Week 4 Day 6

 

“You see him?” she whispered, “He’s a fag. Look how thin and sick he is. “

My Nana was referring to a man walking into the grocery store as we were walking out when the AIDS epidemic had just hit. Even more viral than the disease was the propaganda suggesting it only affected fags and junkies.

At the time, it seemed no one was doing anything about AIDS except quarantine and disposal of the infected. If you were gay, AIDS was a guarantee. How, why and where were all variable, but the when was definitive.

Even as a young kid, I had feelings towards boys. I thought it would pass. I prayed it would, and occasionally there were crushes on girls just as unsatisfactory and torturous as the ones I had for the boys. Glimmers of hope I was simply confused faded with time and one day I woke up with a secret; I was gay.

Along with the standard issue awkwardness of puberty was the intense hyper-self-criticism. Every movement I made and sound out of my mouth was internally scrutinized and deemed a failure.

Like ninety percent of the country, much of my family subscribed to the idea that some slutty flight attendant fucked a monkey in a Sub-Saharan orgy and brought an epidemic back with him. And because of their age, they watched a lot of news and I constantly heard how Act-Up demonstrators were miserable assholes and all the fags got what they deserved.

With nothing to quell the fear, I watched the whispering and finger-pointing infect the majority and those who needed help the most went completely ignored.

Outside of my mother and her mother was my extended family on the frontlines. They were losing loved ones and the waves of death never let the grief process progress past shock.

The horrifying things coming out of the mouths of the matriarchs were embarrassing and I would wonder how such smart, strong women were so scared and stupid.

I wasn’t the only gay in my family; my uncle, who everyone loved, was one too. It was something no one talked about. His sexuality was not the pink elephant in the room, it was the hypocrisy of those that welcomed him in and told him how he would die a painful, lonely death.

After being confronted with my uncle’s sexuality, my Nana realized this thing was in her home now. When I came out, my mother and Nana were horrified. While my mom got busy finding someone to blame, my Nana just became quiet about it and has stayed that way… mostly.

My mother, finding no allies in the fight to save her denial, nested in the delusion that one day I’d find a good woman to fuck the gay out of me. Hopefully, she’d be Jewish.

When I was sixteen, I decided to volunteer for APLA. I found an amazing group of people working for nearly nothing. It wasn’t just fags and PFLAG members. It was people like my grandmother, but a few steps ahead. People who woke up from their fearful nightmares to find they could offer something more than rumors and speculation.

Everyone there asked me if I had been tested and I did it to shut them up. They told me it was important to get tested every six months, and to stay on that schedule no matter what. And I have… mostly.

Every time I get tested, I ask the people in the van or the clinic how many positives they get, and they always say the numbers are growing. They say it’s not just because of consistent budget cuts, but the persistent stigma of the disease.

The biggest jump in new cases is among heterosexual woman. Keeping secrets have become part of the culture and of those women who join the ranks of the infected, most of them got it from having sex with a man who had sex with another man and decided to protect his pride instead of another person.

It’s getting more and more difficult to find men who are HIV negative. Of those that say they are, some haven’t been tested in years and some are just lying.

Some people still think you can get it from a toilet seat, but those tend to be the same people that stand behind the idea the world is flat because they can only grasp gravity as up and down, not in and out.

The A in AIDS stands for Acquired, not Assigned.

Just in case you need it: http://www.hivtest.org/

B