Rodger McFarlane changed the world with his telephone.
It was New York City in the early ’80s, the days before HIV had a name. Gay men didn’t know why they were dying.
McFarlane, then a 20-something Navy vet working in health care, would jot down his home phone number and tell everyone he knew to pass it around.
“What do I have?” “Where can I go?” “What should I do if a nurse refuses to treat me?” callers would ask, desperate.
It was the world’s first AIDS hotline, which morphed into the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the first service group for people with HIV. The lines, unfortunately, are still ringing some 28 years later.
There’s much to say about how McFarlane lived. But first you should know how he died.
Suffering back pain and heart problems, he shot himself Friday in the New Mexico desert. A biker found his body and a note apologizing for the inconvenience. The setting of his suicide, Truth or Consequences, isn’t lost on anyone who knew his flare for the dramatic.
“Rodger’s life was like a Broadway production — perfectly produced, perfectly directed. And he chose the finale,” says friend Ted Trimpa.
McFarlane grew up poor in rural Alabama, a tall, gay kid with a twin who later died of AIDS. He joined the Navy and helped run a nuclear-attack submarine. He was a close friend of playwright and rabble-rouser Larry Kramer, whose work he co-produced on Broadway.
The pair helped found ACT UP, a group that demanded attention to a growing crisis through noisy protest. McFarlane had a knack for harnessing fear and outrage.
“He took something as small and practical as his home phone and altered the course of a pandemic,” says Tim Sweeney of the Denver-based Gill Foundation, which McFarlane ran from 2004 through 2008.
He helped turn the foundation, funded by Quark software founder Tim Gill, into its own kind of philanthropic nuclear sub attacking intolerance toward gays and lesbians. Neither he nor Gill built power by screaming out as victims. Rather, the group and its political arm stealthily built relationships, leveraged grants and helped put in office politicians sympathetic to their cause.
“Fear and respect, friends and enemies. He knew how to work strategy,” says Trimpa, a lawyer and political adviser.
McFarlane’s humor — and snark and bombast — could fill up a room. His mouth was more foul than anyone’s I know, even in the news business. The F-word for him was a noun, verb and adjective.
Caz Matthews, president of the WellPoint Foundation, remembers an e-mail the morning after they met in which he threatened to hunt her down if she wouldn’t be his friend.
“My assistant came in and said, ‘You’ve got an alarming message. Should I call the police?’ I said, ‘No, call the restaurant and make reservations.’ ”
McFarlane griped about Denver being a cow town.
Still, the West transformed him. The triathlete and arctic expeditioner spent his last years climbing mountains and roaming deserts in his black Jeep. He once camped alone at 13,000 feet on Christmas.
He quit the Gill Foundation in December and had since given away his possessions. The man who wrote a best seller on caring for the terminally ill ended life just like he lived it — willfully and on his own terms.
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
