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NOTE FROM PAM: While Gay Men’s HIV Awareness & Testing Day was a couple of days ago (Sept 27), the fact is that every day should be an awareness and testing day because of the severe impact of HIV/AIDS in communities of color.
According to recent data distributed by the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis & Malaria (GBC), men who have sex with men (“MSM”) account for almost half of the one million people living with HIV in the US. In addition, MSM account for more than half of all new HIV infections in the US and MSM are the only risk group in which new HIV infections are increasing — and many are unaware of their status.
Actor Doug Spearman (known to most of you from his work on “Noah’s Arc”) has contributed this guest post to the Blend and discusses how HIV/AIDS went from a front burner issue to the topic some segments of the LGBT community often relegates to the back burner — as if, Doug says, it’s a problem of the last century — even as it spreads like wildfire in minority communities at this moment.
The bubble burst a long, long time ago.
By Doug Spearman
On the night I turned 28, my best friend Jeff and I stood in my kitchen in Boston at 3am in the morning swaying in our after-bar drunkenness making the messiest peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and giggling about the night. I remember he turned away from me and said over his shoulder, “I have something to tell you.”
There was a pop. I don’t think Jeff heard it, but I did. It was tiny and soft like a soap bubble. That gilded bubble of safety and “not us” had burst. I knew what he was going to say, and I knew that he didn’t want to so I licked the peanut butter off my fingers and said if for him. “You’re HIV positive, aren’t you?” He turned around and wouldn’t look at me. So I hugged him. Immediately and as hard as I possibly could.
It dawned on me at that moment that we, two guys who’d been friends since our freshmen year at Indiana University way back in l980, had been dancing on the edge for a long, long time – like Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed doing the Charleston on a moving gym floor in “It’s A Wonderful Life.” Jeff had fallen in and I was still waving my arms in the air trying to keep my balance.
Since that night, September 3rd l989, science and society have come a long way. There aren’t as many death notices in the gay papers anymore. My friends aren’t fading and falling like autumn leaves and turning into dried out versions of themselves. No one seems to be embroidering memorial quilts anymore. There don’t seem to be many people with the same haunted look walking down the streets of Boystown anymore.
Being HIV positive isn’t the death sentence it used to be thanks to medications. Instead, leafing through Out and The Advocate, you see people taking charge of their positive destinies, mountain climbing, and biking, and LIVING with exuberance and resignation through HIV. One of my ex’s was even the poster boy – the blonde world traveler, matched canvas bags in tow – for a drug that gave him nightmares and night sweats.
For a time in the 1990s you couldn’t go anywhere, especially here in Hollywood, without seeing a red ribbon pinned to chest of a celebrity. I remember when my boss at CBS started wearing a small red ribbon brooch that was made of rubies. All I could think of was that the disease that was killing and crippling my people had become fashionable. You don’t see a lot of red ribbons anymore, do you? We’ve moved on to white ones, because now that AIDS has been dealt with we’ve moved on to marriage.
The truth is society, gay and straight, seems to think of AIDS as the last century’s problem. Now, it’s a managed-care disease, as my doctor calls it. There are drugs and therapies to handle it.
Yeah. As long as you can afford them. As long as you’ve got health insurance and/or access to state funded medical services. I know a lot of people in California who are going to be doing a bit less biking and maybe less mountain hiking when and if Governor Schwartzenager’s cuts to AIDS funding really do happen as scheduled.
AIDS isn’t disappearing, especially if you’re Black or Latino in this country. Infection rates may have gone down – a bit – among white gay men, but in minority communities from Oakland to DC, it’s again that thing no one talks about. But it’s killing us. For the last five years, the numbers of new infections among Black men between 15 and 35 is horrifying. The numbers are almost as bad among Latino men. AIDS is the number one killer of Black Women in the United States. People who don’t think to look for it are getting it, and because they’re less likely to have access to medical services, they won’t find out till it’s too late.
Every day that bubble of “not me – them” bursts. Every day people tumble backwards off that edge where Jeff and I stood – and it’s still a long, long, long way down. I’m still waving my arms in the air. Still doing what I can to stay negative. Even though the fighting for funding, fighting for awareness and even fighting the temptation to just not put the condom on can be exhausting and overwhelming.
Why are so many of people – men and women, straight and gay – still converting? After more than twenty five years of messaging, pleading, begging, cajoling, teasing, taunting, and worrying people to take care of themselves and their partners, are we still spreading this disease to each other? How did we fail? We’ve tried everything, haven’t we? What new imagining do we have to do? What new words do we have to craft, what new advertising campaigns? I don’t know. Really. I don’t.
What I do know is that as long as I have to, I’ll keep getting tested. I’ll keep asking my partners about their status before we have sex. I’ll keep asking after my friends’ health. I’ll keep giving my friends holy shit when I hear they’re not being safe. I’ll keep giving money and time where I have it, when I have it.
I’ll keep waving my arms in the air. To keep my balance. To not fall. To not give in. And to continue to draw as much attention to the AIDS and HIV as I can.
You can share your story and learn you can protect yourself from HIV/AIDS, on the Facebook page for National Gay Men’s HIV Awareness Day, where others are continuing to post.
6 Comments
Thanks Doug SpearmanI have difficulty believing gay men are the only group who’s new cases are increasing. The growth in Latinas and Black women I’ve read is the fastest growing new cases.
As someone who lived with the horrors of friends falling like Autumn leaves becoming blind, lesioned covered, dementia, skeletally thin, and dying by the dozens and dozens, yet I was saved by drugs on the very edge of following so many into the abyss. I had 12 t-cells, a dear friend could no longer eat solid food and had a hep port installed in his chest to give him nutrition. We are both survivors…but not without daily challenges.
HIV/AIDS and the drugs which keep us alive have side effects you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemies. The virus mutates rampantly, and only 1 drug FUZEON was developed under Bush’s 8 years. Funding is being gutted in state after state even for the drugs that are available.
There is another coming wave of dying AIDS patients, and it breaks my heart to know it’s coming AGAIN.
I’ve been at peace with my mortality when I was told 25 years ago, my best case scenario was 3 years.
KEEP shouting at friends who are putting themselves at risk, keep shouting at politicians using our lives as DISPOSABLE to budget cuts.
A ramble for no good reason.I was in a relationship in 1990-91 and I had, in fact, come down with a STD (cured with a shot. Later in the relationship I lost 30 pounds in one month and I was 99% certain that I had the virus. Finally that no good bastard, E. convinced me to go get tested.
Mind you, there were no symptoms that I could see other than the rapid weight loss, which everyone who knew me noticed. I turned up negative.
I even remember talking to the counselor at the clinic after my test results were announced, I literally could not believe it. Turned out it was stress caused by the no good bastard that I was with at the time aggravated my alcoholism.
Ever since I’ve been sexually active, I’ve known the importance of wearing a condom. Not that I’ve always followed it. Hell, times got so low for me at times that I used to actually wish that I had AIDS. Why I don’t have it…I will never know.
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I can feel Spearman on this. The information about prevention has been out there since I was sexually active (not that I’ve always followed it.). It seems as if, I don’t know, people are tuned out. Do people really think it’s managable.
I remember I had a roommate when I got sober that had lived with the disease for about 12 years or so at the time (and he was not middle or upper class either). He was (and maybe still is, we’ve lost touch in the past few years, and I regret that…I really do) an inspiration to me. In fact, I told him in one of my darker moments that if I came down with the disease it would at least allow me (as you state petey) to come to terms with the fact that I wasn’t going to live forever. He rapidly and decisively discouraged that foolish talk from me.
Which gets me to thinking all dark and existential…about why this may be happening.
Good to hear from SpearmanI must say, this is the one issue that makes the fact that gay men find me physically repulsive almost bearable. This is the one thing that I most likely won’t have to worry about personally. Sadly that does not keep one from being impacted since I’ve known plenty of people who are infected (WAY too many women).
As to the bigger question…part of the problem is that HIV/AIDS is no longer sufficiently scary. Unfortunately, people are more likely to do stupid/risky things when they think that they have nothing to fear. So much time has been spent trying to let those that are infected know that they can still lead a good life, that we’ve forgotten that the fear of death is the biggest motivator to keep people in line.
On top of that, the community needs to be a lot less tolerant of things like barebacking and risky behaviour. Its a form of political correctness that results in people getting the disease. Even worse are the fools that actively try to get infected or even see the infection as some sort of badge of honor…their way of giving society the finger.
Finally, way more time, money and resources, needs to be spent on the people most impacted by the disease. Its all well and good for there to be robust HIV/AIDS treatment centers and advocacy groups located in the middle of largely affluent white urban LGBT neighborhoods. But the people that need to be reached are not necessarily in those areas (or even likely to go there). Many places with the worst infection rates are far removed from desperately needed resources. Things get even worse in many rural areas in the South. Simply put, the resources need to go where the people are.
SciFi GeekToo many treatment centers and advocacy groups in white urban areas? I can agree with that. But what if those communities that most need the services don’t want them or are in denial that there is a problem?
We need to POUND the stupid motherf*ckers who allowed faith-based LIESSome are the same f*cktards Obama’s Josh DuBois courts their affections, who GUTTED any mention of gay sex from AIDS literature for 8 years, and those who risked MILLIONS of girls and boys life for one mistake under their ABSTINENCE ONLY CR*P.
SCIENCE BASED medically sound AIDS and sex indformation is essential, and F*CK Josh DuBois!
That’s the other part of the problemin a nutshell.
And it’s not about disrespecting anyone’s religion. It’s a public health problem (a crisis, even) and must be treated as such. At times, the gay community has extended a hand only to be rebuffed.