I was born in 1978, so my entire conscious life as a homosexual and a faggot has been lived under the spectre of HIV and AIDS. It’s hard to explain to younger people what that has been like. Yes, technically they have had to deal with that as well, but to them HIV is a chronic and manageable illness thanks to the incredible medicines introduced in 1996.
But it was an absolute death sentence before 1996.
Back then, death came at diagnosis. The ostracism of terrified healthy people with their hatred and judgements made life almost unlivable before the disease actually took them. Then came the wave of opportunistic diseases as their immune systems collapsed, frightening and sometimes disfiguring conditions with terrifying names like toxoplasmosis, Kaposi’s sarcoma, Back then, death came at diagnosis; the ostracism of terrified healthy people with their hatred and judgements made life almost unlivable before the disease actually took them. Then came the wave of opportunistic diseases as their immune systems collapsed, frightening and sometimes disfiguring conditions with terrifying names like toxoplasmosis, Kaposi’s sarcoma, candidiasis, or Pneumocystis pneumonia that would ravage their bodies without relief.
The death of my gay friend Stephen in 1995 from AIDS spurred me to learn much more about the disease than any other HIV- person I knew. For a time I was actively part of a group of famous people known as “AIDS dissidents” who questioned the idea that HIV directly caused AIDS. Of course, my propensity for research-based conclusions eventually led me to fight with these people; In the late nineties I had a vicious back-and-forth with famed writer Celia Farber and her intractable views that science and evidence continually disproved until she finally cut me off. Yeah, I’ve always been a firebrand.
The shadow of HIV/AIDS is a long, cold one that has suffocated at least one entire generation – mine. Yet from that shadow rise voices and examples of those who went to their death struggling to cobble together some amount of dignity as their bodies failed. They wink at us like fireflies in the descending dusk. I thought about them when I was fighting for my life through cancer in 2018, and again though a blood infection of staph in 2020.
Why am I still here, and they are gone?
I feel like a soldier that took the beach in Normandy, only to look around at my friends all blown to pieces or missing limbs and strewn across the bloody sand like refuse. There is gratitude, of course, but also a vacuous void inside me. It’s a hollow victory.
I recently watched a documentary on Pedro Zamora, the beautiful gay boy featured on Season 3 of MTV’s revolutionary “reality” series The Real World in 1994. This particular season was as real as it gets, because Pedro was HIV+ and proudly advocating for knowledge and understanding. I watched that season, and Pedro made an impact on me. To see that bright, adorable young man so bravely stand up for himself during the show, only to fall terribly ill and die a few months later, was impossible to ignore. The memory of that last picture of him, crippled and nearly comatose just a day before his death, still haunts me.
And that’s the perfect word: haunted. My generation of gays is haunted by all of the hollow eyes and piercing cries of those lost to this discriminatory plague. And no matter how long I live here, I will never not hear them or see them.
Which is why I dearly love what Madonna did on her most recent tour. She took her classic “Live To Tell” and used it as a way to pay homage to all of the artists who died of AIDS around her over the course of her long career. The song was not originally about AIDS deaths, but it becomes the only anthem for people like me and Madonna and any others who survived the horror of it all.
