As a gay male who’s old enough to remember some of the darkness of the AIDS crisis in the ‘80s and the few heroes who fought it, I’m ashamed I’ve never heard the following story. Ruth Coker Burks should be heralded for her unselfish compassion and love in the face of horrible odds and even worse hatred and homophobia.
Ruth Coker Burks was just in her twenties when she found herself sitting at the bedside of a dying man with AIDS in a Little Rock hospital in the early 1980s, holding his hand because his family wouldn’t come. At a time when fear and ignorance about AIDS were rampant, when people thought you could catch it from a touch, she became the person who stayed. She wasn’t a nurse, or a doctor, or an activist with a microphone—she was just there, over and over again, when young men, often gay men estranged from their families, needed someone to look them in the eye as they died.
She used her family’s cemetery in Hot Springs, Arkansas, to bury over forty men with AIDS when funeral homes refused to handle the bodies and families wouldn’t claim them. She would often wrap the bodies herself, dig the graves with a friend or on her own, and offer a prayer. She marked their graves with simple bricks or PVC pipe crosses, making sure they had a place to rest that was tended, a place where someone remembered their names.
It wasn’t glamorous. She fought with funeral homes, doctors, and local politicians. She used her savings to buy medicine and groceries for men who had no one left to call, sitting with them while they took their last breaths. She navigated the fear that even medical staff felt around these men, sometimes having to bring them food herself in the hospital. She became family to men whose own parents would call her and demand she “let them die” alone. Instead, she stayed, holding their hands, reminding them they were not alone, that they were loved, even if it was by a stranger.
In a time when gay men were dying alone and being buried in garbage bags or cremated without ceremony, Ruth Coker Burks made sure they had a grave and a name. She became a mother figure, a sister, and a final comfort for so many men abandoned at the end, creating an island of dignity in a sea of fear and rejection. She offered what the world so often withheld from gay men during the AIDS crisis: care, respect, and the simple, holy act of being seen.
Ruth Coker Burks wrote a book titled “All The Young Men” about her experiences with these dying victims. It will be on my reading list.
Thanks to The AIDS Quilt page on Facebook for publishing this!
