August 12th, 1991. It was Monday afternoon in San Francisco and I was going in for routine HIV test results. My anxiety was nil. I expected my test would come back negative like it had every time for the previous 3 years. After all, I’d only had unprotected sex once all year and it was with someone who had told me he was HIV negative. Why worry?
Then the counselor told me my test came back positive. I had HIV. I immediately broke down crying. At the ripe old age of 24, I felt my life was over.
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I grew up in a small town north of Cincinnati—one of the most reliably Republican areas in the U.S. This was Reagan country. I survived high school in the Eighties as a closeted comic book geek by fantasizing about life in Gay Mecca. My white trash family was a nightmare of emotional and sexual abuse, but TV and movies helped me deny reality. If I escaped to California, all my dreams would come true! In my fantasy world, AIDS was something I thought would never happen to me.
When you grow up with Adult Children of Alcoholics for parents, it’s not easy. But I also had the burden of Mom being mentally ill and Dad being a redneck Homer Simpson with Attention Deficit Disorder. Add in a baby brother with cerebral palsy and a middle brother with severe ADHD and that left only one de facto adult doing 24/7 crisis management: me. A few years after high school and doing restaurant work, I decided that with no money and no college degree, my only hope was to run off to the big city. Since I didn’t come from a good family with healthy life skills (like self-discipline, saving money, social graces, etc), my brilliant plan for success was taking a bus to San Francisco with nothing but $27 and a bag of PB&J sandwiches.
I knew no one there and was broke so I ended up staying at a homeless shelter in the Tenderloin District. The place was run by a charming, handsome ex-con who was embezzling from them and using their clients for sex. I was young, dumb and full of shit so I was an easy mark. When he asked me to join him on "vacation," I said yes—only for him to dump me in New York once he was done using me. Feeling abandoned and stupid, I sheepishly called my parents who paid for my ticket back to Ohio.
After 2 more years of minimum wage jobs, I took my last paycheck and got back on the bus to S.F. I was determined to succeed. I was gonna be somebody! Yet I didn’t realize that lacking responsible adults at home left me unprepared to be a responsible adult myself...and I was still in denial about the incest. No wonder I finally got exposed to HIV.
I was sent to San Francisco General Hospital and enrolled in the AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP). Back in the early 90s, the only medication they had was AZT. While I was able to tolerate it, I knew far too many who couldn’t. I watched dozens of men die on a monthly basis year after year. I lost count of how many times I was told by friends in The Castro that I should consider going on permanent disability because I likely wouldn’t live long.
Now, remember that I only had a high school diploma and zero basic life skills. I worked dead-end jobs for minimum wage. I came to S.F. with no contacts, no support system and no common sense. Once I seroconverted, I figured in a few years I’d get full-blown AIDS and then die broke and alone. My future looked hopeless.
By 1995, I’d been introduced to crystal meth. If I managed to keep a job for a year, I was lucky. I’d get an apartment for a few years before I’d have to move again because I simply wasn’t stable. From time to time, I would manage to get it together for several months, but it didn’t last. Then in 1997, I got my first opportunistic infection (thrush) and a T-cell count below 200. Now I had an AIDS diagnosis and went into rehab.
How did I survive? It was a combination of things. One, I’m incredibly stubborn; I refuse to completely give up. Second, like my father and brother, I also have A.D.D. However, unlike them, I tend to hyperfocus when analyzing what went wrong and then I brainstorm solutions. Lastly, despite all the things my parents did wrong, the one thing they did right was give me good DNA that was resilient against HIV.
1998 is when things started to change. After AZT stopped working for me, my doctor spent a year trying out different drug cocktails of protease inhibitors. We found a combination that worked in August of ’98. For the past 12 years, I’ve been on the same cocktail. The AIDS diagnosis has been gone ever since and my viral load remains undetectable with consistent T-cell counts. I finally found the right therapist and started going to a 12 step program, eventually meeting an intelligent and compassionate man who loved me unconditionally. He taught me everything my parents didn’t—how to make my bed, how to balance my checkbook, how to hold down a job, what healthy boundaries were, etc.
In 2000, I moved to L.A. with him to pursue my Hollywood dreams. Everything hasn’t been all rainbows and roses. My partner and I had an amicable split because I’d gotten confident enough to strike out on my own—whereupon I promptly fell flat on my face career-wise and then relapsed to cope with the pain of failure. It took me five more years before everything in my life became as stable as my T-cells and my viral load.
Next August will be my 20th anniversary of living with HIV. I’m in my forties and in excellent health. I’m four years clean & sober and have managed to hold down the same job the whole time. Since my goal is to be a writer, I’m trying to write regularly (hence this diary). I struggle with being torn between when to disclose my HIV status to people and when it’s TMI since I grew up without boundaries so I’m vigilant about such behavior on my part. I find disclosing my status in sexual situations is easy, but in the rest of my life it’s much more complicated.
So here I am two decades later, gainfully employed with an actual career, money in the bank, a nice apartment, a decent-paying job with full benefits and in good shape. If you’d asked me 15 years ago what my future looked like, I’d have told you that I expected to be dead soon. But the fact is, I’m a fighter. My strain of HIV has turned out to be a manageable chronic disease that is still responding well to the exact same drugs for over a decade. I expect to live a normal lifespan—something I didn’t think was possible before.
Maybe someday when gay marriage is legal everywhere, I’ll find the right man, settle down and raise a family. Who knows what else I’ll accomplish in time to celebrate my 20th anniversary next year? I’ve learned that almost no one is beyond redemption and that I can never, ever give up no matter how bad it gets. Now more than ever, I try to keep an open mind and pray for "the courage to change the things I can."
UPDATE: This is my first time on the RecList. Thank you all very much!