Summer Jams
Summer Jams: What We recommend
30 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
Summer Jams: What We recommend
The recent column by Mr. Hess on the subject of gay adoption (“Fathers and mothers,” Feb. 1) wasn’t half as interesting as the responses. That’s either a reflection of an ill-considered approach to a nuanced topic or a simply a cry for better opinion writing. In the case of the column in question, I’d chose the latter. \nWhat I most enjoyed, though, was the morality cavalry riding to the defense of Mr. Hess, namely Mr. Scott Tibbs. When his letters to this paper (Jordan River Forum, Feb. 15), and countless others, engage any border of the topic of homosexuality, they give the appearance of being written by the Rain Man while counting cards at a Vegas casino.\nThe raging heterosexuality of Mr. Tibbs, moral and righteous in its certain nature, would do well to consider its biblical basis in totality: Jesus isn’t a convenience store. The judging, the stone castings and the false witnessing are rather enormous problems in the canon. If one could judge, they might be as bad as which organ hits what orifice and in what marital condition. Until recently, regardless of marital status or sexual orientation, those organs and orifices were illegal acts in over 20 different states. Et tu, Brutus? Sodomites – they are so petty!\nYet we don’t need a tolerance Kristallnacht upon either Hess or Tibbs. It’s a hoot to watch the sun hit Dracula’s skin. These two pieces of writing, opinion and approprobation have all the charm of a talking doll with a broken voice box. Eventually, even little girls with active imaginations will tire of listening to them.
HIV Live is a column that ran in The\n Bloomington Beacon during the past year. It's a\n column about living with AIDS, and how it colors\n the vision of everyday life and events. It's a\n column about risk, resolution and the ultimate\n question -- am I at risk of acquiring HIV? You\n can interact with HIV Live! If you have questions\n about HIV, the column or what you read in it,\n you can e-mail maaprice@indiana.edu -- some\n answers might appear within the series.
I couldn't eat all day last Tuesday, my body ached. I felt as if beaten by a shovel.\nThe six years I lived in New York City, I count among my happiest and most interesting. I was the practice administrator for an orthodontist in Brooklyn Heights, a beautiful neighborhood hugging the East River, one stop into the borough of Brooklyn on the 2 or 3 line from Wall Street. My lunch hour during good weather was usually spent on the Promenade, an urban plaza perched above the non-stop roar of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. There, with French Roast and the best deli sandwiches in the world, the World Trade Center dominated the view center, the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island off to the left, and the Empire State Building visible past the Brooklyn Bridge. I can't think of another place in the city to see so much and move so little.\nTed, my orthodontic boss, maintained a city office in the World Trade Center complex, an office-sharing arrangement with a large dental practice. He'd pester me to go with him on office days, but my work focused on the office in Brooklyn -- I usually didn't go. Besides, one lunch hour in the WTC left me wretched on bad cart vendor sushi -- a caveat emptor I should have taken seriously.\nI struggled Tuesday to remember who among our patients worked in or near the towers, but it's been so long now -- five years -- from the time I worked in the city. We knew so many people who worked in that area, but just as you know others in your neighborhood, or just as you know patients or customers. Their names on Tuesday escaped me, but hurt just the same. Six degrees might separate us physically, but not psychologically: we are all New Yorkers -- I certainly am.\nI've rarely grieved as hard over my own terrorist, AIDS, as I did Tuesday. Lacking any real ability to help on the scene, I can't even help here -- I can no longer give blood, and haven't since my first suspicions of possible exposure in the early 1980s. In high school, I was a blood drive volunteer for three years, setting up, tearing down, and of course, giving of my AB positive stock. My mother and I share that blood type, so I wanted to keep the levels up.\nIf you are reading this, and can give blood, please do that -- but not just now, and not just for New York City, but for good, for as long as you are able. Blood supplies have teetered on the edge of the absurd since the beginning of the HIV epidemic in the United States. Healthy people have stayed away, and the habit of giving is lost among many young people. A blood drive was a big event in my high school days -- make it one again.\nChuck and I were in New York a couple of weeks ago, just for a few days. We visited our favorite store, Century 21, right across from the WTC Complex -- the home of many great shoe purchases. We purchased two waters on the corner, by the St. Paul Burying Ground; saw the typical thousands there on a sunny Tuesday mid-morning in Lower Manhattan. God, we love The City. We grieve for them.
I not only write for the IDS, I read it. I criticize grammatical errors and editorial gaffes; I examine the point of view of fellow columnists. Like many of you, I read Dean of Students Richard McKaig's request for explanation of an incident at Acacia during the "Take Back the Night" march. Undoubtedly, many of us said, "There they go again." \nIn a society of individuals, a university full of them, some view communal living with suspicion. The greek system is admittedly a mystery to me -- I couldn't wait to get away from my parents and siblings and be blessedly on my own. The fact that I ate lots of baked beans and Kraft dinners to make my rent payments wasn't a hardship. Kraft dinner that a poor boy pays for on his own tastes damn good -- and it still does.\nI was of the lower middle class and the first person in my family to graduate from college. To me, the idea of legacy was wholly foreign. The idea of owning a car was remote, much less having a big one. Greeks were privileged, moneyed and had much better clothes. I thought they were appalling.\nIn my older state, occasionally they still are -- beer busts, water slides on Third Street, traffic jams, couches on the lawn -- they do a lot of things I just don't get. I'm not supposed to, I suppose.\nMy lack of comprehension overlooks the incredible good of the greek system, an item easily overlooked by the critical, serious independent students of IU. In the collective, there is a power that can't be matched by an individual, no matter how cause-committed.\nAs an HIV educator, I've been invited to a couple of houses and to training sessions of the Pan-Hellenic Council. In each case, despite my apprehensions and lack of greek experience, I've been treated with great respect and have engaged with people whose openness is a credit to their houses. Undoubtedly, the majority of them grew up in situations economically better than mine. The majority isn't gay or lesbian. For many of them, the idea of engagement with AIDS is fairly foreign to their lives. You wouldn't have known it.\nI thought that the letter from Acacia, printed in the IDS Oct. 10, captured the best of the greek system and put it on display -- much as the action of one misguided individual attempted to play into the worst fears of many regarding greek houses. Some guys don't know when to quit, don't understand what's appropriate, just don't know how to act. One Acacia brother didn't -- the house took action.\nWe are fortunate in two ways through this incident -- we have a dean whose commitment to a better life at IU isn't nine-to-five, an admirable facilitator and listener. I'm a fan of his work. We have a healthy greek system that deserves some admiration, too, for works of charity and commitment to pluralistic education, even when they too are the targets of bad attitude and discrimination.\nHigh five to Acacia for one of the best apologies I've seen in print -- no excuses, a plan of action and some sincere regret. Keep those ugly plaid couches off the front lawn, but otherwise, I'm impressed.
My mother and I compete each March to choose the national basketball champion. She's retired, which means she can park in front of the television and watch teams I have little interest in watching. Utah, Loyola Marymount, Alabama-Birmingham -- she's always good at picking a dark horse like Gonzaga or Siena.\nI skew my picks to place IU as close to the Final Four as possible, which means in the past few years I've done miserably against her. Hardheaded and clear-eyed, she saw the charts through probability and not romance. She didn't like those popping veins on Bobby Knight's neck, the chair incident in Puerto Rico -- to her, anyone so out of control could never win a title except through exceptional talent and some luck.\nMy diagnosis of AIDS came right after the Hoosier Classic and the holiday tournament -- you know, the one where they invite the school of blind nuns or some other patsy team to get chewed up. From that date in 1997 to today, my interest in basketball wavered, waned and has fallen precipitously. Finally, when Bobby Knight got his unceremonious boot, I lost it altogether.\nMind you, I don't know Mike Davis personally, and really don't have anything against him. I got a little tired of hearing how fabulous our record was last year considering the circumstances -- I mean, come on. We recruit people to play this game and they don't pay to go to school, they get fed, and lots of people are very nice to them when they are out and about in town. Yes, you should win some games if this is the circumstance of your life.\nI like passionate people, and I guess that's why I liked Bobby Knight. I like people who stake their ground and don't walk away from their convictions (well, except for the Charles Manson types). I don't respect firing people for not fitting into a civil society, when definitions of the same are squishy at best.\nThe idea that one's life and achievements can only be assessed by specific utterance and a few microscopically examined actions is kindergarten politics, played by skimpy four-eyed geeks. It's an extended whine that can't be satisfied.\nMaybe I feel this way because of the HIV thing, the fact that my disease carries with it the burden of such examinations. Maybe I feel this way because I like to champion the minority viewpoint -- that of people who believe, and act upon their beliefs in spite of fuzzy gag orders and zero tolerance public spaces.\nLife is messy. Emotion is messier, and when conviction is thrown in, often the combination is volatile. Reaction is swift and almost always ill-informed. It's a good description of how people become infected with HIV, it's a good description of how great coaches get fired, how true leaders have their accomplishments diminished by the jealous and the less accomplished.\nI'd rather meet a jerk who believes in something than an angel who believes in everything. It's easier to make friends with those most like us -- and I think Bobby Knight and I would be fast pals.
If opinion consisted solely of unique perspective, that would be the reason I'm here. For in no other way do I make any great effort to be contemporary. In fact, this column is relentlessly self-referential, a full-on blast of what I think. \nMy restless thought process has grabbed on two recent incidents in my life. The receipt of an anonymous cryptic note about my column at the IDS, the other a second-hand report of criticism of my speaking style. \nFirst, anonymous criticism is almost never necessary. It might be wise only if sending the president a threatening letter were on your list of things to do. Normally, people are moved to criticize in the hopes of swaying a negative event (or newspaper column) to a more positive event, at least in their view. \nA name means something, which I've learned in writing this column. A column about life with AIDS written by "anonymous" would have a different impact that one that is assigned to a real person with a real identity. The life anonymous wrote of could be more easily fictionalized, read like a serial, appreciated as an everyman's journey. The same could be said of criticism, but the anonymous critic remains a bogeyman, a fundamentalist fag-hater, a poster child for poor taste, whatever label happens to catch my fancy. \nDetail and honesty are relative terms, but two I try to employ when I write. The crap AIDS life and the good AIDS life are like Janus, the Roman god of gates and doorways -- two-faced, all the time. \nThere is no one way I feel about having AIDS all day every day. I am fed up with feeling sick, but other times it feels normal and I pay it no mind. I feel like either a circus freak or a botanical marvel. I am happy sometimes in spite of AIDS and also otherwise. \nSo, to my anonymous critic -- no, I don't need a therapist. I basically need a newspaper column, freshly ground coffee and an occasional single-malt Scotch. I occasionally wallow in the creamy depths of my self-pity, and I love it. A good miserable wallow is a balm to my normally even disposition. A column about AIDS that is continually happy would be written by a fool and treated like one of those e-mail angels with a frantic delete.\nIn regards to my "vague ramblings," try reading some parables or Faulkner sometime. \nWhen I do any type of public speaking, I'm admittedly tired of euphemisms concerning sex, the imprecisions of some sexually technical terminology. So the second-hand report had me offending a member of some audience somewhere with my vulgar language. \nI suppose while I'm sympathetic to the criticism, I can't entirely agree. No, I'm not G-rated unless the audience is -- but my idea of who needs "G" ratings is quite different from the idea of the majority. I tread as carefully as I can at the edge of the tulip garden of respectability, but I'm a flummoxing visitor. Having never really been considered respectable, I'm not sure how to act when I encounter the expectation. \nAnd I wonder what's on the mind of people when they criticize my language… have they watched television lately? Do they listen to the poorly-written, thinly veiled sexualized content of what's out there? What they watch, or their children watch?\nThe poor behavior of others is not, I know, an excuse to indulge your own. The problem with the comparison I've made is television is attempting to entertain (or, at least that's what is claimed for it), and I'm not focused so much on that. I am hammy enough to enjoy what I do and want those who hear it to enjoy it, or at least not fall asleep. \nI have also said probably too many times AIDS is boring, and taught about and discussed it in a very boring fashion. Never is it personalized, and it's rarely credited with being the sociological phenomenon I think it is. This is the truly fascinating part of my experience with AIDS, and the one I most want to discuss. \nBecause AIDS came about as a long series of choices in my life, I want to uncover the process of those choices, for myself as much as for anyone else. Because I think my life was (even without tossing in the gay thing) fairly out-of-kilter, I'm my favorite lab rat. \nAs opposed to television, I'm more about informing, but that information is born of an unraveling process within myself. A careful scene-by-scene examination of past events -- all as lived by me, experienced by me and described by me. \nI dislike the vulgarity of the world, too, but my definitions of vulgar involve things other than language. The political climate in this country is vulgar. Wearing clothes made in sweatshops is vulgar. Date rape is vulgar. But I digress -- yes, vulgar language is vulgar: I am a happy hypocrite. \nDespite criticism, I am on the opinion page primarily because I've asserted I deserve to be there. I have attempted to make the case for viewing the experience of terminal illness as a voice that should be heard. Better yet, that HIV is a central culprit in the making of the world we live in now, and how, and why.\nSo, don't be silly and send anonymous notes -- that's so primary school. I'm happy to entertain adjustments, to consider hypocrisies of various stripes -- both yours and mine.\nTo end, I'd like to note that Paul Nutter recently died. His extraordinary courage in documenting his diagnosis and treatment for cancer in the IDS helped me face living with AIDS -- in the IDS online, you can search the archives by his name and find the stories about him. I never knew Paul. I wish I had.
There are two types of people: those who unconsciously assume a position of reverence when Celine Dion sings "My Heart Will Go On," and those who find such a thought somewhat frightening. \nI don't know why I was reminded of this when I loaded Joni Mitchel's Court and Spark album into my portable CD player. I suppose the division of the world into easy camps overlooks the gray areas of maudlinness.\nI'd decidedly say I was of the latter camp listed above, never being a fan of artificial sweetener. Yet here's Joni, warbling some very maudlin-like tunes of woman in love, woman scorned, woman vaguely triumphant. \nAll my teenage angst got wrenched through endless repetitions of Joni Mitchel albums, an outsider (I thought) like myself. I learned about tricks that poetry could play from the lyrics, how words had a music all their own. I judged the lyricism of the world around me by the orchestrations on Hejira and Don Juan's Reckless Daughter. I had daylight fantasies of hanging in a coffee shop with Joni, her best gay friend. We'd giggle over large mugs, talk about how men suck and smoke a lot. (Note to heterosexual men: This is why your women like us.) Talk the lowdown of the life behind the songs. \nEverything I learned about how people loved in the movies and on television was thrown out the window by For the Roses -- man, I felt that woman's pain! A good man is hard to find. "Coyote" would be the song I'd live by. \nThere are two types of people: those who venerate and those who objectify.\nThis division of the planet's population was suggested by the opposing anniversary celebrations of Roe vs. Wade. Bush and the Lifers, NOW and the Choosers -- need I tell who I think Joni likes? Any woman who can pose nude by the ocean (butt shot only, very tasteful) for her album art has got to think women are smart enough to run their own lives. \nBut if you listen to the albums of the last 10 years, you might detect another pulse that Joni and I have in common -- thoughts of the supreme importance of life, a wish for a different reverence of it. Not one that defines cellular mass as moral property, but celebrates within that dividing soup a mystical and truly unknowable impulse, a consciousness awaiting its own choices. Joni and I don't like to fuss. \nRight now, Joni is crooning "Raised on Robbery," a song in which she channels the spirit of an inept hooker in a Toronto bar -- this was my brother Matt's favorite song on the album. It's the perfect song for a retro drag queen, though that shouldn't reflect poorly on my brother's younger proclivities. Indeed he chose the song that expressed the duality of Joni best.\nA '70s sex kitten, Joni cut a legendary swatch through the California rock scene, but the longing you'll hear in her voice is usually beyond just catching the next lay. She seems to have felt as so many of the '70s folk did, that we would find in the pleasures of the body what was unfindable in the country at large. \nWe would find the meaning of freedom in freedom itself -- slightly licentious freedom without terrible recriminatory reflections from norms and mores. While we spread pieces of our own destruction, we also created the platforms for newer worlds, better in some ways. Would-be better worlds, I guess -- if they learned from our lessons. \nIf personal control seemed definitely lacking in the '70s, it simply took its cues from the world at large -- or maybe more to the point, stopped taking them. It was the decade of ugly blood and dissension -- a sarcastic generation angling for control from a tight-ass world. \nI hope George W. Bush listens to Joni Mitchel.\nThere are two types of people in the world: those who see choices as the imprint of soul and the truth of the individual, and those who see statements as sufficient substitute for choice. \nAnd I'd gladly put myself and Joni into the former category, but it's a questionable fit. On "Free Man in Paris," Joni is widely assumed to be singing of David Geffen, her crise de coeur back in 1974. The person she sings of has a contempt for the forms of his life, the artificiality of the publicly known. The choices of the artificial life -- do they reveal the soul? Is it only honesty that marks the value of a person? I think Joni and I are stymied by this question. \nOccasionally, the happiest people are truly those who know the least. Ronald Reagan, whose presidency brought the curtain down on the '70s with a Kristallnacht quality, was graciously unaware of arms being sold to Iran, money funneled to vicious guerrillas who did things we didn't think we supported as a nation. He never once recognized AIDS publicly. \nThe morals of one as the values of all -- Joni and I are, I believe, united against such an idea. On a more recent album, Joni stakes out the idea of the cynicism that is used to sell cynicism on "Sex Kills": "And the gas leaks/and the oil spills/And sex sells everything/Sex kills" -- and I'm her acolyte. Sex can kill. Your sex doesn't have to…\nThere are two kinds of people in the world: those who live in the present and those who believe there is a future worth having. What kind of person are you? According to Joni and me, it's your choice.
The gay drug of choice isn't Ecstasy, it's equality, and lots of it. This choice has been confirmed in the last couple of years with the battle over marriage rights. \nI missed my mailing from Queer headquarters, lost somewhere among the HH Gregg advertisements and the weekly offer of platinum credit cards. The one that said, "We must be married! Now!" \nSo when the news stories of legal challenges to the marriageless state of gay men and lesbians in Hawaii and Vermont, of Canadian legal battles and full, "real" marriage in the Netherlands came to my attention, I was taken aback. \nI wonder if I've been silently told I'm lost among the issues. That HIV isn't a defining status for gay men, and needs to be replaced at the center of the movement. Usually it's written "The Movement," though that indicates regularity more than the actual constipation of new ideas. \nAlthough death precedes rebirth in most major religions, for the secular worshipper of the religion of pride, it is the story of continuous life. Mardi Gras alongside coffins, banquets sampled among corpses, the gay story of history (and herstory) is one of survival versus daunting odds. It can be inspirational, and it can be filled with amazing self-pity. \nWe've replaced talk of Leonardo, Edward II, Richard the Lion-Hearted and Gertrude Stein with the antics of Melissa and Ellen, and the bathroom sex of George Michael. Seeing ourselves within a progression of history (and herstory -- last time I'll do that, I promise), was a balm. No matter how bad the cocktails, we survived. \nWe replaced basic human dignity within our rainbow by knocked-up families on the cover of "Rolling Stone," and waifish winks from the cover of "People." If it's good to be gay (and it is), then it's good to be married, too. \nI may be too sarcastic when I suggest that such an idea is a bit over the top. I wear a wedding band, though Charles and I adopted it as a conscious symbol. I consider myself more than partnered, and better than married. \nI dislike the implicit idea that marriage legitimizes someone. That rogue lives become better lives by promising to do something that in a majority of cases will not be done -- to stay together, to only have sex with the spouse, to only build that which two can share. How could anyone in his or her right mind ever agree to be defined like this? \nWe opened ourselves up to the harangues of right-wing fundamentalist lawmakers, often divorced, who have no hypocrisy-meter by which to judge the color of their language. We scared the straights again, at least the skittish ones who have no real problem with gay people, but are damn sure nervous about the gay monolithic agenda. \nWell Buffy, well Chip, sometimes so am I. \nI see the last two years as a fiscal waste on Millennium Marches and court test cases, while real people led real lives behind the glamour of being the new lesbian on a magazine cover, the next to out themselves as gay, the next to out themselves as experimental, the next to out themselves as blessedly free of prejudice. As a boy, I indulged the fantasy that Burt Reynolds was gay (he used to be very hot); now, I just don't care.\nInstead, I care about something that is so 1981. I reached 21 years old just as HIV got its ID and hit the clubs. I've been dancing with death to crooning Donna Summer, New Order and Everything But The Girl for too long to simply cast it aside. Beyond the personal angle, the wasted potential of HIV annoys me.\nIn every other event where large numbers of people have died, we claimed they did not die in vain. WWII, the Civil War, the Holocaust -- we claim a collective memory that seals all attempts to repeat these tragedies. The fact that our sealants have proven imperfect bothers us not a bit. It's a cultural thing. \nEven after HIV escaped its gay ghetto stereotype, gay men still led the way to faster drug approval, the addition of the word to political lexicon. Yet, grousing all the way, we offered photos of the dead not as testimony but as bartering chips. While you hated us, this is what happened. Instead of MLK we had HIV -- lynching by retrovirus. \nPeople who don't die quickly offer no soundbites that can match the gasp of an emaciated corpse. They do not advance political ideas that basic unfairness is just wrong. They aren't too helpful on Capitol Hill. They certainly aren't badges of merit. Reminders of an agenda gone wrong, a decade lost, the drag queen rock throwers of Christopher Street. We survivors are part of the old conversation, the old examples -- the Michelangelos of our day. \nMeanwhile, it is of greater virtue to be post-AIDS, a recognition that life must go on, and battles still await an army. For example: Heather has two mommies and they are divorced! Hollywood Star Outed in Palimony Panic! Such headlines as these await the next generation to carry on the fight.\nIt isn't any easier to disillusion oneself than to pry a tooth out by tying a string and slamming a door. Without exquisite engineering, the result in either case will not be justified by the pain. I didn't imagine when I started writing this column, first for a gay newspaper, I would see for myself any role outside of being a gay man with AIDS. That alone, I thought, would be convincing enough.\nConvincing enough to be testimony, that is, to be considered as part of the ongoing conversation about being gay the past twenty years of AIDS, about the equivalency of HIV, the final proof of shared humanity between hetero and homo. Instead I'm supposed to be hitting Vermont for a long weekend, wearing a matching tuxedo and grinning about the most fulfilling day of my life. \nA white cake with two grooms on top? No thanks, I'd rather be gay.
Reason One: You've been human. \nI've witnessed a wide variety of personalities as a test counselor during the last few weeks: A young girl whose predatory sexual nature is expressed as if she's the narrator of a 13th-century morality play; another woman, this one with a boyfriend who tells her she is responsible for contraception and disease control; a celibate whose partner dangles just over the western horizon in St. Louis; the man separated, the woman divorced.\nThere are infinite varieties of basic plot -- stories that fall between fictionalized crime and suppositional truth. Man, woman, boy, girl in a kaleidoscope so crafty one can't predict the next crystalline combination. The unexpected color of a self-identified slut, the primness of new lovers listening carefully to one another's answers to a battery of questions on past behavior. \nReason Two: It's goal-directed therapy.\nOf great surprise to a test counselor: You are empowered to answer bedrock fundamental questions of right and wrong on a variety of topics. Resist all urges to do so. This is about genitals, needles and choice. You are not a divorce lawyer. You are not closer to Christ, even if you think you're doing God's work. \nFor the people testing, the interview before the test may be one of the few times sex talk hasn't been heating the room, clouding the senses or just a casual brag. Some grab the opportunity to spill the beans, some keep their cards continually close to their chest. \nThese interviews reveal that sex is not an evolutionary force -- we seem to be doing the same things that have been done throughout time. A few Eleanor of Acquitaines come drifting through, a Borgia and a Beatrice; several Henry VIII's show up; a few J. Edgar Hoovers. \nInterviews are sexual Darwinism, though they rarely reveal anything approaching truth if one follows the questions closely. You have to, like a Galapagos sparrow, branch off into the underbrush to find the food source, then develop the tool to extract it. This can only take 15 minutes -- we don't have time for an epoch to pass. \nReason Three: It's educational for me.\nI never understood why I liked Zola's "Nana" so much -- it's to French literature what "Dallas" is to television. It's gaudy, tawdry and winks foreshadows like a drag queen doing Streisand. It is utterly fabulous. Thus I was surprised as I met a Nana or two, an Undine Sprague, very Whartonish, and imagine my delight at a Wife of Bath! \nI never fully understood my choice of an undergraduate literature degree until now. \nReason Four: Fight the stereotype that heterosexuals are boring.\nI admit it -- I believe it, or I believed it. I thought I could decorate better, entertain more earnestly and have sex just a little kinkier than your run-of-the-mill hetero. My, my -- I stand corrected.\nReason Five: HIV Sucks Like Hell On Fire.\nReason Six: I promise I will try to tell you the truth.\nI hedge on the promise associated with this reason -- how could I not? Haven't you taught me at least one thing the last two years I've been a counselor? Absolutely. Truth is the story that is told by the comatose tornado victim on the Kansas farm about a wonderful place she went to while she visibly vegetated on her bed. Nobody believes an eyewitness. \nThe other promise I won't even try to make is I won't judge you. Of course I will, I'm sorry to say. But I promise you, before every interview my mantra is: I've been every buffoon you could possibly be. If this were baseball, baby, I'd be looking for the pitcher's heat. \nIt is baseball and virtually every other metaphor. Stories of lives inevitably yoke disparate elements together with violence -- that's why we still read Andrew Marvell and John Donne. We are perpetual walk-ons to our favorite soaps, with plots that soar into statistically unlikely cul-de-sacs. I keep thinking Karen from "Knot's Landing" will be next through the door. \nUnless it's particularly pertinent, you don't have to discuss my life with me, and I rarely offer the fact of my serostatus unless I need a Nosferatu to liven up the zombie quality of the conversation. Yes, like the narrator of Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus," I eat men like air. Yep, I'll play the AIDS card. Judge my crime by intent. \nI use metaphors for testing because there is no Axis Mundi, no cylinder of universe running through the heart of a Taino village. The relativists have triumphed! The idea of separate dimensions existing side by side is tantalizing but poorly evidenced by the mere verbal. \nI try to think of a word or a phrase that will fit in your pocket, a Chairman Mao primer for a sexualized world. Stock aphorisms skirt sex, diseases of sex, all the clutch and throttle that fills the engine of a typically sexual life. \nWhere words fail, actions don't. After my first week of test counseling, I started jettisoning rules that were suggested by my State Department of Health training. Not that it wasn't helpful, but that's just what one has to do with such training. I began to see that people deserved more than rules, they at least deserved information. Sometimes it isn't about the open-ended question, that conversation laxative. \nIt's about patterns traced through yes and no, the revelation of a life spent looking for love, the torturous or virtuous paths of that two-faced Venus. And not the classical version -- this little vixen is pure Botticelli.
I've written this column long enough to have milestones, though they weren't intentionally placed. They are column titles or particular statements that anchor a place and time in my thoughts.\nThrough every column I look back at, critically or otherwise, there's a screaming, obvious lack of definition and evidence. I write about the head more often than the body, about a type of change that occurred as a result of AIDS. The body, worried over for corpulence, fussed at for dysfunctions, is just a stretched canvas in front of a ready palette.\nThe raw facts of AIDS don't exist in that blank space. Ephemeral attacks of pain are connected to other things -- a nauseous stomach and a sinus infection, sore knees and lots of walking.\nIn January of last year, I wrote about lab results that pleased me. The beautiful numbers were Fantasia creatures in my head. They showed progress over progress -- breakthroughs in function. The body couldn't feel bad because the numbers were good.\nYet it did. Like a recalcitrant jury, the prosecution proved a case for survival, and all the body saw was guilt. In each floating, infected T-cell, it was reading its own case law.\nIt would send up flares of problems, small and often unconnected messages at either end -- a jolt of pain through the bones of the big toe, an extra dryness on the face. These were never connected, though if they had been, the dots would have spelled out SOS as surely as Gilligan.\nIt is surely human arrogance to believe that only one type of evidence matters -- that the spiritual, if kept clean and tidy, can always overcome the physical. The clean soul is more than a relief, it is also a purgative. Passion overcomes fact. I do believe this.\nThis January finds, instead of resolutions, a necessity to reinvent -- to make the physical matter again to me.\nAIDS is so much more than a singular experience of something's failure -- a failure of immunity, morality or luck, however you view it. It is testament to the medical genius of the word syndrome, infinite combinations of symptoms that make up a neat whole. It is the stepchild of the viral equivalent of an invertebrate, able like the octopus to push through impossibly tight spaces and tolerate great pressure. \nI started to see patterns in its randomness even as I wondered at its spontaneity. The two weeks when jolting pain accompanied walking, the alternate aching knees (Monday, Wednesday and Friday are the left knees; Tuesday and Thursday belong to the right; Saturday is reserved for head colds; Sunday is sinus infection day), this morning's ghoulish stabs in my left testicle. Ouch.\nThe mornings, too many lately, with the heaves, the gut an angry waker on the wrong side of the bed; night -- stuck awake thinking of an algorithm I use to hyper-operate my mind into numbness.\nEvidence mounts of problems that don't really exist. Shingles in December, lymph nodes in my groin the size of a golf ball, these were real enough. But no arthritis, no testicular cancer, no diabetes to explain the other problems- because they aren't problems. They don't exist.\nThey are the byproducts of the kind of livestock raised on the kind of farm I am -- and like the methane emissions of a billion cattle, it's equally self-destructive. The mind is far away from all of this -- the body is always on the front lines.\nThat's why you can read a thousand different ways that HIV has changed those who have encountered it. The rush to uncover the self is the unconsciousness grabbing control of the reins - it's forced life in the face of an imagined death.\nThe signals sent out by the body are uniformly different, if not downright bad. This is not the flu -- the body goes into war mode, and it stays there like the needle stuck on a fast 78 rpm. The news is bad -- the mind stops hearing the news.\nInstead, a whole new life is constructed around an idea of survival, and one that is of epic proportion. In a culture of redemption, the potent symbol of regeneration is too big to be done poorly. Survival is crawling; rebirth is the goal.\nPerhaps we are all meant to see, eventually, that we are little more than what we are able to do each day. That we are bound by our ability to walk to the boundary. That, each day, our claim to life is entirely premised on the physical. Even the power of a mind, a driving churn of unconscious ambitions, cannot compensate its loss.\nI can see beautiful numbers that fulfill those ambitions in a column a year ago. The mind keen on its proof. Then, in the summer a falling off, in the fall a faster slide. And, I know a bit of fear in winter, the extra burdens of the cold weather upon the weak. \nOr not the weak, just the poor of body. The strong of mind can scoff at all that, I know I would have a year ago. I wouldn't have foreseen anything but an acquittal of the guilt of HIV. Who would believe the body wouldn't go along with it, would see some evidence beyond a reasonable doubt? That it might begin to believe its own pain?
Everything you've heard about Amsterdam is true. There are whores in lighted windows, fat joints to be had for six guilders (around $2.75), beer, genever (gin) and cognac more accessible than McDonald's. There are many canals, beautiful architecture and interesting historical sites at each corner.\nIt was my No. 1 choice of places to see in the world, and now that I have seen it, I know I made a good choice.\nBeing of sound mind, if not body, Charles and I took it easy on the licentiousness, walked and took the public transit, which is more obscenely and gloriously available than any vice. We took the train to Haarlem and Den Haag, we walked into vast old churches so cold that we put our gloves back on (not the hats, though -- we are talking churches).\nWe stayed in a gay guesthouse in the Jordaan district, around the corner from the Westerkerk -- a study in stone elegance topped with the gaudy crown of a Holy Roman Emperor. We strolled the Red Light District mostly as a passage to other places, to the Oudekerk (the old church), but only during the day -- the conservatism of our ages. We dodged the astounding number of people on bikes, the occasional driver on the sidewalk, the gawking standstill of tourist clutches gazing up in wonderment at thus and such, usually stepping in dog droppings which are neither curbed nor cleaned. \nWe wanted to know the city, the people and how they lived. Mostly, we wanted to see how a society that doesn't deign to pass judgment on every human folly goes through each day.\nI think the city we witnessed was not the place we imagined it to be: it was both better and worse than imagination could frame it without facts. My theory is that the people of Amsterdam are rather laid back because they have to be -- we didn't see rush hours (although it was a holiday season), traffic jams or the rush to open anything much before 10 a.m.\nTaking my pills on schedule was the most grueling affair. Because of the time differences, I had to wake up at 4 a.m., go back to bed, jam in some food by 11 a.m. (hard to do in a city that considers breakfast a chance to have ham and cheese) and then not eat lunch until the noon pill time hadmellowed into 1 p.m. The dinner hour was difficult, too -- eat at 5:30 p.m. or so, stop eating by 6:30 p.m. or so, take pills at 8 p.m., and then start all over again.\nIt is a trial to eat fast in Amsterdam unless you wish to eat a Tosti (like a grilled cheese sandwich) or french fries slathered with mayonnaise in a cup. I recommend the tomato soup to anyone -- it is not Campbell's, I promise.\nThere is an HIV life in Amsterdam, an active one, I think. We went to the HIV cafe at the gay community center (whose initials on the sign were COC -- and, yes, we pronounced it that way like the Beavis and Butthead we are) and found few people swirling around a pitch-in table loaded with what looked like varieties of potato salad and a crowded disco floor revved up next door. Why bother? We left.\nOur guest house was very small, and a breakfast was served everyday downstairs. There were a couple of Germans, another American couple and the rest were British tourists. The owner of the house was English and Dutch in origin, which seemed a ready-made reason for the boys from England to hop on over for a holiday.\nEach time we ran into British people at the breakfast table, they studiously ignored us -- too bent on loading caramel, chocolate and Marmite onto toast, croissants or anything that didn't move. I was grossed out and offended by their attitudes, which seemed among the three couples we encountered to be a point of national pride. Priggish and silly, with jam rings around their mouths, they only affirmed the genius of Dickens in describing their classless behavior. My travel tip? If you don't have to have breakfast with gay English tourists from places like the Midlands, don't seek the opportunity out.\nAll of my life, I've felt drawn to Amsterdam, wanted to see it, wished to just pull up and move there, and I didn't lose all of that feeling. I imagined myself arising at 10, having a koffie verkeerd (like cafe au lait) then venturing out to puff a fatty while surveying the surrounding world with an enhanced sense of humor. I thought of a life without plastic signs, vinyl siding, Kroger's and billboards, and the thought was good. On cable television in our room each night around 11 p.m., they carried "The Jerry Springer Show." The contrast was present, real and undoubtedly favorable to the Dutch.\nOne needs to see the world, to shut up, practice the culture of the locals, walk alongside them. To wonder at the differences, ask pertinent questions and listen to the answer. Smile, learn the currency and pay attention. If you can't do that, stay home -- you'll do the peoples of the world a favor by your absence.\nAs for me, I'm on a new search for a place to live -- Amsterdam full-time isn't for me. Rather than feeling disappointed about that, it was a relief. There are new horizons after all, and the world gets bigger in my eyes each day. It is a reckless planet, and I'm headlong after it.\nAnd for nine wonderful days I was not HIV Live, I was not Mr. AIDS. I was in the urban Eden, and I chose to bite the apple and leave.
to clarify one common misperception: I am not an activist.\nI cringe at Robert's Rules of Order, sub-committees and rubber chicken luncheons. Agendas are just what they sound like, whether personal or typed: a funeral for spontaneity.\nI make a bad activist because I don't always think the enemy is identifiable. I hear wild implausible theories for the origin of AIDS, the transmission patterns data-mined out of clinical and hospital reports, the accusations of biological warfare and selective infection and, what do I know? I'm just a guy with AIDS.\nI don't have the exalted calling of uncovering the truth or proof of anything. What I do in my limited confines is explain more often than not. I go often on the way I feel, not with the objectified clarity of a Kinsey report. \nI can't be an activist because my knowledge of chemical processes, suppressed lab data and the existence of pheromones is ephemeral, at best. Half urban legend, half life experience, sex is not the thing I know most about. Well, I know some things. I don't know fetishes per se, I'm not clear on obsession, but I'm picking up new pointers in every HIV test interview. Activists know everything and also everything that nobody else knows; it's not in my job description. \nThe plodding nature of what I do is also a disqualifying factor. Activists practice going limp, study the parameters of civil disobedience, know the local laws down to the degree where protest ends and trespass begins. Right this instant, I could barely pass a driving test. Case closed. \nOn World AIDS Day, I'm often an activist, but only because I show up, say I'm positive and answer questions. I'm not urging consumer action against anyone at the moment, so that's my most radical act. \nWhen I was much younger, I wanted to be a teacher. I thought that would be the coolest of all possible professions. And I think when the pay is equitable, the administration supportive and the facilities well-tended, it still is the coolest of all. \nI was introduced to poetry by Mr. Funnel in seventh grade, to algebra by Mr. Reid, to Shakespeare by Mrs. Steill, to Ahkmatova by Mrs. Robbins. The list could go on. \nTeachers, the good ones, are activists of the most general type. They recognize a commitment to facilitate change and not pound facts. Teaching is not the rote recitation of lists that listens for the recitation back -- it is the presentation of information for the purpose of transforming facts to knowledge. \nElin Jacobs would be proud of that last sentence -- I think I took it from her. \nMy model in writing this semester was the idea that I wanted to be a teacher, too. I think too little of facts in my own life to write of them often. The life of a person with AIDS is not filled with reports from the CDC as a matter of government policy. We aren't mailed any special alerts or instructions of any particular sort by anyone. \nLeft pretty much alone to stumble through the more arcane joys of living with AIDS, we describe our lives in strikingly similar ways when we meet. We don't spout condom commercials, we talk about the same things everyone talks about: weather, sex and real estate. \nWe teach each other about the subtle ways of the negative world around us. The dating difficulties, the disclosure problems, the meds, always the meds; we talk less about new discoveries than we do of past events, how we got here, and what it's like on the island of HIV. \nI learned this year that part of teaching is a balancing act. A yinless, yangless blend of one's beliefs and point of view with other points of view, sometimes unpleasant points of view. One presents the obtuse angle to teach the rounded curve. To teach is to believe that such a thing can really be done. \nSuch belief is the most admirable thing about teaching, and its Achilles' Heel. Contentious as we are with language, race and politics, it's hard not to step wrong, hurt someone, leave someone out. Teachers, when they love what they do, are both great correctors and self-correctors. \nIt's this last point where I fail myself as a teacher. I recognize I have a point of view and I have trouble with others. I don't always reveal this in writing or speaking as much as I should. I shouldn't freak on intravenous drug use, condomless anal sex, the idea that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, or that it is a biological warfare agent directed at Homos, Haitians, Heroin Addicts and Hustlers -- a perverted kind of Sesame Street. But I do. \nTeachers always have a last out, which is just to say we are learning, becoming better each time we stand in front of a room full of people and act like we know what we are saying. I am not an activist, I am a subversive activist -- I am a teacher. \nFor those of you who wrote me this semester, whose class I was invited to or who attended a kegger over on Mitchell Street, I have bad news for you: because we interacted in some way, you have now been deputized.\nYou have been taught the example that it's OK to fail, that failure is in the head and not in the soul, that it's perfectly fine to be attracted to, have sex with and even fall in love with the opposite sex, your own sex, or both or all. You have been taught that the last thing you have to do with HIV is sit by a window and cry like you are in a Movie of the Week on Lifetime. \nYou know HIV thrives on behavior and choice, on opportunity meeting disaster. You know, too, that the way to talk about HIV is not condom, condom, condom. If you could bottle that talk, you'd take serious market share from Sominex. \nYou have been taught to talk about respect and love, and if you are good at it, you might just convince yourself. So, get out of here, and go teach someone else.
My mother's standard advice -- her answer to everything -- is to get some rest. If she had her way, the ills of the world, the Middle Eastern conflict, the pains of hunger and the lack of faith would be solved by a hot beverage and a recliner. \nUnder normal circumstances, she would be right -- even a genius. How many times did I believe that influenza, rhinovirus or a sinus infection would kill me, only to find that a day in a Lazy Boy would recoup my losses?\nI cruised into the Thanksgiving holiday doing my darndest to do what she would do. I cooked a turkey, baked cookies and slept. I saw my doctor, who told me to rest. \nThere is a wall I've hit; much like falling asleep at the wheel of a car, it took me by surprise. It is the barrier of a disease that doesn't act like flu or cold, but feels like both. It comes with surprise as its element of choice. A sudden surge of water, a Nor'easter in NYC, a Plains snowstorm -- it's like all of these. It leaves one cold and feeling vulnerable to the elements.\nIn the process of test counseling, I met a person who is in the process of moving to Bloomington, in love with someone who lives here. The fact that the proposed love is positive and the proposed lover is negative was a pleasant surprise. Well, maybe that's not the way to put it -- it was a blip on my radar. The relationship-to-be would have, built in, some of the same parameters my relationship with Chuck has -- an admission of certain barriers to be overcome by love and devotion. \nMy mother is a mujahedeen for love, a woman who believes in its inexplicable power so much that she will countenance some shadiness to see it achieved. Because of my sexuality, it's her greatest fear that I will live alone, die alone and never be surrounded by it. My parents both see it as the apex of achievement, the singular mark of success. Their attitude toward my achievement of it has been flummoxed by the gay thing and then the HIV thing -- my possibilities took two body slams in the smackdown of life. \nI am my parents' child, even as a test counselor, even as a person with AIDS. I talked about the road ahead with my test subject. I talked about my life briefly and the proposed relationship a lot. I spoke with all the conviction of three years experience in dealing with a negative partner, the fright of sudden illness, the erection-dwindling reality of transmission. \nI met the proposed love when the results of the test were back. A person of great charm, doubtlessly easy to fall in love with, a former New Yorker (I always like people who have lived there). The three of us chatted, got the results and decided to get together some time for dinner. It isn't the typical result of a test session for HIV, but neither is their situation. \nWe talked about the HIV flu, a disease undetectable in any Physician's Desk Reference. It has no locus of symptoms, and can't be described with the dull uncertainties of weather forecasting. It is a description known only to people with HIV. The pain in joints, the back that feels like it has hauled stone, the stomach a finicky partner. \nIt is the type of problem that mothers dread -- one for which chicken soup, hot tea and love have no answer. The solid force of mother love cannot dent it. \nDoctors don't like it, either. The chart of an HIV positive patient would look like mine -- patient complains of fatigue, painful joints, upset eating patterns. Temperature is normal; blood pressure is normal, no outward signs. Like my mother, my doctor says rest and hot beverage. And unlike my mother, he can order blood tests. \nWhat would mom do? Well, if she's my mother, she would persevere, and so have I. By baking a turkey and cookies, I participated in the legendary status of my people to go stubbornly against what their body tells them to do. The apocryphal story my mother tells is of her own mother, a woman I never met. On her last day of life, she states admiringly, her mother got up out of bed and washed the baseboards of the rooms in the house. She wasn't about to die in a dirty house. \nAs I looked at the indifferent conditions of the baseboards in my house, I felt the stirrings of a call to action. Over two days I cleaned, vacuumed, dusted, bleached and Windexed. I made stabbing motions at the floors, determined to control my environment. I castigated my uncooperative body to do, do, do! Like Mussolini's trains, I needed an outward sign of control, proof. Something that eludes us, every one of us, in the telling of this story. \nToday, as I wrote this column, my coffee resurfaced into the world. Suddenly, no warning but the hyperactivity of my saliva glands, a rumble unworthy of a volcano -- then I was fine. I drove Chuck to school and called the city to complain about my neighbor's trash. I test counseled, I helped some undergraduates with a semester project. I washed the baseboards in my life, if not my house --I've gained nothing on my ancestors.\nMy mother looks for proof and so do I; we look for reasons in the well of superstition and home remedies. Antecedent weaknesses that would explain the present, if by nothing more than poorly understood genetics. We believe in science, but we believe in the body more. And although our faiths are fervent, our devotions regular, we have never learned the language of the body. We cannot translate pain to inaction; rather, it's a rallying cry: if you can't reach understanding, try reaching for the Pine-Sol. My mother's mother would be so proud.
Inevitably, when people ask me questions about HIV, they are simple questions -- how, when and who. \nThey are questions asked to fill in newspaper responses, quick and to the point. They focus both on how I live now, and how, as I lived before, HIV happened to me. \n They assume an easy relationship between cause and effect, that it can be objectified, as it would be in a newspaper story. \n Sometimes, the questions assume I knew when I was infected. That I was an actor in a scenario well rehearsed.\nEvery question should be answered, I think, and with better than a demurred response -- too personal? Not usually. It is not as if I'm a snake who has shed an unlucky skin for a new year of living, but my life up to the point of HIV is a hide of a life I lived. Living differently now, thinking differently, reacting differently, that person's life isn't just mine anymore -- some of it belongs to you. \nI know of certain places within it that are entry points for HIV, but it's difficult to view the past as a bloodstream waiting for an infection. It loses the whole point.\nFor me, as for you, combinations of choices brought me to the present, and will deliver me into the future. More considered ones from me now, perhaps, but born of the same hurly-burly as always.\nWhen choices end in traumas, we'd rather forget them. As if we could etch-a-sketch the looping trails of our epic struggle to do the right thing, then shake them clean. The mind is a washing machine. \nUntil I became a person with HIV, when I was a person without it, the educational zeal I have today just didn't exist. My advocacy was limited to supporting the death sentence for bad drivers in New York City, my zeal -- well, I don't know that I had any. I lived as people often do, from choice to choice. \nI came back to Indiana because my parents were aging, as were my nieces and nephews. I didn't know the younger ones, I had lapsed communication with their parents. I was tired of city living at the time.\nI came back to the scenes of my earliest possibilities for HIV infection. I drove by houses I knew the inside of, that looked much the same. Points on a sexual tour of an undergraduate life. Within the last few years, one of my last connections to those days, one of my last living possibilities for transmission died. He never acknowledged to me that he had HIV. I knew it by accident.\nI knew it by seeing a medical record in passing; a diagnosis of complications from primary HIV infection, a routine problem. I knew about it after we had sex.\nI knew nothing we had done sexually would be likely to transmit, except oral sex.\nThis was a person for whom I had deep, unrequited feelings -- I don't know if it was love, as that never had a chance. From a different culture and a different time, he was never gay in the way we consider gay now.\nQuestions of where and when and how provoke me to privately reconsider my list of suspects, to go through an endless loop of experience checks, like a sound-check roadie at a rock concert. \nI can't erase him. Our sexual liaison had possibilities. My work as a test counselor has benefited from it -- you can't discount oral sex as a route of transmission.\nHe was in all ways a beautiful man. A potent intellectual, a great sense of humor, a fascinating talker, generous with ideas, a natural gymnast in the ways of the body; I would have taken him home to meet mother.\nI could never talk to him about HIV, I could never admit I saw what I had no business seeing. He never talked to me about it. We last spoke on the phone when he was ill, an illness he said he would get over, and never did.\nI first met him at Bullwinkle's, I was out with my friends; he was with his gay friends, the ones who knew what his life was really like. It was summer.\nIt was ice cold, January, when he died, almost 15 years later. \nDid he infect me? Obviously he did, but not with a mere condition of health. He infected me with his charm, his curiosity about the world; he infected me with an idea of who I wanted to be with -- they would, I knew, have to measure up to him.\nOf the points of entry for HIV in my life, each one of them has a name, and I remember them. They weren't faceless partners, or nice smiles from across a smoky bar. They had, and still have, a place in my affection. Each one of them was interesting, virtuous to various degrees, all of them were talented; they didn't pass through like sailors and no, I wasn't a port.\nWhen I visit them, and I do, our conversations are stuck on tape, the image is scratchier each time. I shouldn't call it conversation, it's more like amateur seance. Each of them is dead. \nI want to talk about HIV all the more because of this, because I can't discuss it with them. I can't pin a date and know whether I should apologize or be apologized to; there are no heroes and no victims, my life is a bad literature.\nWe were all a lot like you.
Most of the funding programs of the federal government aimed at HIV services, prevention, education and financial support for people with HIV have a basic fundamental goal: stability.\nA stable social situation with regards to transmission rates, a stable factual message about risks, a stable home to go to when you feel too sick to work: It's hard enough to take pills, maintain one's social connections, and make plans for the future with a home, and nearly impossible without one. \nI came to my HIV life with some stability built in -- I could afford my rent, I was working, I was covered by medical insurance. I didn't have to think too much about stability, and when I did, it was in comparison to someone who had it far worse than I did in his or her HIV life. \nI've been thankful to God, but in retrospect, probably not enough. \nMy decidedly unrobust analysis invaded my consciousness recently, triggered by my fourth anniversary with Chuck. Our story is very simple: Boy meets boy, boy falls for boy, boys have commitment ceremony, one boy is diagnosed HIV positive, boys get dog. \nIt could be said it has played out like that, but all those delicious details would then be left by the wayside. The torrid fights (we've had, I think, three), the pissy moments, the unexpected laughs and the almost frightening conformity of opinion we possess. \nI opened my e-mail this morning, and had a message from Chuck. These are a feature of my e-mail queue Monday through Friday. They are brief, and they usually say he loves me, is thrilled to find me in bed each morning and can't wait to see me after work. They have x's and o's. \nMy stability in the early days after diagnosis had nothing to do with the government and everything to do with him. We had our commitment ceremony a bit more than a month before I was diagnosed. We had our first date a year before, Nov. 4, 1996. \nWe've all heard the stories of people who are diagnosed positive, who lose their lovers, married partners, family, friends or all of them. I couldn't imagine it.\nI never feared what my parents would do, or my siblings. It was difficult to imagine what Charles would do.\nAnd that's no slight on him -- everyone who knows Chuck sees he is rock solid; abstemious about flights of fancy, he projects a considered and introspective stance. This is not a man who freaks (and I might interject here that it is considerate of him, as I do enough for both of us). \nIn the early days, hidden in my body, there was a substance, odorless, colorless, tasteless, but as lethal as a plastic explosive. It was a Houdini trick, a barrel over the Niagara Falls, but the problem was, I was not Houdini. I was not brave: I was Mark A. Price, and I was scared out of my wits. \nI saw all promise sliding away, but not dramatically. I felt I would see it go piece by piece, a job here, a friend there, a future next -- then, they would be permanently out of reach. I saw for myself a living death, and worse yet, a slow one. \nToday, opening my e-mail queue, 1,000 and some odd days later, 100,000 conceptual years away from ground zero, another message from Charles -- punctual, as always. We have learned so much together that we have learned to have faith in one another. \nI would have liked to achieve this happiness without HIV, and I know he would too. But having no other basis for explaining it, I'd like to believe we achieved it in spite of HIV. \nIn spite of every attempt I made to differentiate myself, there was Charles reminding me I was still the same guy. In spite of every attempt I made to blame HIV for everything, Charles reminded me I was still in charge of my life, still my own decision-maker. \nMy anniversary gift to Charles this year is a wish I have for you -- that you will find love at the same time it finds you -- that you will be able to accept it, and know wholeheartedly that you are worth attracting it. \nIt is my soppy, romantic side that wants this, an ever-increasing part of my character. I feel its blob tendencies starting to dull my hard edges. \nIt is my damnable belief that love is the answer to too much to be spoken of so little, with so little seriousness. \nI call this idea foundational logic. It is the idea that you create your reality, you control your destiny, you work for your luck -- and love is the alchemy that affects its combination. Stable is a word that describes a good foundation -- to me, a good foundation is made of love. \nIt's been a long time since I thought the answer to preventing the spread of HIV was made of latex, or that it could be contained in laws or policy statements. I see it in moments between people who care for one another, all too ephemeral for me to teach; there is no "Mark's 10 steps to being HIV free."\nContrary to what you might expect, the best foundations for the strongest homes are portable across the boundaries of geography and time. Thank you for another year of simple answers, Chuck -- let's show them how it's done.
It's all over but the analysis, the first job interview I've had as a positive person -- at least, this type of positive. \nI had the night-before jitters, not because of my qualities or qualifications, but because of revealing my HIV status during the interview. It was a baffling fear. My resume is covered with "HIV Live," HIV test counselor, HIV speaker, AIDS this and AIDS that. \n With an hour to convince someone I have qualities that can't be found in Times New Roman 12-point type, I can't avoid talking about the single most important event in my life, or at least the one that drives my ambition and determination. \nAs much as I didn't want to turn my interview into an opportunity to educate, it's the work I've chosen to do. So I read employment advice for positive job seekers, from sources as varied as "The Body online", Poz Magazine, the government. Each one of them screams -- "Don't Reveal." A part of me knows they are right; a part of me thinks they're screwed in the head. \nDisassociation is impossible for me, which might give you an idea of the trench I have engineered for myself. As Blanche DuBois sadly learned in "A Streetcar Named Desire," a life of relying on the kindness of strangers inevitably manufactures its own hurdles. \nWhy wouldn't I have it differently? Why wasn't I content, as so many are, to keep my status to myself?\nI confidently told my interviewer I was tired of the lack of reality in the media about HIV. I told her that of all good things I've managed in my life, nothing comes close to this HIV life I've been having. \nThe worst of what has happened to me the past three years is how it has affected my approach to the affairs of life. They fascinate me, I want to grab them by the metaphorical lapels and pull them closer. I want the people in my life to know and be known by me in better ways than "how's it going" or "nice to see you" might suggest. \nYet I walk in a constrained world, and understand it well. I speak of loving things the way others speak of liking them. I feel love not because I'm such a saint but because I understand how difficult and how wonderful things can be, often at the same time. And I understand the tentativeness of the negotiation between those two extremes we casually call life. \nI never expect people to accommodate me, I expect I will accommodate them; to consider myself handicapped in any way runs counter to what the past three years have meant to me. I might be a checkbox on an application, a token to be slipped into the spot marked "Americans With Disabilities Act," but that isn't the reality I live. \nI recently had an e-mail interview from a student working on a paper. One of the questions dealt with the empowerment or disempowerment I have experienced since diagnosis. \nWhile the question honestly confused me -- I answered that I thought being born white and male in the '60s made disempowerment a moot point -- I thought of all the "fears" I have carried forward the last three years. \nI was afraid of ending life, I was afraid of mainstreaming, I was afraid of graduate school, I was afraid I wasn't smart enough, and now I am afraid of interviewing. \nBut I left that job interview with the idea that the company that didn't hire me would miss out on a good deal. \nIn fact, I learned today that my difficulty in thinking of disempowerment wasn't based on where, how and when I was born, but because I hadn't thought of empowerment, I hadn't defined it or identified it with myself. \nThis interview comes early in the process for me -- I won't finish my Master's program until next summer -- but it couldn't have come at a better time: A month before my 40th birthday, my fourth anniversary with Chuck, a time of assessment. \nAnd I've learned a new piece of metadata about myself -- empowered: Fit and alive at a fascinating moment in time, with as many years as I want to enjoy it. I enjoy my little paranoias, they are anchors in the stream of events. I told my e-mail interviewer I thought my fears were refreshingly common, a perspective I learned as I reviewed my answers. \nThere will always be someone who can reject my experience, or not be compelled by it. My interviewer might have been one of them. I only reward myself by going at every situation with the steamroller of honesty and this intensity I live, but damn, that's a good reward. \nIt is the story of change that keeps being told here, an interactive story in which the end changes when choices are made in the story line. What surprises me when I write it is how small the changes are that eventually repaint the big picture. Life never changes at the moment something is done, but about a hundred ripples out in the metaphorical ocean it occupies. What waves will come out of this?\nThis week I'm living the story as I'm writing it. It's my favorite way to write this column. In fact, it's Friday and I'm going to the Homecoming Parade, which I find enormously entertaining. What will be playing in my mind won't be an interview, a debate of whether I've made the right choices, if my story will end the right way. I know full well I've done the right things; my parents think so, Chuck thinks so. I'll be jonesing for candy, watching for Miss Gay IU. \nThere's nothing like a guy in a dress propped up in a convertible to remind one how tenuous reality is …
If you like being scared at Halloween, you can visit a haunted house or a hell house. In a haunted house, someone will come at you with a rubber axe, a few goof walls will tremble, eyes will move in a portrait, you'll hear a "Shh, they're coming -- do you have your mask on?" \n In a hell house, more complicated tableaux might well greet you. The profound detritus of ungodly choices are on display this year at the Ellettsville House of Prayer Hell House. In an article from The Herald-Times' Lifestyle section, Oct. 17, a hell house is defined as dealing with the topics of today -- prejudice, school shootings and homosexuality, among others.\nLater in the article, we learn that new to this year's hell house is an AIDS scene in which a man dies from AIDS as a result of engaging in homosexual intercourse. Which can happen, by the way.\nWe might question why this dying man wasn't a Wall Street broker getting a hooker job under the West Side Highway in Manhattan; an IV drug user trading sex for a fix; a housewife whose husband found conventionality so imperative that he married, and cruises for men in public parks; a child in Africa; a cowboy in Argentina with a little too much gaucho in his swagger; a high-fashion model.\nReligion is an emotional institution and it demands emotional reactions. For the same reason that some people like to read new Jon-Benet murder theories in supermarket tabloids, some people enjoy having their moral outrages depicted outrageously. The birth of Christ is a circus, the Crucifixion a tabloid-ready event. \nThe outrageous attracts the eye, a pattern repeated in nature through tropical birds, reef fish and various reptiles. The specialized are easily noticed.\nThe fact that gay sexual behavior is linked to HIV, or condemned, or causes moral outrage isn't a story anymore. The fact that some gay men have HIV or have died of AIDS-related complications is a fact. No arguments.\nThe real story of the House of Prayer isn't that it concocted this little piss in the eye of reality, but that it had the moxie to do so publicly. In doing so, it tableau-ed its own misconceptions about HIV, demonstrated its lack of understanding of recent trends in infections, showed how vulnerable it could be to the epidemic.\nIt could very well be that no member of the House of Prayer will ever have gay sex, and not a one of them will ever desire it. This is fine -- leave the swimming pool to the swimmers. \nThey might never be adulterous, get drunk and have unprotected, ungodly, unsanctioned sex (with the opposite sex, of course). And, if needles are the fangs of the devil, they'll give them a wide berth. \nSuch a life of virtue, and a strict adherence to virtue, is difficult for me to think of having, and I couldn't have it anyway. When I've written about my own feelings of God in my life, I usually receive an e-mail from a well-meaning strict constructionist of What God is All About. Yes, they say, God loves you, but you can only be saved by: A. being homosexual but never having homosexual sex; B. not being homosexual and turning away from your sinful choice; C. asking Christ to forgive you at about 10 seconds before death for your bent ways and deviant life. I've got salvation problems, they tell me, from the get-go. \nIt isn't relevant to the House of Prayer that I don't think they get it. I'm not anxious to defend the fact that people, of all sexualities and situations, continue to acquire HIV and die -- at least we agree on that one. \nOne silly little fag on a hell house floor in Ellettsville -- I mean, one silly little dead fag -- won't stop reality, various realities, from overtaking the House of Prayer. \nIt might stop some gay teen from a House of Prayer family from ever connecting with gay life. He or she might think twice. He or she might raise a real family, not a made-up one. Love will overcome longing.\nHe or she might grow up with that revulsion of homosexuality that is manifested on the Hell House floor. Objects of disease, they might feel the calling to do the work of the Lord and wipe them out. \nHe or she might find those parks where men who aren't gay cruise for sex with men who aren't gay, or are out doing their civic duty: relieving the godly of a bit of their virtue. \nI've tested some fundamentalist children at Positive Link -- I'm not making this stuff up.\nIt might be tempting for us to say as in the advertisements for a drug-free America: This is your brain, and this is your brain on Christ. It feels a little tingly good, I have to admit. \nInstead of that, let's take this opportunity to simply choose not to go. The Hell House will have its visitors, but they won't be us. This message is sometimes better than confrontation.\nLet's raise money for public education and fund our testing clinics, and be ready for the next wave of infections. Let's keep the doors open late on transmission education, so these stragglers can still make it in. They will be experiencing guilt and remorse, tempted to turn away from God and everything they believed. For them, HIV will be the sure marker of disfavor for their lives, their choices and their sins. \nThey will need us, and we need to be ready for them.
Columbia City, Ind., has always prided itself on its Christmas decorations. Each year of my young life, I was shunted off to the Whitley County Courthouse on Christmas Eve to sit on Santa's lap and receive a bag of oranges and a bag of haystacks (those vanilla creamy things covered in chocolate). The line would be long because everyone did the same thing. \nWhen the ritual was fulfilled, we'd go the four blocks home to find that Santa had arrived. In a Christmas Eve family, the whole set-up was a little hard to believe.\nI never bought the Easter Bunny madness. \nI munched the chocolate, and I wondered why we did such things. My ordinary parents were suddenly transformed into love mongers, my siblings forced into Sunday pants, a dinner with 40 relatives stifled our little house. I was far too serious as a child.\nI'm dealing with new myths that threaten to become as monolithic as those cartoon holidays we have. One struck very close to home the other day.\nOne of my friends has met someone, and as we discussed it while rocking on my porch, inevitably I had to ask if they had sex yet -- which I always ask in a roundabout way: "Have you seen him naked?"; "Did you touch anything?"; "What about the kissing, did you get any tongue?"\nThen of course, each detail brought forth completes a list of risk factors I mentally check off. We finally reach the "do you have or did you use condoms?"\nI hate to be so predictable, but inevitably my friends know about this column, so it's caveat emptor when discussing sex with me. Because she is a good friend, I put her through the drill.\nTongue? yes. Naked? no. Touch anything? maybe. A little bit of wine went into pushing the attraction between my friend and her amour from "look across the room" to tongue tango in a most gratifying turn of events.\nI'm the cheerleader for discovering emotional and physical interest in another person, so I wasn't harsh. Because I know both parties I have the task to educate at the same time as I receive the thrill of the voyeur. I wanted to know if my friend had condoms, were they discussed, will they be needed?\nAs she knows from being around me when I'm sick, HIV is no real laughing matter. She's well informed of women's health issues. So when she told me she thought this guy was "clean," I got the surprise of the evening. \nWe've become a nation of diagnosticians, a mutant class of them blessed with viral X-ray vision. Such vision is naturally an all-consuming function, and it apparently tampers with our common sense.\nWe stop hearing words like condoms and incurable, just like I stopped hearing the Backstreet Boys a couple of years ago.\nI fixed my glare on her. She had the glow of the monolithic myth all over her. \nLike a deer in the headlights, she didn't immediately realize her mistake. If you're going to tell the monolithic myth, you don't usually have to worry about your audience. They probably believe it, too.\nToo often, we deal with the myth backward, by testing people who have believed it and have had hindsight regret. They peel off the vestments of a priesthood of immortality and get down and dirty with the rest of us. \nThe monolithic myth that you can know someone's status for sexually transmitted diseases just by looking has taken a staggering count of human life. Because its rituals are so often Dionysian, they are shrouded in the blessed forgetfulness of hangovers or crashing, part of a cycle of various addictions. \nIt doesn't take drugs or booze, it functions in more ascetic settings: between partners in a marriage or an arrangement, in monogamy as well as adultery. We know ourselves to be clever creatures, and we are too clever for our own good.\nWhile I gave the well-worn lecture, annotated with examples, she knew she couldn't win. Sighing, and throwing herself back into the rocking chair, she bore it like a pro. \nSometimes, when I write this column, I feel like I'm painting a bull's eye on my chest. Because I know the monolithic myths, you must know I believed them at one point of my life. It was the time least suited and most crucial for such mistaken beliefs. I tried to remember that when I started my lecture, my old life as a believer. \nI tried to remember when AIDS was a death sentence, as automatic as a mail sorting machine. Those myths we had then! We thought only people who had anal sex got it, then we thought only promiscuous people got it. We'd see someone out at the bars and say -- "I can't believe he doesn't have it."\nWe'd compare ourselves and know it wasn't possible that educated men would contract an STD. A case of crabs was a fluke, a poor choice of partners. A case of AIDS was like a demarcation -- that was for people who were out of control. They paid for their mistakes right in front of you. The proof of superiority was that you didn't have it, you weren't dying and of course, you never would. \nYour ethnicity, your education, your income, your cultural background -- these are all poor predictors of your risk for HIV. To me, nothing predicts as well as myths, the stories you tell of yourself. "I was so drunk…" and "I had the clap, but I took care of it…" or "I'm clean…" mark you as acolytes of the religion of denial. On my porch on a warm summer night, I defrocked another one of you. I'm a bounty hunter for you little pagans -- like Clint Eastwood after anger management, I'll try to make it painless.
Columbia City, Ind., has always prided itself on its Christmas decorations. Each year of my young life, I was shunted off to the Whitley County Courthouse on Christmas Eve to sit on Santa's lap and receive a bag of oranges and a bag of haystacks (those vanilla creamy things covered in chocolate). The line would be long because everyone did the same thing. \n When the ritual was fulfilled, we'd go the four blocks home to find that Santa had arrived. In a Christmas Eve family, the whole set-up was a little hard to believe.\n I never bought the Easter Bunny madness. \nI munched the chocolate, and I wondered why we did such things. My ordinary parents were suddenly transformed into love mongers, my siblings forced into Sunday pants, a dinner with 40 relatives stifled our little house. I was far too serious as a child.\nI'm dealing with new myths that threaten to become as monolithic as those cartoon holidays we have. One struck very close to home the other day.\nOne of my friends has met someone, and as we discussed it while rocking on my porch, inevitably I had to ask if they had sex yet -- which I always ask in a roundabout way: "Have you seen him naked?"; "Did you touch anything?"; "What about the kissing, did you get any tongue?"\nThen of course, each detail brought forth completes a list of risk factors I mentally check off. We finally reach the "do you have or did you use condoms?"\nI hate to be so predictable, but inevitably my friends know about this column, so it's caveat emptor when discussing sex with me. Because she is a good friend, I put her through the drill.\nTongue? yes. Naked? no. Touch anything? maybe. A little bit of wine went into pushing the attraction between my friend and her amour from "look across the room" to tongue tango in a most gratifying turn of events.\nI'm the cheerleader for discovering emotional and physical interest in another person, so I wasn't harsh. Because I know both parties I have the task to educate at the same time as I receive the thrill of the voyeur. I wanted to know if my friend had condoms, were they discussed, will they be needed?\nAs she knows from being around me when I'm sick, HIV is no real laughing matter. She's well informed of women's health issues. So when she told me she thought this guy was "clean," I got the surprise of the evening. \nWe've become a nation of diagnosticians, a mutant class of them blessed with viral X-ray vision. Such vision is naturally an all-consuming function, and it apparently tampers with our common sense.\nWe stop hearing words like condoms and incurable, just like I stopped hearing the Backstreet Boys a couple of years ago.\nI fixed my glare on her. She had the glow of the monolithic myth all over her. \nLike a deer in the headlights, she didn't immediately realize her mistake. If you're going to tell the monolithic myth, you don't usually have to worry about your audience. They probably believe it, too.\nToo often, we deal with the myth backward, by testing people who have believed it and have had hindsight regret. They peel off the vestments of a priesthood of immortality and get down and dirty with the rest of us. \nThe monolithic myth that you can know someone's status for sexually transmitted diseases just by looking has taken a staggering count of human life. Because its rituals are so often Dionysian, they are shrouded in the blessed forgetfulness of hangovers or crashing, part of a cycle of various addictions. \nIt doesn't take drugs or booze, it functions in more ascetic settings: between partners in a marriage or an arrangement, in monogamy as well as adultery. We know ourselves to be clever creatures, and we are too clever for our own good.\nWhile I gave the well-worn lecture, annotated with examples, she knew she couldn't win. Sighing, and throwing herself back into the rocking chair, she bore it like a pro. \nSometimes, when I write this column, I feel like I'm painting a bull's eye on my chest. Because I know the monolithic myths, you must know I believed them at one point of my life. It was the time least suited and most crucial for such mistaken beliefs. I tried to remember that when I started my lecture, my old life as a believer. \nI tried to remember when AIDS was a death sentence, as automatic as a mail sorting machine. Those myths we had then! We thought only people who had anal sex got it, then we thought only promiscuous people got it. We'd see someone out at the bars and say -- "I can't believe he doesn't have it."\nWe'd compare ourselves and know it wasn't possible that educated men would contract an STD. A case of crabs was a fluke, a poor choice of partners. A case of AIDS was like a demarcation -- that was for people who were out of control. They paid for their mistakes right in front of you. The proof of superiority was that you didn't have it, you weren't dying and of course, you never would. \n Your ethnicity, your education, your income, your cultural background -- these are all poor predictors of your risk for HIV. To me, nothing predicts as well as myths, the stories you tell of yourself. "I was so drunk…" and "I had the clap, but I took care of it…" or "I'm clean…" mark you as acolytes of the religion of denial. On my porch on a warm summer night, I defrocked another one of you. I'm a bounty hunter for you little pagans -- like Clint Eastwood after anger management, I'll try to make it painless.