Patrick Cowley Thank God for Music (1981)
Patrick Cowley, generally considered one of the pioneers of electronic dance music (along with Giorgio Moroder), released today’s song on his sophomore album Megatron Man in 1981.
His songs made it onto Billboard charts and were played in the clubs of his chosen hometown of San Francisco, but Cowley only went on to release one more album before he died as one of the early victims of the AIDS crisis in Ronald Reagan’s America, which in the last two decades of the 20th century claimed about 500,000 lives across the country. The health crisis and lack of accurate public information in the US caused the stigma of both homosexuality and the AIDS virus to spike during the 80s and 90s. But among all the devastation this caused, there were also people like Ruth Coker Burks.
After the 25-year-old timeshare salesperson and single mother found herself confronted with the loneliness of a man dying of AIDS at her local hospital in Arkansas in 1984, Ruth Coker Burks spent the next decade helping dozens of men dying of AIDS in her local community: She provided food and emotional care for those fallen ill and the people around them, and even buried some of the men she cared for in her family’s graveyard plots when their own families didn’t want their bodies.
Even as someone merely connected to the queer scene, she was at the time controversial enough that the KKK burned not one but two crosses in her front yard. Despite the backlash, Ruth Coker Burks’ support never wavered and went on beyond the end of the AIDS crisis in her state: Today, she is in her 60s, still lives in Arkansas, and still advocates for LGBT rights. In her local queer community, she’s been nicknamed “The Cemetery Angel.”
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