1981 was an eye-opener for me. It was my 7th grade year–my first year in public school. Between the quaint but ridiculously out of date elementary school I’d attended and my overprotective mother (she cringed at the thought of me playing football or riding my bike in the street), I quickly realized I’d missed out on a lot. I was particularly clueless about sex: although I discovered the joys of masturbation around that time, it took me at least a year to understand the real implications of what I was doing.
1981 was also the year AIDS appeared in the headlines. Over the next couple of years, the public learned more about it, and I learned more about sex. I began fooling around with men–not just the few curious boys in my class, but men, with wives and children and houses and stuff. I didn’t yet identify as gay, but I slowly came to realize that I might have something in common with the gay men on 20/20 and 60 Minutes who spoke about their uncertainty and fear in the face of this new disease. So as I got older, I was dealing with two problems–my not-so-latent homosexuality and the fact that my dalliances could be dangerous.
Of course, that didn’t stop me. I kept having sex with men–in fact, if anything my escapades grew more frequent. I was a teenager filled with raging hormones. What could I do?
As I came to accept my homosexuality over the remainder of that decade, I became fairly active in AIDS activism. Well, as active as any of us could be in Mississippi, where talk of sex–much less homosex–was not commonly a topic of dinner table conversation. There were no ACT UP chapters, but I did what I could.
Today, though, I can’t tell you the last time I attended an AIDS fundraiser. I feel kind of like an anomaly. Yes, I’ve had a few acquaintances die from AIDS, but no one very close to me. And I know a number of men who are living with HIV, but to the best of my knowledge, none have even become seriously ill. With advances in treatment, it feels like no one’s dying anymore.
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