Grossman believes Rodger’s fatalism probably can’t be separated from his history in the epidemic, watching so many people die so horribly. “I think of a gun as my Samurai sword,” he wrote. He settled his bills, and on May 15, sometime after 9 a.m., a bike rider found his lanky remains, pistol in hand. He had checked in to the Blackstone Hotsprings motel, and mailed farewells to his closest friends. “I really didn’t want to come back to civilization at all,” he said. “Let’s catch a drink,” Rodger called to me after the screening, but two days later, he was already in New Mexico. “Rodger stage-managed everything,” Kramer says. He doted on his brother David, who died of AIDS, and on the literary agent Jed Mattes, as he died of cancer, and on his old flame Larry Kramer, during a liver transplant. Though he’d written The Complete Bedside Companion: A No-Nonsense Guide to Caring for the Seriously Ill, he was a terrible patient. What none of his friends knew was that a recent heart attack added to his troubles. “I would say, ‘Go coach! Do amateur competitions,’ and he gave me this look like ‘Are you out of your mind?’ ” “I know that was very distressing for him,” says Tim Sweeney, his successor at the Gill Foundation. But it turns out that he’d broken his back on the first day of an Eco-Challenge in Fiji in 2002, and though he underwent one operation, his friend Howard Grossman, a doctor, tells me he refused the surgical rebuilding that might have lessened his agony. Now 54, you could still imagine him aboard a Navy submarine or trekking to the North Pole or competing in extreme Eco-Challenge races. Six foot six and athletic, with towering Alabama charm and wit, he built Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS into a grant-making behemoth, and then moved to Denver to remake Tim Gill’s gay-rights fund, where he worked until December, into a player in national politics. He went on to become one of the savviest organizational strategists in the fight against AIDS. He liked to say “I won my Oscar at a young age,” in reference to his work running Gay Men’s Health Crisis, which is where we met 25 years ago. (“I actually kind of admire them,” he says of the stalwart wives of Larry Craig and Jim McGreevey. Rodger was the film’s standout star, the only one with laugh lines. When I last glimpsed the famous large ears of Rodger McFarlane, who chose Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, as the enigmatic site for his recent suicide, he was standing outside a May 1 screening of Outrage, a documentary about closeted politicians.
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