The blinds were drawn.” At 8 pm, they forced open his bedroom door and found him in bed, alone and unresponsive. “I went down to the garden in back and looked toward Thom’s window. “Starting around midday, I felt there was something terribly wrong,” Bill Schuessler later told the news blog SFGate. A few hours later, his housemates got up, had breakfast together and went about their business. Gunn let the caller in, took the man into his bedroom and closed the door. A decade after meth use peaked, what can the sheer resilience of one generation offer the next?Īt around 6 am on Sunday, April 25, 2004, the doorbell rang at the house that the poet Thom Gunn shared with his lover and two friends in San Francisco. For many gay men, meth spoiled the pleasures of drugs in the way that AIDS had spoiled sex.