Surviving HIV a big motivator for new supe
An hour or so after his first meeting as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Jeff Sheehy stood in his new City Hall office, nodding at the small desk in the corner, the battered leather sofa pushed against one wall, a pair of armchairs.
He had a window open to the wet, chilly weather to temper the smell of fresh paint on the walls. Those walls need some art, Sheehy said. Something colorful, maybe children’s art.
“Well, Billy will know what to do,” Sheehy said of his husband, Bill Berry.
For Sheehy, 59, his appointment by Mayor Ed Lee to supervisor marked, in a way, the end of a long recovery — and of capturing what was once seemingly lost.
Twenty years ago, around the time that Sheehy and Berry became a couple, Sheehy was diagnosed with HIV. It was 1997, and though hope was starting to seep into the AIDS epidemic, the diagnosis was terrifying.
Sheehy had dipped into politics by then, following his father and grandfather, who had both been mayors of Waco, Texas. But he had also lived most of his adult life believing he was going to die young — that he would never have a career, a partner, a family.
Now, he’s got it all. He has been married for almost a decade, and the couple have a daughter, Michelle, in middle school.
He stands as well as a sort of beacon to San Francisco’s community of long-term HIV and AIDS survivors, many of whom are still suffering from the trauma of growing up under a death sentence, struggling to imagine any sort of future.
“What Jeff represents for a lot of us, and for me, is hope for the future,” said Vincent Crisostomo, a long-term survivor who leads a social group for his peers within the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. “I think there will probably be a lot of expectations put on him.”
As the first openly HIV-positive city supervisor, Sheehy knows he’s an outlier among survivors. His generation of gay men was hit hard by HIV and AIDS, and many who are still around grapple with depression, isolation, physical ailments and financial troubles.
Sheehy does not, but the trauma he lived through, he said, profoundly colored his politics. It gives him a sense of urgency — that there’s no time to waste in addressing the needs of his community, whether that’s people with HIV/ AIDS or the residents of his District Eight, which includes the gay mecca of the Castro.
“I’m haunted by loss,” Sheehy said, thinking back on the young men he knew in Austin, where he attended the University of Texas, and in San Francisco, where he moved in 1988.
“I can see a dance floor, filled with people who aren’t here anymore,” he said. “It gives me this constant sense of urgency, urgency, urgency, because the consequences of delay are someone’s life is lost. I’m not saying that I’m unique among supervisors in feeling a sense of urgency, but I do think my experience drives me.”
He says, too, that his appointment by Lee opens political doors for long-term survivors who have felt largely ignored, including by politicians who say they want to help but have yet to provide much money or services.
Since taking the oath of office last Sunday, Sheehy has spoken with leaders of the survivor community who asked for $2 million for services like mental health care and housing subsidies. He said it was going to be a “tough budget” but that he wanted to look closely at the requests.
“The long-term survivors don’t have to figure out how to get into supervisor offices. They’re inside now,” Sheehy said. “The question is, what do we push for first?”
Sheehy grew up in Waco, the second of six children. He was nearing the end of his college years when he came out to his parents. Their reaction was swift: They cut him off.
It was 1979, and the first reports of AIDS cases were still two years away. But Sheehy already felt as if his life and career were over. If his parents didn’t want anything to do with him, who else would? Then, as AIDS took hold, that existential despair became further entrenched.
The first death close to him came in 1986: Jerry Smith, the former pro football player who owned the Boathouse, a popular gay bar in Austin. “He was this bigbrother type, really great,” Sheehy said. “So he dies. And then this other guy dies. And another.
“It was terrifying,” Sheehy said. “I remember this article about AIDS in Time or Newsweek and thinking, ‘I can either go back in the closet, or I’m going to die from this.’ And I couldn’t go into the closet again.”
He left Austin in 1987 when he chased a lover to Los Angeles, then followed the same man to San Francisco a year later. He was adrift — couch-surfing for a while before he got a cheap room in the Fox Plaza tower, and working as a bike messenger, an usher, other odd jobs.
He hit the bar scene most nights. The late ’80s and early ’90s were rough for San Francisco’s gay community. Almost everyone, it seemed, was infected, or assumed that was their fate. People were dying every week. But Sheehy said the mood at the bars was, if anything, becoming wilder.
After a two-year stint in Japan — he left San Francisco after the Loma Prieta earthquake, when the economy tanked — Sheehy returned to San Francisco in 1993 feeling more confident. He had picked up a new work ethic in Japan and had fallen in love, though the relationship didn’t work out.
He drifted into politics, first canvassing for Greenpeace, then joining Kathleen Brown’s 1994 gubernatorial campaign. Within three years he had been elected president of the Harvey Milk Democratic Club.
In 1996 he helped San Francisco pass the Equal Benefits Ordinance, which required companies doing business with the city to provide the same benefits to domestic partners as they did to married couples. He was still thrilling in that success when he had sex with an old friend, someone he knew to be HIVpositive. They used a condom. It broke.
A few weeks later Sheehy developed a high fever that lasted two weeks. He lost half of his hair and a startling amount of weight. In the back of his mind, he knew it could be HIV. But he waited several months to get tested.
“And of course it comes back positive,” Sheehy said. “I freaked out. I walked out the door and didn’t know what the f— to do.”
He took antiviral drugs almost immediately. His choices weren’t great — one drug was a liquid so awful it was almost impossible to swallow, another caused something called “kidney sludge.” The drug he opted for, the one considered most palatable, caused diarrhea within half an hour of taking it.
But he had choices. He had hope. And in a way, being diagnosed with HIV — a fate he had been bracing against for more
than a decade — was a relief.
“I didn’t have to worry about the HIV anymore,” Sheehy said. “The worst had happened, but now the fear was something tangible. I could confront it.”
He didn’t hide his HIV status, but he didn’t announce it either. About a year and a half after he was diagnosed, he was arguing with two friends about something to do with the Harvey Milk club when, in a burst of righteous anger, he told them he was HIV-positive.
One of the friends began to cry. A week later, that friend asked him on a date. Sheehy and Berry went out for the first time on Aug. 29, 1998.
Sheehy recalls grabbing Berry by the lapels of his jacket as soon as he walked into the bar and kissing him. Berry says they were, in fact, halfway through their first beers before the kiss. But they both agree they left the bar that night to return to Berry’s home, and Sheehy basically never left.
“This is what I know about Jeff after almost 20 years of being with him every day: Whatever he does, he does 110 percent,” said Berry, 50, who is HIV-negative. “There’s this talk of him being tough, a bulldog. Which is true. But that’s a fraction of who he is, as a husband and as a father.”
Sheehy said he knew as soon as he got together with Berry that he wanted a family — something he had never thought about before, because the idea seemed so preposterous. But now he saw a future of stability.
Berry, nine years younger, took some convincing. They were flying back from the International AIDS Conference in Barcelona, Spain, in 2002 when Berry said he was ready. They began the adoption process, and got a call on Jan. 15, 2005, that a girl had been born, and that the birth mother had chosen them.
Sheehy and Berry married 10 years to the day after their first date, in their home in Glen Park.
In the years after he met Berry, Sheehy’s career took off. Friends first encouraged him to run for the Board of Supervisors in 2002, but he resisted, in part because Berry didn’t love the idea.
Sheehy became then Mayor Gavin Newsom’s AIDS adviser in 2004. The next year, he joined the governing board of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine — the state’s stem cell agency — as a patient advocate. He joined UCSF as a spokesman in 2010 and is expecting to retire from there soon.
Lee chose Sheehy to replace Scott Wiener, a moderate who was elected to the state Senate in November, and the mayor is counting on his ability to win re-election. He is scheduled to run in 2018, unless the city’s progressives force a special election.
Sheehy has leaned progressive in the past but is more moderate these days. Moreover, he has a well-known stubborn streak and has never shied away from striking out on his own, said friends and colleagues.
“Maybe it’s the Texas heritage, but he’s pretty tough,” said Art Torres, the former state senator and vice chair of the stem cell board. “Jeff suffers no fools. Sometimes people take that abrasiveness the wrong way, as opposed to looking at it for what it is, which is advocacy, pure and simple.”
Over the past decade, Sheehy said he has thought about why he survived his tumultuous 20s and 30s when so many did not, and why he is thriving now.
He thinks his parents’ rejection may have saved his life. If they had been supportive, he probably would have left Austin for one of the “gay meccas” earlier in the epidemic, to pursue a career and relationships. Instead, he spent much of his 20s detached and scared to move forward.
“It kept me from having the full life I should’ve had,” Sheehy said. “But if I’d had that full life, I would have been more vulnerable to the epidemic that was raging.”
So it makes sense that Sheehy, approaching his 60th birthday, is only now fully embarking on a career that he has been preparing for his whole life.
“I haven’t seen Jeff so happy and so energized about work in a long time,” Berry said. “He’s been working really long hours, and he comes home like a beam of light. He feels really good about what he’s doing.
“His is not the job I would think someone at almost 60 would want,” Berry added, “but here he is.”