Jad Abumrad

When his mom died, it was so bad that Oliver Sipple's father didn't let him go to the funeral.

And because he sort of – he had so few people I guess at the end and because there weren't –

You know, a lot of news articles about him and because a lot of people in the gay community from that time have died because of the AIDS crisis.

It was really hard to find out what happened to Oliver Sippel in those last five years of his life.

And the only way we could was because when we were talking to Daniel Lutzer, he mentioned this interview that he did with this guy named Wayne Friday.

He was a friend of Oliver's.

Wayne died last year, but Daniel still had the transcript of their conversation about Oliver Sipple's last days.

And so... We found an actor, the very gifted Gordon Pinsent, and we had him read it for us.

This story was reported by Latif Nasser and Tracy Hunt.

It was produced by Matt Kielty and Annie McKeown with Latif and Tracy.

Special thanks to Bruce T.H.

Burke, to Stacey Davis at the Gerald Ford Presidential Library, to the GLBT Historical Society, Stephanie Arias at the Huntington Library, James Crammond, who's Gordon Pinson's agent, and as long as we're on the subject of Gordon, the actor you heard just ending the piece, wow.

Wow, yeah.

Just wow.

Yeah, thank you to Gordon.

Special thanks also to Alan Jones, Denny Meyer, and Floyd Abrams.

Thank you all.

We had original music in this story.

We used a lot of music from a guy named Patrick Cowley.

He was a guy who grew up in Buffalo, moved to San Francisco in the 70s like Oliver Sipple.