Many readers have responded to my essay yesterday on the plague and gay history. And I touched on some of its themes in this excerpt from my long conversation with Matthew Vines. Specifically the impact of AIDS on the first two gay weddings I attended:
A reader remembers as well:
Twenty years ago when I was diagnosed, I thought I had three years – at most – to live. And here I am, healthy as a horse. And it gets better … I am married to a man I love, and my über Catholic parents love him. If anyone told me any of this was possible 20 years ago, I would not have believed them. Thanks for refreshing my memory and reminding me how far we’ve come.
Another writes:
Missing from your essay is the profound grief – in all its stages – that we plague survivors still feel today. I watched “The Normal Heart” with tears streaming down my cheeks because nearly all these young, vibrant men were struck down in the most hideous fashion and disappeared forever in less than 15 years. As few of us have children, they were OUR family and we grieve their passing as any family that has lost a son or a brother.
I appreciate that a blogger isn’t allowed to be a blubbering mess but for me the loss is intensely felt 20 years on, as retirement looms. These aggressive young men would be today’s activists for LGBT seniors fighting the institutional homophobia rampant in retirement homes, forcing greying gays to engage the world. Instead, our lost generation’s voice is silent and the already diminished survivors are even more alone and isolated.
Another:
You may not remember me. We met sitting at the Duplex Diner in 2000. You knew my now deceased partner Clay, who died in 1997. I was one of those who survived, fought back Meth addiction (am still going to meetings daily) emerging out of my personal abyss and climbing that mountain.
Clay was one of four men I dated who subsequently died. Another reader:
I have welled up with tears, pride, and love while reading this. I’m 49 and have been out for 25 years and I can say, here’s my story. I can send this article to my large Southern Baptist family in Texas and present to them a proud record, a context in which they can place this life of mine; the one they never quite understood. History does this.
Maybe this is overstating it, but I feel our history has begun only now. That is to say, the perspective from which we view this history is beginning to settle at a healthy distance.
Another HIV positive reader:
So your post has me somewhat weeping at work. Thank you, but I should remember not to read essays like that in my office. This is my first time writing you, but there is a minor personal perspective I want to add to your history.
Although I can map much of my life to the history you wrote, I did not actually feel a part of the gay community until recent years. I was diagnosed as HIV positive in 1992, when I was 18 and still completely closeted. I got it from sex with one of the other closeted guys I had met in cruisy parks and other places in those pre-Internet days.
Even once I started to gradually come out a year later, the majority of my friends remained straight men and women. The one or two gay friends I had at any given time were like me. Although we would “visit” the gay bars in the gayborhoods for a night every few weeks, most of the time we would hang out with our straight friends. For many years, I was always the only one of my friends that was HIV positive. And they loved me and supported me as my immune system gradually plummeted. Thankfully, I have never had someone I know die of the disease.
So I cannot necessarily call it survivor’s guilt that led me to addiction and seeking oblivion once it became clear that I was going to live. I relate to the depression and questioning “what now,” once simple survival was no longer the primary concern. I relate to the experience of shame and pain when I would read “DDF” and “Clean” in dating profiles. I had not expected to live to be 25, but at that age my immune system had rebounded, I had a job with health benefits that gave me access to those life-saving medications, and I was spiraling into the slow suicide of addiction.
Luckily, I found recovery. My first time feeling a part of the gay community was in predominantly gay 12-step groups. From there, I experienced the camaraderie and empowerment of playing for a predominantly gay sports team against “straight” teams. I started a new career, and although it is not the focus of that career, I have donated significant time and money to LGBT rights, marriage equality, and to helping those with HIV gain access to health care and other services. As the gay community has “healed” and strengthened itself, I have done the same, and come to feel a part of the community as a result..
Another:
Thank you, thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart for this piece. I’ve been a committed Dishhead for over seven years but only came out this March at age 31. You and your work helped get me there by viscerally impressing on me all of pain and sacrifice by my predecessors that made my coming out a virtual non-event. (My boss at my corporate law firm gave me a tight, motherly hug and congratulated me. I teared up realizing that I could be out at work without fear of reprisal.)
I’m of that limbo generation that came of age after Stonewall, gay ghettos and the onset of the AIDS crisis, but before the mainstream equality movement. Even in liberal Seattle, to be an openly gay teenager in the late ’90s would have been a lonely, frightening thing indeed, and I didn’t have the courage. It took me ten years of adulthood to shed the vestigial fear of rejection and stigma that had been inculcated into me, and four months after coming out I still haven’t absorbed the liberating indifference with which the community around me greeted my outness.
This isn’t the same world in which I grew up – when Ellen’s homosexuality was splashed across the cover of People and men holding hands in public made us gawk and giggle. In 1996, I acutely remember my mother agreeing with the crackpot GOP candidate for Washington state governor that homosexuality was a mental disorder. Now, she keeps asking when I’ll bring a boy home to meet her.
Another:
I just retired from teaching at a Catholic High school in Ft Lauderdale, Florida. At my retirement party, I said one or two sentences about how much I appreciated the people in my high school for giving me their love through the years since 1984. Then one more sentence. I said that when I went out to Wilton Manors on occasion, and when I saw the rare man I had known or said hi to in the eighties, I often went up to hug him. Because most of those men are long since dead.
You know what, Andrew? I received comments the next day from some of my most intimate colleagues. They worried that I had said too much in front of my bosses, in front of my school’s chaplain.
Every word you wrote this afternoon, then, is true. It hurts me when I hear friends still living somewhere else in time than in the land of today. But your words here make it clear that I have millions of fellow travelers who have gone through much the same thing.
We’re not alone.
The Dish 