M. on Palestine - Part I

First, the story of M. and David

Today I intend to post a guest piece written by my friend M. about Palestine. (He will be using a pseudonym because he mistrusts the vilification possibilities of posting controversial opinions on social media – which he has never been on, at all, believe it or not. A genuine unicorn.)

But before I post it though, I think the story of our friendship merits the telling.

In the mid-80s, I was roommates in the East Village with a young man named David B., (above) who was seriously beautiful, extremely funny, and prone to biting and fairly bitter observations about life, his own in particular, uttered over too many generous helpings of cocktails. Then, quite surprisingly, he got sober, and stuck to it. He met M. in a leather bar and their chemistry was immediate and of the soulmate variety. David moved in with M. to his large and lovely Washington Heights apartment, which helped David greatly as he progressed from waitering and cleaning jobs to a good job at a stock photo agency. (He had always been an aspiring photographer.) M. was a very successful film production designer, on location a lot, but when he wasn’t, they either cocooned or went traveling. M. took David to Europe (I think more than once), trips which had been completely unimagined as even possible by David just a few years earlier. I really don’t think they fought-- even though they both had very strong personalities. But perhaps that’s because David became much more of a listener, much less combative. He was already something of an auto-didact, but must have gotten the equivalent of a college education from the very well-read M, just by going through his stupendous library when M. was on set in another state.

M. was born here, to Palestinian immigrant parents, and though I had long left my Zionism-curious teenage years behind (I was a suburban New Yorker with almost exclusively Jewish friends), during the rare lunch I managed with David, he made clear that he had acquired a very eye-opening perspective on the Middle East.

I lost so many friends to AIDS, and yet I cannot remember any of the exact conversations when they told me they had tested positive, including the one I must have had with David. But while he was still healthy, I do remember meeting him on one of my trips back to New York and hearing him tell me with the fiercest determination, “I’m going to beat this.” (The greatest irony of my life is that I was the one person amongst all of my friends who was sure he was not going to beat this.)

The period from 1991-1996 brought so my AIDS deaths amongst my friends that I have trouble placing them accurately in time. But I remember that in an AIDS support group he attended, David had met and become friends with Paul Bos, a Dutch ex-boyfriend of mine who was one of the kindest souls on the planet. It was David who called to tell me Paul had died, which was so much better than reading it in the New York Times obituaries. That was in 1992, and David was still healthy and didn’t stop working for a year or two.

On one of my visits home to my parents in NY, I visited David and M. in Washington Heights. It was probably in late 1994. David had just come out of the hospital and was still hooked up to an IV, about which he fussed with irritation, but also the efficiency of a slightly exhausted nurse. “I’m so over AIDS, I can’t begin to tell you” he hissed, just in case I didn’t know. I think it was only the second time I’d met M., and we felt the instant rapprochement of two people simultaneously trying to will someone they treasured to recover from a serious illness, agreeing that the alternative was simply unacceptable. M. also saw that I could make David laugh, and I think appreciated our friendship in a way I don’t think he had just through secondhand stories about me.

Our prayers went unanswered of course, and David died in March 1995, just over 30 years ago. I wrote a personal eulogy that I sent to M. that I hoped he could read at the memorial service, and only found out recently that M. was so immersed at the time in creating a video tribute, he could not remember ever receiving it. That’s okay. It was very therapeutic for me to write, and I was able to contribute it to the AIDS Memorial website years later.

A few years later, M. moved to Los Angeles. The story of how we resumed a friendship that had barely begun will have to await a Part II, because I hadn’t intended to write so much about David, and I’m afraid I’m too emotional to write more at the moment.

MCO 2025