Physician's life has taken many unexpected turns

By John Przybys
Review-Journal

      Jerry Cade is known throughout Nevada as a physician who treats people with HIV and AIDS, as co-founder of the HIV/AIDS unit at University Medical Center and UMC's director of HIV services, as a political activist and as a member of the President's Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS.
      He has enthusiasm to burn, a great sense of humor and a tendency to not take himself too seriously. All of which is good, considering the new entry he'll be making on his eclectic resume next week.
      Impersonator of Canadian songstress Celine Dion.
      On Tuesday, Cade, 43, will don gown and wig and lip-sync -- even he concedes that hearing him sing will benefit nobody -- at a fund-raiser for Parents & Friends of Lesbians and Gays. The benefit will be from 7 to 9:30 p.m. at Inferno, 3340 S. Highland Drive. Tickets are $50.
      And if that performance isn't a big enough life event, Cade recently entered into a formal, legal union -- like a marriage, if you will -- with Chris Khamis, PFLAG's vice president who, incidentally, will be joining Cade onstage as Barbra Streisand during the group's benefit.
      These events are surprising since putting down roots in Las Vegas was the last thing on Cade's mind when he moved here in 1981, fresh from a medical internship in Los Angeles. He came to Las Vegas to work off a two-year commitment to the U.S. Public Health Service for financial aid he received during medical school.
      Cade grew up in Texas, in a small town near Lubbock, and attended college at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in Dallas.
      He'd already come out when he was 19.
      "Since the day I figured I was gay, I've been out," Cade says. Because Austin is a liberal oasis in a conservative state, "nobody cared," he recalls.
      "I also came out with my first lover," Cade continues. "I tell people that I was so in love that, by the time I figured out I wasn't supposed to like myself, it was too late. It was later on that I figured out, `Huh. A lot of people don't think this is cool.' "
      When he began working at a North Las Vegas family practice clinic, he found the region to be less liberal than he was accustomed to. In 1981, Nevada's sodomy law was still in effect, Cade says, noting his original plan was to return to Los Angeles in 1983 when his health service hitch was up.
      But the accidental Nevadan met "some incredibly good people" here and has become impressed with "how much we have moved into the 21st century and become a much more enlightened city."
      Another reason he decided to stick around was the arrival of HIV and AIDS to Southern Nevada. Cade admitted his first HIV/AIDS patient to University Medical Center in August 1985, he says, "and that's when we really started actively trying to organize things to make sure people were taken care of."
      There were no other local programs before the hospital opened its first clinic for HIV/AIDS patients almost 12 1/2 years ago, he notes.
      Cade remembers his first hospitalized AIDS patient. "I'm not blaming the hospital for this, because this was the standard of care back then and this hospital very eagerly changed, but there was a sign on this guy's room (requiring) mask, gown, gloves, walking in in a space suit, basically. All I could think of was, it's got to be horrible to be sick and die, but it's got to be infinitely worse to be sick and die alone, without somebody sitting there, holding your hand, touching you."
      He decided not to wear the extra gear, and others at the hospital quickly followed his example.
      The medical community's response to HIV/AIDS during those early years "was mixed," Cade says. "There were physicians who didn't return my phone calls when they knew they were going to get HIV patients. But, for every one of them, there were two others who I'd never sent a patient to who called me and said, `We'd be happy to help.' "
      Soon, working with HIV/AIDS patients began to overtake Cade's work as a family practitioner. The shift took Cade by surprise.
      "I liked family practice. That was my background," he says. "And in those early days, none of our patients had insurance or money, and it was my family practice that was supporting my ability to see all the patients that had HIV disease.
      "But it was about '90 or '91 that I realized that every conference I'd been to for a year had something to do with AIDS and that I hadn't done a general family practice-update in a long time. So, it was time to focus."
      For several years, Cade has devoted his practice solely to people with HIV or AIDS. What Cade half-jokingly calls "the big, cosmic joke" in all this is that he didn't even want to take an oncology elective in medical school.
      "I said, `I don't want to deal with dying patients. I'm going to be a family practitioner and I'm going to have a young healthy practice,' and they let me get by with it," Cade says, laughing.
      Cade's political activism stems, at least in part, from what he has seen while treating HIV/AIDS patients. If nothing else, he says, "the disease and the attendant discrimination in the early days forced you to be politically active."
      In December 1995, Cade's political activism reached a new level when he was sworn in as a member of President Clinton's Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS. Cade says he has fewer frustrations with the process than some of his colleagues because he understands government moves slowly.
      "My personal goal is to move the agenda a little bit, not a lot. Austin was kind of a college radical town and I used to go and march and protest, but I remember somewhere along the way figuring out that even though I may think and feel all those things, I didn't fix anything by doing all that. I fix things better by my trying to say, `OK, well, I can't move them this far, so I'll at least move them a little bit.' "
      Although he's one of the most high-profile members of Southern Nevada's gay community, Cade says he's never thought about the effect, either pro or con, his openness might have on either his professional work or the political efforts in which he has been involved.
      "By the time I started reflecting on those issues, I was already very comfortable being out. It was way too late," he says. "It's kind of late to build a closet after you're out of it, I guess.
      "A lot of my professional friends are closeted, and I'm not saying they don't have a point, but their point is: Is this going to hurt my business? Does it matter in my business? I'm not sure I completely disagree with them. It's just that my own experience has been that my colleagues I don't think care.
      "They want to know if I'm a good doctor and how well I take care of patients and if I'm fun at parties," he says, laughing. "But other than that, I don't think they care."
      Cade pauses, smiles, and adds, "And I'm not boring at parties."
      Oh, about that performance as Celine Dion. Cade says entertainer Kenny Kerr, who will be master of ceremonies at the benefit, has been a friend for years. "Every Halloween, he says, `Jerry, I'll give you a gown and dress you up.' I don't have any problems putting on a dress. It's just that I didn't think I'd look very good," Cade says, adding, "And I don't. I think we've proven I was right."
      Meanwhile, Cade's union with Khamis became formal Dec. 31 with a ceremony in Hawaii, the only state that offers something legally akin to marriage to same-sex couples.
      In addition to a commitment service conducted on Maui, Cade and Khamis filed a petition for reciprocal benefits "which is tantamount to a marriage anywhere else," Cade says. While valid in Hawaii, the legal document is "not necessarily invalid anywhere else, but it's untested in the other 49 states."
      Cade and Khamis have been together since June, but had known each other for about a year before that when they met at a benefit at the Cyber City Cafe.
      "We're both into computers -- my job, his hobby," says Khamis, who works for a company that provides Internet service. "So we really meshed well early on."
      "We have this very exciting life," Cade says. "We sit around the house and play with the computer."
      On weekends, they also play dad to four children, ages 7 to 12 who, Cade says, "needed somebody to be `dad.' " Cade and Khamis say they've talked about raising their own kids someday, too.
      And Cade doesn't intend to leave town anytime soon. But what about those plans to return to Los Angeles?
      Cade laughs. "You know, L.A. already has enough rowdy radicals."