HIS OWN WAY

After nearly dying of AIDS, a Wilton Manors man goes from a lifestyle of
careless promiscuity and angry activism to living his life in a loving
relationship and advocating for change.

The ghosts of dead friends and lovers would come to him through the
morphine haze and settle on his deathbed, talking about old times, some of
them good and some bad, but all of them revealing the ways in which he had
wasted his life.

On this day it was Dennis, his old mentor who used to call him a
son-of-a-bitch, though always with a smile. The ghost wanted to talk about
the small granite blocks they had stolen years earlier from a half-built
sidewalk in Paris.

A silly memory, hiding those worthless blocks in a pair of combat boots
when they crossed the border, as if anybody would care, silly and funny,
and leading, as did all of the hauntings, to recrimination and regret.

It made him think of how important friends and lovers were, which made him
think of how he had treated them. Shouting at them. Judging them. And
worse. Seducing them and being seduced, one after another, and saying
nothing of his AIDS. Who knew how many were dying because Greg Scott had
said nothing?

His mentor had been too kind. There should have been no smile. Just the
truth. He was a son-of-a-bitch. And, with only a few weeks left to live, it
was too late to change.

But a few weeks was all it would take before doctors everywhere were
prescribing a new series of drugs, protease inhibitors, that staved off the
virus, sometimes making it disappear altogether.

And three years later, Greg Scott is 37, still lifts weights at Better
Bodies Gym in Wilton Manors

He takes fistfuls of pills to stay that way, and smokes pot to keep the
pills down. Twice a day he fills his tiny pipe with marijuana and breaks
the law. At night he breaks it too, for sodomy is outlawed in Florida and
he shares his Wilton Manors home with a partner, a man already infected
like him.

Scott is a pot-smoking homosexual with AIDS, a poster boy for sin, he jokes
as he takes another toke at his kitchen table. At least that kind of sin,
the kind some people say they find in the Bible.

But he believes he knows, at last, what real sin is. He found it in his own
life, not where the Bible said it was, not in the love he feels for other
men, but in the way he once treated them, and treated himself, too. And
though those who take their morality straight from the Good Book might
still find sin inside him, he believes his life in his small house with his
lover and his pot is a life, not of dissolution, but of redemption.

"If I have any moral ground to stand on," he says, "it's that I have stared
into my own grave."

What he found there was far different from what he found as a young boy
when he, too, was among those who delved into the Bible for moral guidance.
He was struggling against something almost everyone said was evil,
something that seemed a part of his very soul. He found himself desiring to
hug and kiss other boys, and already he was getting judged for it.

His sixth-grade classmates in Oxford, Miss., had raided his locker, found
love letters he wrote to an older man and posted them across the walls.
Then they had beaten him up on his way home from school.

All during the next year, he prayed for God to forgive him for the desire
that wouldn't go away. He read first the King James Version of the Bible,
then the Living Bible and the American Standard and even passages of
Translations from Latin Vulgar.

He lined up verses side by side, trying to compare and decode them, and to
reconcile himself with passages such as Leviticus 20:13:

If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have
committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood
shall be upon them.

He searched through dozens of volumes of companion Bibles for explanations
and tried to take comfort in reading that these were practical admonitions
from a more desperate time when procreation was crucial for survival of the
tribe.

By high school he was driving north to Memphis gay bars and hanging out
with the theater crowd at Ole' Miss, having sex with college men. He read
the Bible less, and the poetry of Walt Whitman more, trying to decode the
homoerotic messages he had heard were embedded in his verse:

Welcome is every organ and every attribute of me, and of any man hearty and
clean. Not an inch, nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none

shall be less familiar than the rest.

He had been raised in the Episcopal Church and he chose to go to an
Episcopal college. It was supposed to be a tolerant religion and he made no
secret of his homosexuality, a mistake that forced rejection upon him once
again. He came home from class one day to find "Go home faggot"
spray-painted across his door.

He dropped out, joined the Navy, and was kicked out two years later, in
1987, when the results of his HIV test came back positive.

He moved to Washington, D.C., broke, jobless and so embittered that he
joined radical gay groups that had members scale federal buildings to hang
banners, block rush hour traffic and infiltrate Catholic masses to take the
host, the Body of Christ, break it in half and toss it on the altar.

He himself went to news conferences to heckle conservative speakers and
street rallies to press himself face-to-face up against a line of police
officers, daring them to arrest him. Again and again, they did. Breaking
into the mayor's office, charging at police at a pro-choice rally,
protesting at the White House. Five times in all, and when he wasn't
shouting at the police and the politicians and getting carted off to jail,
he was shouting at friends whose views were too moderate for him.

"How dare you even come in here," he said once to Andrew Sullivan, a gay
author who disagreed with some of Scott's radical stands.

"Collaborator!" he shouted at him in a gay bar, and then he smashed a glass
on the floor and shoved Sullivan up against the wall.

"Greg was so over the top it was hard to get too upset," says Sullivan. "He
was almost campy in his anger."

But Scott still pondered morality, almost every day, still spoke of it, and
wrote of it, too, producing short stories that he tried to get published
while working in a sidewalk deli.

So consumed was he by the thought of right and wrong that when a friend
from Los Angeles came East to talk to him about a new idea he had for a
television show, Scott spent hours telling him his idea was wrong, fascist,
Orwellian even.

The friend, whose

idea was a TV show that hunted down actual fugitives, was so impressed with
Scott's fervor that he hired him to make sure the show wasn't used as a
tool by the police or the FBI. By the early 1990s, Scott was making
$140,000 a year as chief writer for the show, America's Most Wanted, which
had become a hit.

He was also retreating further and further into the morality of the
rejected. Gay men practicing their own version of right and wrong, dark and
twisted and full of destruction.

What he now calls "the morality of promiscuity" encouraged him to never let
talk of AIDS ruin a good time.

"Why are you telling me this?" prospective partners would say when Scott
told them he was diseased.

It was tacky and rude, unnecessary even because of another false morality,
"the morality of the condom."

"We're going to use a condom, aren't we?" they would say. A condom took
care of the risk, didn't it? There were going to do the right thing,
weren't they?

That's how most nights began, with good intentions. But those intentions
faded before Happy Hour was an hour old, and then vanished in the drugs
Ecstasy, cocaine, marijuana. As always, sex for Greg Scott, blue-eyed and
buff, was easy. And as often as not, it was as it had always been, with not
even the latex illusion of safety to protect his partner, whose name he
might or might not know.

In the early 1990s, he went to a gay pride march in Washington, where men
took turns laying roses on the ground. One rose for each of the "heroes"
who had died from AIDS, rose after rose, hero after hero until Scott found
himself shouting at them to stop.

"These are the people who gave us HIV!" he said. "I don't want anyone to
call me a hero."

He was about to lose his glamorous career, go on full disability and begin
the process of selling off his furniture and artwork to pay for medicine.
By 1995, his friends, who had been dying slowly, one by one, began to die
in bunches.

"Wastings" is what killed most of them. It had killed George, then Patrick,
then Brian. Scott had watched them die, and he was watching himself, too.

The diapers came first, and that's where Scott was, in diapers. The nausea
was there, too, the relentless urge to vomit that drove away the appetite
and induced cramps and made the body turn on itself, consume itself.

His skin would soon stretch tighter and tighter over his bones, giving him
that concentration camp look that George and Patrick and Brian all had on
their deathbeds. Scott could see the hollowness in his cheeks already. And
then he would need the tube and then he would get the infection from the
tube and that infection, called toxoplasmosis, was what the doctors would
write on his death certificate.

At all costs, he told himself, avoid the tube. In order to do that he had
to eat, and in order to eat he had to get his appetite back and to get his
appetite back he had to cure the nausea. And he knew of only one way to do
that.

And so after he choked down his pills, he smoked his pot and inhaled, deep,
again, again, until his stomach calmed and he could swallow some breakfast.

In the winter of 1995, Scott's doctor, Douglas Ward, came to his Washington
apartment for dinner and watched him gag down his pills and light up his pipe.

"He was a walking skeleton," says Ward. "I didn't expect him to live
another couple months."

The ghosts began to come, and Scott began to apologize as fast as he could,
first to the men he thought he might have infected, then to the friends he
had yelled at for daring to disagree with him.

He came up with the idea of a think tank to fight discrimination against
gay people. The Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies had a
budget of little more than $25,000 when Scott found himself too weak to
raise any more money, or too weak for any more apologies, too weak for
anything but the worthlessness of his deathbed epiphany.

He hung on until spring 1996 when the protease inhibitors came out, and by
summer, Scott had gained back the 50 pounds he had lost.

He was buff again. Men were looking. It would be easy. But this time, he
said no. He would never again risk infecting another person, he told himself.

Scott packed up and moved to Florida, far from the urban hotbeds of gay
activism, and gay sex, too. He began to write a book about right and wrong.
He renewed fund-raising for his think tank, and he kept apologizing, though
the ghosts no longer came.

He met Steve Cox, 35, a survivor like himself, a military veteran, too, who
had heard of Greg Scott, "that left wing liberal nut."

Cox had been an activist, too, a more moderate one, a Republican even, far
less controversial, less well-known, more willing to work with those who
might disagree, the sort of man Scott would have yelled at. Instead, he
fell in love with Cox.

Rather than having a different partner every week or so, Scott has
committed himself to just one, bought a house with him, and a truck, too.
He goes bowling, rather than bar-hopping.

"Greg realized that sex was not the meaning of life, it's not the
foundation of all relationships," Cox says. "The foundation of
relationships is trust."

Scott never smokes marijuana or does any drug just to get high.

Rather than marching through police lines, chanting with a hundred other
protesters, Scott quietly types at his computer screen at home. He is
writing grant applications, boosting the budget for his foundation to
$100,000. It is now funding a study of a program designed to make it safer
for gay teens to come out of the closet in their schools. Previous studies
have been reported across the country, even in papers such as The New York
Times, where Scott's old nemesis, Andrew Sullivan, now sometimes writes for
its Sunday magazine.

Sullivan was thinking about Scott when he wrote about the "hate of the
hated" in a recent cover story.

"People who have been told they are sinners have to ask themselves what is
morality in a more fundamental way," he says. "What Greg shows us is
there's nothing worse than indifference. Not to ask yourself what's right
and wrong and to just take it out of a book is a waste of a life."

The two men got together recently when Sullivan came to Miami for a book
signing. They went to a gay bar, sat at the same table, ordered a beer. No
glass breaking, no shouting. Just Scott talking of his love for Steve, of
his house and his garden. And Sullivan, remembering how bitter Scott used
to be, stomping down an urban sidewalk with big black boots, ready to point
his finger and accuse.

One of Greg Scott's favorite activities is gardening. Here he harvests
sweet potatos from his garden at home in Wilton Manors.

"The idea that he would be cultivating marigolds was absurd," Sullivan says.

Scott hopes to finish his book by year's end. It touts virtues such as
loyalty, fidelity and self-responsibility.

"How do we define virtue when we have no rules, when anything goes?" says
Scott. "This notion that there is no right and wrong is clearly bogus."

He still reads the Bible and finds morality in the places where Christ
talks of loving your neighbor. He reads Whitman, too, seeing alongside the
passages of homoeroticism messages about the importance of camaraderie and
strength.

And when he is finished, he puts the books back in the bookcase with the
two granite blocks he uses as bookends, which, though worthless, are among
his most cherished possessions.