The eighties was known for its bright lights, parties, and rock and roll. But behind the usual imagery, there was a problem. The gay community was fighting AIDS. Thousands of men died of what was then a mysterious illness.

Look no further than Queen’s legendary front man, Freddie Mercury.

AIDS was discovered around 1981-1983. The world is now honoring the 40th anniversary of the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic by recognizing its heroes and activists.

Ruth Coker Burks had been caring for a friend who had oral cancer at a local hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas. This was in 1986 and she was just 26. It was then that she noticed something unusual.

There was a door down the hall with a bright red tarp across it emblazoned with the biohazard sign. Nurses waited outside as if afraid to enter. Food trays were also piled outside.

Coker Burks said,

“I had been in hospitals a lot of times and so I thought that was really bizarre. The nurses were literally drawing straws to see who would go in and check on this person.”

And as if that wasn’t strange enough, Ruth added,

“They would draw straws and it’d be best out of three, and then they didn’t like that and so then it’d be best 2 out of 3 and then no one would end up going in to check in on this person. They just walked away.”

Like a scene from a Netflix series, Coker Burks secretly entered the room. There she found a patient so frail and near-death to the point that he was unrecognizable under the sheets.

This was Ruth’s first encounter with an AIDS patient, one near death, and it would not be her last. Ruth would take it upon herself to care for thousands of dying gay men. Men abandoned by their families.

The lack of information and misinformation spread would create the stigma surrounding the disease.

She took the next ten years and dedicated her time to them.

Coker Burks had a little bit of knowledge regarding AIDS prior to the encounter, after hearing rumors from her cousin. It was mostly associated with “leather guys” from San Francisco.

But meeting that dying patient changed her perception. She recalled,

“I went over to the bed and I didn’t know what to do but I took his hand and I said, ‘Honey, what can I do for you?’ He looked up at me and he didn’t have any more tears to cry. He was so dehydrated there was nothing left to produce any tears. But he looked up at me and he said he wanted his mama.”

The painful part was that the mother had no interest in seeing her dying son.

The nurses told Coker Burks,

“His mother’s not coming. Nobody’s coming, he’s been in this hospital for six weeks, nobody’s been here and nobody’s coming and don’t you go back in that room.”

His name was Jimmy and Ruth stayed with him until the end.

And even in death, these abandoned gay men were refused by morgues for fear of contamination. A problem all too common in their time. Meeting Jimmy would set Coker Burks on her journey to HIV/AIDS advocacy.

It was Ruth that found a funeral home for Jimmy’s body.

She placed Jimmy’s ashes in a chipped cookie jar before burying him above her father’s coffin. She shared,

“We had a little do-it-yourself funeral, said the Lord’s Prayer, put the flowers and a big rock on top of him and we left.”

Ruth is a Christian and she wanted to set a good example for her daughter.

Nurses at the Arkansas hospital began giving out Ruth’s number to HIV/AIDS patients and she helped all. Ruth cared for hundreds more, eventually burying 39 patients in her family’s cemetery.

“I had that honor of handing them back to their friends and to God,” she reflected.

Coker Burks detailed her story in “All the Young Men,” which came out in December 2020.

To Ruth, she did it because God told her to. It was about love and kindness and overcoming the fear and stigma commonly associated with AIDS.

And there was always hope. Parents may have abandoned their sons but they turned to their friends and community for support. In the nineties, there was greater awareness and social acceptance of the disease. Coker Burks didn’t have to personally care for patients as treatments made progress.

Her advocacy continues. Ruth recovered from a stroke, which she partly attributes to the stress of her HIV/AIDS activism. She initiated a crowdfunding campaign to raise $75,000 to fulfill her dream.

Ruth wants to create a memorial for those she buried at the Historic Files Cemetery. She wants the memorial to state:

“This is what happened. In 1984, it started. They just kept coming and coming. And they knew they would be remembered, loved, and taken care of, and that someone would say a kind word over them when they died.”

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Source: My Positive Outlooks