11 Feb 2005
9 Feb 2005
Being negative
Things are going mightily well. I'm almost frightened. Pitches and speeches going ok. I'm finally over that illness I brought back from California. I got my tax refund check in the mail. The chicken little inside of me is wondering when the sky's going to come falling down.
In truth, I was terribly worried something was wrong. I had for a while not been feeling well, then I got some sort of strange infection. I went to the doctors who insisted I have blood tests done, syphilis, chlamydia, Hepatitis, and the first HIV test I've had in four years! I sort of knew it would be ok - my sex life is hardly prolific and seldom seedy. Mostly vanilla, although I'm happy to note that in at least one case it was French vanilla. But waiting for HIV results are perhaps some of the strangest times one will ever spend. I was alternately surprised how easy it was to forget about it, and how easily it crept up behind me to shake and rattle my nerves.
After two weeks of not being able to get out of work to follow up with the doctors, I decided to ring and see what the test results were. I stood in the stairwell of the office, my voice audibly shaking, to find out if the sometimes seemingly impending storm was going to engulf me. It was a brave / stupid moment. Was I really going to have to break down in the stairwell of the office if something really was wrong?
Luckily, it wasn't. Not perhaps just luckily, but maybe reassuringly, yet probably more realistically lucky. Everything was negative.
Negative.
I was surprised at how surprising the words and the feeling of surprise were.
Had I somehow been resigned to the possibility of becoming HIV positive -- though, not likely given my sex life of pillow hugging and daydreaming -- even though I hadn't had unsafe sex, or shared needles or had a blood transfusion? Would it have been less scary a verdict than in the early years of my so-called gay life in San Francisco when AIDS was still cutting a wide swathe through the gay community and the papers were filled with pictures of those who fell victim to it? I remember the chillling habit of skipping the second-half of the Bay Area Times for fear of what? Knowing there was a human face to the epidemic? Wondering if one of them was a former lover? It's most likely that someone in my sexual past is and was HIV positive.
That should be chilling. But now that people I know live with the virus was it somehow less ominous than it was? Was some irrational inner self surprised that one could be gay and 36 and HIV-negative?
And is it that irrational inner self that sets one on the road to complacency? That's more scary sometimes than the eventuality itself. Why resign oneself to the surrender when simple acts of vigilance can pre-empt the battle?
So I'm going to be relieved and celebrate for a moment. Then I'm going to realise that whilst I've been lucky, others haven't been. It's still an epidemic of shocking violence and strength, and we let it fester and rage in quiet corners of our social consciousness. Has AIDS become the quiet secret, or the troubles of a continent 'over there'? Do we still know that it has a very human face? Had I succumbed to the American habit of belittling disease and disdaining the weakness it brought? When did I actually start to think the storm was retreating? Because people stopped dying or just because there weren't pictures in the back of the gay papers filled with the dead?
So now, and hopefully for a time, I live. And I'm going to be positively grateful for being negative but I'm going to try to remember not to forget the power of being negative.
In truth, I was terribly worried something was wrong. I had for a while not been feeling well, then I got some sort of strange infection. I went to the doctors who insisted I have blood tests done, syphilis, chlamydia, Hepatitis, and the first HIV test I've had in four years! I sort of knew it would be ok - my sex life is hardly prolific and seldom seedy. Mostly vanilla, although I'm happy to note that in at least one case it was French vanilla. But waiting for HIV results are perhaps some of the strangest times one will ever spend. I was alternately surprised how easy it was to forget about it, and how easily it crept up behind me to shake and rattle my nerves.
After two weeks of not being able to get out of work to follow up with the doctors, I decided to ring and see what the test results were. I stood in the stairwell of the office, my voice audibly shaking, to find out if the sometimes seemingly impending storm was going to engulf me. It was a brave / stupid moment. Was I really going to have to break down in the stairwell of the office if something really was wrong?
Luckily, it wasn't. Not perhaps just luckily, but maybe reassuringly, yet probably more realistically lucky. Everything was negative.
Negative.
I was surprised at how surprising the words and the feeling of surprise were.
Had I somehow been resigned to the possibility of becoming HIV positive -- though, not likely given my sex life of pillow hugging and daydreaming -- even though I hadn't had unsafe sex, or shared needles or had a blood transfusion? Would it have been less scary a verdict than in the early years of my so-called gay life in San Francisco when AIDS was still cutting a wide swathe through the gay community and the papers were filled with pictures of those who fell victim to it? I remember the chillling habit of skipping the second-half of the Bay Area Times for fear of what? Knowing there was a human face to the epidemic? Wondering if one of them was a former lover? It's most likely that someone in my sexual past is and was HIV positive.
That should be chilling. But now that people I know live with the virus was it somehow less ominous than it was? Was some irrational inner self surprised that one could be gay and 36 and HIV-negative?
And is it that irrational inner self that sets one on the road to complacency? That's more scary sometimes than the eventuality itself. Why resign oneself to the surrender when simple acts of vigilance can pre-empt the battle?
So I'm going to be relieved and celebrate for a moment. Then I'm going to realise that whilst I've been lucky, others haven't been. It's still an epidemic of shocking violence and strength, and we let it fester and rage in quiet corners of our social consciousness. Has AIDS become the quiet secret, or the troubles of a continent 'over there'? Do we still know that it has a very human face? Had I succumbed to the American habit of belittling disease and disdaining the weakness it brought? When did I actually start to think the storm was retreating? Because people stopped dying or just because there weren't pictures in the back of the gay papers filled with the dead?
So now, and hopefully for a time, I live. And I'm going to be positively grateful for being negative but I'm going to try to remember not to forget the power of being negative.
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