Michael Onstatt, Stephen Berman, James & Ila Mae Eagleton
Can we forget the Three's Company
jokes? In the two decades they've shared as a family of lovers,
Michael Onstott, 48, James Eagleton, 59, and Steven Berman, 50, have
heard it all, thanks.
When I ask Onstott, who's been HIV positive for 17 years and runs
the nonprofit National AIDS Nutrient Bank out of their home, if he
ever gets any trouble in his little Northern California town of
Guerneville, he just says that they've "developed a thick skin." If
anyone does have a problem with these three, they have to get past
Ila Mae Eagleton first. Mother Eagleton, 79, couldn't be happier
with her three sons -- after all, she has shacked up with them since
1980.
What's their secret, when many of us can't even find one Mr. or
Ms. Right? This is how the threesome happened: Eagleton, a student
of Aryuvedic medicine long before Deepak Chopra was the toast of the
publishing world, and Onstott had been together eight years when
Berman appeared on the scene. Eagleton was trading homeopathic
recipes with a young woman on a bus bound for a spiritual retreat.
"When I heard him talking about the remedy anacardium," says Berman,
a most unlikely tax and financial services adviser, "I knew that I
had to get to know him."
Eagleton was nervous about introducing his lover to his lover,
but Onstott put the situation in perspective. Berman recalls, "He
said, 'Well, I can put up with you if you can put up with me.' I
felt like I had walked through the looking glass." And they had.
Soon, Onstott began to show signs of infection. "It was 1982,
before HIV was discovered," Eagleton says. "We didn't know if it was
contagious. I thought all four of us, my mother included, might end
up with AIDS. Should we have separate dishes? Was it safe to bathe
in the same tub?"
Onstott survived the viral wonderland and is here today, he says,
because he used natural medicine for so long before hopping on the
protease bandwagon. The three men say they feel at ease supporting
each other during medical crises. And Mother Eagleton agrees.
"Living with three men who really love each other gives me a
sense of security," she says. "Each has a mind of his own, but so do
I."
