testing... testing...

I've got AIDS on the brain.

After reading a troubling (and somewhat overlong) article in the New Yorker last night about rising rates of HIV infection in the gay male population, I spent a significant portion of my time at work today researchig the history of GMHC (Gay Men's Health Crisis), the first AIDS advocacy group. This was for our June "gay pride"-themed newsletter at work. I came across this quite amazing timeline on the GMHC website. Reading about the early years of the epidemic was revelatory -- these were years that I was living through but the horrors of the disease did not at all penetrate my childhood world. I can remember the Reagan-Mondale election and the Challenger explosion but it was not until Magic Johnson's revelation that I even feel like I had any clue what AIDS was. (A result, probably, of the Reagan-Helms-et al. effort to hide/deny the reality of the disease, an effort that resulted in hugely increasing the number of infections.)

Most significantly for me today, though, I went and got my first HIV test. I am going to come clean to all of you and say that this is because I had some unprotected sex last weekend. I did not know my status at the time (and still don't -- I'll get the results next week). It was a really, really stupid thing for a "smart" guy to do -- especially considering that I was not really drunk, not on crystal meth, and work with HIV/AIDS patients at my job every day.

The thought process when you decide to do that goes something like this: "Well, I've been pretty sexually active for the past year or so but I've mostly used condoms. No one's ever penetrated me without a condom on. I was definitely negative before. I'm probably negative now. I'm giving it to him. He wants it without the condom and it's not really very likely that I'm gonna get it by giving anal sex, is it???" Not the greatest logic. But it's the sort of thing that, when testosterone is rushing into my head, I'm likely to say to myself. And I'm ashamed to say that I might well say something to myself like that again....

Before you start sending me "You're so stupid! What the fuck are you thinking?!?" posts, let me just write my reactions to getting my first test (at a free anonymous New York City testing site).

The place was in Chelsea (that's where I work), but a pretty unfashionable section of it -- nearer to the projects than the trendy clubs. The clinic opened to the public at 8:30am but when I arrived around 8:00 there were already 10-12 people who'd formed a line outside waiting. The group was somewhat amazing: young black males (a couple of whom appeared to be high), young gay white males my age (trendily dressed and reading stylish magazines), a Latina teenager talking non-stop on her cell phone, a very bedraggled and somewhat upset looking middle-aged white woman who looked like she hadn't gotten enough sleep the night before, and even a threesome of one cookie-cutter blonde gay boy and two fag hags who looked liked they'd wandered out of a Sex-and-the-City-fan-club meeting (it was hard to tell which of them was there to test -- were they all?).

We all stood for a good thirty minutes as Parks Department workers used a leaf blower to clean up the courtyard around us. It was hard to know where to look. You didn't want to stare at people too hard because you suspected that some of them were very much on edge and might think you were judging them. There was a weirdly cruisy dynamic among the three or four lone gay men peppered throughout the crowd, each of us trying to be as nonchalant and self-immersed as possible (one of the others had a Norman Mailer book with him that he was reading).

Inside, we sat for a long time in a waiting room as a ten-minute public service announcement about HIV testing played on a video screen in a continuous loop: first in English, then in Spanish, then in English again. Everyone else seemed to be tuning it out after they'd watched it once through, but I couldn't. I hadn't brought any reading material and besides I'm not good at focusing on something else when any kind of media is being projected. I waited a good hour and fifteen minutes before I was called and that video kept playing and playing. Maybe that's the point. To just drill the message in: "HIV can be transmitted by the following bodily fluids -- blood, semen, pre-ejaculate, vaginal fluid, breast milk..." I'm never going to forget that.

I feel a little bit uncomfortable writing this and I don't know how everyone out there is going to react to it, but getting my HIV test sort of made me feel good. And I don't mean good like the people depicted in the video who say things like, "Now at least I know -- what a relief!" (I still don't know and won't until I pick up the results next Friday.) The squeamishness and uncertainty that I felt in that ugly, ugly waiting room feels like a good thing. It brought me down a peg. It's hard to condescend to the elementary tone of the video ("Did you use a condom every time you had sex? Every time?") when you know that you're there because you did something kind of dumb.

There was an incredible frankness and a dropping of pretense in that room. People who wouldn't feel comfortable sitting next to each other on the subway were sitting there wondering lots of the same questions, experiencing the same fears. (Unfortunately, that equality doesn't extend far after someone's been diagnosed -- those with medical coverage and some money to spend on anti-retrovirals have a much easier time of things, as do those HIV positive people who live in communities where being infecting is less suspect and stigmatizing.)

When I went in to be screened by a middle aged Carribbean woman, I had absolutely no problem telling her how many times I'd given it to somebody up the butt in the last three months. It was almost as if everyone in the room had said something like, "OK, this is serious. Let's drop all that bullshit about identity and discomfort and get down to brass tacks."

People who work in HIV prevention often seem to have that bluntness; it can be jarring when you're an extremely sheltered, virginal college freshman arriving at a place where you're obligated to sit through demonstrations of how to place a condom on a wooden penis. No doubt that frankness makes aging, celibate Catholic bishops all the more uncomfortable and thus more intractible when people ask them, "Why can't you distribute condoms in your health clinics in Africa?" But when you work every day under the spectre of that disease, you don't have time for bullshit or niceties. It's all about practicality.

There ought to be a perverse solidarity about AIDS because the virus is so indiscriminate. For so long it was presented as a concern only for "degenerates," but ironically that very stigmatization helped it spread into all communities. We're all sleeping around and AIDS has made that clear. We can't hide under the veil of respectability anymore. Even we who work in social services and have to act all put together and superior to our "clients" day in and day out have to admit that we, too, make stupid choices and fuck up sometimes. AIDS ought to make us rally together, to forget all the small stuff and feel closer to one another. Unfortunately, though -- because of money, race, religious intolerance, and apathy -- that day of universal solidarity is still a long way off.