A woman who cared for over 1,000 gay men who were dying of AIDS and abandoned by their families has reflected on her legacy and impact, insisting she is ‘no angel’ — ‘just a person’ who wanted to do the right thing.
Ruth Coker Burks, 62, from Hot Springs, Arkansas, opened up about her accidental call to activism during an interview with Today in honor of LGBTQ Pride Month and the 40-year anniversary of the beginning of the HIV and AIDS epidemic in 1981.
The real estate agent-turned-AIDS advocate was 26 years old and had only heard rumors about the disease when she encountered her first AIDS patient at a local hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1986.
Candid: Ruth Coker Burks, 62, from Hot Springs, Arkansas, opened up about how she cared for hundreds of gay men dying of AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s during an interview with Today
Legacy: Over the courses of a decade, Coker Burks buried nearly 40 AIDS victims in her family’s cemetery and became known as the ‘Cemetery Angel’
Coker Burks was serving as an interpreter for her friend Bonnie, who had her tongue removed while battling oral cancer, when she noticed a door across the hall that had a red ‘biohazard’ tarp taped over the entrance and a group of nurses unwilling to enter.
‘I had been in hospitals a lot of times and so I thought that was really bizarre,’ she recalled. ‘The nurses were literally drawing straws to see who would go in and check on this person.
‘They would draw straws and it’d be best out of three, and then they didn’t like that and so then it’d be best two out of three, and then no one would end up going in to check in on this person. They just walked away.’
Coker Burks, a single mother of one, snuck into the room to see who was in there, a decision that changed the course of her life forever. She said the man was so frail that she ‘couldn’t tell the difference between him and the bedsheets.’
Looking back: Coker Burks was a 26 years old single mom when she encountered her first AIDS patient while visiting a friend at a local hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1986
‘I went over to the bed and I didn’t know what to do but I took his hand and I said, “Honey, what can I do for you?”‘ she explained. ‘He looked up at me and he didn’t have any more tears to cry. He was so dehydrated there was nothing left to produce any tears. But he looked up at me and he said he wanted his mama.’
Coker Burks remembered how she went to speak to the nurses, thinking she would be able to get the man’s mother to come to the hospital. They actually backed away from her because she had been inside the blocked-off room.
Kind: After coming across an AIDS patient named Jimmy who crying for his mother, Coker Burks stayed with him until he died
They told her that no one was coming to see the patient — Jimmy — who had been in the hospital for six weeks without any visitors, and they warned her not to go back to see him.
She ignored the nurses and took it upon herself to call Jimmy’s mother, who initially refused to speak to her. It wasn’t until she threatened to put Jimmy’s obituary in the local paper that the woman finally took her call.
‘My son died years ago when he went gay,’ his mom told her. ‘I don’t know what thing you have at that hospital but that’s not my son.’
Jimmy’s story wasn’t uncommon in the 1980s and 1990s, a time when many gay men who were diagnosed with HIV and AIDS were abandoned by their families and left to die alone.
After speaking to Jimmy’s mother, Coker Burks decided to stay by his side for 13 hours until he died the next day.
With no family to make arrangements for him, nurses insisted that she take the body, explaining the hospital morgue wouldn’t accept it out of fear the other bodies would get contaminated.
Coker Burks struggled to find a funeral home that would take Jimmy, but she was eventually able to get him cremated. With the help of her young daughter Allison, she had a makeshift funeral and buried Jimmy’s ashes above her late father’s coffin.
Hero: Coker Burks continued to work with HIV and AIDS patients over the next decade, befriending drag queens and becoming an advocate for those battling the disease
Memories: Coker Burks is pictured with her best friend Billy, who died of AIDS at age 24
She returned to her day job selling timeshares, but as the number of gay men contracting HIV and getting sick with AIDS in Arkansas increased, nurses started giving them her number.
Coker Burks never refused a call and would always comfort the men in their final hours, just like she had done for Jimmy. She found them places to live, cooked for them, and worked to get them disability payments.
She became an expert on HIV and AIDS, reading everything she could about the disease. She even learned to take blood samples as she urged people to get tested.
Her advocacy made her a social pariah, and she was shunned by everyone from her best friend to her church congregation. Sometimes she woke up to find that the Ku Klux Klan had burned a cross on her lawn.
But she didn’t let that stop her from her work, and she forged strong bonds with the people she helped. While teaching sex-ed at gay bars, she became best friends with a drag queen named Billy.
Incredible: Coker Burks became an expert on HIV and AIDS, reading everything she could about the disease. She even learned to take blood samples as she urged people to get tested
Looking back: Coker Burks buried her last AIDS patient in 1995 as medical care for those battling the disease improved
‘I had never even heard of a drag queen,’ she admitted, ‘but I would stand by the stage with my dollars, I wouldn’t even go back to my chair, I was just handing out dollars all night, thinking to myself these are the most fabulous creatures I’ve ever met in my life.’
Before Billy succumbed to AIDS at age 24, he gave a talk to Allison’s class — a sign that people were becoming more accepting of gay men.
Published: Coker Burks shared her incredible story in her book All The Young Men, which was published in December 2020
Coker Burks buried nearly 40 AIDS victims in her family’s cemetery and helped hundreds of others over the years, earning her the nickname ‘Cemetery Angel.’
She also lobbied Bill Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas, and he championed AIDS funding and research after he became president in 1993.
Coker Burks shared her incredible story in her book All The Young Men, which was published in December 2020.
‘It’s about friendships and it’s about having the very worst of situations and turning it into something else,’ she said. ‘It’s about kindness and stepping through the door, whatever the door is. It’s a fear that you override.
‘Whatever fear you have and you just walk into that room, because everybody always asked me what made me walk into that room. To me, it was a voice of God saying, “Go in there. It’s going to be OK.”‘
Coker Burks told Today that the men she helped taught her how to live life to the fullest, even when faced with death.
‘Oh no, my guys lived until the day they died. I learned more about living from the dying than I ever learned about dying with the dying,’ she said, adding: ‘Hope was all they had. That was it.’