Reintroducing: Stephen Lenton

“I remember he was at VCU.”

“The single greatest gay rights victory so far in Richmond.”

Next to a “This Month in History” brief reminding everyone that two years ago a gay D.C. nightclub celebrated Marion Barry’s mayoral election with a disco party, the January 1989 issue of the Richmond Pride newspaper announced that Lenton’s papers to do with the “historic” GAS lawsuit would be donated to what is now the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

“The appeals court’s ruling in the case,” the Richmond Pride wrote, “paved the way for the recognition of gay student groups on college campuses throughout the states of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Gay Alliance of Students vs. Matthews remains the single greatest gay rights victory so far in Richmond. 

“The collection now at the historical society forms a chronicle of the gay rights movement in Richmond from 1974 to 1988. Future historians and other researchers will hear gays speaking for themselves about injustice and other issues of importance in the lives of gays. A perceptive researcher reading through the collection could not fail to sense the growing strength and pride of Richmond’s gay community.”

In 2017, professors Michael Hevel and Tim Cain proved Richmond’s old gay newspaper, now long defunct, perfectly oracular.

“I was doing research on the case, and [Lenton’s] name kept popping up,” says Hevel, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Arkansas. “I did some Google searching, probably to see if he was still alive, to be honest with you. I went over to the [VMHC’s] library to look at his records for the purpose of finding more information about the case, and then [realized that] his archival collection is much bigger than just the lawsuit.”

Hevel studies the history of college students, campus life and student affairs. Cain, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Georgia, focuses on the history of labor and activism in higher education. Their research covers lawsuits brought by gay student organizations, such as Gay Alliance of Students v. Matthews.

“Right now, student affairs is viewed as progressive, but that’s not its history,” Cain says. “That is a relatively recent phenomenon, and Lenton was involved in this sort of transition period and really doing what we thought seemed like important work to advocate both on his campus and in his city, but then also within the field of student affairs. He was giving talks at student affairs conferences to other student affairs administrators who had no knowledge of, no insight about, working with LGBTQ students. 

“It just seemed like there is a really fascinating story, but then also an important story to talk about the development of the field of student affairs, and how one individual — who basically sacrificed his career for his values and for advocating for people who he believes should be treated equally and equitably — could make a difference and did make a difference.”

Twenty-one years after Lenton’s death, Hevel and Cain co-authored a biographical paper on Lenton: 2022’s “The Queer Student Affairs Career of Stephen Lenton, 1970-1980.”

“I knew of no other piece of historical scholarship about it: an openly gay student affairs
 administrator,” Hevel says. “Or someone who was becoming openly gay, or someone people were increasingly perceiving as gay. In my head, it was a bridge towards modernity, where colleges and universities were becoming, for lack of a better word, popular places for gay people to work or relatively safe places for gay people to work.

“There’s ways in which that’s not true today, but certainly in Stephen’s time, he was on the vanguard of this. Before his time, it would’ve been very hard to be what you’d call ‘openly gay.’”

* * *

To the extent Lenton’s remembered in Richmond today, it’s for his gay rights activism, communal living, LGBTQ scholarship, and counseling and ministering to people with HIV-AIDS, first as a licensed professional counselor at his practice in Carytown, Commonwealth Professional Services, and then, at the end of his life, as a Catholic deacon.

Born in Los Angeles on Aug. 18, 1941, Stephen Micheal Lenton arrived to work at 901 W. Franklin St. for the 1970-71 VCU school year after a long undergraduate career at University of California, Berkeley. During two stints, first from 1959-62 and then 1969-70, he majored in political science, raised money for civil rights groups and got arrested protesting the war in Vietnam.

Between his Berkeley years, Lenton spent several years in the Peace Corps, where he served in the first cohort sent overseas after President Kennedy created the agency in 1961. There, Lenton met Richard Wilson while teaching elementary school in the Philippines.

VCU hired Wilson in 1969 as its vice president of student affairs, and he recruited his friend Lenton to join him on campus in 1970. He tasked Lenton, then 28 and adept at making chicken salad on a budget, with designing the classes that became the Awareness Series.

“I think we were calling it Education of Self at that point,” says Wilson, 91, who retired from VCU in 1993. “[Lenton] established some classes where students were able to explore their own identity and the issues of concern to them — and he was, of course, dealing with many of these issues himself, his own identity. He was dating a woman, [Marilyn], I think her name was, and at that time discovered he was gay.” 

Lenton, in his journals from the time, describes himself as a gay man in love with a woman. When he was younger, he considered himself bisexual but came to view that more as an “intellectual conviction” than a state of being.

“I think students were hungry for an opportunity to talk about their lives and what they were going through,” Wilson says. “Especially the gay students. There were very few opportunities for them to acknowledge their sexual orientation and be supported.”

In July 1974, the Richmond News Leader wrote about the Awareness Series and Lenton, who had just completed his master’s in counseling from VCU. The previous spring, the series’ five sections had 123 students. To accommodate demand, VCU added two more sections that fall. The university also recommended the courses to its resident advisers.

“Often what we do in our series is to unlearn what we were taught about how not to be ourselves,” Lenton told the paper. “We reteach the English language.”

Walter Foery met Lenton while taking Education of Self in fall 1974. It led Foery to join the Gay Alliance of Students in the winter of 1975, becoming the group’s spokesman. 

“Other than my father, there’s nobody I ever knew that taught me more than Stephen Lenton,” Foery says. 

“He had a speaking voice that was very soothing, and if you watched his body language, the thing I remember seeing him do most often was nod his head, whatever you were saying. Even if he might come back and disagree with something I said, he would nod to show me that he was listening and paying attention to what I was saying. And he did that, I think, with everybody. He made people feel safe.”

At the end of Foery’s first class, Lenton had the students write and sign short notes about their expectations for the course. In the next session, Lenton shared the notes.

“I came out to the entire group, kind of accidentally,” Foery says. “I said something like, ‘It’s great to be here, I’m really excited, and I’m a bit curious about how being gay might affect my experience in this room.’

“I wasn’t thinking anything about what was going to happen to that note I wrote, even though he had told us what was going to happen. I wasn’t thinking about that. And the next week, when I came in and he handed the sheets out, I was reading mine and I said, ‘Holy s---, look what I said.’

“I found out later that several people in the room were curious to know: ‘Which one’s Walter?’ Because we signed them. They weren’t anonymous. We signed whatever we wrote. It was fine with me that I’d done that. I was just a little surprised at myself, because at that point in my life, I was out to all my friends, but certainly I was not out to everybody.”

This era was the high point of Lenton’s time at VCU. Relations between Lenton and student affairs officials gradually soured beyond detente, accelerating after the GAS lawsuit and with Lenton’s increasing gay activism, despite his often effusive performance reviews from students and staff.

In his journals, Lenton writes about being denied promotions and appropriate raises, especially after completing his doctorate, by mail, in applied behavioral sciences from the now-defunct Union Graduate School in Cincinnati in the spring of 1976. He laments losing office space, staff and administrative support, particularly for the Awareness Series’ curriculum on gay identity and issues. He has to stand up against abuse at work.

“I wrote [a colleague] that I didn’t like his f----- joke at the staff meeting,” Lenton wrote on Sept. 21, 1976, two months before the appellate court’s GAS-VCU ruling. “I wrote to [a gay college student in the news] that he was not alone, I expressed my feelings to others about being on television seen as a f-----. I resent the invasion of privacy and yet to change things it seems necessary to go public. The paradox.”

The next summer, Lenton tells his bosses in a memo that he’s thinking about quitting. In his journal, he makes it seem inevitable: “My career here is over, the final chapters are in the writing.”

Lenton held out for 2 1/2 more years. His last day at VCU was June 30, 1980.

“Stephen was becoming more and more visible about subjects his supervisors were not particularly interested in being all that visible,” Hevel says. “I think if he was only known on campus, it would’ve been a much different deal than being known throughout the state. He was basically the gay expert in the state, or one of the gay experts in the state, and I’m not sure that’s what they were wanting from him.

“I can’t say Stephen was the first openly gay student affairs administrator. I don’t even know how we would ever know. And what does ‘open’ mean? There were plenty of people who may have been perceived as gay, or living with a same-sex roommate, air quote or not air quote. You never really know. It’s not the heterosexual norm, but it’s also different than overtly telling people your sexual orientation or your sexual practices. 

“I think there are many people who probably lived in same-sex relationships on college campuses that people knew lived together, but those people weren’t out, speaking out, advising gay student organizations, suing their employers and becoming prominent public experts about the topic. They were probably avoiding all of that really aggressively.”

“I was complete poison ivy.”

By the late summer of 2000, when he was 59 and recording oral history interviews about his life and activism, Stephen Lenton had rimless glasses, two earrings in one ear and a year-round preference for sandals.

When Lenton graduated from high school 41 years earlier, he looked like Buddy Holly by way of Parris Island. In between, he was a man of many costume changes, with blue eyes and quite a smile.

In 1977, it was a time of sweaters and jeans, breaking up with Marilyn, and, to his surprise, a promotion at work.

“In my seventh year, [student life officials] called me in and said, ‘Stephen, we’ve been talking about reorganizing student affairs for some time, and we finally had decided on the new structure,” Lenton recalled in an interview recorded Sept. 13, 2000. “And you are the only person who is going to be promoted, and you will have the counseling center, your current program and these other things.”

He took a week to think about it. He was suspicious of the offer, given that three years earlier he sponsored a gay student club that sued the school over discrimination. So Lenton decided to make a point.

“I said, ‘Well, you can’t promote me because I’m queer, and everybody knows, and it just won’t fly.’”

The officials were prepared for this response.

“They said, ‘No, we’ve already asked the university higher-ups, and they all know you, and it’s not gonna be a problem. It will be groundbreaking or something.’” 

As Lenton starts to talk about the lawsuit, you can almost hear him grinning.

“Gay students were denied access to meeting on campus, and I said, ‘You can’t do that.’” He laughs, hard. “Well, anyway, to make a long story short, I was the adviser of the student group that sued the university. And my own boss. And that they still wanted to promote me was kind of astounding to me — oh, I’m so bad!

“But it was a wonderful time because I had never really invested in gay stuff before, and like my college years, nobody had ever raised money for a gay issue before, but we had to raise a lot of money to pay for our lawyers, and, finally, ACLU picked it up — and [VCU] lost terribly.”

* * *

On Sept. 5, 1974, the Gay Alliance of Students applied to be recognized by VCU as a student organization. The students reapplied Oct. 2 after management asked for specifics.

“I find it possible to attribute a wide variety of interpretation to terms such as: ‘supportive community, educative situations, or advocating gay rights in concert with the civil liberties of all people,’” Assistant Dean of Student Life William Duvall wrote to GAS co-founder Brenda Kriegel on Sept. 16, quoting a portion of the club’s mission statement.

Duvall also said that, for the first time, student clubs must agree to operate by VCU’s organization policy manual as a condition for approval.

The Gay Alliance of Students said OK, applied again and laid out its plans. The group would exist to “alleviate the problems of homophobia” and “support the equal rights amendment, to alleviate discrimination of sexual orientation.” 

For programming, GAS planned to hold “discussion groups” and “awareness encounters,” establish a “speakers bureau to educate classes & interested organizations” and “collect relevant literature on all aspects of sexuality, establishing gay counseling service.”

The students said their new club would “bring together in a unified and supportive community, men and women of all orientations, who oppose discrimination, especially discrimination based on sex and sexual or affectional preferences.” The only eligibility requirement was wanting to join.

Fifteen days after the students reapplied, the Board of Visitors turned them down. The BOV offered no reason and refused student requests to talk it out. 

On April 9, 1975, Richmond attorney John McCarthy filed suit against VCU in the U.S. Eastern District of Virginia. The suit named the student life dean, Alfred Matthews, as the lead defendant and accused VCU of violating the students’ First and 14th Amendment rights. The Richmond Times-Dispatch mentioned the lawsuit the next day in a half-column brief on Page C14.

The suit argued that VCU stepped on the students’ First Amendment right to assemble when it withheld meeting space and on their 14th Amendment rights when the university rejected the club for being gay-oriented. That went against the 14th’s Equal Protection Clause, which requires the government to apply laws fairly to everyone.

On Nov. 7, 1975, Judge D. Dortch Warriner ruled for the district court and relegated GAS to a ghost status. The organization would be allowed to exist informally and use university facilities but relieved VCU of any advisory or financial obligation. VCU also didn’t have to add GAS to the official student directory, though Warriner did sheepishly concede the club should be listed somewhere.

“We defer to the Board’s discretion [on the] resolution of the practical difficulties involved with properly designating GAS in the Student Directory and otherwise, in such a way to conform to the Court’s holding,” he wrote. 

Warriner also said the state (VCU here, being a public institution) had the right to police behavior it considered immoral and, ultimately, that the students’ case just wasn’t important enough to matter.

“Although there may be some vague nexus between these privileges [of official student organizations] and the ability of GAS to attain its goals and stated purpose, the connection is not one of such magnitude as to elevate the denial of those privileges to the level of a deprivation of ‘fundamental rights.’”

Warriner concluded that gay people weren’t a legally protected class — “suspect” in the parlance of the courts — because the origins of homosexuality, unlike, say, being Black or a woman, remained obscure. At least to the guy ruling on this case.

“The absence of conclusive scientific evidence and medical data prevents us from determining whether homosexuality is indeed an accident of birth, or whether it is a function of varying degrees of individual preference, or both. Certainly there is no proof that it is any more of an ‘accident of birth’ than the status of being poor. Thus, one of the essential elements which would align homosexuality with other recognized suspect criteria is lacking.”

Warriner continues:

“Further, the inability of medical authorities to reach complete agreement on whether or to what extent homosexuality is a mental disease” — it wasn’t, according to the then-most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the definitive clinical reference on mental illness — “inhibits our ability conclusively to determine in what matter that status affects one’s capacity to perform and function in society. Is it an immutable characteristic or a controllable inclination?”

And finally: “We hold that homosexuality is not a suspect class.”

The students appealed immediately.

ACLU lawyer Richard Crouch argued the case before the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals on June 7, 1976, taking over for the original attorney McCarthy, who suffered under the stress of the case. By 1981, he had closed his office at 422 E. Main St. in the basement of the Caskie house downtown.

The court deliberated until fall. Three days before Halloween, wielding the 14th Amendment and a keen sense of irony, the 4th Circuit overruled the district court by pointing out the obvious.

“All of the justifications put forth by VCU for the denial of recognition are based upon the nature of the issues which GAS intended to confront,” said Judge Howard Winter, writing for the appellate court, which is one level below the Supreme Court.

“If the university is attempting to prevent homosexuals from meeting one another to discuss their common problems and possible solutions to those problems, then its purpose is clearly inimical to basic first amendment values. Individuals of whatever sexual persuasion have the fundamental right to meet, discuss current problems, and to advocate changes in the status quo, so long as there is no ‘incitement to imminent lawless action.’ … If on the other hand, VCU’s concern is with a possible rise in the incidence of actual homosexual conduct between students, then a different problem is presented.”

The 4th Circuit’s Oct. 28, 1976, decision gave the Gay Alliance of Students official recognition and applied to the five states in the court’s jurisdiction: Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina and West Virginia. The GAS group of about a dozen students started meeting at McCabe House on Wednesday nights, and the organization lasted in some form into the 1980s, eventually being listed as a community resource in local gay media.

Today, VCU has several LGBTQ-oriented student organizations, four philanthropic funds to support LGBTQ programs and two LGBTQ scholarships.

The court case itself became a key step on the way to 2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges, when gay people won their constitutional right to get married.

* * *

Student life officials told Lenton that despite everything, it was going to be cool. The counseling center director gig was his.

“Well then,” Lenton said in the oral history interview, “‘I want the job.”

The university quickly reneged, ostensibly because the student life department reorganization had been postponed. But Lenton said a department official told him, in a private conversation, that important people at VCU feared the state would cut funding if it hired an openly gay person as director of its counseling center.

“So that was painful to hear,” Lenton said. “As the situation emerged, eventually I was told, ‘We’ll never fire you. You can work here forever, you can do whatever you want, we’re never going to ask you to do anything — and also you will never be promoted in any way or shape or form or title.’ 

“Well, it was helpful to have the truth, but I couldn’t deal with it. I really couldn’t deal with it. I never kept a job just because I needed to work.”

Lenton told his boss Jan. 30, 1979, of his decision to resign, and officials allowed him time to get his future in order. Lenton left VCU in the summer of 1980 and took six months off to reflect.

“I was complete poison ivy,” he said. “No other institution would interview me or anything. Well, it’s the bed you made, sweetheart.”

“The Board of Visitors really should be credited for expanding gay rights.”

A year and a half after the lawsuit, Lenton wrote an op-ed that James Madison University’s student newspaper printed on St. Patrick’s Day 1978. The editorial could be considered an act of making one’s own bed.

“The Board of Visitors and then-Attorney General Andrew P. Miller spent a great deal of state energy and money in oppressing GAS,” Lenton said, “even though from the beginning there was little chance of this ‘massive resistance’ technique working. The irony is that the Board’s attempt to block one gay group resulted in a court decision which gave gay groups the clear right to organize at Virginia Commonwealth University, throughout Virginia and the states covered by the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

“The Board of Visitors really should be credited for expanding gay rights.”

Lenton then updates us on the Gay Alliance of Students.

“The future is murky,” he writes. “It is not clear what programs or projects, if any, GAS will elect to do. If they elect to have a beer party as other student groups, then there will be another direct confrontation with the university or the Commonwealth — it is, in essence, illegal to serve a homosexual alcohol or to employ a gay person as a server of alcohol.

“If left alone, GAS will probably continue its current course of meeting every Wednesday night for the sake of spending a few hours each week together in a supportive atmosphere. Students will probably continue to attend for a wide variety of reasons, chief of those being comradeship.

“Each time this quiet, small group meets, whether the students feel it or not, history is in the making.”

The late ’70s were a historic time for gay rights activism in Richmond.

In the year between Lenton’s JMU op-ed and the GAS court ruling, Anita Bryant provoked Richmond’s gay community, in a sleeping giant kind of way. 

A local Baptist church on Oct. 8, 1977, sponsored a concert at the University of Richmond, where the antigay zealot, singer and orange juice pitchwoman stopped as part of her Save the Children tour. Opposition to the former Miss Oklahoma sparked the city’s first organized gay rights rally (officially, the Rally for Gay & Lesbian Rights), when several hundred protesters mustered in a rainy Monroe Park on the day of Bryant’s visit. Lenton was among them. 

Two weeks later, activists formed the Richmond Gay Rights Association. By February, there was the Virginia Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Rights, which became the first group to lobby the General Assembly on gender and sexual equality.

Two years after Bryant’s visit, Richmond hosted its first pride celebration, the second ever in the South after Atlanta’s in 1970. On June 23, 1979, 15 or so cars powered a parade from Azalea Mall to Byrd Park, where about 60 people joined the festivities in a reserved picnic shelter. For an after-party, the Richmond Lesbian-Feminists sponsored a dance.

Lenton likely spoke at Richmond’s first pride. He was always speaking. He gave talks to college psychology classes at VCU and William & Mary and to people in city government, at professional conferences and conventions, on TV, radio and even for the Jewish Woman’s Club, which had him out to chat about “The Gay Culture” — unless, the group wrote, “you wish to suggest another title.”

He wrote strongly worded letters to college administrators, professional organizations and congressmen. He urged them to endorse antidiscrimination protections and particularly annoyed former U.S. Rep. David Satterfield III when he accused the Richmond Democrat of being antigay. 

Lenton didn’t even spare J. Crew.

“Back in the day, we used to get catalogs all day, every day, just L.L. Bean, J. Crew,” says Margaret Buchanan (B.F.A.’79), a graphic designer who lived with Lenton for eight years at Mulberry House, the commune Lenton co-founded in the Fan. “They came through the door in droves — people don’t do that print stuff so much anymore — but he would look through those things and fire off a letter to J. Crew and say, ‘I’m not gonna buy any of your products until you start featuring more African American models.’ He was trying to make a point. ‘You need to get this right.’

“He taught me a lot about feminism and standing up for myself and not falling for all these paradigms that we have in our culture about who’s got the power and something worthwhile to say.”

“Our whole lifestyle was radical.”

The old Commonwealth Professional Services building, still a counseling office, at 12 S. Auburn Ave. now bears Lenton’s name. It’s the stucco one with the turquoise trim, across the street from the Babe’s volleyball court and about a mile away from Mulberry House. That’s the commune Lenton started in 1972 to explore “intentional” living and, in part, save on rent. 

A crepe myrtle marks the southwest corner of West Grace and eponymous Mulberry where it stands. Built in 1910, 2701 W. Grace St. is red brick, with a dollhouse balcony and just the garnish of a front yard. At some point after 1987, the house lost the big swordfish that used to be on the side gate.

In the mid-1970s at its peak, Mulberry was home to 20-some people, ages 19 to 40-something, some couples, a few kids and a cat named Soot. The residents’ professions ranged from social worker to ballet dancer to architectural historian. Lenton later made Mulberry the subject of his doctoral dissertation.

“Our whole lifestyle there was radical — and we weren’t quiet about it. People knew about Mulberry House at the time,” says Marilyn Sokolof, that old flame of Lenton’s and a former VCU psychology professor who lived at Mulberry from 1975-78. “And that we were a group of unmarried people living together, and there were gay people. … It was certainly in contrast to the genteel Richmond population — but we weren’t alone.”

The city had a strong arts scene, undergirded by VCU’s art school and a politically aware gay population.

“There was a very strong art culture, and some of [it] supported by very normal, sort of regular, wealthy Richmonders,” Sokolof says. “There was this kind of culture that it was all right to be a little off base, and our group certainly took that to extremes. I don’t remember us going any place and not being served because there were gay people with us. But again, we were going in groups that were mixed groups, so how are they to know who’s gay and who’s not?

“We were kind of relentless ourselves, in terms of our belief in the kind of lifestyle that we were living. And we were out there. Many, though not all of us, looked like hippies. We would have our faces painted and go riding around on our bicycles during the Easter Parade.”

In its day, Mulberry House was bright, bohemian and tidy, with various hazes, and bedrooms like art installations. The dining room was like a great hall, with a great table, under homemade chandeliers. The stairway banister was the mast off a sailing ship.

The Mulberries were vegetarian when at home, made their own yogurt and kept stores of peanut butter and cheap tequila. A schedule determined who cooked and who cleaned. Everyone ate family dinner together, with absences excused and guests announced in advance. They governed themselves on Sundays, and those weekly house meetings could last hours.

Bylaws required a one-year probationary residence before a new member could be made official, and new members, like all house decisions, could be approved only with consensus. “The police thought we were a dope den for a while,” Lenton said in one of the several newspaper stories about Mulberry. “People just don’t know what category to put us in. We defy categories.”

Mulberry House and Lenton’s Awareness Series classes grew out of each other, both, at heart, being about emotional literacy. Lenton had a knack for taking the taboo out of things. 

In the fall 1980, after years of teaching experiential-learning classes and mediating Mulberry House meetings, Lenton made his psychology work official and got credentialed as a licensed professional counselor. He is considered the first openly gay person Virginia “knowingly” licensed as a therapist.

“You could sit in a meeting with him, and people are throwing out all these complicated feelings and ideas and stuff,” Buchanan says. “He could just step in and kind of pull it all together and say, ‘Here’s the kernel and here are some things to, maybe, lead us to a decision,’ or whatever it was that needed happening, or ‘Here’s the question that needs answering.’ In fact, whenever we would have meetings, he would always insist that we list the agenda in the form of a question. ‘What is it that we’re trying to understand better here?’”

“Even now …”

When Mulberry House ended in 1987, it was just time. “People wanted more control over their environment,” Lenton said in an oral history interview. “They didn’t want to come home and deal with some vicarious experience.”

It took the Mulberries a year or so to figure out what to do with the now two houses they owned collectively after the group spread their little demimonde next door in the mid-’70s. From a list of 19 options, the council chose not to “torch it all,” but rather to sell, invest and donate, meeting every year to pick a charity and see old friends. They all grew close during Mulberry’s 15 years. Some of them fell in love. One of them got sick.

“[Stephen] and Lee Merkle bought and renovated houses together, and they became very close,” says Buchanan, who is Mulberry’s archivist and oversaw the donation of the rest of Lenton’s papers to the Virginia Museum of History & Culture. “Lee was a straight man who lived at Mulberry, but I think they really had an intellectual connection that was good for both of them. And then Lee developed a brain tumor.”

That was in 1982.

“We took care of Lee for three years until he died at home, with all of us around,” Buchanan says. “I think it was a very moving, special thing that we did there. But it also kind of wore us out, and we just sort of folded up our tents and walked into the sunset.”

Merkle was 35 years old and a high school English teacher. His friends took turns sleeping by his door, and he had a bicycle horn for when he needed help. Lenton was with him when he died on Oct. 17, 1985.

Lenton later described it as a “magic thing” to be with someone at their end, and he blackly called Merkle’s illness “great training” for the HIV-AIDS epidemic and loss that would dominate his life for the next 16 years.

He counseled people with HIV-AIDS at his Carytown practice, as well as through the Catholic Church, for which he had long volunteered. Bishop Walter Sullivan, who ordained him as a deacon in April 2001, put Lenton in charge of the diocese’s AIDS Task Force. Lenton also led its gay ministry.

As the epidemic worsened into the ’90s, Lenton estimated that AIDS-related work took up 60% of his time. He compiled reports for Sullivan — in which he quoted poetry and wrote vignettes — organized relief efforts, including a trip to Haiti, and talked to parish children. He sat with people as they were dying.

“Over the years,” Lenton wrote in his journal on Sept. 15, 1998, “I have lost more than 50 actual clients to AIDs, that number again among friends and acquaintances, and four times that for people who have received services from community groups with which I volunteered. 

“Perhaps it sounds odd but I thank God for allowing me to be actually holding hands with at least six people at the very final moment of their lives — a very rare and unique experience each time, which makes me thankful for my health and ‘wisdom.’”

Two days after a second test confirmed his HIV diagnosis in May 1994, Lenton wrote in his journal on a mostly cloudy late afternoon: “I cried hard for the first time. What is the sadness? Some vague loss. There is always a period at the end of a sentence, a paragraph, a story — the period is no clearer but somehow closer. Even now it is not all sadness.”

When Stephen Lenton died on Sept. 15, 2001, his friends were holding his hand. He was 60 years old.