I first met June Holmes on August 25, 2017, in her office at Yale New Haven. I had just moved to New Haven to begin law school, but I was meeting with Holmes to talk about something else entirely. Like her, I had come across a newspaper article about Carlotta Locklear; captivated, I’d begun researching the story, tracking down those who’d known this woman whose name had once been printed in bold letters. Widening my circle, I began interviewing others in the community, hoping to learn about the epidemic in New Haven more broadly.
New Haven is perhaps best known as the home of Yale University, but to many that simple fact has tragic implications. The university is the city’s fount of jobs, but it was also complicit in the destruction of many of the city’s historic Black neighborhoods; Yale’s presence ensures a steady flow of capital into New Haven businesses, but it also laces the city with locked gates, dispatches armed university police far from campus, and serves as a magnet for entitled interlopers with no interest in putting down roots.
Holmes was generous in sharing her story and her recollections, but she was also cautious. After asking many questions about my intentions, she agreed to show me her files. But, she added, she would do so only if I agreed never to reveal the names of people with AIDS that I discovered in her records. (Perhaps she had Locklear’s ordeal in mind.) I agreed.
What Holmes then handed me was a peeling black binder. It was stuffed with old memos and meeting minutes, with printed-out emails and crumbling pamphlets. It also contained dozens of obituaries.
These were the AIDS patients Holmes had assisted as a social worker, or at least a fraction of them. At some point in the early 1990s, Holmes had begun saving the obituaries of her patients—carefully clipping them out of the New Haven Register and filing them away. Over the years, she accumulated several dozen, neatly stacked atop one another and tucked into the pocket of the binder.
Presented with this pile of documents, I took out my smartphone and began hastily photographing everything, capturing the documents electronically for later consideration. In the weeks and months that followed, I continued to conduct interviews and collect documents, speaking with June Holmes several more times. But it was only years later that I revisited her collection of obituaries. Upon this second, much deeper viewing, I found myself struck not so much by the information they contained—names, occupations, hometowns, ages at death—but by the information they omitted.
Of the fifty-four obituaries, just one identified the cause of death. The rest stated simply that their subject had died after either a “brief illness” or, more frequently, a “long illness.” Of the fifty-four obituaries, not a single one explicitly identified the same-sex partner of the deceased, even though surely, among this early cohort of patients, many had been both queer and partnered. Not a single one mentioned the pain, the suffering, the ostracism, the loneliness.
