"Next to die was Tom Wirth in August 1987. Tom, initially a friend of Carl Miller, loved visiting Butterworth Farm, and I was one of several people who equally enjoyed visiting him in New York City. His Lower East Side apartment was a funky walkup without a working door buzzer system, so you had to call Tom from a public phone nearby and then he came to the window and threw down the key on a very long string, pulling the key back up after you unlocked the entranceway door. Visitors to that iconic New York apartment – beautifully put together despite its minuscule size – enjoyed scintillating conversation, comfortable well-worn furniture, excellent meals cooked by Tom and his lover Gene Bowman in their tiny kitchen, and a sophisticated record collection. I’m not a music buff, but I remember him playing some Nina Simone tunes for me.
AIDS impacted Tom’s brain, and he fell totally and completely silent. When this happened, and he was clearly in decline, I went to visit him. He had broken up with Gene before becoming ill, and he was living by himself with help from friends and neighbors. I sat alone with him and told him how much I and others at the farm loved him. I recalled some of the good times we had together. I think he heard what I was saying, but I don’t know for sure. It was all very disturbing. ...
Tom became so ill that he was hospitalized at Bellevue. In a failed attempt to get him home – as he would have wanted – his legal guardian and friend, John Evans, went to court. A New York Post photographer made his way into Tom’s hospital room, and a large photo of Tom was placed on the front page of the New York Post with a sensational headline, giving him some bizarre fame via this tragic illness. The court case made him famous enough to get this obituary in the New York Times on August 22, 1987:
Thomas Wirth, Sought the Legal Right to Die
Thomas Wirth, a New York City man who had urged doctors not to take extraordinary measures to prevent his death from AIDS, died Thursday at Bellevue Hospital from an AIDS-related brain infection. He was 47 years old.
Mr. Wirth became the focus of a court battle last month when a legal guardian whom he had appointed filed suit to force doctors at Bellevue to discontinue drug treatments and allow Mr. Wirth to die.
The guardian, John Evans, who was Mr. Wirth's neighbor in the East Village, based his case on a ''living will'' that Mr. Wirth drafted with a lawyer in April. The document stated that Mr. Wirth wished to be allowed to die without extraordinary medical measures if he could not be restored to a ''meaningful quality of life.''
On July 27, however, Judge Dawn A. Sandifer of State Supreme Court in Manhattan ruled that Bellevue doctors could continue Mr. Wirth's treatment. Although Mr. Wirth's instructions were clear and binding as far as a terminal illness was concerned, Judge Sandifer wrote it had not been proven that Mr. Wirth's brain infection, which was treatable, was itself “without hope.”
A decent obituary about Tom’s life was written by his friend John Evans and published in a local city weekly. He described Tom as a “handsome man, tall and with a regal bearing; he had beautiful gray-green eyes, dark curly hair with a full, but well-trimmed beard which he wore for at least twenty years,” and told how the judge could not be convinced that “quality of life” was “probably his prime concern. All his life, he had remained on the edge of society, picking and choosing what he liked.” He recounted that his ashes were taken “to a farm in Massachusetts. He visited there each year. It is a beautiful spot and on a particularly beautiful spot, a flowering crabapple tree was planted to mark where we spread the ashes….In his suffering, he did a great service for the gay community and for all persons who wish to die in peace and dignity.” At our intimate ceremony at Butterworth,
