The small plaques were wedged in the dirt off the back patio. They had people's names, the year they were born and the year they died - often just inside the brick ranch house on North Greensboro Street.

When McDaniel, now 61, moved in to the Orange Community Residence, he thought someday there would be a plaque for him.

"At one time I was kind of proud," he said. He thought "when I pass away my name will be out there."

For much of the past 15 years, that's what happened to people with AIDS who moved into the six-bed house. They died.

You had to have full-blown AIDS to enter the house and need help with everyday activities like feeding yourself and taking your medicine. You also couldn't have anyone else who might be able to help.

"Your family had turned its back on you, or your partner had died before you and there was no one to fill that gap," said Jacquelyn Clymore, the state AIDS director and former director of Raleigh-based Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina.

Most residents stayed less than a year before they died or were transferred to a hospital or other setting. Many stayed shorter.

"I can remember many times the ambulance pulled up to the door and the patient stood up with assistance and would walk through the door," said John Paul Womble, the alliance's current director.

"We'd roll the stretcher in and the patient would get back on the stretcher and we'd roll them in - because the rule was you had to be able to walk through the door."

Doll babies

McDaniel was 4 or 5 years old when he realized he was different from other boys.

"My cousins used to laugh," he said. "'Raymond,' they'd say, 'you always loved the doll babies.'"

"My mama used to say, 'I don't care what he is; that's my sissy,'" he said. "I just look back at those days and laugh to myself. My mom, she was really religious, but she didn't let nobody talk down on me."

McDaniel cooked for hotels and a rest home in Greensboro. He never knew his former lover had HIV. They were together 11 years, but after he died, McDaniel figured it out.

"They told me it was walking pneumonia," he said. "As I got older, I said, yeah, it was the virus. His family, I don't know if they knew themselves, but they never told me."

He stares blankly when asked what he knew about protecting himself from the virus. It was a long time ago.

"I never had the faintest idea that this would have occurred," he said. "I was with the same partner."

'My whole life'

Womble has been HIV positive for so long that he can't remember exactly how long.

"17, 18, 19, 20 ... it seems like my whole life," he said. "I was 23 or 24 when I was infected. I'm 42 now."

Sunlight streams in from the big picture window behind him. He's sitting on a beige couch in the Orange Community Residence's living room. Newt Gingrich is pitching his new book to the ladies on "The View."

As director, Womble oversees the alliance's two homes and other programs and about $2.7 million in state and federal funding that pays for services for people with HIV and AIDS in an 11-county region.

His own experience with AIDS mirrors that of the people he now serves.

He took up to 16 pills a day early on. Today he swallows just two pills at bedtime. His viral load is undetectable, and his T-cell count, a measure of the body's immune system, is almost normal.

Womble noticed a change in the Carrboro house a few years ago as well. Residents who once would have died were getting well enough to move out. Some went to the alliance's Husted House in Wake County, which has became a more informal family group home as residents no longer need the care they once did.

At the same time, AIDS is no longer the principal reason many patients are being referred to Orange Community Residence. Instead many coming from UNC, Duke and other places have multiple diagnoses: substance abuse, post traumatic stress disorder, severe mental illness.

"And then, 'Oh yeah, by the way they have HIV,'" Womble said.

Stomach cancer

McDaniel sits on the edge of his bed and clenches his eyes as he remembers the pain.

He was living in a group home for men with AIDS in Smithfield when stomach cancer forced him to move in to the Orange Community Residence.

"I couldn't keep nothing down," he said, his eyes watering. "I was so weak, I would mess my bed."

The chemo made his thick hair fall out. He lost weight. He lies down to show he would curl his body toward the pillow and how an aide would have to prop him up to feed him.

A wheelchair, walker and cane hooked around the closet door line the bedroom wall, as McDaniel slowly improved and traded one for the next.

The doctor says the cancer is gone. His HIV load is undetectable, and insulin keeps his diabetes under control.

"I really give this place a lot of credit," he said. "They give me my medicine. They give me my meals. If I hadn't come here I'd probably be dead."

A few months ago the Orange Community Residence pulled the plaques out of the dirt behind the house. McDaniel, who once thought his name would join the others, said the garden had started looking like a cemetery, when all the residents really wanted to see were the flowers and the trees.

His mother died at 83, and he's not sure what comes next.

"I always wanted to open a restaurant. That vision never leaves me," he said. And he'd like to visit Jamaica someday, because his mother used to tell him how blue the water was.

"I am grateful," he said. "I am a blessed child, to be 61. I been through a lot of things that should have taken me away from here. I guess God put his arms all around me."