The call came early in the morning, November 9, 1990. I believe it was Kim Christensen who telephoned to tell me Ray Navarro had just died, and invited me to sit with his body before he was taken away and cremated. A number of us from ACT UP who cared for Ray throughout his illness joined the few who had witnessed the moment of his passing. Ray’s mother, Patricia, and his sister, Christine, were there with us in his hospital room on the seventh floor of St. Vincent’s, nicknamed the AIDS floor because it was fully dedicated to the treatment of patients with HIV-related illnesses. After her son’s death, Patricia, a long-time Chicana activist, also became a Los Angeles-based AIDS activist. When she speaks publicly, it is always as a mother who lost her son to AIDS. After Ray first became symptomatic, and again when she landed in New York to care for him during the last stretch of his life, she joined Ray’s informal (but highly organized) group of caretakers, of which I was one, and she immersed herself in the ecosystem of AIDS activism and advocacy.
In ACT UP, activists didn’t usually interact with family, especially when one of us was ill or hospitalized, because families so often rejected their children on the basis of their sexual identity, substance abuse, or AIDS diagnosis—even when they developed AIDS-related opportunistic infections. Patricia’s choice to fully accept Ray’s circumstances and how he chose to address them wasn’t automatic either. In a 2001 speech, Patricia said that from far away, she hadn’t grasped the importance of Ray’s activism—that his demonstrating, media production, and political organizing weren’t separate from his professional ambitions or his art practice. She recounted,
Ray went to New York in August [1988], and the following June was the International AIDS Conference in Montreal. He went up there with his lover Anthony [Ledesma], and while they were in Montreal his lover came down with PCP [pneumocystis pneumonia, one of the most prevalent opportunistic infections presenting in early AIDS patients] and was in a hospital in Montreal. They called me, and it was devastating. That was the first I knew about AIDS in our family. Anthony recovered . . . and all I could think of . . . well, I don’t have to tell you all that I could think of. But I couldn’t say anything. Thank god I had the wisdom to know not to say anything. . . .
[I said] “I don’t want to hear about this, Raymond, I want to hear about your studies.” It was incredibly insensitive, and I’m ashamed to say, as an old activist, I was not encouraging to my son being an activist—I wanted him to study. . . .
Ray refused to get tested until he came back to New York City and went to an anonymous test site. I knew nothing about any of this. All he said was, “I will not go to a doctor,” and he told me the reasons, and I said, “Oh my god!” He’d been telling me about all this stuff, but I hadn’t really been listening. I had just been saying, “You shouldn’t be going to these meetings and going to these demonstrations.”