It was my sophomore year at Tulane, circa 1986. While I had lost my virginity with a man at age 16, that one time had been my only gay experience when I arrived in New Orleans to start my freshman year. Right at the end of that first year, and starting into my second, I began to hesitantly, although it could not be said cautiously, experiment with my sexuality.
It came with a nearly crushing amount of internal conflict. I had known since earliest adolescence that I was gay. But I hadn’t yet reconciled the juxtaposition between how I knew I felt and what I thought the world held for people who felt that way. I went through a fairly consistent cycle: horniness drives me to an anonymous encounter, which was easy to find on an urban college campus. Anonymous encounter leads to terror and bottomless guilt.
The fact that it was 1986 didn’t necessarily have to be important to my little story. Gay men throughout history have gone through the same soul-killing cycle of letting go and then white-knuckling it and depending on “self control.” But it was 1986 and that meant that a killer disease was lurking around every corner and beyond every shadow for gay men.
AIDS at the time was too new for anyone to understand what it all meant, so the worst was assumed. (As it turned out, the worst was just about right.) However, it was known at least in the gay community enough to spur endless confusion and misinformation and drive people deeper into fear and guilt.
In November that year, I had spent too much time in the Howard Tilton library, reading every thing I could find about AIDS, or GRID as it was still sometimes called then. One horrifying story after another of young, healthy men dealing with monstrous, tortuous illness and dying painful, lonely agonizing deaths.
Then I developed a cough. Maybe it was just the drafty library. Or maybe it was that guy I met last week. I ran back to look up more about symptoms. Swollen glands. Check. Night sweats. Check. Shallow, unproductive cough. Check.
Panic? Check.
By the end of the following week, a week filled with blood tests at the student health center, compromising a will (whatever a 19 year old thought he had to will, except a bunch of new wave records), and writing goodbye letters to my family, I was alone in my dorm room, the day before leaving for Orlando for Thanksgiving, calling in to find out my results.
From the moment the woman said “Negative” I couldn’t hear anything else. I literally fell to my knees. So certain was I that I was going to be heading home to say goodbye to my family. I picked myself up and swore I would never have sex with another man.
Of course that was a promise I couldn’t keep. But the terror I felt in that moment has stayed with me since. And I had every reason to feel that fear. Even irrational fear has a foundation in fact. And the fact that soon developed was this: Within the next 36 months I would attend one funeral after another. In one 12-month period, I watched 13 men be buried in the ground, not a single one of them over 40.
AIDS has gone from apocalyptic to manageable. But to me it’s still some scary shit.
If recent rates of infection in Central Florida are any indication, some of you don’t agree. Okay, AIDS will not pick up and carry off entire groups of your friends. It will not suck the life out of a healthy robust man in what feels like a month. But it’s still a serious disease, one that will be with you for the rest of your life. It is a circumstance that will have to be factored into every decision you make for the rest of your life.
It might seem terribly old-fashioned, but it still works: wrap it up, boys.
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