Designer, writer, activist, muse, bodhisattva.
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Satori
My generation is inbetween those who loved before and after AIDS. I know too many men who have died at the hands of AIDS and HIV-related illnesses, yet I don’t regard a poz status as something akin to leprosy or the plague. Having dated, fucked and loved during the time of AIDS, I am not opposed to dating, fucking or loving someone who is poz. I know many older men who can also look beyond an illness and see a man who is capable of loving and love at the same time. Younger men, however, see HIV and AIDS as an abomination of such disease and filth that anything but a negative status equals eternal exile.
Lyricism appears in the strangest of places.
I met a 25-year-old online for the possibility of something casual, like donning a pair of ill-fitting pants. Between his best attempts of kissing me, which I thought of more as renditions of Lionel Richie ballads than one really good song by The Jesus and Mary Chain, he finished his latest diatribe of all the boyfriends he’s met online and fucked within a span of three days each. I asked him if he ever dated a guy who was positive. He stopped everything he was doing to me – thank God – and looked at me like a deer caught in headlights. Are you positive? he asked me. No, I am not, and when was the last time you were tested? He couldn’t remember.
I met another younger man that I am now dating, and he was unapologetic in his views toward HIV, which I encouraged him to openly express without fear of backfire. Positive men scare him, and he’s never known anyone who died of AIDS. Like the 25-year-old, he is terrified at the thought of dating someone who is poz. Unlike the 25-year-old, he got tested. Negative. So rare a moment in the English language when a word such as negative can produce such a magnanimous effort of relief.
I recently got tested for HIV and STDs. Confidential rather than Anonymous, and I based this decision on the fact that were I to test positive, I would want to make sure that any strain or possible infection I may carry would lend itself to research or connecting one gay man to another. The test for HIV required only a drop of blood and twenty minutes in a solution to detect antibodies. The counselor, whom I met one night at a bar as a friend of a friend, talked with me about establishing a healthy support group were I to test positive. I’m not worried about that, I told him, I have many friends who love and cherish me, and my status wouldn’t affect their feelings for me one iota. I know this in my soul. I confessed that my biggest concern about a preliminary positive would be discussing the results with a younger man I am dating, especially when I know that he, like others in his generation, would not think twice to shun me because I might run the risk of dying a little bit faster than everyone else. Yes, we are all going to die, but the idea that HIV or AIDS causes the end of the line to approach at an increased rate is ignorance and fear; nothing more.
Twenty minutes later, and the results were ready. Negative. My STD results would arrive in one week, as the blood samples must be sent to the lab for testing. I could call a number, provide my case number, supply a password, and receive my results over the phone. First the internet, and now office bureaucracy. Where will convenience end?
My jeune beau was relieved to know that I am Negative, but the very conversation caused his voice to strain with emotion to mask the fear I could hear so clearly in his mind. I am not badmouthing him for how he felt or what he thinks, because he is an adult and fully capable of independent thought. And like my generation, time will allow him to reconcile his fear of HIV and AIDS, and he will learn to accept and love people into his life without regard of status. Or not. It’s not my course in life to chart.
One day a year, unity is a celebration to parade. One day a year, illness is given solemn grace. Between the two days lies a straight line. And somewhere tonight online, a 25-year-old is looking for a clean body to love.
Thursday, 2005 March 10