When I was a fifth-grader, I sat in Ms Jill’s science class laughing hysterically one day. She had just brought up a topic I’d never even heard of before. HIV. What a silly disease it sounded like when I was 10. I laughed at the idea of people sharing dirty syringes at hospitals, or being stupid enough to put two open wounds in contact. HIV was for idiots, I thought. And it wasn’t just me, all of us little know-it-all fifth-graders walked out of our science class joking about how so and so was HIV+ for scraping their knee playing basketball and using the someone else’s shower.
Of course, at the time, Ms Jill wasn’t at liberty to say that people could get it by loving one another.
That information came later on, from multiple sources. I remember, when I lived in Egypt, how I thought it was a foreign disease, affecting those poor African people south of the Sahara, and those reckless homosexuals in Europe and North America.
Boy was I wrong. By the age of 18 I’d already had two near misses. One Egyptian guy, and one Lebanese. With the former, I’d taken him and his friend home with me one night after a long party, and the three of us fucked like rabbits till 9am. I’d run out rubber, but that wasn’t going to stop the mad teenager within. With the latter, I’d dated him for 3 months, and we’d only fucked without a condom once. In both cases I was extremely lucky (if you can call yourself that for sleeping with someone who’s HIV+ without a condom) – they contacted me roughly 3 months after we’d done the deed and told me they were positive. I was lucky in the sense that they told me after any incubation period for the virus (6 weeks) had lapsed, which meant I could go get an HIV test right away and the results would cover the period when we’d slept together. Had they told me any sooner I would have been in the horrible situation of having to wait for my sentencing until the 6 weeks were over. I was lucky in another sense – in both cases I came out negative.
Since then I’ve been getting regular check ups, roughly every 6 months. It is probably one of the most terrifying things on my bi-annual calendar. Your mind races through the faces, the bodies, the nights you’ve spent, the mistakes you’ve made. You wonder why God punishes man’s most basic and primal instinct. In your mind you see all the faces of all those children in sub-Saharan Africa who were born with it, and you wonder if you will have something in common with them after all. But worst of all you think about those people you know who have it, and what their lives have become. Drug addiction, recklessness, super-infection. A fist-full of pills every morning, a face both tired and pulled from the medication. Wandering eyes looking around at all the forbidden fruit. Self-loathing.
Of course, not everyone reacts to it that way. There have been people who have refused to let it dominate their life, their identity and have been leading extraordinary and fulfilling lives. But that takes strength of character, and you don’t get that very often in gay men.
So when my sexual health clinic texted me my blood report this morning with an all-clear, I said a silent prayer for all those that haven’t been so lucky, may the Creator be with them in every step and comfort their broken hearts.
