I was just budding into puberty and starting to feel the feelings of who I am when the AIDS crisis struck. Already scared and slapped back by the kids at school who seemed to know before I did, now what I felt inside was branded by a horrifying plague with no cure.
Today on World Aids Day I am reminded of the incalculable ripples of how HIV/AIDS affected my own life and the lives of everyone around me during my lifetime. I am reminded how it changed the world in ways we still haven’t fully accounted for or grappled with as a whole.
In the early 1980s I was already scared of who I was and what it meant. All indications were that society would reject me. My church said I would be cast into the lake of fire without passing “Go” or collecting my $200. Even Jesus could not save me from this.
Then the preacher began talking about how AIDS killed the soul as well as the body – that it was Almighty God’s ultimate punishment for disobeying the number one commandment that existed for all of mankind. Don’t be a dirty, disgusting faggot.
TV, newspapers and magazines in the 1980s had myriad news stories of famous celebrities of the day going down from the Gay Cancer one after another. People made ignorant gallows humor at the water coolers and family gatherings. Politicians waged social wars on gays with their new cudgel of disease.
My parents, family and seemingly all around me would comment about how this should be a warning to anyone who even thought about “choosing to be gay”. It was yet another black mark, and a huge one.
I wanted to cry and express my sadness, but feared I could not for being thought of as one of those gays. The few times in my teenage years when I had feelings for a friend or classmate, let alone experiment sexually – the experience was overshadowed with the fears of death of mind body and soul.
The HIV/AIDS crisis marred, blackened and irreparably altered what might have otherwise been a natural but bumpy path of discovery, truth and coming of age.
Long story short, all of this going on in my formative years quite frankly kept me scared straight. I put bigger locks on my closet, pushed my feelings deftly into alcohol and drugs, and did my best to be the man society told me I must be or else. I tried desperately to pray it away and be “normal”.
Decades later a lifetime of lies, self loathing, unmet yearning to be who I am and the battles with alcoholism finally broke me. I came out at age 47, effectively detonating a nuclear bomb on the life and family I knew and loved. It was devastating, heartbreaking and just wrong in so many ways. Yes the truth set me free, but 35 years of living the lies took their toll on me and the family I had built.
While less common, my story is not unique. I’ve met many others who managed to survive the plague simply being too scared to take the risk of living as they truly were. I have be to grateful I didn’t contract HIV/AIDS back then as I likely would not be here to share the seemingly small-ball story of how bad it made me feel.
After all, I was lucky. I had the luxury of changing the channel or turning of off. I didn’t have immediate family, a lover or a close friend who’s life was devastated by AIDS back in the day. I didn’t have the immediate fear of dying myself from it. Do I have survivor’s guilt sometimes? Maybe.
The bottom line is that each of us has our own story that is one of millions that affected billions. For those of us who survived whether we are HIV positive or not, AIDS has left a mark on our society that’s so vast we cannot even see it anymore – if that makes any sense.
Generations that have come since are largely insulated and sometimes indifferent from the horrors of this past. Their present is however shaped by it in ways they can see and ways they cannot. We have today a workaround, a treatment, a prevention that allows life to move forward.
I am thankful to God that for the younger generations their natural path of true self, discovery, love and coming of age has at least one less boogeyman in it. For me however the survivor’s instinct drives me to somehow participate in the acts to educate, prevent and see they have a clearer path than we did.
This is why I share, why I actively participate in my community to promote things like testing and things like PrEP. It’s why I act sometimes like a docent at a museum when talking to men of all ages I meet in the play spaces, encouraging them to take a role in their own self preservation. It’s why I do my best to walk my talk. Does it right the past? Who knows. It feels like it rights today.
Smoker of fine tires, eater of natural foods, connoisseur of aromatic leathers, pusher of limits.