On Monday, August 14, 1989, two hundred people gathered at a Hackensack, New Jersey, funeral home to say goodbye to AIDS activist Jeffrey Bomser. Local journalist Mike Kelly reported in his column for the next day’s Bergen Record: “There were a rabbi, a Lutheran minister, and a Roman Catholic priest. There were gay people and straight people. There were retired men and career women. There was a mother with her infant.” That infant was me, four days old at the funeral of my mother’s first cousin, dead at 38 from AIDS-related causes just six months after AIDS took the life of his brother, Larry.
I’ve always known that my great-aunt Evelyn and great-uncle Phil’s only two children died in the AIDS epidemic the year I was born. I know it in the same way I know most family history without regard to how I first learned it, but until recently I’d never thought to ask about the rest of the story. Evelyn, who is now 100 years old, and I rekindled a phone friendship between New York and Florida a few years back, and I’ve become accustomed to listening to her speak about her boys for minutes on end while puttering about my apartment. Last fall, she asked if she could mail me some materials about Jeff she’d held on to in case I might be interested in writing about him, and I said yes because I had no reason to say no, never imagining that his story would come to consume my thoughts for the next six months. On top of the creased pages inside a wrinkled legal envelope, I found a Post-it note blanketed in Evelyn’s centenarian scrawl: “Dear Sophie, quoting Jeff, ‘any questions just ask me.’ Love, Ev.”
The papers in that package were only a fraction of the handwritten loose-leaf, newspaper articles, transcripts, and diaries that helped me piece together my cousin’s thorny path to speaking at state Senate hearings and the seventh National AIDS Forum at the very end of his life. Over months of research and countless phone calls with those who knew and loved Jeff, most of my questions have been answered, but one remains: How did I grow up in Chelsea in the 1990s and not know there was an AIDS activist in my own family?
Jeff’s story begins in 1951 in Teaneck, New Jersey, where he and his older brother, Larry, grew up in a prototypical white middle class suburb like those on view in the first season of Mad Men. Despite living under the same roof, the two boys couldn’t have been more different. Four years older than his little brother, Larry was smart and reserved with a quietly dry sense of humor, but always in the background. Jeff, on the other hand, came into the world as a bolt of lightning; his magnetic energy was felt wherever he went. He wanted to experience everything that life had to offer, even if he got into mischief in search of it.
While the boys weren’t close growing up, they both struggled to live up to their parents’ expectations. Although Jeff was a star athlete and football player, he struggled academically and resented being compared with his brother and cousins, for whom school came more easily. The Bomser family’s next-door neighbor Diane Psomas, who grew up alongside Jeff and Larry, was shocked that her uber-popular neighbor could have felt inferior to his shy older brother, but Jeff’s feelings are clear on the pages of his diaries. “Emotionally, I feel very cheated. I carry so much blame and resentment towards my parents around with me,” he reflected as a young adult.
Diane drifted apart from the boys as they got older, but Jeff’s high school friends could see that the dysfunction of the Bomser household ran deep. “Jeffrey spent as little time at that house as he could when he was growing up,” remembered Laurie Knowles, a close friend of Jeff’s. “It was always an undercurrent of anger in the house… I could see both Larry and Jeffrey were so wary of [Evelyn], like was she going to explode. Phil too—they were both very angry people.”
Things only got worse at home after Larry departed for Bridgeport University in 1966, leaving Jeff alone with his parents. “Jeffrey was the one who got caught in the middle of Phil and Evelyn’s constant meltdowns,” explained Laurie. “I think that’s where, later, a lot of his anger came from, but at the time I think he just didn’t know what the hell was going on.”
In 1970, Jeff left to study marine biology at the University of Miami in Florida. It was there that he began using heroin and cocaine, a habit that would go from social to perpetual over the next few years as he dropped out of school and started doing odd jobs around town. Laurie joined Jeff in Florida in early 1973 and moved into the communal group house he shared with six other people near the university campus. The two struck up a romantic relationship, but it didn’t take long for her to notice a profound shift in her friend. “Things were very weird and disjointed,” she told me. “He kept disappearing and not being where he said he was going to be and being very unapproachable. It was very weird and unsettling.”
As Jeff was falling apart in Florida, Larry was on his own path of self-destruction in New Jersey, where he faced a serious battle with addiction. By the time Jeff moved to Miami, Larry was already struggling in a challenging marriage following an unplanned pregnancy. According to those close to the family, there was no animosity between the brothers, but they didn’t see each other very often. It wasn’t until Jeff returned to New Jersey in the mid-1970s that he and Larry started using heroin together.
Despite their mismatched personalities and circumstances, Jeff and Larry bonded for the first time, both as brothers and as addicts. “They were very troubled people,” said Laurie, who had repaired her friendship with Jeff a few months after leaving Florida to move back home to New Jersey, and was now married to her first husband. Jeff and Larry would visit her house several times a week to spend time with her and her young son. Although she says it’s clear they were often on drugs, Jeff knew that Laurie didn’t want to know anything about it and kept the details of his “errands to the city” to himself. “The trouble with Jeffrey is that I, and many other people, just forgave him,” she explained. “Whatever his transgressions were, when he was right there in front of you, they were nothing. He came and went probably a dozen times in my late twenties and early thirties, but whenever he came back, it was instantly how it had always been.”
Jeff’s natural charisma and powers of persuasion worked on more than just his friends. Ever the charmer, Jeff could and would talk to anyone, allowing his light to shine on them for just long enough to secure his next fix. Evelyn recounted getting two calls in the same week, one from a rabbi who lent Jeff $25 to get home after his wallet was stolen, and the other from a doctor at Mount Sinai Hospital who lent Jeff $200 after he claimed to have lost his wallet on the way to watch his wife give birth to their first child. Neither man was calling to get reimbursed but rather to make sure that Jeff got home safely without his wallet.
When I first started interviewing Evelyn about Jeff, it was hard to believe that he was as powerfully magnetic as she said. My great-aunt is remarkably sharp for her 100 years, but she is still his mother. However, by all accounts, after months of phone calls with those who knew Jeff throughout his life, Evelyn’s effusive claims were rooted in honesty. The way people spoke about Jeff’s ability to connect to people reminds me of stories I’ve heard about Bill Clinton on the campaign trail in the nineties. Multiple people I spoke to said that, had he lived longer, Jeff almost certainly would have gone into politics.
Jeff’s personality enabled him as a drug user, but despite the confidence he projected, the shame and guilt he felt about both his own addiction and his brother’s is clear on the pages of his diaries (and the miscellaneous writing exercises he held on to from a revolving door of expensive in-patient treatment programs funded by Evelyn and Phil). In 1980, he wrote in frantic red scrawl: “This may seem… the words of a sick person, but I must get my honest thoughts on paper. My brother Larry is on a purposeful collision course with death; and no one seems willing to face up to the responsibility. I must clear my conscience at this time or probably go mad at some time in the future when the inevitable [godforbid] happens. What is love and/or what is responsibility? More importantly, what is the difference!!!!”
It would take another three years for Jeff to get clean for good. “Maybe this will be the last time,” he wrote on the first page of a small out-of-date 1978 planner he used as a diary during the earliest days of his tenuous sobriety at Bergen Pines hospital in March of 1983. As much as Jeff wanted to get sober, it’s likely that this latest admission to an in-patient facility was at least partially involuntary. The previous fall, Jeff had been indicted in Hackensack Superior Court over a drug deal gone bad that saw him fire a gun into a wall, which almost injured someone in the apartment next door. No one was hurt, but Jeff was privileged as hell to walk away with five years of probation and no jail time on what was written up as two charges of attempted murder—a courtesy I’m sure was not extended to similar crimes committed by non-white drug users at the time. I expected the incident to reverberate further in Jeff’s story, but I only learned of it from a brief mention in an interview he gave to The New Jersey News & Herald in 1988. Other than that interview and occasional notes in his diary to “call PO,” it’s never cited anywhere else.
It was at Bergen Pines that Jeff first learned about Daytop (Drug Addicts Yielding Against Persuasion) from his roommate, a chance encounter that would finally set his life back on course. Daytop is an intensive long-term drug-rehabilitation program open to New York residents built on a model in which users help other users to stay off drugs by living together in drug-free spaces. They also benefit from a rigorous curriculum emphasizing physical work, counseling, and open communication. First Lady Nancy Reagan had a close connection to the organization, having been inspired to launch her infamous “Just Say No” campaign while on a visit to Daytop in support of her husband’s presidential bid. The irony of this connection against the backdrop of Jeff’s eventual diagnosis of AIDS—a word Ronald Reagan would refuse to say publicly at the beginning of his catastrophic mishandling of the virus—is not lost on me.
A few weeks later, Evelyn drove Jeff into the city to interview for admission to Daytop at its office near Bryant Park. It was there, double-parked on the side of 42nd Street, that she finally gave him an ultimatum. “I said to him, ‘You know what, if you decide to go back to drugs, the door isn’t open to you anymore,’ ” she told me. “I took the key to the house back, and it tore the insides out of me.”
After years of living a double life, Jeff was ready to face his demons head on. Watching him develop through the pages of his diaries and writing-class assignments over the two years he spent enrolled in Daytop is like watching the fog burn off from a hazy day. The early entries are full of self-loathing (“I was a low life, a backstabber, a liar, cheat, a bum”), then turn to months of self realization (“You create your own reality. There is no other truth. Friendships and loves are pretty and bright, yet all love must first come from within”). At last, he ultimately arrives at self-acceptance (“Life is beginning to glow brighter with each rising sun). On September 19, 1984, a year and a half after joining Daytop, he wrote, “I feel like a little boy inside. Alive with hope. Aware. The miracle of my even being here is rippling through my body.”
Jeff wasn’t the only one going through a metamorphosis. Larry, too, began emerging from the clutches of alcohol and drug addiction in 1983, getting sober for the last time a few months after Jeff entered Daytop. Although Larry never went to an in-patient treatment facility, he found a powerful community in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), to which he remained devoted for the rest of his life. His sobriety is hesitantly peppered into Phil and Evelyn’s letters to Jeff, as if they were afraid to jinx something so fragile by putting it down in ink.
They, too, were finally taking an honest look in the mirror at a time when getting your parents to go to therapy was even harder than it is now. As parents of a Daytop enrollee, Evelyn and Phil attended weekly family meetings and received separate group counseling. They even started a Bingo night for Daytop families on Long Island by popular demand. For years, they had been in denial that their domestic dysfunction might have contributed to their sons’ addiction issues, but Daytop forced them to confront their own participation. Phil wrote in a letter to Jeff three months after he enrolled: “I think in a way, we (you + me) are both going through a learning experience. When I have the courage to be honest with myself (it’s getting easier) I realize how much room I have for improvement.”
In 1985, as his time in the program wound down, Jeff got a job as a salesman with Riviera Trading Co., an importer of sunglasses and hair accessories. Charming to the last drop, he quickly became one of their top salesmen, which earned him a promotion with a one-way ticket to Little Rock, Arkansas, as the new head of Liz Claiborne’s regional merchandising. Jeff was excited about the professional opportunity, but his diaries are riddled with uncertainty over the decision to leave home at this particular moment. “I miss Larry already—I love him so much and we were just starting to get close again—or maybe for the first time,” he wrote on the first page of a new diary shortly after landing in Arkansas.
That same day, Jeff met Pam at a 12-step meeting in Little Rock. She was 26, a former local model turned assistant on her own recovery journey. They were both beautiful and smart, both strong-willed to the point of stubbornness, and Pam says they immediately gravitated towards each other. That connection is obvious in the miscellaneous photos she compiled for me in an album coupled with marginalia narrating their life together.
I would be remiss not to mention the integral role Pam played in my ability to re-create Jeff’s story here on the page. Not only did she mail me the archives of Jeff’s life she’d held on to for decades, but she spent countless hours on the phone recounting memories of a life she left behind long ago. It makes my heart ache to think that in an alternate universe, we might have spent the Jewish holidays together each spring and fall instead of meeting for the first time as virtual strangers over the phone.
By Christmas, Jeff and Pam were living together. For an excruciatingly brief stretch of time in the mid-1980s, the Bomser family sailed through calm waters. While Jeff committed to work, his budding relationship with Pam, and the NA/AA community in Little Rock, Larry rebuilt his career as a CPA and dove headfirst into AA in New Jersey. Separated from his wife and now living with a long-term domestic partner, Larry focused on repairing his relationships with his two sons, Michael and Josh, as well as his own nuclear family. Despite the distance, Jeff and Larry spoke over the phone often during this time. “He said he loved me. It was the first time I heard him say that with meaning. It felt great,” Jeff wrote in a 1986 diary entry.
After a lifetime of hurt feelings and resentments, Jeff, Larry, Evelyn, and Phil were all in a place to mend tears in the torn fabric of their family. It wasn’t perfect—and to be clear, it sounds like everyone still drove each other crazy—but it was the start of healing after so many years of pain. “Do you realize we went through the whole weekend without one major argument (maybe some minor disagreements, but what the heck, that’s life ha ha ha),” Jeff wrote to Evelyn in a letter sent from Arkansas following a trip home to New Jersey to introduce his family to Pam.
As Jeff was constructing a new life for himself, his body was starting to break down. His diary entries from 1984 to 1986 are riddled with references to perpetual colds, splitting headaches, and other chronic maladies that loom as fatal foreshadowing of what’s to come. However, the first mention of HIV doesn’t appear until Larry’s diagnosis in the spring of 1987. On May 25, Jeff wrote, “My brother is sick. Everyone is searching for hope, everyone is practicing some denial. Larry is dying from AIDS and there isn’t a fucking thing I can do about it.” Further down on the page, a sentence that stopped me in my tracks: “What can I say. That I wish it were me instead. That I’m better prepared for death than you are.”
Larry’s diagnosis pushed Jeff to get tested, which soon revealed that he too was HIV positive. Despite his deepest wishes, Jeff’s own HIV status did not cancel out his brother’s. “I love you Larry,” he wrote in his diary the next month. “So much I want to say, so much we need/want to do. Where the hell did we take that left turn. The path/journey was doing so well. No drugs/drink. No legal problems. New friends, new ideas, new lease on life. I feel like my checks are bouncing and someone/thing is trying to evict me. I think of Mom and Dad often.”
While those with well-treated HIV can now live an average healthy lifespan thanks to the wonders of science, the life expectancy was just three years when Jeff and Larry were diagnosed. AZT, the first FDA-approved drug to treat AIDS, had only just been released that March, and it wouldn’t be until the mid-1990s that the more effective antiretroviral drug cocktail started slowing the avalanche of AIDS-related deaths in the United States. That number continued to rise for several years after Jeff and Larry passed away (324,029 people died in 1987 and 1998).
Larry getting sick was the inevitability Jeff feared, and while he didn’t go mad as predicted in his haunting 1980 diary entry (“My brother Larry is on a purposeful collision course with death”), Jeff faced an immense amount of guilt over their circumstances. Even though he very well may not have introduced Larry to heroin, Pam says, “Jeffrey felt guilty because he didn’t do anything to make it any different; he just made it worse. At some point along the way, they were using heroin together, so when HIV became an issue, Jeffrey always felt like if he had not been so messed up, then Larry wouldn’t have been so messed up.” At the time, IV drug users made up 25% of new AIDS cases, mostly men in Jeff and Larry’s same demographic.
In the summer of 1987, Jeff decided to move back home in order to be closer to Larry and his nephews, and to continue mending his relationship with his parents. He asked Pam—who remained HIV negative despite their involvement for two years prior to his diagnosis—to go with him. They got married a week later before packing their life into boxes and driving east.
“I wasn’t going without a ring on it!” she joked in a note next to a photograph of her and Jeff seated on their wedding day, dressed in matching pastel pink and white outfits, purchased in haste. No one who knew about Jeff’s HIV status could believe she wanted to marry him. “I didn’t have an answer for them except that I just loved him and wanted to be with him,” she said.
It’s not just that Pam was marrying someone with a terminal illness; she was marrying someone with a disease blanketed in immense cultural stigma and legal discrimination, which touched everything from health care to housing. “She was so clearly in love with him,” said Laurie, who has maintained a long-distance friendship with Pam to this day. “To me, that was the most important thing. Was this someone who was going to support him? Because he had a hard line ahead of him.”
Surrounded by 15 close friends, they were married by a universal life minister on September 6 in the same office where Jeff attended AIDS support groups. “I was crazy in love with this man,” Pam wrote on the next page of the album next to a photo of her and Jeff gazing into each other’s eyes, her hand resting gently on his face.
The weekend after their wedding, Jeff and Pam arrived back at his childhood home in Teaneck. Making sure he and Larry stayed healthy was now Jeff’s number-one priority, and Pam said she often had a hard time convincing Jeff to come home from Larry’s new house out on a dirt road in North Bergen County. “I’ve been getting to spend a lot of time with [Larry] for which I’m very grateful,” Jeff wrote in his diary a month after arriving home. “Together we are such miracles it’s awesome. Against all odds.”
There was never any formal conversation between Jeff and Pam about getting involved in the cause, but Pam said it was in Jeff’s DNA to be an activist. Despite keeping his HIV status hidden from his parents, Jeff became involved with local AIDS activist groups in New Jersey and New York, like ACT UP (The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and the New Jersey Buddies (a support group for people living with AIDS). “God knows we didn’t know to what extent he was going to become involved in it,” said Pam. “I’m not sure I would have been dragged down that road with him.”
That road appeared in front of them in May 1988, when Jeff reached out to local activist William (Bill) Orr about speaking at an upcoming gathering of AIDS groups in Trenton held to pay tribute to New Jersey state deputy health commissioner and activist Jack Rutledge, who had recently died from AIDS-related causes.
Bill was impressed with Jeff’s chutzpah from the first day they met. “Jeff came out that day, so to speak,” he told me. “A lot of people with HIV didn’t want to admit they had it until it was necessary, but he just came out and said, ‘I’m a person with HIV’ and gave a great talk. People loved it and clapped.”
Jeff’s speech was cited in an Associated Press article published the next day: “Bomser, appearing with his wife, Pam, who married him last fall after his diagnosis, told the crowd, ‘I wasn’t just going to hang on until I died. I wanted to get on with living and loving.’ Bomser said his wife has tested negative for AIDS three times. ‘You can’t catch anything by hugging me or loving me.’”
After that day in the park, Jeff stepped into the spotlight as a local advocate for people living with AIDS, and Pam came with him as part of a package deal—one she saw right through. “What people found so tantalizing was a young attractive man… then they saw me, his wife, this little blonde-headed southern girl, and it was just too good a story for them to look past,” she told me. “They could put us out there as, ‘Oh, these are the normal people next door to you, but they have a secret.’”
For Jeff, the truth was more complicated. Despite crafting a narrative for himself as a straight married man who contracted HIV through IV drug use years prior, Jeff was bisexual, and he never knew whether he contracted HIV from shared needles or from sex.
“Jeffrey was not 1000 percent sure how he got it,” said Pam, who chose to share Jeff’s sexuality with me on our third call after talking it over with Laurie. “The story we used and everything published said he was a recovering drug addict, because that was true and it was acceptable. He knew that he wouldn’t be as marketable if he was open about maybe having contracted it through other ways.”
Laurie, who always knew about Jeff’s bisexuality, agreed with Pam that Jeff would love to see his sexuality come out all these years later. “He wasn’t ashamed of it; he just recognized that staying quiet about it gave him more of an audience,” she said. “He was looking to spread a message, and he didn’t want people to get distracted from that.”
The enduring bias against gay and bisexual men was a huge distraction for people with HIV and AIDS, who struggled to get medical care and live openly at a time when the majority of those with the virus were men who had sex with men. Public perception around the LGBTQ + community has radically changed in recent years, but in the late 1980s, the perception of AIDS as a “gay disease” immediately closed many off from caring about it as an issue, or even caring about the people dying from it. The ability to see one’s own public image so clearly while facing down your impending mortality leaves me in awe of my cousin. Jeff believed that the more people who knew about AIDS and people who had it, the better chance there would be of finding a cure. He was aware of his privilege as a charismatic, straight-passing, sober, middle-class white man dealing with a diagnosis mostly shared at the time by gay men and disadvantaged IV drug users who were being systematically ignored. For so long, Jeff’s privilege had been used to feed his ego and drug addiction, but in the final years of his life, he used that privilege and charisma to contribute to a movement.
Like many bravely outspoken AIDS activists involved in ACT UP and other community-based organizations, Jeff was passionate about empowering people with AIDS to fight back rather than accepting their HIV diagnosis as a death sentence. In the fall of 1988, he started up the People With AIDS Coalition of New Jersey (hereafter referred to as PWAC-NJ for brevity) and quickly enlisted Pam, Laurie, and Dennis Clermont, another close friend from Teaneck High, to get involved. Unsurprising to anyone who knew him, Jeff was incredibly effective in his newfound role as coalition president, and PWAC-NJ quickly grew from a small group meeting in Dennis’s converted sauna room to 40 to 50 people convening every Saturday night in the basement of St. Paul’s Lutheran church in Teaneck.
Despite being an organization in its infancy with no full-time staff members, PWAC-NJ offered as many services as it could to those living with HIV and AIDS in New Jersey. “Jeff would tell people what they needed to do to live as long as they could, to find different types of treatment and financial resources,” Laurie said. “He knew it all—he made it his business to learn all that.”
The organization’s January/February 1989 newsletter, published just months after its inception, lists resources for a coalition clothing bank and food bank, transportation services, pet sitting, a PWA reference library, a hospital visiting committee, AIDS 101 classes taught by Jeff, and a biweekly partners support group run by Pam. Laurie and Dennis led healing circles before some of the Saturday meetings. “That was what we had to offer,” she told me. “It didn’t cure them. I wish it could have, but it helped people find more ways to be at peace with themselves—less afraid. That’s maybe all you can do.”
While Jeff’s pre-diagnosis diaries are littered with self-loathing references to his habit of procrastination, there was no slowing him down in his undertaking to help PWA during the last year and a half of his life. “He didn’t know what his purpose was until AIDS came along,” Pam said. “He knew he was capable of most anything, but he just couldn’t quite nail down what it was. That’s the real story: a person that was searching his entire life for meaning and where he belonged, only to find it at the latest moment. It was where he belonged. I just wish he could have found it without having to die for it.”
Despite all this, Jeff’s writing is filled with hope and even gratitude for the position he found himself in at this time. In September 1988, he wrote: “I feel strong, I feel frustrated, I feel hopeful… So much good to be done now. Thank god for the chance/opportunity.”
When he wasn’t working to deliver direct aid to people in New Jersey living with HIV and AIDS, Jeff was helping Bill and the New Jersey Community Research Initiative (NJCRI) expand access to clinical drug trials. Like many, Jeff felt enraged by the glacial pace at which the FDA was approving new HIV medications. Despite the fact that more than 200 types of drugs had shown promise in lab testing to treat HIV/AIDS, the FDA had cleared doctors to prescribe only AZT to their patients, many of whom were unable to tolerate its extreme side effects. That meant that in order for most people in New Jersey to access the treatments that might extend their lives until the next scientific breakthrough, they needed to be in the know about clinical trials taking place at New York City hospitals or otherwise how to get experimental drugs from private gray-market buyers clubs—and be rich enough and able-bodied enough to access them.
In contrast to the more commonly publicized white male community of people living with HIV/AIDS in nearby New York City, the disease primarily affected low-income, racially diverse IV drug users in New Jersey, which had the fourth highest rate of HIV/AIDS cases of any state in the U.S. Not only were drug users traditionally left out of clinical trials altogether for their alleged unreliability, but women—a fast growing segment of New Jersey’s HIV-positive population—were doubly excluded due to the medical establishment’s discomfort with giving experimental drugs to someone who may become pregnant. “They never took into account that women, drug users, and poor people had a right to medication; that was something that pharma never considered, and that they were forced to consider by AIDS activists,” said writer and AIDS historian Sarah Schulman in ACT Up’s study guide for Jim Hubbard’s documentary United in Anger: A History of Act Up.
Despite the fact that the largest concentration of AIDS cases in New Jersey was in Newark and its surrounding towns, Newark University Hospital refused to conduct clinical trials that might give those living with AIDS in their community a shot at a longer life. As Bill told me, “They were always afraid that if they conducted clinical trials, they’d scare away their patients. What they wanted was to have wealthy patients, or patients who had insurance.” Bill led Jeff and other members of ACT UP in a demonstration in front of the hospital demanding that they conduct clinical AIDS trials in Newark.
It was the hospital’s continued inaction that inspired 40 AIDS advocacy groups in New Jersey to come together to form the North Jersey Community Research Initiative (NJCRI) in the summer of 1988. According to an August 1988 article in The New Jersey Herald News, the organization’s stated goal was “to help the national effort of research by finding out what particular treatments are good, and making the newer, alternative treatments available in North Jersey that have been nonexistent up to now.” Bill came on as the organization’s first executive director.
On the same page of The Herald’s article on the organization’s launch is a posed photograph of Jeff and Pam smiling at the camera next to the headline, “CRI bringing hope into desperate lives.” In blow-out black and white, they give what NJCRI cofounder Robert Sproul later called “a very articulate and honest face on AIDS for the whole state of New Jersey.” I imagine it was hard for many subscribers in their suburban culs-de-sac to look away from that photograph at the breakfast table.
Jeff was more than just a public face for NJCRI; in fact, he served on multiple boards and spoke for the community of people living with AIDS as chairman of NJCRI’s first PWA committee. “It was the voice of the clients to have a say in what they thought was needed,” explained Bill. “We were getting funded by amfAR, NIH, and pharmaceuticals, but it’s also important to know what the clients need and how we can help them, and that was where Jeffrey spent his time.”
It wasn’t just Jeff’s powers of persuasion that made him so effective at harm-reduction work encouraging people living with AIDS in Newark to get tested and treated at NJCRI. “As a former drug addict, he understood the mentality, the pull and excitement of drugs, but he also realized that it was important for them to get treatment and for them to get tested,” Bill said. Jeff knew that experimental drugs weren’t a magical solution, but he believed they were the best chance any of them had to survive this plague.
It would take a book for me to list all of the stories I heard about Jeff counseling someone in recovery or newly diagnosed with HIV who needed his amassed wealth of knowledge to give them a flicker of hope for survival. “Everybody wanted a piece of him,” said Laurie. “People would call with a problem or an issue or an idea, or they knew somebody who needed to be talked to. Whatever it was, Jeffrey would do it.” Behind the scenes, she, Pam, and Dennis tried to make sure that Jeff didn’t put helping others ahead of his own health, making sure he got enough sleep and remembered to eat. She said, “He didn’t know it, but we were all working together to make sure he was protected.”
At the end of 1988, the hope started to trickle out from Jeff’s diary entries as Larry’s health waned. “Larry in hospital. I’m on mars,” he wrote on December 16. Then, right before the new year: “One day at a time is all we have. Larry said he loved me this morning. It’s wonderful hearing ‘love’ from Larry. I love you Larry.”
From our very first conversation, Pam was adamant that Jeff’s love for Larry was the thing that fueled his involvement in the AIDS movement. “I believe everything he did he did for Larry, but you wouldn’t have known that from the outside,” she said. Jeff idolized his brother, and he would have done anything to find a cure in time to save him. Like finding his passion for activism at the end of his life, his relationship with Larry blossomed in the face of their shared prognosis, and he wasn’t ready to let that go so quickly. “That fateful thing is what bonded them at the end. It may have even healed them as brothers,” Pam said.
Sadly, their bond came to an end when Larry died in February of 1989. Although Larry battled AIDS and addiction more privately than his brother, the impact he made in the last years of his life was obvious at his funeral, where several people Evelyn and Phil had never met before showed up to pay tribute to their son. As recounted in an August 27, 1990, article in The Record, a shy young woman introduced herself to Phil and Evelyn at the shiva call to let them know that without Larry’s help quitting drugs, she would likely be dead.
Larry’s death sent Jeff reeling. Diane distinctly recalls sitting in the den of the Bomser house with Jeff and Pam after the funeral. “I remember looking over at Jeffrey constantly and the look on his face was devastation,” she said. “I always said to myself, what was he thinking? ‘This is my future? This is going to be me?’”
“After that, it was just like the light in Jeffrey went out,” Pam told me. In a diary entry dated less than a month after Larry’s death, he wrote, “My insides feel broken a thousand different ways. What isn’t broken is empty. A dark, black, cold endless, empty. I still don’t understand that Larry took his body and left.” Further down the page, he scribbled haphazardly, “If it weren’t for Pam, Mom, Dad [and a couple others] I’d probably be joining you soon,” not knowing that he would be joining his brother in less than six months.
It’s not that Jeff and those around him didn’t know that he was near certain to die from AIDS, but because of his persistent optimism in the fight for a cure, it was hard for many (including Jeff) to imagine. Pam said, “In my heart of hearts, I knew that he had been given a death sentence. But in my mind I was still thinking, ‘Well, he’s going to be one of the ones that makes it. We’ll get a cure.’” On their first wedding anniversary, Jeff sent Pam a bouquet of flowers at her office with a card that read, “Looking forward to the next fifty years.”
Despite his emotional pain and deteriorating health, Jeff kept running PWAC-NJ and speaking publicly about AIDS to anyone who would listen well into the early summer of 1989. He was sent to San Francisco on a PWA scholarship to speak at the 11th National Lesbian & Gay Health Conference/7th National AIDS Forum in San Francisco, and he testified about AIDS in front of the NJ State Assembly Health and Human Resources Committee. He and Pam attended countless events, including the AIDS Walk and New York Pride Parade, but despite his determination to fight, he never made it to their second wedding anniversary.
In mid-July 1989, Jeff was admitted to Englewood Hospital to undergo brain surgery to treat the toxoplasmosis that was causing him excruciating headaches and beginning to affect his cognitive abilities. He was expected to make a full recovery, so he went in without any pomp and circumstance, or saying his goodbyes. The last item on the to-do list he wrote before going into the hospital was “will.”
Soon after the procedure, Jeff slipped into a coma from which he never surfaced. As his body clung to life in those final days, Jeff was never alone. “There were always friends there,” Laurie said. “That month was very hard and draining, but it was important that we felt so connected to each other. I think that’s pretty much how we got through it.”
So much of Jeff’s life was defined by reaching out for meaning, and it’s undeniable that he died having found it. In the end, he had devoted friends, parents who loved and respected him, a caring wife, and a purpose that drove him day in and day out. Pam said, “He got to see who he would have become; it just got interrupted.” In every one of our conversations, Evelyn told me how proud she was of who her sons became after they got sober.
Jeff died early Saturday morning on August 12, 1989, two days after I was born at a different hospital across the Hudson River. Besides the devastation to his friends and family, his passing was felt by the New Jersey AIDS community. “It was a real loss,” Bill said. “He was a force in NJCRI and really a force in the whole community. I still think about it. He played an important role. He was there at the beginning when things were really tough, but he persevered. He had courage to speak out, first of all, and he had courage to reach out to people and get them involved, and he had courage to talk to authority.”
He was buried in the pink-and-white outfit he’d worn on his wedding day two years earlier. Dennis, who had become especially close with Jeff at the end of his life, shocked guests when he stepped up to the pulpit in an all-white suit, proclaiming, “Jeffrey himself is not dead”—a statement he meant metaphorically, but which gave everyone in the room a brief moment of hope that this had all somehow been an elaborate joke.
Dennis’s eulogy went on:
“One of [Jeff’s] qualities was that everyone he dealt with, no matter who it was, felt ‘special’—they had a special relationship with him, whether it was 20 years or for three seconds in a hurry passing by. So one of the most important gifts he gives is that he makes other people able to love, and able to care and be compassionate. Part of what is so exceptional about Jeffrey is that you loved him unconditionally… you simply loved him—even if you were mad at him or disagreed, the situation didn’t matter—and what’s truly amazing is that when you love someone, your heart opens, and in a way Jeffrey went through life opening hearts, you know? Open, open, open. And if that’s not what it’s all about, I don’t know what is.”
Throughout his time as an activist, Jeff stuck ACT Up’s silver “Touched by a Person with AIDS” stickers on any public surface he could find. Jeff’s goal as someone living with AIDS was, metaphorically, to touch as many lives as he could every day, whether it was opening someone’s mind or opening someone’s access to treatment. The impact he made in such a short time makes me even more regretful that his life was cut short, knowing how much more he could have done if he’d lived longer.
In 1991, NJCRI cut the ribbon on the Jeffrey Bomser Clinic in New Jersey. The facility was established entirely to carry out clinical trials, recognizing Jeff’s dream to make trials more accessible to everyone, not just those with financial means. Bill told me the decision to name the clinic after Jeff was “a no-brainer.”
Programs for the dedication ceremony were stuck among the papers that both my great-aunt and Pam kept with them for the past 32 years through countless moves and purges. They’ve both expressed how glad they are to be rid of their miscellaneous boxes of pages holding unknown memories of Jeff, comforted to know they’re now in the hands of someone newly invested in his story.
“You shouldn’t forget these things,” Bill reflected when we spoke. “People forget stuff, but there are points in the past where something important happened, where someone important did something. It’s nice to remember when people have passed away, and by and large been forgotten, and then we’re reminded that 40 years ago, people did make contributions. Jeffrey is one of the individuals and he deserves to be in the spotlight.”
It hurts to think that had my great-aunt passed away during any of her countless hospital visits in recent years and never sent me that package, Jeff’s whole story would never have gotten its moment in the spotlight. I am eternally grateful to be the one who got to shine the light in his direction, if only for a moment.
Sophie Vershbow is a social media strategist and freelance journalist in NYC; her work has appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, Vulture, Literary Hub, and more.
