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Remembering a past love

Robert Rokos, of Peru, is seen here at the Green Goddess LGBTQIA-plus social on Saturday. (Enterprise photo — Lauren Yates)

Peru resident Robert Rokos met the love of his life in a bathhouse in New York City.

It was 1973, not long after the birth of the city’s gay liberation movement. Rokos was 25 and white, Donald Townsel was 18 and Black, but their differences didn’t keep them apart.

What started as something casual developed into a decades-long partnership that survived and thrived despite all that was stacked against them. Together, they found family and lived a life most people only see in movies.

They stayed together for 26 years, all the way until Townsel’s death in 1999.

Love and loss in the city

Rokos and Townsel lived in a hub of gay culture: New York City’s East Village.

Rokos said there were “consciousness-raising groups,” where gay people would get together once a week to talk about their inhibitions, how they grew up and how they felt about being gay. He said it was like “primitive talk therapy,” because he got to contrast his feelings and thoughts with other gay people, and he came to the conclusion that his sexuality wasn’t “just a passing moment.”

There was a lot of promiscuity, too, Rokos said — but Rokos and Townsel always came home to each other.

They weren’t rich, not even close. Townsel didn’t have a full-time job and Rokos was struggling to get his career as a chef started. They managed to make ends meet and pay rent for their 12th Street apartment — a then-hefty $65 — but the building was burned down by two dueling drug dealers. Their next apartment on 4th Street, between Avenues A and B, was eventually abandoned during an embargo on oil, and Rokos and Townsel became squatters there.

Even though they didn’t have money and had to heat the building with stoves in the winter, Rokos and Townsel found their chosen family there. They lived there with other people in the gay community, and despite working late nights, they all came together for dinner around the kitchen table. Eleven o’clock at night was a standard dinner time for the group, which usually hovered around 20 people. Thanksgiving was always a late-night affair, Rokos said, and in the summertime the group would pack up the kitchen table and eat dinner on the roof.

“(There was) obviously too much drinking, but there was always somebody cooking something and bringing something and trying something new,” Rokos said. “And that’s how you got to know people.”

Then the AIDS crisis hit. Rokos and Townsel watched as their friend group dwindled.

In the early days of the AIDS crisis, not much was known about HIV or AIDS, or how to treat positive patients, or why the disease progressed faster in some than in others.

Happy holidays turned into Christmas parties thrown for their friends with AIDS. They wrapped up stones to give for presents because they couldn’t afford anything else. Some people who came to stay with Rokos and Townsel died with them, and others stayed until they left for hospice.

“AIDS really destroyed our family in New York, and it left us devastated to the point where we just refused to go to funerals,” Rokos said.

Rokos and Townsel made it through alive, and they even formed a Housing Development Fund Corporation co-op from their two abandoned six-story buildings, which Rokos says is still there today. The two formed a bond through their experiences there, like glue for their relationship.

“He was always my best friend,” Rokos said.

Family ties

Townsel’s brothers loved basketball and baseball, but he loved flowers. Townsel loved to garden, sew, dance, cook and party. Rokos was drawn to Townsel because they shared those interests. Townsel’s family liked to party, too — in their Saranac Lake home on Lake Street.

Townsel’s father had an upholstery business in Lake Placid, L. Townsel and Sons Interiors and Upholstery, and though Townsel lived in the city, he’d come up to stay with family in Saranac Lake to upholster and earn some extra cash. Townsel’s father died young, around 55, and he’s buried here in Saranac Lake.

Rokos said his own family was “not amused” by his relationship with Townsel — his father didn’t speak to him for 20 years — but Townsel’s family always welcomed them to Saranac Lake with open arms.

Rokos said his father came around eventually. He came to respect Townsel and made his apologies with Rokos, and his parents even vacationed with the couple in the Catskills.

Rokos said it would have been nice to create a family with Townsel, maybe adopt a couple of kids, but they didn’t think about declaring a civil partnership very much.

“We kind of thought of that as like, ‘Well, straight people are married, why do we wanna be straight?'” he said. “‘Why do we wanna mimic that?'”

Rokos and Townsel didn’t need rings to define their love, and they might still be together if it weren’t for Townsel’s struggle with diabetes.

An affair to remember

Townsel was skeptical of doctors. Even when his sugar levels would get too high, he didn’t want to seek medical care.

Sometimes he’d play around with his friends’ medicines to reduce his water retention, but he eventually caved in and decided to make a doctor’s appointment.

The night before Townsel’s first doctor’s appointment, he died in his sleep, lying next to Rokos.

The next morning was traumatic for Rokos, he said. On the phone, screaming at the 911 operator. Trying to perform CPR and rehab. Trying to do his best.

When the police and fire department came, Rokos said he was walking around “just in shock.”

Rokos used to tell Townsel everything, and after he died, Rokos said he’d forget that his friend wouldn’t be there to listen to him. He remembers telling people that he wanted to talk to Donald about some piece of news and being hit with the sober remembrance that he was gone.

But Rokos remembers the good times, too. Fishing with Townsel in Palm Beach, sleeping together on a rooftop in Marrakech, Morocco, traveling here and there on a dime, connections made with the gay community and cooking countless meals together.

“I learned from him and he learned from me,” he said.

“A strange movie”

Rokos left the city for Peru at the start of the pandemic. His memories of the Adirondacks stretch back long before he met Townsel, when he was a kid coming to the area for Boy Scout camps. He’s trying to step into the gay community in the area, but he said the pandemic has made it difficult.

Rokos lives with two cats. That was another thing he shared with Townsel. He said he and Townsel “took a fancy to cats,” and they had a cat together when they were squatting on 4th Street. The cat was a topic of conversation among the friend group there, and everyone liked to piece together the cat’s whereabouts by sharing their feline sightings.

It was a bizarre time, Rokos said — no one had any money, but they had a cat, and they lived a vibrant life, running from Studio 54 to disco clubs to gay clubs. Reflecting back, he said he’s lived quite a life.

“Sometimes I just sit and wonder, ‘What is all this for? This is a strange movie,'” he said.

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