David's POZ Blog

I’ve been dancing around this one for awhile, but I guess its my responsibility to ‘fess up and face the music.

In the two or three months that I’ve been blogging here, the one theme that keeps bobbing its nasty little head up on the surface of the blogosphere is the stigma that most of the non-positive world assigns to people with HIV. I keep trying to push that sucker back down, but the fact is that I’ve been contributing to that stigma by hiding my face from the world. When Peter Staley and the folks here at POZ/AIDSMEDS invited me to write for them I agreed to do it with the understanding that instead of showing a clear picture of my face, I would post using only a filtered image. Its been great being able to write for you, but I haven’t been helping our community by hiding my face from the rest of the world. Its time I put a stop to it.

My name is David, and I have HIV.

I have had HIV since 1979 or 1980.

I’ve been incredibly fortunate. As I’ve said before, I’ve probably been living with HIV for as long or longer than any heterosexual human being in the world. Although I’ve had my share of medical lumps, bumps and bruises over the years, few of them were really HIV related. HIV was and still is a deadly virus, but it isn’t so much the fact of HIV that makes the non-positive world view us with disgust, disdain or pity as it is the underlying assumptions that people make that we are foolish or weak or wicked. Well, I’ve got news for you: I’m certainly not a perfect human being by a long shot, but I’ve done things in my 28 years of living with HIV that most people can’t even imagine.

While living with HIV I finished college and went to New York Law School, from which I graduated with honors in 1984. While in law school, I won the Eastern regional “best oralist” (!) title in the 1983 Jessup International Law moot court competition. I went on to place fourth in the world championships in Washington, D.C.

After law school I became associated with radical lawyer Lynne Stewart, the attorney convicted by the US government and sentenced to prison for assisting the terrorist blind sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who organized the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. I established my own practice in New York City in 1986 at 305 Broadway in Lower Manhattan before moving to 41 Madison Avenue, at the northeast corner of Madison Square park. In 1989, one year after I tested positive, I became one of the youngest lawyers ever appointed to the federal Criminal Justice Act panel of defense lawyers in the Southern District of New York. In 1991 I won the case of United States v Nelson Cuevas-Ramirez, becoming the first and only criminal defense lawyer in the history of the United States to win a complete acquittal of a foreign national extradited from his home country by the US. Two years later, I persuaded the US government to drop all charges against one of three crew members captured aboard the cocaine smuggling fishing vessel Endeavor II, which had been seized off Panama loaded with 2000 kilograms of cocaine.

In 1995 I represented Luis Felipe, a/k/a “King Blood”, said to have been the founder of the Latin Kings gang in New York and charged with having ordered other gang members to execute his victims. My other clients have included John Surgent, the accused mastermind behind an alleged 46 million dollar stock swindle, and 1970's narcotrafficker Nicky “Mr. Untouchable” Barnes (you may remember him from “American Gangster”.) There have been many more, and I’m still at it, practicing as a criminal defense lawyer in the New York area and nationwide federal courts. Most of my federal work is now in the Eastern District of New York, where I am still on the CJA defender panel.

I’m not telling you this to brag about it - I am telling you this because its an example of how accomplished many of us are and what we can do. Nor do I wish to engage you in a debate about the American legal system. For better or worse, the system works, and not all of the people who become entangled in the legal system are bad people - some of them are perfectly decent and honorable folks who trip up. Life is complicated. Some of my clients are guilty and some are innocent. A lot of what criminal lawyers do is damage control - helping people get past the past. I suppose there is an irony in all of that, since I wouldn’t have HIV myself if I hadn’t used IV drugs some 30 odd years ago, but the fact is that these days I’m one of the good guys in our system, despite all of the stereotypes you see on TV and in the movies. And I am proud of that.

So here I am. A reasonably smart, reasonably regular guy, making a living and getting along.
And on top of that, I’m one of the best Scrabble players you’ll ever lose to.

Stigma is only a seven point word. It isn’t worth wasting the “S” on.

Yesterday was a big day here in New York: our state’s governor, Elliot Spitzer, rocked the house with the revelation that he was a client of a so-called “high-end” prostitution ring that catered to wealthy patrons. As a result, Spitzer is now under pressure to resign.

In my view, Governor Spitzer’s betrayal lies not in the fact that he paid for sex (shocking !!!) but in the fact that he campaigned and was voted into office largely on his claim of being a reformer who would clean up government corruption in New York State. As a result of that revelation, we now know that instead of holding an upright position of virtue and morality, he was often lying in a horizontal position with paid sexual performers.

His crime lies not in the fact that he had sex with prostitutes, but that he screwed the people of the State of New York by lying to us all about his irreproachable sense of morality. He advocated for tougher prostitution laws while patronizing the prostitutes. In other words, Spitzer is a big-time hypocrite, and that, my friends, is the problem - it is dishonesty in its most fundamental way.

By itself, the fact that Elliot Spitzer - or any adult human being - paid young women to have sex with him bothers me not in the least. Have I ever paid for sex? Hell yes! I doubt that there are more than a dozen fully functional heterosexual men in the entire world who haven’t engaged in sexual shenanigans at one time or another. As far as I am concerned, what adults do with our sexual organs is nobody’s business as long as we do it without harm to others - without coercing or exploiting people. It simply isn’t the business of the state to regulate our sexuality. When it comes to who we sleep with and why we sleep with them, we should all simply mind our own bedroom business. It should be as private as our private parts. Spitzer, however, pretended to be above the pale instead of being just another impaler. In other words, he lied to us, and now he must pay the price.

On a lighter note, while our state government was being rocked by Spitzer’s revelation, Cupcake, Ginger and I were having a supernaturally fine evening listening to Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band rock the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island. It was a great concert. My ears were still ringing this morning, and thankfully, it wasn't because of who Elliot did with his Spitzer.

In all these years, I’ve never seen Springsteen live before. He has to be the most physical guitar player I’ve ever seen. He beats the music out of that ax with his whole body. They played for over two hours and we had a terrific time, as did the whole crowd of 20,000. He and the E Street band are the guys we all want to have a few beers with.

Spitzer Postscript:
Former NY Governor Spitzer's resignation was a high but appropriate price to pay for his transgressions. Mr. Spitzer should now be left alone to live his life as the very smart, decent (more or less) and talented individual that he is.

It’s been a turbulent week on the East Coast. an F2 tornado (tornados? in Atlanta?) blew through downtown Atlanta, an F3* sex scandal blew through our state government in Albany, a giant construction crane toppled over in midtown Manhattan, and Bear Stearns became the latest bank to topple on Wall Street - selling itself for 16 million dollars less than Heather Mills McCartney was trying to get from her ex-husband.

The bright light of the week is our new governor, David Paterson. Paterson is a legally blind, African-American politician who rose to power less by self promotion than by honest hard work, overcoming the obstacles of physical impairment and of race with a grace that inspires the toughest skeptics. He gave a 28 minute inauguration speech from memory that made me feel at least a little hopeful that our state will be well managed in the difficult months ahead.

Self promotion isn’t necessarily an evil. We live in a crowded world whose inhabitants often must shout to be heard above the noise. It’s only when we promote ourselves simply for our selfish needs that it gets ugly. Paterson’s heart seems to be in the right place. I like this guy.

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* I rated the Spitzer debacle F3 only because it could have been worse - if Spitzer hadn't stepped down, we'd have been forced to endure months of tabloid television features about prostitutes and politicians - two professions that are often said to be indistinguishable from each other.

You just can’t make this stuff up. Our last governor, Eliot Spitzer, resigned after it was revealed that he’d been having sex with a prostitute. Our new governor, David Paterson, formally announced today that he’s had multiple affairs.

If you’ve been following this story, you know that that there’s obviously a huge difference between Eliot Spitzer’s hypocrisy and David Paterson’s sex life, and I’m glad that Paterson is being honest, but there is a limit to how much I want to hear about everyone else’s pubic policies. Seriously.

On the other hand, perhaps those who have HIV and other diseases that are usually associated with human conduct should be pleased with all this: if it’s acceptable to have our leaders admit their personal imperfections, then the public should be able to accept a leader who picked up HIV while abusing drugs with a call girl, right? And what could be better than an HIV positive President whose First Lady is an immortal jewish vampire, and a white house haunted by the ghost of a call girl who died from the AIDS the president gave her? I hereby declare my candidacy: vote “wishihadacat” this November.

Here is the link for campaign donations:

Mea Culpa. If you've been following this blog, Eldredge Street is the name of the novel I've been working on, the first two segments of which were previously posted here a few weeks ago. So what happened to them? I repaved the street, so to speak - the software we use for the blogs was unhappy with the size of the files. If you haven't read any of it, Eldredge Street is a story about an HIV positive defense attorney, and a very unusual client who changes his life. You can read or print the latest version by clicking on the link below. It isn't a blog and the plot may twist from time to time. For reasons that can never be explained while I am alive to tell the tale, I may never be able to tell you the end.

http://redlockbox.net