A friend from several years past is dying. He is much younger than I am. I hadn't even known he was HIV+ and with the "cocktail" folks are now given, it's a shock to hear of anyone succumbing to the disease so young in their lives. But my friend apparently has had several complications along the way, and now they have taken him off meds in a downtown hospital several states away, issued a "do not resuscitate" order and he will soon die. I am glad that he has a partner by his side during this time because when we worked together a few years ago and were both officers of the same LGBT employee organization, he was single.
He quit the company to move to another state and after a short while we lost touch. Occasionally I'd wonder what happened to him, but did not know that he had kept in contact with anyone I knew. Last week I started thinking about him again and on Friday received a call from a business associate, another former officer of the LGBT organization at our company, who gave me the news. Part of me wonders if we lost touch because he started dealing with the disease or whether it was just because he'd met someone and was focused on that relationship.
My old friend is in what I call the "young enough to know better" category. I was reading about a new, rare, (still unnamed) gay disease in the Village Voice when he was still a baby. My partner and I have two teenaged boys. We hope we have given them the tools (both the information and the emotional stability) to avoid falling victim to this terrible disease.
When I mentioned to a co-worker that this had happened, we had a discussion about AIDS and young people. She said that at the predominately African-American high school that her daughter attends, 35% of the students are HIV positive. At another high school in the same district, 20% of the students are HIV positive. What is happening in America? I knew that the rates of HIV infection in the black community were rising in America. I had no idea it was already reaching epidemic proportions. Why isn't this being discussed publicly?
It has been a long time since I watched a friend waste away, develop dementia and die from AIDS. I still have friends who are HIV+ and they have their occasional scares but it is not the same as it used to be. I can't exactly explain how but I'm sure it's because of the new drugs. The "cocktail" really has changed things over time. There is part of me that is glad I have not watched this particular friend go through this.
I still donate money to the various AIDS walks and rides when friends ask. The people who always seem to ask me are my friends who are gay men. So many people think we've somehow "conquered" the disease in the gay male community. But even the rates of gay men have started to climb again. Young people think they are invincible. They think this will never happen to them. They think that with the new drugs available they can continue to live normal lives and never have to worry about it. Unfortunately young people always seem to have this kind of thinking. They are so heart-breakingly wrong.
I haven't looked at the statistics lately, but within my own age group, most gay men became HIV+ when they were teenagers who lacked the self-esteem to have the kind of dialogue necessary to insist on safe-sex practices. And I am certain that this must also be true of the straight African-American community within which my co-worker's daughter and my own children navigate their young lives. Something must be done. Years ago, when the numbers were primarily in the gay population of the US, we tried to tell people, this disease affects all of us. When will people finally wake up and believe that we weren't just looking for sympathy?
