hankycode magazine is a print and digital publication dedicated to sharing queer stories.

Welcome to the first edition of our new series, ‘Living Archives,’ where I chat with a variety of folks who have been involved in impactful moments of LGBTQ+ history. Today’s Q&S is with Dianna Wellen Traylor, who was the patient care coordinator and worked as a hospice nurse at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, while also getting her master’s in oncology. During the late 80s and early 90s, she was on the front lines of the fight against AIDS. Now, at 70, she and her husband have settled in North Carolina, and the life-changing lessons from those years still stick with her today.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Q: When and where were you working as a hospice nurse for AIDS patients?

A: I was doing two things. It was in the late 80s and early 90s, and I was the patient care coordinator and worked as a hospice nurse at UC Davis Medical Center, which is in Sacramento. However, I was also commuting a 2.5-hour drive a couple of times a week to San Francisco because I was getting my master’s degree in oncology. And at the time, because of the huge immune component to AIDS, the oncology group of caregivers was assigned to AIDS. So my degree/focus of study became oncology and HIV. I was at UCSF, which is in downtown San Francisco; it’s a huge medical sciences campus, and it is one of the University of California campuses. It was one of the epicenters where we were learning, microscopically and macroscopically, how to take care of people, the community, and ourselves. That’s where I was kind of in it, just because of where I was working and where I was traveling for school.

Q: So it was kind of a combination of patient care and research?

A: Yes, I wasn’t doing bench research. I was learning in graduate school how to be a really good consumer of research. Learning as much as I could and then applying what I learned to patient care.

Q: What was that experience like in terms of patient care?

A: It was heartbreaking. San Francisco, at the time, had less than a million people in it, but the percentage of gay men living in the city was higher, and the per capita rate of AIDS was so high because of the concentration of the gay population. All you had to do was talk to somebody, and your heart would break.

In Sacramento where we did our hospice work I remember more of the patients whose grandmothers cared for them. There were very few patients I recall, just two actually, who had a parent directly involved in supporting them in their dying at home. The others it was almost all grandma. We did what we could at the time, because you know, hospice wasn’t a really popular thing in the late 80s either; that was a new movement.

The overwhelming physical care required to take care of these young men who were just wasting away, and then you worried about bed sores, and worried about nutrition, and worried about medication, and everything. There was not a lot of permission structure psychologically for them to give up hoping and fighting, when you’re 22/23 you just figure ‘what the f, I’m gonna fight as hard as I can.’ So it was rarely a peaceful letting go. And their immune systems were so messed up. We got pretty creative. The guys who would have lots of nausea and vomiting, then they’d want to smoke pot, and you couldn’t because of the lung disease that they would get, and the coughing and everything. We didn’t have the internet back then, so they couldn’t just Google ‘pot brownies,’ so I would walk around giving people copies of the pot brownie recipe. You’d do things like that.

There were other things I remember too, again because the immune system was so nonexistent, and different cultures would do different things for treatment. I remember this one Hispanic man; it wasn’t his family caring for him, it was his friends, because his family had completely let him go, but their curandero recommended powdered rattlesnake skin. I was like, ‘No, you can’t do that, it’ll be full of salmonella.’ A normal immune system could take it, but this guy couldn’t. But at the same time, it was like ‘well, but he thinks this will help.’ It was flying by the seat of your pants a lot of times and just doing lots of talking with people.

Early on, Kaposi sarcoma was pretty bad, so there were a lot of people with lesions and things like that, and we had to handle that, too.

I’m not gay, I’m heterosexual, but I had a hard time with people not understanding what I did. They’d be like, ‘How can you do that?’ I’m like, ‘What do you mean? How can I do it?’ It never occurred to me to not do it. I felt a little bit rubbed the wrong way sometimes by people when they found out what I did.

We were all so angry, the resources started coming, but I remember the quilt project and silence=death. When COVID came around, and nobody knew what was going on at the very beginning, and we were getting lies that were the first thing I posted, silence=death. But it slowly changed in the early ‘90s, and then the first few medications and things like that.

Q: Were there lessons that you learned during this time that have really stuck with you?

A: So many. First of all, who am I to judge? My husband and I moved out of California to relocate in 2014 because my husband had some health issues, and I did an early retirement, and we moved to Asheville, North Carolina, where I live now. Leaving the Bay Area and moving to the south, even though Asheville is a blue dot in the south, I couldn’t understand how so many people thought and felt so differently than I did. The openness and acceptance and all of those things just never occurred to me that there would be other places in our country where it wasn’t that way. That was one of the things that always struck me.

And speak up, be well researched, make sure you know what you’re talking about, and speak up, don’t keep quiet. That was another lesson.

That’s the other thing I learned, not to have judgments about the way people grieved because in the gay community, especially, these guys would know, ‘I’m HIV positive, but I’m not sick right now, but I have three sick friends and another one who is dead.’ It was just boom, boom, boom, all these people dying all the time.

Caring for the dying is a very sacred and profound experience, and having comfort with that translated to my mom dying a couple months ago. She was 95, she couldn’t take care of herself anymore, we moved her in with us, and she lived and died with us, and it was like ‘of course I would do that.’ Because the dying process itself, and the caring for the dying, it was like, I knew I’d be okay.

Q: Do you have anything that you wish people knew about this time and your experience?

A: I wish people knew how to separate their judgment from their experience because it’s the judgments that seem to be the source of all unnecessary pain and suffering. It’s so sad to me the way that religion dictates morals; in this part of the country, it’s the Southern Baptists. I wish people could suspend judgment and hypocrisy.

Q: That completely makes sense, because it sounds like so many people were suffering so much, and on top of that, had to deal with families and people around them being so hateful and judgmental.

A: Right, because “clearly you’re suffering because the Lord Jesus does not believe in your lifestyle and you deserve what you get.” How could people think that about an infectious disease?

It wasn’t until Ryan White, finally, a non-gay ‘innocent,’ that we could make the poster child of AIDS. It was awful that that happened, and between that and Rock Hudson dying and there were a few more high-profile HIV deaths, but prior to that, it was pretty much ‘you guys did it to yourselves.’ I’ve never seen such a severe judgment of a group of people.

So you slogged through and fought as hard as you could. Commuting to grad school, going to work, taking care of people, and being on call on the weekend. At the time, I didn’t do a lot of protesting because I just didn’t have time. Now I protest for politics.

Q: Is there anything I didn’t ask about that you’d like to mention?

A: To me, that part of my life seems so long ago. I have very sad, very fond, and very wonderful memories, and I am very proud of the work that I did. I just wish more people had the opportunity to experience it, but not because that would mean more people were sick, but it was life-changing for me, absolutely life-changing.

Cover image provided by Dianna Wellen Taylor