COMPOUND Q GALLERY
In 1982, Tandy created Belew Design and started doing graphic design on his own. I'd been hired as Director for Youth News in Oakland. In the summer I went to Washington DC for a Youth Communication conference, staying with a former friend who had been in the Band.
When I called Tandy, he told me he'd just come from the doctor's office and was told his blood work seemed to have abnormalities similar to a score of men in San Francisco, LA, and New York City... "some kind of immune thing" that was making these men susceptible to other kinds of infections. It was difficult to grasp.
A few months later, the doctor who had diagnosed Tandy died, and more news was breaking about a "gay disease." In the fall, the term GRID (Gay Related Immuno-deficiency Diseases) yielded to AIDS which then became the label for it (definition article well worth reading).
Tandy remained healthy, but we expanded our network, hoping for good news. By 1983 political efforts to get funding for research in the areas of cure and prevention were mounting. We joined the Stop AIDS project to support in-home teach-ins for friends to share what we knew about the sexual transmission of this disease, and we supported the early organizations, Shanti, SF AIDS Foundation, etc., which were organized to care for the increasing numbers who were getting sick all around us. Project Inform was established as a source of updates on what the disease was and what was being done about it.
People were going to Mexico to get drugs not allowed in the US. Many people were trying drugs with no medical supervision. The numbers kept rising. The term Gay Plague entered our vocabulary and chilled our minds and hearts.
It was a dark time. People began losing their jobs because of the fear of transmission. I often felt like some kind of criminal just boarding public transit, and saw people keeping their distance from anyone they thought could be Gay. Jon Sims, founder of the Gay Band, got pneumacistis and Kaposi's Sarcoma. He was put on AZT and Acyclovir but was not doing well. Jon was taken to the hospital and was in the new AIDS ward. We could barely stand it, seeing his emaciated demented condition, as he thrashed around under restraints in the hospital. On the streets we could easily spot people taking AZT by the gray pallor of their skin, their sunken eyes. We believed in natural healing, so we felt AZT was contributing rather than helping.
Jon Sims died in 1984. His memorial was held in Grace Cathedral, and it must have been the largest gathering for someone who died of AIDS up to that point. The consequences of the epidemic just could not be ignored.
We explored all kinds of natural immune boosters, read about some really radical theories, drug claims, and heard a zillion rumors. We joined groups focused on health, and did about everything you can think of — drinking tremendous amounts of water, food rotation, eliminating dairy and wheat, taking supplements, acidophylus, herbs and teas, doing special enemas, yoga, transcendental meditation, IFA, running through the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park, guided visualization, kinesiology, "Touch for Health" — anything we came across.
In retrospect, there were major benefits for me in participating with Tandy in all this. Even the daily massages I gave him (a gift certificate for his Valentine's Birthday in 1983) later led me to training in Biodynamic Psychotherapy. Always beneath the surface was an alert concern, often fear, and then denial. We did daily inspections, looking for tell-tale purple lesions, the characteristic of Kaposi's Sarcoma. When we found something odd, we studied it, measured it daily, until convinced it was not a lesion. I got tested every month or two, and joined the San Francisco Men's Health Study.
Little had come forth through the spotty research that the CDC was willing to fund. President Reagan was unwilling to even mention AIDS. More and more friends were testing positive. ACT UP formed to seek ways to get the attention of officials and the general public. Randy Shilts describes the political events of this period in his book "And The Band Played On."
But on the bright side, there were people who tested positive but were still living normal lives — as normal as could be at least. Tandy was one of them. After hearing George Menton and Wil Garcia tell their story at a local gay church, Tandy was inspired to be more public about his diagnosis, and to help people see that a diagnosis with HIV was not a death sentence.
Tandy discovered a knack for doing kinesiology self-testing, a way
of checking in with the body to test whether a particular pill (or
action or
affirmation) was beneficial for his health. Returning from a holiday
trip to Oregon to see Tandy's family, as we drove by Mount Shasta,
Tandy began using his muscle-testing to see if there was a treatment
for his developing thrush symptoms. Like 20 questions: is it animal,
plant or mineral? Answer: plant. As he worked through this, the answers
he got were that it was a tree, the bark of the tree, made into tea.
The tree had compound leaves, etc. He pulled out a napkin and sketched
the tree. He drew half of the tree, and then went on to sketch the
leaves. After we arrived home, he was impelled to follow the vision
quest he'd begun. It took him to Marin County, and he found the tree...
in fact it was only half a tree, and looked just like his sketch.
He brought some of the bark home and started fixing his tea. His symptoms were reduced and this served him for many months. With research, we found it was a Brazilian Pepper tree, and we found some similar trees right in our neighborhood. We concluded that the vision quest was necessary in order for Tandy to believe it, since finding the trees near home could have been too easily dismissed as something he'd unconsciously noticed. The tea helped. Later, Tandy repeated this process and found a grass in Golden Gate Park had additional health benefits.
Tandy scheduled a trip to a health resort, where he would get great food, exercise and plenty of rest. He intended to write a book about his seven years in business for himself, as a promo piece for his design business. But when he came back, he had instead written copy that described his 7 years of living positively with AIDS. He wanted to inspire people to take a positive attitude, knowing that attitude made a huge difference. How the book came about is described preface to his "Seven" book. Tandy worked with artists, assembled the art with his writing, and made mock-ups of the book.
In the conclusion of his book "Seven" he expressed his purpose in writing it:
"The point at which I began seeing myself as a survivor came as a result of a presentation by George Melton and Wil Garcia, two lovers who have recovered from AIDS through self-healing. George and Wil now travel around the country sharing their story.
Meeting them was not only inspiring, it was empowering. As George points out in the introduction to his book, Beyond AIDS, "Only a little more than 500 years ago the world was flat. Everyone believed this was true." But eventually, someone had the courage to question that belief, and now everyone knows the truth.
Today, almost everyone believes that AIDS is incurable. To challenge that belief takes great strength and courage, but there are men and women who are not only surviving, they are recovering.
My goal is to help make this truth known to everyone."
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