Live To Tell
I have a tale to tell…
One day, I was walking with my grandfather along the streets of New York, as we so often did. This is some time back in the late 80’s, so if I were to guesstimate, I was somewhere between the ages of 11 and 14. We were walking through Alphabet City when we came across an outdoor garage. I don’t know it’s technical term, but it was one of those situations where a car got on a lift and was raised so another car could be placed under it. We noticed a man drawing these crazy figures on a wall, and I distinctly remember my grandfather calling the work “garbage.” I should probably tell you that my grandfather thought most modern art, no matter it’s medium, was garbage. Anyways, we continued on our way without giving it a second thought.
Years later, I was staying at my grandfather’s apartment for the weekend, and he asked me if I remembered that time with the man in Alphabet City, and when I said that I did, he told me that the artist was in the paper recently and had died. That man was Keith Haring.
Now, maybe it’s because I “met” him without even knowing it, or maybe it’s because I equate him with my grandfather, but Keith Haring has been, and will always be, my favorite artist. Unfortunately, we lost Keith on February 16, 1990, at the age of 31 to Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, otherwise known as AIDS.
The first time I heard the term AIDS, I was around 8 years old. By that point, I had already been called a faggot on numerous occasions, because I apparently had a Wonder Woman doll that I brought to school for show and tell in preschool, and I was more studious than athletic. Although I had not a clue what the word meant or any inkling of what a sexual orientation was at that point, that term became synonymous with my name. Interestingly enough, I was never called Gay or a homosexual, although I probably wouldn’t have known what those words meant either. I just knew that I was not being praised or called something positive in their eyes. It didn’t help that my only point of reference to what a faggot was came from a series of books called Gross Jokes that had chapters solely dedicated to the subject. But now I’m getting off topic.
Getting back to the first time I heard the word AIDS; I was waiting to get on the bus home from school when a kid in the grade above me screamed out the window that I either was going to get or had AIDS (I don’t quite remember which one). Again, I had no clue what that meant, but I did know it wasn’t something good because people were laughing at my expense.
In the years to follow, I heard that I had AIDS more times than I can count, and unfortunately, that was not the end to the bullying I received during my elementary, middle, and high school years. I can tell you about the time in seventh grade when someone “borrowed” a pad of mine and wrote a very sexually explicit note to a male classmate and slipped it into one of his textbooks, leading everyone to believe I wrote it. Or the time in first or second grade when a fellow classmate jumped on top of me during a game of hide and seek and wouldn’t get off unless I “put it in my mouth,” and only did when I started screaming for the teacher.
Needless to say, I felt very isolated as a child, and I will admit that there was a lot of crying and tattle-telling on my part, which probably made the situation worse. I’m sure it couldn’t have been easy being my parents, siblings or attempting to be my friend, but in my defense, I didn’t have anyone to speak with about what was going on, or anybody that I could look up to, unless you count the man dressed in drag so he can get out of the army on M*A*S*H*, or Jack Tripper pretending to be Gay so he could stay in an apartment with two girls on Three’s Company. Basically, I had people telling me who and what I was before I even knew or understood, and there certainly were no programs like Queer Eye or Will and Grace, or movies like Love, Simon back then that would have helped me see myself in a positive light.
It was a very lonely existence, and when I tried to find some comfort in things of an artistic nature, such as performing in some way or drawing, my mother would say to me that I needed to stop because “people would talk.” I even went as far as to date a girl in high school to appease my parents and stop the gossip, but that turned out to be a disaster (I wrote about that experience in my blog Love in the First Degree).
The phrases “people will talk” or “the community” were weaponized against me to basically stifle who I was for a major chunk of my life, and in response, I really believed there was something wrong with, and hated, everything about myself. It took moving away for college, meeting people who liked me for me, and being exposed to the greater world for me to begin to become my authentic self. And even after coming to terms with the fact that I actually was attracted to men, there was always this fear in the back of my mind that I was going to end up with AIDS, as if it that was the inevitable. I mean, that was pretty much the fate of every Gay character I saw on TV or in the movies up until that point. With that being said, it wasn’t until I was 29 that I went on my first date with a man, and 30 that I lost my virginity.
For a long time, I held a lot of resentment towards the people who started those rumors about me, and my mother for being more concerned about what a community said or thought than how her own son was feeling. If I were to be completely honest, I always felt that if I were to be diagnosed with AIDS, I probably would have been more scared of society’s reaction to me having the disease than the disease itself. But as time goes on and I really think about it, I realize that as horrible as they were to me, they were a product of their time.
Think about it…
I was born in 1974. During the 70’s in New York City, after the Gay rights movement began and the birth of disco, came a time when people of all sexual orientations were going to clubs, bath houses, and places like the piers along the West Side Highway, and there was a sexual liberation which hadn’t been seen before. During this time, STDs (sexually transmitted diseases) were seen as a rite of passage. Unfortunately, something came along that changed the world forever.
In the early 80’s, a “cancer” started to spread within the Gay communities of cities like San Francisco and New York, which became known as GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency). People were showing unusual symptoms, some of which were only seen in animals before this, and doctors could not explain what was going on or how people got it, other than to say it was spread through Gay sex. And because this “cancer” was initially seen primarily in Gay men, a black cloud of hysteria and discrimination fell upon them.
During this time, Gay men were ostracized, and there was a rise in Gay bashings. Many who were positive tried to hide their symptoms for fear of being fired from their jobs or evicted from their homes. Hospitals would turn patients with AIDS away, or quarantined them into wards where nurses and/or orderlies refused to go into the rooms to care for them. Partners were not allowed in to see their loved ones, and many AIDS victims were disowned by their friends and families and left to die alone. And after their death, they were either placed in garbage bags and tossed into alleys, or buried in unmarked mass graves, like the one on Hart Island off the Bronx coast. Or if they were “lucky,” their families claimed their bodies and secretly buried them, but never fully disclosed their cause of death.
One of these men was my mother’s good friend, Michael. Although I do have a vague recollection of him, most of what I know came from either my mom or their friend Alyse. My mother and Michael were close, and at one point, were in business together. Michael was diagnosed with AIDS at the onset of the epidemic and passed away in May of 1981. In fact, he was the 13th person to die of AIDS in New York City, 2 months before the New York Times wrote their first piece about the “Gay Cancer.”
In 1982, this “cancer” started to be seen in others besides Gay men, and GRID was temporarily renamed 4H Disease to represent the four groups it was being found in (Homosexuals, Haitians, Heroin Users and Hemophiliacs). It officially became known as AIDS in July of 1982. By then, close to 1,500 cases had been diagnosed and about 550 people had already died.
Unfortunately, at the start of the epidemic, there was a lack of information and education available to the public, and as scientists fought over patent notoriety or who got pats on the back for any strives being made, people were traveling to other countries and smuggling in experimental drugs that 9 out of 10 times sped up death and did more harm than good. And even after a 20-month-old was diagnosed with AIDS due to a blood transfusion in December of 1982, and the first woman was diagnosed in 1983, Gay men continued to take the brunt of the heat.
Religious groups spread propaganda, proclaiming AIDS to be “G-ds way of killing off perverts and deviants.” In 1983, Gay men were completely banned from donating blood, regardless of their status (which remained in effect until December of 2015). In the summer of 1985, 14-year-old Ryan White was denied entry to an Indiana school due to his diagnosis, and Rock Hudson became the first celebrity to publicly come out and, shortly after, die of AIDS. It wasn’t until May of 1987 that the then president, Ronald Regan, made his first public speech about the epidemic.
But all was not lost. Luckily, in this time of great despair, the Gay community created its own organizations, like GMHC (Gay Men’s Health Crisis) and ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), to help themselves. People like Elizabeth Taylor, Whoopi Goldberg and Madonna lent their celebrity status to help raise awareness and educate the public on AIDS, fundraise in the name of finding a cure, and lobby the government to get off their asses and do something.
Unfortunately, things had to get a lot worse before it started to get better, and the AIDS epidemic reached its height in the early 90’s, right around the time I was in high school. In 1994, AIDS became the leading cause of death in the United States amongst people between the ages of 25 and 44, and in 1995, AIDS cases in the US reached an all-time high with 500,000 reported. But thanks to the introduction of cocktail drugs, like AZT (Azidothymidine) and other NRTIs (Nucleoside Reverse Transcriptase Inhibitors), the number of new AIDS cases started to decline in 1996.
In the 40+ years since the epidemic began, there have been many strives made towards a cure, but unfortunately, AIDS has continued to allude us. As of 2021, 84.2 million people have been infected with HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus, the virus that causes AIDS) worldwide, and 40.1 million have died due to AIDS-related complications. In New York City alone, 186,917 people have HIV, and 116,403 have died of AIDS as of 2020. And although education is more readily available these days, AIDS is still seen primarily as a “Gay” disease.
Since losing my mother two years ago, I have spent a lot of time trying to come to terms with her feelings towards me. I always found it confusing how she could be very welcoming to people I was in a relationship with when it came to her home, but those same people were not welcome around when “the community” was involved. It was as if she was ok with me being Gay so long as I didn’t act on it publicly.
As I started to learn more about her life, especially that period in the early 80’s, I began to wonder if there was some correlation between my mother’s attitude towards me and what she experienced when she lost her good friend, Michael, to the “Gay Cancer” that became AIDS. Perhaps, having a son being called a faggot throughout his childhood, and then seeing him, as an adult, in relationships with other men triggered something in her where she thought history would repeat itself. It’s definitely in the realm of possibility for her to think I would suffer the same fate as Michael, since I myself felt for a long time that as a Gay man, contracting AIDS and dealing with the biases of the world would be the inevitable. Maybe, in her own screwed up kind of way, she was attempting to protect me, and in the long run, herself.
As I look back at all that transpired in my life, both on a personal and a more global level, I have come to realize what roles ignorance and fear played in those early years of the epidemic. I’m sure it was probably easier to point the finger at “those people,” and kick them while they were down because it allowed others to feel like they were better than someone else. As if this “cancer” couldn’t touch them. I guess the expression “ignorance is bliss” really worked in this situation, until the rules changed, and AIDS no longer discriminated. After that, the world had no choice but to stand up and pay attention because AIDS became everyone’s problem.
On December 1, the world celebrates World AIDS Day. It’s a day to raise awareness and bring solidarity in the fight against what some people call the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. We remember all the beautiful souls whose lives were taken due to this terrible epidemic, and to remember those living their everyday life with the disease.
People like Keith and like Michael.
Every year, it has become important for me to participate in some kind of way, whether that be going to the AIDS Memorial at St. Vincent’s Triangle and listening as the names of those lost are read, or going to see panels from the AIDS quilt when they are on display. Not because I’m such an activist, because the truth is that other than doing AIDS Walk NYC every May, I probably have done the bare minimum to help bring attention to and help fight this disease up until this point.
The reality is that I go because I’m from the last generation who can say they lived in a time before AIDS. And for all intents and purposes, if I believed all the things ever said about me growing up, I should have been a name on that list a long time ago.
I go because it’s a reminder to me of a time when society as a whole lost their humanity, and a way to bring home the point that all those people that were either lost to or are surviving every day with AIDS are more than just names on a list or a statistic. They were and are somebody’s friend or family member, and the reality is that they could be any one of us.
And they too have tales to be told.
There’s an amazing Instagram page I recommend called @theaidsmemorial which brings a humanness to the epidemic by putting faces and stories from loved ones of those lost to AIDS. It really makes you take a moment to pause and look within to see less of what makes us different and more of the commonalities between us.
So, I guess at the end of the day, I go because the tale of AIDS has become a lesson in compassion for me.
And isn’t that what life is all about?
To learn more about the history of AIDS, check out: