated about it, other than it was something to do with sex, and that men were dying from it. I remember the first man I allowed to penetrate me—without a condom. I later found out that he had a wife. In all honesty, I didn’t know that a guy could put his penis into my anus until this man did and I had no idea what a condom was used for.

A year later I was informed that he had AIDS, was in the hospital and dying. I well remember my mind going beyond the fear and straight to feeling numb and disconnected with everything in life. To give you an idea of how it affected me, I had received this information early on a Sunday evening. I went to sleep that Sunday night and arose from bed to go to class the next morning, only to find out when I arrived at class it was Tuesday morning. I had slept from Sunday night to Tuesday morning.

Wow, that knocked you for a loop, boy! Of course….
I’ve lost many friends to this epidemic and did help take care of a few, especially my former partner’s good friend, Danny. Memories come up of things I did to help him achieve his last dream before passing: to maintain some dignity and still feel like he was an attractive man. [Tim becomes very quiet, reflecting.] I can think of so many who passed too soon before the cocktail medications came out. They were so young; many were in their early thirties. As you know Ruby, my first partner Greg, who had once been your boyfriend, passed away in the early 2000’s from AIDS.

I heard about Greg. What a fun time the four of us (my fiancé Rudy) had that one New Year’s Eve in Palm Springs, huh?! After your diagnosis how did it affect you?
The first year was horrible, everyone was dying, and my spirit was dying on the inside. About a year after my diagnosis, while I was songwriting and in a severe drama of imminent self-pity, it occurred to me that I was still alive. I took back my life that day realizing I might be alive even another year. Did I want to spend it the way I had just spent the last year?

How did you discover you were positive?
About two months prior to my next HIV testing, I contracted a severe flu. People used to ask, “Who do you think gave it to you?” My response is still the same, “What does it matter? What does it have to do with who it was? I was the one who was there, with my low-self esteem and compulsive decision for bare sex.

Indeed. What medical treatment did you seek?
I have to tell you, Ruby, my very first doctor gave me the best advice ever. He said, “Do what you believe is right for you.” I waited till the first cocktail drugs came out before taking anything. My belief was and still is today, quality of life versus severe side effects and longevity of life. I quickly learned that my little body could not handle the regular dosages, so I made an adjustment. I take only about a third to a half of what is prescribed. Through the years I have also taken five or six-month breaks from medications in order to clean out my system. I don’t recommend it to others, but this has been my experience.

I’ve always believed that everyone needs to do what is best for them, not just what a professional advises. It’s so easy to sit back, be told what to do, and not take any responsibility. So easy….
I think it works well if you believe it does. [I nod.] And the monitoring test can be good proof to back it up. I’m currently on a one-pill regimen of Stribild. I take half every night before bedtime, along with 1,000 mg of Vitamin C. I also take 1,000 mg of Vitamin C twice a day, and always one along with my HIV meds. Fortunately, I continue to have excellent numbers.

YEAH! [We hug.] Do you do anything else alternative?
I am a big fan of Zyflamend, a 100-percent pure fish oil pill, and Holy Basil, all made by the company New Chapter. When needed, I take liquid silver, a natural antibiotic. I find it helps with sinus infections and allergies. I work out to keep the body active and lively. I’ve been working out in the gym with both weights and cardio since I was nineteen years-old. Exercising has absolutely made a positive difference in many areas of my life, and continues to do so. I also eat very healthy, most of the time, though as you know Ruby, I love my sweets!

Join the club, Tim! What inspired you to found your organization Picture Me Happy?
I wanted greater fulfillment in life. I began volunteering my photography services at Los Angeles Children’s Hospital. I saw a real need for the creative project I was offering to the children. They were engaged with the creative process and it got them into the playrooms. It also worked well for those who were at bedside.

What year was it established and tell me what it does exactly.
It was created in 2007. Picture Me Happy inspires the healing process through creative arts for hospitalized children with serious medical conditions, such as cancer, leukemia, AIDS, sickle cell, pulmonary disease, and other chronic and terminal illnesses. We currently serve children’s hospitals in Long Beach and San Diego. And we’ll soon be expanding a number of programs, adding more variety and activities for children and teens.

What motivates you to continually offer yourself to others? Oops, maybe I should ask that in another way. [We both cackle

hysterically.]
I have learned that I have a choice to work on the solution or to be a part of the problem. I used to cry watching commercials showing children and adults going through horrible life circumstances. I cried and whined, but I didn’t bother to be active. [He declares in an assertive voice:] Get into the solution and help better the situation! I realized my crying and sadness had a lot to do with me, not them. I can’t help everyone, but when I choose one [an organization], I’m working alongside millions of other caring people who are helping to create a better world together.

Ya know, my friend, I want to know more about your addiction.
Oh my…First of all, this isn’t me being very anonymous [according to AA rules one needs to remain nameless], but I hope this will be of benefit to someone.

I spent eight years of my life committed to meth, and lots of alcohol before that. I say committed, because it got to a point where I couldn’t not do it. As those using years passed, I was dying more and more on the inside and looking like death on the outside. The bottom for me was a Thanksgiving evening when I didn’t show up at a friend’s big dinner. I was in my apartment on my bed, convulsing, while a friend was on-line looking for his next trick. Ignoring my flipping around all over my bed, he left me, but with a big bag of drugs to help. I knew I needed to get to a hospital; I was going to die. It seems I was about to get what I wanted…the final escape. Here I was finally going to get out of this life that was too hard and painful for me to live in. But…I really didn’t want to die. [As an afterthought, Tim laments with a chuckle:] My goals and dreams had never included, “I want to be an alcoholic or an addict!”

So what happened next?
I woke the next morning and admitted to myself, “I…need…help.” Very weak and degraded, I got myself dressed and drove to a noon NA [Narcotics Anonymous] meeting in West Hollywood. With gratitude, Ruby, I persevere in my recovery to this day. I discovered a life worth living.

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For more information, visit TimCourtneyphotography.com and PictureMeHappy.org.

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Ruby Comer is an independent journalist from
the Midwest who is happy to call Hollywood her home away from home. Reach her by e-mail at MsRubyComer@aol.com.

Hands-on Healing

Features

Nov 6, 2011

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San Francisco’s Positive Being celebrates ten years of providing healing bodywork to low-income people living with HIV
by Brent Calderwood

Bill Stern webl — Positive Being founder Bill Stern (middle) with two bodywork volunteers. Photo © Steven Underhill

Certified massage therapist Bill Stern, PhD, founded Positive Being three years after he nearly died of complications from AIDS in 1996. “After several close calls, I started seeing a massage therapist regularly,” recalled Stern. “The fact that someone was willing to touch me with loving and healing hands made a huge difference.”

With a handful of other volunteers, Stern opened Positive Being’s low-cost massage clinic for people with AIDS in January 2001. Today, Stern mobilizes and manages a volunteer team of certified massage therapists and other bodyworkers who donate at least one hour per month to treating Positive Being’s clients.

The story of Positive Being is the story of Bill Stern, who still serves as executive director, although, he says, “We’re currently searching for a new executive director who wants to bring their passion and skills to the job.”

Stern’s sunny garden apartment is nestled on the ground floor of a modest Victorian in San Francisco’s Mission District, the city’s predominantly Latino neighborhood, at the heart of the famously foggy city’s “sun belt” and cheek-by-jowl with the Castro and South of Market neighborhoods.

As serious as Stern has had to be about his nonprofit work, he’s disarmingly light-hearted and open in person, and his apartment is clearly the home of an art lover and academic, overflowing with books about health and HIV, art history, alternative medicine, anatomy, and world travel. What walls aren’t lined with books are decorated with works of art by friends and lovers, many of whom he’s seen pass away over the years; it’s the perfect setting to sit down with a mug of Earl Grey and delve into the long and fascinating journey that brought Stern and Positive Being to where they are today.

“I started showing symptoms [of having HIV] when I was working on my dissertation at UCSB in the nineties. First, I got PCP—the pneumonia, not the drug,” he jokes. “Then it was MAC [a blood disease], then other opportunistic infections followed. I worked as a teacher for as long as I could, making it through two bouts of pneumonia, but then I had to go out on disability.”

After his diagnosis in 1994, Stern decided to move from Santa Barbara to San Francisco, “where the healthcare was infinitely better,” he says.

“Shortly after moving to San Francisco, I began the first of two long courses of chemotherapy. I was also advised to enter a drug trial, [which I did] with disastrous results: I started losing my eyesight.”

Stern was still working on his dissertation at the time, in art history, “which is totally based on visual analysis,” he explains. “I knew I was in trouble. But I finished up my PhD by dictating the last few chapters of my dissertation.”

Anyone who has gone to graduate school, let alone gotten their PhD, knows how grueling the several years of austere student life can be. But add to that the prospect that when it’s all over, you won’t be able to practice in your chosen field, and you’ll get a sense of the resiliency and determination that went into the formation of Positive Being.

But that resiliency didn’t happen overnight. “I had no career, no purpose. I couldn’t read, I couldn’t drive, and I could barely walk. I was bitter about my visual disability, so I asked a friend, ‘Know any jobs you can do by feel?’”

Although Stern’s question was sarcastically rhetorical, his friend immediately suggested massage. “It was a light dawning on the clouded mind—here was something I could do!”

By the end of 1999, Stern was certified in Swedish and Deep Tissue massage from a program that had involved studying with Irene Smith, a pioneer in the use of massage in hospice and hospitals.

“That’s basically how Positive Being was born. I had a new business, a new title—executive director—and, honestly, a new reason for living.” Positive Being opened its doors January 1, 2001.

Stern’s story may sound like an isolated incident to some, or a “miracle story” of recovery from terminal illness. “But it isn’t,” he maintains. For one thing, his health problems haven’t magically gone away; in the past ten years he’s had to contend with two hip replacements, a heart attack, and a broken foot due to osteopenia, a bone density condition, all before turning fifty in 2007.

By the first years of the new millennium, there were populations who’d been living with HIV/AIDS for well over twenty years, and doctors had realized that long-term HIV can cause premature aging—“just what every gay man wants!” Stern adds. “But despite all those physical problems, my social and spiritual life grew, and so did Positive Being.”

Stern believes that the overall improvements in his sense of happiness and well-being have come not just from the therapeutic effects of massage, which are well-documented, but also from the compassionate human contact that bodyworkers provide.

Bodywork, he explains, can serve as a model for offering and accepting physical affection in the “real world” outside of the clinical setting. “Our goal at Positive Being goes beyond nurturing a client’s sense of integration with his own body, mind and spirit, but also with others.”

For many patients and caregivers searching for alternatives to a purely Western-medical approach, Positive Being has been a godsend—some clients have called it a lifesaver. But Stern is quick to add, “These aims serve as a complement, rather than an alternative, to drug therapies.”

Whereas pharmaceutical drugs function by negating the virus, the programs of Positive Being function by affirming the positive aspects and healing potential within our own bodies. This approach has struck a chord with clients who not only crave loving physical touch, but have often felt beleaguered by impersonal clinical therapies and the damaging side effects of toxic drugs.

In 2007, Stern began organizing an ongoing series of workshops along with therapist John Olesen, now the clinical supervisor of San Francisco’s Shanti L.I.F.E. Program. According to Olesen, “The workshops help people listen through their hands.”

Called “Exploring the Body Positive” the workshops are held at Wildwood Retreat Center, tucked into the forested mountains along the Russian River, just over an hour’s drive north of San Francisco.

“I work a lot with stress reduction,” Olesen tells me, “and I saw how stress was harmful to HIV-positive men. In addition to the bodywork, which is different from massage and is purely non-sexual, we also do walks, meditations, and breathing exercises, so people can get in touch with breath, listen to their bodies, learn to accept and like their bodies—which not only helps with self-esteem, it helps the immune system.

“A lot of long-term survivors have felt untouchable,” Olesen continues. “They remember how it was when people had to suit up, and didn’t know how it was transmitted, when it was GRID and gay cancer. You can intellectually understand that you’re touchable and lovable and great, but your body has to learn that, too.”

In its mission to make Positive Being’s services accessible to everyone, especially the low-income people and clients of color who now account for a disproportionate

bodywork volunteerweb — A bodywork volunteer at Positive Being. Photo © Steven Underhill

number of new seroconversions in San Francisco and worldwide, Positive Being also sponsors the annual benefit concert “Positively Touching,” featuring a cast of local celebs and musical performers on tour with traveling Broadway shows.

Artistic director Sean Ray has been producing the cabaret, which is presented every October at the Rrazz Room, a nightclub just off Union Square, since 2001.
After Ray moved to San Francisco in 1999 and began performing in Bay Area musical theater productions, he met singers he bonded with and who shared his passion. “Then in August of 2000, I tested HIV-positive,” says Ray. “Being affected so personally gave me the final push to make the singing group happen, which I’d wanted to put together for years.” Members of this group form the core of the the annual “Positively Touching” benefits.

“During my ten years with the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus,” Ray recounted, “I lost many friends and was singing at memorial services all the time. I am so pleased and honored to be a part of this. And the singers and musicians I’m able to assemble each year give so much of themselves—time-wise and talent-wise. They’re great people who are also trying to make a difference for others. And actually, that’s true of everyone who volunteers for Positive Being.”

Additional information and quotes provided by Eric Jansen.

For more information on Steven Underhill Photography, visit www.stevenunderhill.com.

For more information about Positive Being, visit www.positivebeing.org.

Brent Calderwood is a journalist, poet, and Literary Editor of A&U. Log on to his Web site at www.brentcalderwood.com.