December 2007 Archives

His name was Gurwinder Singh.

I was riding in a taxi heading downtown on Ninth Avenue this afternoon when I noticed that the driver was wearing a baseball cap, yet bore a full beard in the style of the Sikh religion. He was not wearing a turban, as more orthodox Sikhs wear.

The Sikhs are often the butt of bad jokes on late night talk shows. Most of the American public has absolutely no idea who or what they are. An astonishing number of people mistake them for some kind of Arabic sect, when in fact they are not Arabic at all.

I asked Gurwinder whether he was a Sikh, and whether all Sikhs use Singh as their last name, as many of us suppose, or whether most people named Singh were Sikhs. In reply, he told me the story of the origins of the Sikhs and some of their fundamental beliefs

The founder of the Sikh religion was "Guru Nanak", who was born in 1469. He preached a message of love and understanding and criticized the blind rituals of the Hindus and Muslims. Guru Nanak passed on his enlightened leadership of this new religion to nine successive Gurus. The final living Guru, Guru Gobind Singh died in 1708. The Sikhs live according to the following principles:

There is only One God. He is the same God for all people of all religions.

The soul goes through cycles of births and deaths before it reaches the human form. The goal of our life is to lead an exemplary existence so that one may merge with God. Sikhs should remember God at all times and practice living a virtuous and truthful life while maintaining a balance between their spiritual obligations and temporal obligations.

The true path to achieving salvation and merging with God does not require renunciation of the world or celibacy, but living the life of a householder, earning a honest living and avoiding worldly temptations and sins.

Sikhism condemns blind rituals such as fasting, visiting places of pilgrimage, superstitions, worship of the dead, idol worship etc.

Sikhism preaches that people of different races, religions, or sex are all equal in the eyes of God. It teaches the full equality of men and women. Women can participate in any religious function or perform any Sikh ceremony or lead the congregation in prayer.

The name Singh is Hindu for "Lion", and while not everyone named Singh is a Sikh (the golfer Vijay Singh, for example,) almost every Sikh male uses the name Singh.

It's not what you thought, is it? In fact, most of it sounds pretty reasonable to me. Nonetheless, don't expect to see me in a black turban anytime soon, even though "David Singh" does have kind of a nice ring to it.

The most important lesson that my encounter with Gurwinder today should teach us all is that we should never prejudge people. When we make assumptions like that we not only cheat ourselves of the truth - it devalues the humanity of others. It is the same kind of thinking that perpetuates the stigma associated with HIV and AIDS, and if those of us living with HIV and AIDS engage in the same kind of judgmental thinking, we can hardly expect the rest of the world to refrain from prejudging us. If anything, we should be teaching the world how extraordinarily courageous many of us are. My good friend Susan is a perfect example:

Susan has been living with HIV since 1983. Last May, her CD4 count was 87, and she came down with shingles. In November, her CD4 count was 8, and she came down with PCP. In addition to the PCP. Susan's shingles spread to the retina of her left eye, which became partially detached.

This is a simulation of what Susan now sees:

This isn't merely a visual effect. Susan's shingles also cause swelling, pain, extreme sensitivity to light, more pain, a gravel in the eye feeling, and an eye that's almost constantly watering.
She takes Truvada, AZT, Reyataz and Norvir, and on top of that, Bactrim and a mega dose of Valtrex.

Despite it all, despite the pain, the pills, and the partial blindness, Susan has raised two teenage girls on her own, and she goes to work at job almost every day to support her family.

Her story is hardly unique. The forums here are filled with the stories of incredibly courageous men and women like Susan. If someone wrote a book it would tear your heart out to read it.

I posted this entry today to remind us all that we are still in the midst of this struggle. As we go into the new year, let us never forget that the epidemic is still not even close to being under control, and that we can never allow ourselves to become complacent.

I'm sure Mr. Singh would agree with me.

I’m an atheist but I believe in God. It’s a hell of a paradox.

Cupcake, Ginger and I were just hanging out on the couch together. Cupcake was wearing her favorite Dr. Dentons Christmas pajamas, and Ginger was painting her ghostly toenails with cherry red glitter. The three of us were were just chilling out and listening to the usual holiday elevator music when it started.

Mendelssohn's “Symphony No. 4" began streaming from the cable channel. It is very compelling music and most of you have probably heard it in a movie soundtrack that you can’t quite put your finger on. When I listen to certain music, it convinces me that there is something greater than ourselves. They don’t call it inspirational for nothing.

I’ve spent most of my conscious life grappling with the question of existence: what meaning it has, whether it is random or organized, whether the laws of nature that rule us were written by an unseen hand or whether they are simply the inevitable consequences of existence. I’m certainly no expert on the matter, but I think I know the answer.

So here’s the deal, kids. It doesn’t really matter how you imagine The Big Guy, or whether you even believe that he or she or it exists. The big G is only interested in how you live your life.

The big G is a very progressive teacher. The big G doesn’t tell you your homework assignments in advance. He also doesn’t care what language you do it in or how messy your handwriting is. He doesn't even care if you write it down. You do have to get it done on time, though. He lets us do the all of the work here on Earth (and for the time being, its our only crib, baby, so we better take good care of it) and he let's us play in the schoolyard after work. He only cares that you life your lives with fairness, integrity, and respect for the truth. Everything else flows from there. That’s it.

I could go on about this, but I’m not a person of the cloth, and besides, if it was my personal homework assignment to pass the message on, it’s been done and I've handed it in.

Happy holidays to all of you. Even you other God-fearing atheists out there.

Her face has been eaten from within by word boring insects. The thin layer of paint that defines her features is chipped and crazed. Her hands and elbows, which once articulated freely, are now frozen in place and she does not like to be moved.

I found her at a flea market in Massachusetts, many years ago. I’m sure that her creator, a Spanish or Indian artisan in Mexico sometime in the long-forgotten past, could never have foreseen that one day she would be standing on a pedestal in someone’s living room in Manhattan, twenty-four hundred miles away.

Despite the toll that time and nature have taken on her, she remains dignified. I think of her now as an icon for HIV - my own personal “Our Lady of Aids”.

The last time I changed the position of her hands was in 2001. I had lost my cousin Gale to breast cancer ten days before 9/11, and my other cousin, Gale's sister, Jill, to a brain tumor six weeks later.

We all become more reflective at this time of the year. It’s the time of the year when we think about where we came from, where we are going and what we want our lives to mean. Sometimes it makes us sad, but more often than not, it leaves us with a warm glow that guides us through the winter months that follow. I miss my cousins, but their memories are with me wherever I go.

When I look at the statuette I smile. Despite all that she has seen, all of the people I have loved and lost over the years, I believe that the expression on her face is one of hope, and that her hands, forever open to the sky, are telling me that all my absent friends and family are at peace, wherever they are.

I hope that all of you have are having as happy and healthy holiday as I am, and that we will all have many more happy and healthy hoIidays in the years to come.

Last night, Cupcake and I entertained two of our neighbors, Vincent and Jane, at our apartment here in Manhattan. Vince is an epidemiologist at New York Hospital. Jane is a fitness coach at the Crunch health club down the street. As we sat around the table talking about HIV and other diseases, I found myself secretly amused by the fact that neither Vincent nor Jane had the slightest idea that I am HIV positive.

I’ve been incredibly fortunate. In 28 years of living with HIV (and Hep C) the only scars I bear are the emotional ones, and I''ve become very good at keeping those hidden. My skin gets a little dry this time of the year, and my lower back is acting up, but hey, I'm 57 years old; if those are the only health issues I have to contend with, I'm a happy camper. Sometimes people even remark that I look distinguished, and there are even moments when I believe that being HIV+ has helped me grow.

I’m not completely convinced that I deserve my good fortune. There are so many men and women in this community for whom survival with HIV is a daily struggle - and yet manage to soldier on in spite of it - that not even Oprah at her best could comprehend and praise them enough for their courage. When I began to write this entry today, I intended to describe the lives of the many HIVers who post in the forums, but they are all so incredible that it was too daunting a task. There are men and women who have been to the brink of death and returned; men and women who have lived year after year overcoming one health crises after another; men and women whose faces and figures have been assaulted by our unseen enemy.

I probably shouldn’t admit this, but Cupcake, the HIV+ vampire I’ve been shacking up with lately, is a metaphor for long-term (if not eternal) survival. Ginger, the HIV+ ghost who now lives with us and whom I may have infected, is the avatar of my survivor’s guilt. The two of them make for very interesting company. I hope that those of you who enjoy reading about our colorful life together will forgive me for blowing the punch line, but I figure that the three of us may be living (?) together for a very long time, and I thought that a proper introduction was in order.

Sean Sykes and Charles Mahan knew they were HIV-positive. They each attended counseling sessions in which they acknowledged their HIV status, demonstrated their understanding that HIV may be transmitted through unprotected sex, and even affirmed their awareness of the Missouri criminal disclosure law. Despite this, Sykes repeatedly had sex with a sixteen-year-old girl and a nineteen-year-old girl without wearing a condom or informing them of his HIV status. Mahan repeatedly had anal sex with another man whom he told that he was not HIV-positive. Sykes was charged with two counts and Mahan was charged with one count under the statute. Juries in separate trials convicted both men and sentenced them to five years on each conviction.*

Since I began reading the posts in the forums here, I've become increasingly disquieted and saddened by the stories I've read about men and women who were infected with HIV by partners who knew they were positive but failed or refused to disclose. The last 20 years have seen the development of ever more effective treatments that have made HIV a so-called "manageable" chronic health problem for many of us, but many others are still dying every day. In my view, negligently or intentionally infecting another person is akin to driving while intoxicated or pulling the trigger of a lethal weapon. Accordingly, it is no surprise that in many states, the laws that have been passed are extremely punitive and impose an irrational and coercive approach to AIDS and people living with HIV.

Such a coercive approach is wrong, yet there are certainly some circumstances for which failure to disclose is justly punished. The answer to balancing the rights of HIV + individuals with protecting the health and safety of our uninfected partners is reasonableness. A "model" penal law might read as follows:

1. It shall be unlawful for anyone with a sexually transmitted disease or condition to knowingly and intentionally fail to disclose that condition to a partner immediately prior to engaging in any sexual activity that carries a reasonable risk of transmission that the partner may become infected.

2. Notwithstanding the above, if anyone with a sexually communicated disease knowingly and intentionally fails to disclose that disease or condition to a partner immediately prior to engaging in any sexual activity, without actually transmitting such disease, such conduct shall not punishable by law.

3. Section 1 shall not apply to anyone engaging in sexual activity for payment or in any commercial establishment or other venue where sexual activity between consenting adults occurs.

The above language would protect uninfected individuals without imposing an unfair burden. If you screw up (yeah yeah, I know its a bad pun) but no one gets hurt, it shouldn't be the government's business and you shouldn't be punished by any government agency or authority. If you have "safe sex" and don't disclose, it should not be criminal because you are not engaging in conduct that is unreasonably dangerous. If you have sex for money, you assume the risk because the underlying assumption throughout human history has always been that people engaging in paid sex have no obligation to their partner other than a measure of respect. Business is business and when we do business, its caveat emptor, babe. The same holds true for the buyer as well as the seller. Neither has ever had the right to expect the truth. If you frequent an establishment where sexual activity is part of the entertainment - paid or not, you are on your own.

A lot of folks have argued that anyone who participates in unsafe sex has assumed the risk of being infected and that therefore the individual who infected them should not be held responsible. I don't buy it. Unless you are in an "anything goes" kind of environment where it is implied that you are at risk if you leave the latex at home, you should let your partner know beforehand. Period.

If you do have safe sex without disclosing, it shouldn't be criminal, but in my view it is still unfair to your partner to do the dirty deed without their knowledge. I know that some of you may disagree with my views about disclosure and the laws, but if our community hopes to be treated with dignity and without prejudice, we owe it to ourselves and others to do the right thing.

The question of when to disclose your HIV status to someone with whom you hope to become intimate with is a complicated and vexing issue for anyone with HIV. No one wants to be rejected simply because they are HIV positive, but it is our moral obligation to behave responsibly - not only for our prospective partners, but for our HIV + community, even if you are a minister, a congressman or an immortal being, speaking of which, I have to go now - Cupcake is calling me. The Giants game starts in about an hour, and she and Ginger and I are going to watch them beat the Redskins and clinch a playoff spot.

*www.courts.mo.gov/Courts/PubOpinions.nsf/ccd96539c3fb13ce8625661f004bc7da/f003cb774bfa55ea8625662400534e26?OpenDocument

I’ve always had a bad history with dogs. Our first family dog, a chocolate colored standard poodle named Cocoa, disappeared when I was 3 years old. The dog was no fool, and wisely slipped out the back door when I became obsessed with Cocoa’s appendages.

We replaced Cocoa with Pepe, a black miniature poodle puppy whose energy and enthusiasm for burying my mother’s favorite rhinestone pumps delighted me and matched my own proclivity for causing general mayhem in the house. Pepe and I were inseparable until the day that Pepe was flattened on Roslyn Road five years later while under the influence under of a pheremonal frenzy induced by Jolie, the fluffy golden pomeranian owned by the neighbors across the street.

I was devastated by Pepe’s sudden and unsavory demise. Desperate to console their miserable child, my father persuaded Aunt Ethel to part with Tiffany, her white miniature. Tragically, however, my dad backed over Tiffany in the driveway with his British racing green MGB as he left for the next day’s morning commute to Manhattan.

We buried Tiffany’s remains next to Pepe in a shallow grave next to the tetherball pole in the backyard, and after my father delivered a brief eulogy for Tiffany, we all piled into the family Pontiac and drove to the North Shore kennel, where we adopted Bomber, an adorable wire-haired terrier pup. For three long and lazy summer days our family once enjoyed a reasonable measure of domestic tranquility. The next morning, July 14, 1958, I discovered Bomber’s bloated corpse floating in our swimming pool, shattering the brief period of serenity that Bomber had brought to the Kushner* clan.

Not to be discouraged, my parents tried again. They scanned the classified pages of Newsday together, settling on a lively two year old terrier bitch named “Gypsy” whose temperament former her owner described as “perfect for a small family”. But true to her name, Gypsy fled out the back door the next day.

We should have gotten the message. As fate would have it, however, “Duke”, an enormous yellow labrador stray, fortuitously found his way into my mother’s azalias and I once again fell in love. I lured the dog into the house with a trail of crumbled Kennel Biskits, gazing intently as the gigantic beast padded from room to room. My mother, skeptical about the dog’s sudden arrival as well as his general suitability, followed the animal’s footsteps, broom in hand, ready to shoo the dog out the front door at the first sign of trouble. Duke, undoubtedly sensing her lack of enthusiasm, calmly lifted his right hind leg and urinated on her new Maytag. My mother immediately swept the dog out the front door, ending my short-lived rapture. My father - recognizing the bad canine karma in the house - explained to me that it was perhaps God ’s intention that the Kushner family was destined to be dogless.

Losing five dogs in seven days is the kind of childhood experience you never forget, and when I became old enough to start dating I was wary of forming any kind of romantic attachments with my teenage girlfriends because somewhere in the back of my mind I was afraid that the same misfortunes that struck my dogs would surely happen to them. Instead of falling in love, I fell “in like” and I embarked on a series of relationships that resembled what we now call “Friends with benefits.”

“Friends with benefits.” It’s such a clever euphemism. It sounds so benign - a much more dignified expression than “F**k Buddies”. You would think its easy to find a suitable FB, but it isn’t. The truth of the matter is that someone almost always gets hurt. Someone always feels just a little something in his or her heart, something that makes you want to be there, lying next to each other, all of the time.

You may have read about a hormone called “oxytocin”. Oxytocin is one of the many hormones that our bodies - male and female alike - release during orgasm. According to the latest research, oxytocin acts as kind of emotional Astro-Glide that facilitates bonding when we have sex. One source describes it as “a nine amino acid peptide that is synthesized in hypothalamic neurons and transported down axons of the posterior pituitary for secretion into blood.” Somehow, that description seems a bit sterile. It doesn’t quite communicate the complicated emotional components of human sexuality. Its kind of like saying that Crazy Glue is a little sticky. Or that heroin is a little addictive.

I’m sure that its possible to block that inconvenient chemical bond. If we can block HIV at the sub-cellular level by taking a few pills, surely we can condition ourselves to resist the effects of a common hormone. Surely. No problemo. Just like getting used to caffeine. Or maybe like being a quiet drunk.

Quite some time ago, I had an FB we’ll call Jane. We had a few mutual acquaintances when we were students at SUNY Binghamton, and after we both moved down to New York we became friends. It didn’t take long before we became more than that. Over a period lasting a few years from the late 70s until the early 80s, Jane and I used to get together once in a while and have a few drinks together, and we would find our way back to my apartment near Gramercy Park or her place a few blocks south. We never really talked about our little arrangement, preferring instead the old “I could really use a massage” ruse; sometimes we skipped that routine and got right down to business. But in the back of my mind I always kind of wondered whether Jane felt that little tug, that little piece of heartbreak that comes when you slip out the door and go home to your own bed, alone.

I’ve had one or two other FBs in my day. It’s amazing how delusional we can be when it comes to our satisfying our physical needs. Perhaps we all have some kind of innate ability to secrete another kind of hormone that kicks in when we want to dilute that nasty old oxytocin goop - kind of the same way that Naloxone soaks up heroin. Sometimes I think that “oxymoron” would be the perfect name for it. If there is such an “anti-oxytocin” hormone I’d like to bottle it and register the brand name. I can just picture the advertising compaign: “Hooking up tonight? Don’t want to fall in love? Don’t be a fool!, be an Oxymoron!”

If there is such an anti-emotion lotion, I know quite a few people, including myself, who might be very interested in it these days. You could slather it on your face like cologne. It might not keep the bugs away, but it would certainly make life simpler for a lot of us.

Everyone is different and there are times in our lives when we are less vulnerable to unwanted attachments. There are those of us who can be FBs and remain friends without longings and regrets. It takes an extraordinary confluence of circumstance and personalities to become and to remain FBs, but it does happen. I just wish it would happen to me....I think.

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* The names have been changed to protect the not-so-innocent.

Instant gratification freak that I am, I opened my Christmas presents this morning even though it was a few days early. The first present was an Iphone given to me by Cupcake. The moment it was activated by AT&T, a new message appeared on the email in-box. It was from God. I was skeptical of course, but when you get an email from the Big Kahuna, you ignore it at your own risk. Here is what it said:

“Dave - I am very unhappy with what you people are doing down there on earth, and we need to talk..”

When I first saw the message, I quite naturally assumed that he was irritated with me for having opened my presents early, but I was wrong - he had something else on his mind.

“My child, you kids are really screwing things up. I know you have your problems, but I’m a very busy entity, and when I send you messages I expect you to pay attention.”

“When I created your world, I worked like a dog to get it right, and I thought I did a pretty good job. So what have you done with my creation? Not much.”

“I spent an entire day (and we’re talking cosmic entity days here, not your 24 hour earth days) filling the swimming pool for you. I spent another whole day putting together some nice property for you, complete with ponds, lakes, rivers and streams, so that you’d have a nice place to live. I spent another day of my very precious time stocking the pool, the ponds, the lakes and the streams with fresh seafood so that you’d something to eat besides manna (which I confess, can be a little gritty, but hey, it’s free.) I took another day doing a lot of landscaping to increase your property value. After that, I pulled together as much fresh air as I could scrape together out of the ether, and finally, I gave you baseball and Bono, so you’d be able to enjoy yourselves and have a couple of good laughs during your miserable little lives.”

“ In short, I gave you a very nice planet with all kinds of really neat stuff to play with and I even gave you a few pointers on what to do with it, and what have you done with it? Nada.”

“Now maybe I should have given you more than those ten commandments, but because I created you in my image, I assumed you’d be bright enough to understand the instruction manual, even if it was written on stone tablets in a font that was perhaps a little hard to read. But it seems that you kids haven’t been paying attention to the rules.”

“The moment I turned around and left you kids alone, you started to screw up the whole thing. You’ve been peeing in the pool, killing off the fish, fouling the air, and in just over a hundred or so years of your earth time, you’ve almost used the whole tank of gas and oil that I gave you so you’d be able to run things for a while until you figured out how to take care of yourselves without my help.”

“What am I going to tell your mother when she comes home from her job?”

Needless to say, this was a very disturbing email. But there was more.
“You know, I really don’t ask very much of you. All you had to do was use your tiny little brains and play together nicely. Instead, you spend half of your time arguing about who I really am, and the rest of your time you spend bickering with each other over idiotic nonsense such as what my name is, how to call me for help, and who owns what. It’s really starting to piss me off.”

“If you guys can’t get your shit together, its your problem. I have other worlds to create and I’m not going to waste any more of my time watching out for you. Fix it! - G.”

I switched off the Iphone and put it back in the box. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a self-righteous deity without a sense of humor.

I wasn't expecting there to be much. Just some junk in boxes - an old man's things left behind in an apartment he would never return to. My father didn't have many possessions of his own when his wife and family took him into the nursing home over in Davie, on the east coast of Florida near my sister. His brain was scarred and eaten by Alzheimer's, his body a shuffling shell that could no longer even store the memory of his only son's name. I had let the family down there run things once I had seen him there in that nursing home and had assured myself that there was nothing I could have done. The finances at the end of his life had been left in the hands of a capable and trustworthy stepsister, an arrangement that had satisfied everyone. I hadn’t given much thought to his possessions, the objects of his life.

So when he died there, alone in a hospice ward room in a back corner of the Sunshine State a few months after his wife died from cancer, and my stepbrother and his wife called to ask me if I wanted my father's things, these things suddenly were there, things that had to be dealt with so that they could empty out his wife’s apartment. My sister and my stepbrother hadn't been on good terms so it wasn't surprising that my stepbrother and his wife called me instead of my sister even though my sister lived near Boca Raton and they lived in Cape Coral and I lived all the way up in New York City. It was a sad and lonely detail that had to be done. They asked me if I wanted them to store my father’s things in their garage for a while or have them shipped up north. It was just a few boxes of stuff - some pottery shards from when he and his wife threw pots together, a few small stones my father had carved to look like owls and an abstract black marble statue that he had gotten many years ago and that was supposed to have been the work of a sculptor friend of his. I remembered the statue because my father kept it on his office desk, and as a child I used to run my hands over its cool, smooth contours. In my child’s mind the statue always reminded me of a big black cat. I thanked them for calling and told them I would let them know, but I didn’t.

A few weeks later they called and offered to bring his things to Cherry Hill, New Jersey, where I could pick up the boxes at my stepbrother’s son’s home. I thanked them, and when they brought the boxes up a few weeks later I rented a car and took the New Jersey Turnpike down to South Jersey.

As far as I know, there are no hills at all in Cherry Hill. Cherry Hill isn’t even a town in the sense that we ordinarily think of towns - it is a seemingly endless sprawl of subdivisions, chain stores and strip malls that begins near the northeastern edge of Camden, east of Philadelphia, and stretches up towards Trenton. It’s a two-hour drive from Manhattan down the turnpike past Newark and through the enormous tanks and sprawling refineries of the New Jersey industrial corridor.

I pulled into the driveway of my step-nephew just before noon, and after a polite chat I loaded my father’s “estate” into the back of the car: two boxes of pottery shards and carved rocks, and the sculpture. The sum of my father’s life. Driving back home with his things, alone in that rented car with the manifest of my father’s existence, it made me think of my own life.

I grew up on the North Shore of Long Island, twenty five miles east of Manhattan. My father commuted back and forth by car on the Long Island expressway every day for twenty years until my parents split up and he moved into the City, where he worked as an industrial interior designer. I was the youngest of their two children. My father was a creative and likeable man and both of my parents were reasonably intelligent and responsible and never abusive. Nevertheless, they did not seem to be particularly communicative in the ways that mattered to me as a child. My sister and I never spoke at all. Only fragments of any happy memories from the first ten years of my life are retrievable now. I stumbled through adolescence as mindlessly as most of us did.

In the late 60's I went off to college at SUNY Binghamton, where I majored in theatre before dropping out 12 credits short of graduation. I spent my early twenties in vain self-absorption. Despite a good measure of material success, I wasted my late twenties either too blind or unable to deal with life, and from roughly mid 1979 to the late spring of 1980, I sought refuge from the pain of my confusion by injecting myself with cocktails of cocaine and heroin, and for those ten months I lived in that chemical dream with a young woman I knew who made her living by selling herself to other men.

When the money ran out, as it always does, so did she. I woke up from my stupidity and started to use the gifts I’d been given by life. The year was 1980.

Still searching, but lacking direction, I tried writing for a while and I did manage to have at least one short piece published in the now-defunct American Heritage magazine, but it very soon became very clear that I was not really meant to be a writer, so I finished college and then law school. It was a practical decision and it gave me a sense of purpose and meaning that I had never really known before. I followed that path, met my wife in 1985 and after I married her in 1986 we lived a happy, if not boringly conventional life, blissfully unaware of a cunning invader that I had unknowingly injected into my arms and into our lives six or seven years earlier.

Like everyone else in those days I thought of HIV and AIDS as a strange new plague fueled by tainted semen and bottled blood that fed on the flesh of gay men and hemophiliac children. And then, in late 1987, as the epidemic continued to spread and the world learned that HIV also sought out intravenous drug users and that it could sometimes incubate hidden for years inside us, devouring our bodies from within, only to emerge years later, I began to wonder if I was also one of those who had been infected. At that time my concern was mostly for myself; I had never had any signs or symptoms of the opportunistic illnesses that science and medicine grouped so neatly together as resulting from this new "acquired immune deficiency syndrome.” I hoped I was wrong, but somehow I knew I was part of it all.

I went to a clinic down on Ninth Avenue operated by the New York City Health Department and left a small sample of my blood, and on a cold clear day in January of 1988 I learned that I was one of those people whom the doctors so clinically referred to as "long-term slow progressors." Like all of us who are HIV positive, it was a day I will never forget. If there is a god, it is by his or her grace that I did not infect my wife.

This brings me to the question that you may be asking yourself: “why is the author of this blog hiding his face?” The obvious answer to that question is that I prefer to maintain some dignity even as I disclose so much of my personal life, but the larger issue is the stigma that is still associated with HIV/AIDS in this nation and around the world. Having lived with HIV for 28 years might well make me the longest-living heterosexual male with HIV in the country, if not the world. I do realize that is a grandiose kind of statement in a very twisted way, but it's a distinction I could live without. I prefer to write anonymously not only because I do not wish to be judged but also because there are other people in my life whom I need to protect, and although coming out of the HIV/AIDS closet can be an act of courage, I am not ready to make that leap just yet. Like it or not, we live in a world that too often judges us not by the good that we do for others, but for the mistakes we have made in our own lives. It is a tabloid society that wallows in our sordid failures even as it pretends to celebrate our achievements, a society more concerned about our wealth, our sexual preferences and the short-sighted way we may have lived our brief and insignificant lives than about the short-sighted way we manage the planet that is our only home.

I hope that someday that will all change, and that someday I will feel confident enough about our grace and our humanity to decorate these pages with a recent picture of my face. Until then, I feel fortunate to join the talented bloggers here at AIDSmeds.