In April 2012 I wrote a piece for PositiveLite.com entitled “My Barebacking Journey”. In it I talked about how I had made the decisions not to use condoms since my college days and how this had ultimately led to my testing HIV positive in September 2011. 

A year later, I thought I’d take the opportunity to sit down and put my thoughts over how things have gone over the last 12 months.  Some things have changed dramatically, others haven’t changed at all.  I guess in some respects life is just carrying on just the same as it always has. 

Since I wrote here last, I have come out as an HIV-positive person to nearly everyone I know. Only my parents and immediate work colleagues are in the dark. I managed the “coming out” process carefully; telling a few people, gauging their response, and then telling a couple more, until the deed was done. Surprisingly, for a city of its small size, the public reaction to my condition has been overwhelmingly supportive. Not one person has reacted negatively to it, and the gossip has largely been low key. People whenever I see them, ask me how I am doing, and it has really shown me that the people I call friends really are friends, and I am honoured to have them in my life. 

In November 2012, after my viral load reached a peak of 1.7 million, and my CD4 flicked a margin above the 350 threshold, I took a week off work to start my HAART medication. I was prescribed Truvada and Sustiva, with a view once the viral load was fully suppressed to move on to Atripla.  In order to get a week off work in order to manage any side effects at such short notice, I decided to inform work. After careful consideration of the pros and cons of taking such a step, I decided that it was the right thing to do. I didn’t actually have to say it as it turned out – my manager asked me for a private word and turns out he had guessed it. I suppose a sexually active gay man, talking about having a medical condition which requires a lifetime of medication, kind of drops the hint – and he had put two and two together.  

The reaction I got from him has been fine. No issues whatsoever, and as a result of him being informed of my condition, he has allowed me time off at short notice to attend the clinic for blood tests and regular check ups – something that would have been hard for me to do had he not been aware of the situation. What is more, he has kept it to himself, and not blabbed it to all my work colleagues, so there are no issues there either. 

The question I get asked most now I have started the medication, is how is it going? What about side effects? 

Well the first couple of weeks were a mixture of horror and bizarre experiences.  I wanted to experiment with the drugs – to see how they would impact on my normal life. So I ate my usual meals, drank a few beers before taking them and all that jazz. The first time I took them with beer was like nothing on this earth. I had a couple of pints then popped my pills. Within half an hour, I had gone from merry to totally blotto. I said goodbye to my friends, and staggered home. What normally takes me 20 minutes, took me one hour to walk. I fell through my door, passed out on the sofa with the room spinning! It was as though I’d had twenty pints, not two. A very peculiar experience, it made for a cheap night though! 

Over time I got fed up with not being able to enjoy a couple of quiet beers after a 14 hour shift at work, and it came to a head just before our works Christmas dinner. I spoke to my consultant, and he informed me that I didn’t have to take them at exactly the same time each night; if I wanted to take them immediately before I went to bed, within a four or five window period each night, that would work just as well. So this is what I did, and continue to do. 

I lead life just as I always have done; the only difference is that before I go to bed, I chomp down on my HIV medication. Sure, sometimes if I’ve eaten late at night, the medication triggers some strange vivid dreams, but truth be told, I quite like them! They’re not scary, and on the whole, are very enjoyable experiences. 

More importantly, the medication is working. Within 5 months of starting my treatment, my viral load has gone from through the roof, to undetectable and my CD4 is on the rebound.  I feel more energetic that I have at any point since my diagnosis back in September 2011, and I know that provided I keep taking them, and they keep working, then there is nothing to worry about.  HIV isn’t a death sentence any more, it is a life long chronic, but manageable condition.  I think this is the most important message that we need to get out there people who are recently diagnosed, or whom are living with the virus, but not on treatment.  Especially with the continued debate over treatment as prevention – something that I am a strong advocate for.  

However life on HIV treatment isn’t all smooth. Over the months, I have noticed an alarming development. It would appear that I am losing my libido. I have a far lower interest in sex now, than I did before I started HIV treatment. It’s not that I have HIV, as even after my diagnosis I was still an exceptionally horny guy. I still get my moments, but when I look back to how I used to be, the libido has certainly waned since starting HIV treatment. This isn’t a universal issue though; friends of mine on treatment have found their libido actually increased.  It’s clearly something that I need to continue to work through with my medical team. 

So what else has the last year brought? I found myself in a relationship, something that hadn’t happened in a very long time. It was nice; we met in a bar, and things quickly moved onto more, it was during a night out together that I realised I had the dreaded disclosure to do. I plucked up the courage, and told him that I had something to tell him. As with all my friends, his reaction was great. He said that he knew the risks, he knew other people in the city who were HIV positive, and it didn’t faze him. Sadly it wasn’t to last, only a fortnight ago we broke up after three months together. He said that it wasn’t anything to do with the HIV, but as these things go, it always leaves that lingering thought in your mind. Still, such is life, we live and learn and move on. 

Over the course of the year since I last wrote for PositiveLite.com, there have been moments where I wished to the high heavens that I didn’t have this condition; I would be lying if I said otherwise. On balance however, I think that it has made me a stronger person for it. It has given me a greater appreciation of my health; I take a more active role in keeping myself healthy, I’ve cut out the junk food and eat more fresh fruit and vegetables. I drink less alcohol and more water.  As I am an out and proud HIV positive person, I also tackle stigma head on when I hear people talking rubbish in the circles that I socialise in. I strongly believe that it is only by being out and open about our statuses, can we eventually reduce stigma of the condition. If we sweep it under the carpet, or are ashamed of it, then stigma is allowed to grow and rear its ugly head. 

That’s about it really; my thoughts of living with HIV are as they have always been. It’s something that I live with, not suffer from. My journey over the last year, of coming out as an HIV-positive person has led me to meet many other people I already knew who are also in the same position, and I take strength from them, and hopefully them from me. 

You can follow Josh on twitter at @JoshLandalexxx. 

Every now and then I catch myself speaking or laughing and I will hear my father’s voice. And as much as I hate it, I can’t deny that I am my father’s son. From the shape of my eyes and nose to the bad varicose veins on my legs….I was definitely made of his genes. And for the past few years I have been thinking about him. Wondering where he is and what he has been doing.

Because my father is 17 years older than me, he would be of the generation that would find computers and facebook a little intimidating. Hell…I can remember when I first started working with them back in the 80’s at The Tampa Tribune. Those black screens with the space-aged green fonts seemed like something out of a movie (“War Games” to be exact). So, he would probably have shied away from ever actually using a computer to find his son. And most likely he didn’t want to find me at all.

You see, my father was a longshoreman. He wasn’t a big man. He was actually kind of thin and spry. Don’t get me wrong…he was strong, but not that big in stature. The last time I saw him was Thanksgiving of 1991 at his mother’s house. By this time in my life, I had already come out to everyone in my family. I was living a gay lifestyle and working in gay bars. My father had even come to pick me up a couple times when I was stranded after a drag show at Rene’s (the popular black gay bar in Tampa). So, it was no big deal that I was in drag or had a boyfriend. He had even gone to school with a well known drag queen in town named Zara. But what happened at that Thanksgiving dinner would change our relationship forever.

My earliest memory of my father was my fifth birthday. My grandmother, Carrie, had told me that he had called and said he was going to come see me for my birthday. I remember taking a bath that afternoon. I never wanted to take a bath back then, but I wanted to look good for my father. I put on my Sunday best. I would run and go peek out the front window every time I heard a car go by. This went on for hours. I remember my grandmother making me come and eat a late lunch because he still had not arrived. Then it was getting later in the day. I had tried watching “Underdog” and a couple of other cartoons to keep myself busy until he arrived.

Finally it was after 5 PM and I decided to go wait on the porch. I remember rocking in the chair. It was really warm out and the gnats were swamping the yard. I sat there and waited all day until the sun went down. My father never showed up. This would become a long series of disappointments my father would supply throughout my life.

A few years earlier before that dinner, I was living with my gay cousin Michael and a friend, Godfrey (who went by the drag name Apollonia). Michael (who was also a drag performer named “Michelle Holiday”) had lost his job and was pretending to go to work everyday. Apollonia survived off her drag shows and her boyfriend. I was working as a DJ and drag performer. I happened to call Michael at his job at McDonald’s because my uncle Herb need him to come pick him up and was informed he no longer worked there and would I ask him to return the uniform. After confronting Michael, I told him and Godfrey that I was moving out. We were going to lose the apartment if we didn’t have the rent. Michael was unable to get another job immediately so I moved in with my friend Christie Matthews. Apparently, Michael and Godfrey went to my father and Uncle Herb and told them that I had moved out and left them with the rent.  My father and Herb gave them the rest of the rent and I guess my father started harboring ill will towards me.

Fast forward to 1991 and my father shows up to Thanksgiving dinner at his mother’s house with his current girlfriend. Grandma Sally always had a big meal at the holidays. Even my adopted gay brother Anthony Evans was invited. Now, my dad showing up with his girlfriend doesn’t sound like a problem, but his ex-wife, Teresa and the kids were there. I noticed that he had been drinking before he got there. He was very abrupt with me when he arrived. But like most dysfunctional family dinners, the main event was saved while we were eating.  My father proceeded to tell me that I had ruined his name (since I am a junior), I needed to go out and get a real job and stop hanging around all those faggots before I caught something.

Ironically, the year before I had received my diagnosis of being HIV+. I had no intention of sharing that fact with anyone in my family. I already felt like an outsider since I left home at 16. At the time when my father verbally attacked me at the dinner table, it seemed to have come out of nowhere. I was told later that he was still mad at me for moving out on Michael and Godfrey and felt that I was irresponsible. But this was laughable, coming from a man who didn’t have a permanent residence himself.  I sat and listened for about ten minutes and then I went off.

“You gotta lotta nerve! You ain’t got a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of!” I said.

He gave the same look he did when he punched me in 1980 when I stopped him from beating on Teresa in their kitchen. I remember sitting on the floor after the hit and singing “We Shall Overcome” and him cursing at me. So, I guess he was about to hit me again, but my grandmother wasn’t having it. She threw him out of her house on that Thanksgiving. And that would be the last time I saw my father.

When I describe my parents, I always say that they seemed like my older brother and sister who were always in trouble. Mainly because I was raised my mother’s mother until she died in 1982. It’s funny how life can be like a stacked set of dominoes. You do one thing and it changes so many others’ lives.

My mother was the only girl out of three children. So, my grandmother kept her under lock and key. She was very strict with her and wanted her to go to school to become a teacher. But it was the 60’s and my mother had other plans. She wanted to see Jimi Hendrix live. She wanted to be a part of the Psychedelic Movement. So she got pregnant on purpose and my father was the poor victim. He really loved her and she ran off with a boyfriend shortly after having me. He didn’t know anything about raising a child. So, he took me to the one place he knew I would be safe and loved….my mother’s mother.

Unfortunately for him and all the rest of the women he came in contact with from then on, he would never truly fall in love again. He would become an abusive and womanizing man that had kids all over town.

So, on April 22^nd, 2013 I opened up my facebook account and found a message from a girl named Lakiria. It read: “Miss Teresa misses you and loves you. Please call her.” At first I was going to ignore it, but then I noticed the number had an 813 area code. That’s Tampa. So, I called it.

The joy in Teresa’s voice was so wonderful to hear. Apparently she and my brothers had been searching for me for a while. My step brother, Adrian and his girlfriend, Lakiria came across my facebook profile and decided to write me. I cannot tell you the emotions that overcame me when I started talking with Theresa, my brother Adrian, my brother Anton, my brother Anthony and my Uncle Rudolph.  They were all so glad to finally reconnect with me. It had been 21 years since I had spoken to or seen any of them.

But it was a bittersweet opening conversation with Teresa. You see, my father had died in 2006. So, I finally had my answer. The man that I had despised for all these year was gone. But of course a part of me wishes that I had worked things out or at least got to tell him that I am married now. I believe I have found my purpose in life. I have a family of friends who love me and believe in me. I have a life that I am proud of. But this conversation was reaffirming to hear.  My real family still loves me and they are proud of me. Teresa even told me that she has been walking around the house singing “Bitch You Look Fierce”. Her and Lakira are now the biggest Jade Elektra fans.

My father’s death left so many questions. I wonder if he ever got to see any of my accomplishments. Did he ever hear any of my records? Did he ever see me in a movie or on television? Did he ever know that I really understood him and why he did the things that he did? Would he have embraced me if I had told him that I was HIV+? 

Well, a part of me thinks he would have. Teresa told me that he died of AIDS.

A part of me was shocked, but not surprised. For as many women he had slept with it wasn’t surprising at all. But my Uncle Rudolph shed some more light on something else I had no idea about. My father, like my mother had started doing heavy drugs and was shooting up. And at his funeral, the family discovered that he had three daughters that we knew nothing about. And since he got around - a lot - there’s no telling how many more are out there.

To put the kids in order of age…..it would be me, Von, Jerome, Anton, Anthony. These are the brothers I knew about. We didn’t have the same mothers, but there was no denying that were Alfonso King’s children. Out of protest of not having a father around when I was growing up, I changed the spelling of my name in grade school. Then it became my professional name when I started acting and modeling.

I guess the thing that I regret the most with both my parents is that I never got to tell them that I forgave them. They were two young 17 year olds who were making the best decisions that they could at the time. They had no idea that what they did that day I was conceived would change the rest of so many lives in the aftermath. And although many have said they were horrible parents, they taught me a very valuable lesson……how not to live. I just never got the chance to tell them that I loved them regardless of the mistakes.

I just spent a few days in Berlin, capital of the Federal Republic of Germany and according to the brochure, the largest city between Moscow and Paris, working on an HIV-related project; of which, as it is big enough to literally affect all of us, much more detail later. But meanwhile, I’d warrant that Berlin itself deserves a story.

Start with the obvious: if you enjoy urban beauty or the elegance of a perfect cityscape, book a flight to Paris. Berlin is, to be blunt, ugly. It doesn’t have the richly layered history of Rome or London, the gilded perfection of Saint Petersburg, the raw pulsing energy of Hong Kong or New York. Berlin is too young to be profound, too compromised to be innocent or exuberant. Its nightlife can be of an order of decadence to make the Marquis de Sade blush; but alas, the local metro goes to sleep at one A.M., incomprehensibly, leaving one with a Hobson’s choice of a very long walk or the use of taxis that are literally beige. That’s right: beige. Nothing says “I just had epic sex with twin Siberian gymnasts in front of a paying audience” quite as clearly as a beige Mercedes-Benz. It is to weep. On the other hand, the city’s Lord Mayor, Klaus Wowereit, is openly gay.

Until recently divided by the monstrous Berlin Wall – one of my earliest memories is standing in front of it, and understanding even as a tot that I was looking at something abhorrent – Berlin has not yet truly become one city. What it has done instead, assisted by the largesse of the German taxpayer, is nonetheless remarkable: acknowledge the darker sides of its history with a frankness probably without equal anywhere else. That begs the question of how it got to where it is today.

Few places have been as central to the tragedies of the last century than this lightly wooded spot of sand, lakes and gravel roughly the geographic size of New York City (with rather a bit less than half as many people, no coast and no skyscrapers). It began the century as the ostentatiously nouveaux-riche capital of Imperial Germany, ruled by a man we in the English-speaking world know simply as the Kaiser, Emperor William II. He qualifies as a tragedy of his own. This is the complete jackass that practically single-handedly strangled four centuries of European world pre-eminence by dragging every great power of his day into a war none of them wanted to fight all that much, and despite most of them being ruled by members of his immediate family. He began his career as monarch by firing his chancellor, Otto Prince Bismarck, the man who in 1871 handed William’s grandfather and namesake King William III of Prussia the crown of a shiny new German Empire and then kept the peace of Europe for decades. “Jackass” may be an excess of charity, come to think of it.

His dynasty, the House of Hohenzollern, produced competent, hard-working and occasionally brilliant kings of Prussia over the course of several centuries, then two quite serviceable German emperors, but apparently had precious little left by way of talent, taste or administrative ability in the genetic larder for poor William. Those imperial buildings still standing, tragically mainly his, breathe an air more at home in a nightmare Las Vegas than the smaller, merely royal and more humanly modest Berlin that was the capital of the kingdom of Prussia. The aesthetic difference is roughly that between Wagner at his most loud and Mozart at his more sublime. What remains of Royal Berlin is one of the jewels of Europe. Imperial Berlin was then and is today a continental eyesore.

Empire and kingdom both fell in the course of a single day at the end of the Great War, the 9^th of November 1918, as Germany’s armies disintegrated in defeat on the bloody fields of northern France.  In the Commonwealth, this date is marked as Armistice Day; in Berlin, it saw the birth of the first German Republic, declared in a mix of exuberance, confusion and despair from the balcony of one of those Imperial buildings, the Reichstag or Imperial Parliament. There’s a certain irony inherent in the fact that this happened more or less by accident; the emperor had fled the capital for the Netherlands a day previously (maybe to avoid the fate of his cousin, the Czar, recently shot by the Bolsheviki), the crown prince refused the throne, no other male members of the Imperial House in the line of succession were to be found, and a republic was essentially the only option left that might prevent the full collapse not just of the already crumbling government, but of the state itself.

That republic, colloquially known simply as Weimar, was not long for this earth. It did manage to preserve the Reich as a united state, but never gained the broad legitimacy required to sustain itself. However, in fourteen short years it brought into being one of the great brilliant fireworks of human civilization, the sudden and gorgeous flowering of a new modern age. Modern cinema wasn’t born in Hollywood; its cradle rocked in Babelsberg. Without those few years in faraway Berlin, New York City’s iconic MoMA would be as interesting as a barn. A defeated, impoverished republican capital became the Chicago of Europe, a marvel of the world entirely beyond the imagination or capacity of imperial Berlin. And equally something contemporary, democratic Berlin would like to be again, but presently is not – and likely never will be.

Consider the losses:  Albert Einstein, Theodor Adorno, Walter Gropius, Greta Garbo, Mies van der Rohe, Wassily Kandinsky, Fritz Lang, Thomas Mann, Marlene Dietrich, Billy Wilder and too many others to count. No modern city since the sack of Constantinople has lost so much talent, so quickly; with one obvious exception: New York City in the age of AIDS.

Those halcyon days will not return for one simple reason: the force that extinguished them, the Nazi dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, murdered or drove into exile the very men and women who made them possible. Obviously, Hitler – who Berliners today are quick to point out was a native of Austria and never won an election in Berlin itself, accurate statements both – hated Jews to the point of genocide, along with gypsies, communists, homosexuals, trade unionists and many, many more. Precisely the groups that provided the yeast for the city’s ferment and made it das Rote Berlin, Red Berlin. This Red Berlin became Hitler’s first victim.

The infamous Reichstag fire, likely set by the Nazis themselves, provided the pretext for outlawing the powerful communist party and imprisoning its leaders and many of the rank and file in the first concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, an hour outside of the city limits.

The Nazi paramilitary organization SA stormed and burned to the ground the world’s first gay research institute near the Brandenburg Gate. Clubs and bars within larger buildings couldn’t yet be torched without consequence, but were sacked.  Meanwhile, Berlin’s 160,000 Jewish citizens – out of a population of four million – were systematically ghettoized, first economically and then physically, from the life of the city. The silence of the majority of Berliners at this very visible persecution was and remains a moral disgrace to the city’s people; it continued during the infamous Kristallnacht and until the last Jews were deported to the death camps in 1943, at which point the city was declared Judenrein, “cleansed of Jews”. At that time and in the following months and years, though, there wasn’t much of Berlin left, either; instead of Hitler’s fabled European capital Germania, it became just one more field of rubble among many on a continent in ruins. Nor is this ancient history; not in a city where the very stones seem to weep.

It is a matter of supreme irony that the regime’s crimes hit the city as devastatingly as they did; historically, Prussia was the first country in Europe to fully emancipate its Jewish population and grant Jews the rights of citizenship, in line with a royal decree, revolutionary at the time, that granted freedom of worship to all faiths. So many French Protestants fled the radically different policy of Louis XIV of France, the Sun King (and architect of Versailles), that at one time the language most widely spoken in Berlin was French. The kingdom of Prussia was a notoriously militarized and regimented state, but its capital was a place of intellectual and artistic ferment, a place where a brilliant Jewish woman, Rahel Varnhagen von Ense, in the latter half of the 18^th Century could lead the leading Enlightenment salon. She was a peer not merely of Christians or aristocrats, but of men as one of the first widely published female writers. In the late 19^th Century, the first modern gay rights group was founded in Berlin; around the same time, the first gay magazine was published there. The city that Christopher Isherwood scoured for male flesh was often a scene of hunger, riots, and pitched battles between Nazis and Communists, but das Rote Berlin had room for the outcasts of the world.

As did New York, and Toronto, and London, and all the other cities large and small scourged by AIDS. Berlin has something to teach them: how to preserve the memory of the lost. How, in the Part Two. 

“Some people are going to think, ‘Oh god, why did he not take steps to prevent HIV? Why did he act recklessly, and who the hell does he think he is, I saw people die from AIDS!’” A friend and colleague whose candor is always helpful said this to me over lunch recently, and his words have stuck with me over the past day

Most interestingly, I’ve noticed that those most receptive to my messages are under 30, those 30-50 are generally receptive but ask more poignant questions, and those over 50 are oftentimes, not always but often, openly hostile to my writing on bareback sex and HIV. In the next few months, I’m going to be speaking at several sexual health seminars and symposiums, and I’ve been assessing my own writing and essays on sex, barebacking, HIV, and personal responsibility, and I’ve reached the same conclusion that I originally had when I began writing on HIV and sex; that is, we are inadvertently sustaining HIV infections and continuing this epidemic because we are unable to confront our past honestly and without emotion.

I was born in 1984. Personally, I have no firsthand recollection of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Ryan White, Arthur Ashe, the AIDS quilt’s beginnings, Rock Hudson, C. Everett Coop, or the obscene neglect the United States government took in relation to HIV/AIDS throughout the entire 1980s.  Rather, all of my knowledge of these things, people, and movements comes from oral histories from LGBT elders that are my friends, exhibits at places like the William Way LGBT Community Center’s stellar John J. Wilcox, Jr., Archival space, named after a man I am heartened to have called a friend, and from textbooks and documentaries. In addition, when I began to go through puberty and learn about the physical and sexual changes taking place in my body, it was the late 1990s, Bill Clinton was president, HIV/AIDS organizations and infrastructure had been in place for over a decade, and my teachers, parents, and mentors knew how HIV was transmitted, how HIV was not transmitted, and HIV’s timeline of progression in the human body.

When I was growing up, there was no plague where funerals were being attended every week. There were no candlelight vigils, there were no large scale protests interfering with traditional institutions of power and policy in the United States; rather, there was knowledge, there were early concepts of treatment that are still being used today, and there was a local, state, and federal government trying its best, guided and sometimes provoked by activists and advocacy organizations, to respond most effectively to HIV/AIDS.

Instead of learning about HIV through my own experiences or through seeing friends or loved ones suffer or die too early, I learned about HIV as an abstract concept far removed from my own life. Of course, this abstract viral boogeyman was as frightening as it was imaginary; after all, when our own innate fears are coupled with histories, real or not, of our elders and teachers, we manifest these fears in irrational terror and paradoxical behavior, like posting links on Facebook to condom campaign websites but barebacking someone we met on Adam4Adam because he said he was “clean.”

For years, I was terrified of this virus because it had seemingly no effect on me or my own circle of friends and family; rather, it was something that we knew existed, we knew how to prevent, and we knew how it attacked the human body, but this knowledge was predicated on the idea that I was born, luckily, at a time where I did not become a man or a sexual being until long after the early days of the virus spreading rapidly through the gay community. Of course, the only reason HIV/AIDS took off throughout the gay community is because gay men engage in anal sex which allows for easy access for the blood barrier to be crossed between sexual partners because of, often entirely unnoticeable, usually microscopic abrasions and tears around the skin on the penis or inside the anus.

Contrary to the belief of some misguided idiots who think HIV/AIDS was god’s divine judgment toward those of us who like to kiss men, HIV only seemingly “picked” the gay community because of this fact; if straight women were clamoring to engage in anal sex like gay men typically do, they would have been the ones who bore the brunt of HIV/AIDS. Instead, because gay men are the ones who engage in this, admittedly fun, activity, we were the ones who suffered the most during the early days of HIV/AIDS. And, to this day, the LGBT community overall, including transwomen and gay men, are dramatically disproportionately affected by HIV because of this fact.

So, like the Holocaust, the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic are a mere idea my generation and the generations after mine have to learn about from our elder peers, from our teachers, or from our books. We have no concept of the human tragedy endured by millions; we have no firsthand account of what things were like. And, this is why our experience as HIV+ people born post-AIDS outbreak is entirely different than that of those who lived during this time as sexual adults. Now, this is not to say that either experience is better or worse; rather, our experiences are equally as valuable and equally deserving of a seat at the table when it comes to outreach, prevention, and care.

Notwithstanding, if we are to successfully combat the tide of rising HIV infections brought on by what older folks like to call “recklessness” but what I like to call “natural human behavior,” we must be willing to honestly look at ourselves and admit that nobody has a monopoly on HIV/AIDS, and the fact that someone lived through something does not automatically give them deference on opinions just as the fact that I am HIV+ most definitely does not give me absolute authority on all things related to HIV. Rather, on the logical and science-based merits should we approach HIV/AIDS today without the baggage and trauma, both experiential on part of our elders and vicarious on part of my generation.

This is the current approach of the more misguided folks in our LGBT elder generation, generally, in relation to HIV: tossing out HIV stigmatic slurs like calling me, literally, a “murderer;” browbeating young men who bareback as “reckless;” advocating condom use over everything else; making people who bareback feel bad about themselves; shrilly obsessing over death when telling 20 year olds about the 1980s instead of honestly admitting that you were at the DCA club also getting topped on the truck bed at the bar; claiming falsely that dental dams are used widely to prevent hepatitis and so should condoms for anal sex; ignoring the fact that part of sexual liberation means engaging in natural human sexual activity like bareback sex; and, ignoring all scientific literature that refutes every single backward notion born out of 1990 and early treatment that effectively was more toxic than HIV itself.

If this approach worked, then we would not be seeing a steady rise in HIV infections.

 So, let’s stop damaging the lives and futures of young people today by taking a step back and stop forcing other people to obsess over our own memories, effectively refusing to allow these men and women to experience life on their own without the specter of a de facto Holocaust; the time of this period is over. We have antiretroviral treatment with no side effects that literally both gives us life expectancy into our 70s while simulanteously preventing us from being able to transmit HIV whatsoever (when we adhere to this medication); we are not dying, we are living. And, we are not frightened anymore because now that some of us have seen HIV for what it is. In particular, we know that HIV is a virus that will kill us if left untreated but that it is also a virus that is, today, incredibly manageable with the right governmental approach toward treatment availability like exists here in Philadelphia.

Human tragedy should never be swept under the rug or forgotten. And, we should strenuously remind folks that these things went on, that good men and women died needlessly and far too soon. But, we should not predicate our public health efforts and prevention efforts on the idea that we should force people to remember our dead friends or a tragic decade that future generations had nothing to do with. After all, if this fear-based approach was effective, nobody would get HIV anymore.

The fact that I’m writing this and HIV+ refutes that hypothesis.

This article originally appeared on Josh’s own blog here.

"You are old, Father William," the young man said,
"And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head—
Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

"In my youth," Father William replied to his son,
"I feared it might injure the brain;
But now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again." 

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland 

I play a computer game called “Fishdom”. It’s a matching game with fish tanks, various things you can purchase for the tanks and a timer. As I get closer to the time allotted for the round, the timer starts to make noises alerting me to the fact that time is running out. 

I realized one day that the more I focused on the timer, the less likely I was to successfully complete the round. I got sloppy and careless, missing opportunities and potential matches. I was worried that I’d be timed out and the round would have to be repeated and I made errors in judgment because of that worry. 

Sometimes I think that we live our lives, as people living with HIV, with a timer ever present in the background of our minds. Somewhere here we’ll find that we’re getting too close to the end of the game and the warning bells will go off letting us know that we’ll be leaving shortly. The timer for us can be measured in years, but it can also be measured in CD4 cells and viral loads, in kidney functioning and liver enzymes. Each one of those indicators can inch us closer and closer to the end. 

It was like that in the old days – people did what I call the “T-Cell death spiral”. They’d blank-facedly announce that they lost another 100 T-cells, or that their T-cells were down to 6 or some other indication that they were dying. It was horrible to experience with people: the disappointment and despair as though they had somehow personally failed. 

Now, the medications are marvellous and we live a lot longer, but the timer is ticking away. We may not give it our full attention, but like a mental grandfather clock we are reminded that we are mortal and that we will die. One day there will be a chime and that will be that. 

Of course, we will die. Everybody dies: it’s inevitable. It’s the dying “before our time” that bothers us. We all prefer to think that we will be old men and women and pass quietly in our sleep. We could just as easily be hit by a car or die in a natural catastrophe, but our dreams are more than likely about old age and quilts and a soft rain outside our bedroom window as we drift back into the vast and expansive no-thing-ness. 

The problem is that like the game, if we spend all our time while we’re here focused on the end of the round, we miss the everyday opportunities that surround us. We miss the potential to connect with lovely people and summer days, with snowmen and with daffodils. And if we focus solely on “winning” the round, collecting as many goodies as we can, we again miss the point of being here. 

The point of being here is being here. 

There’s no other purpose to existence other than to exist. Our existence is nothing less than miraculous, and our connection to everything is nothing less than wonderful. It’s not about earning brownie points for heaven, or collecting things or making scads of money. It’s society tells us those things are valuable. Life is about being in connection with people and the world in which we live: we are here to love, laugh and create; and we are here to weep and to mourn. 

We only have one round (that we know about) to this particular game. Whether we leave at 9 months or 90 years makes no matter. We leave when we are finished. 

And in the meantime, there are birds singing in the trees… 

It’s always heartwarming to watch communities rally together when they have a common health concern.  In the early days, the gay HIV community was a great example of how people were able to join forces in the face of a terrible stigma and even death to ensure strong networks were able to provide support.  It is a model that has been emulated in the breast cancer community, MS, liver and heart disease and many others. 

I was reminded of this recently at the Gathering for people living with HIV across the province, organized by Positive Living Society of BC.  People were relieved to be connected with others... they could chat informally without fearing stigma and there was clearly a sense of camaraderie and common purpose.

Recently, I was thinking of our family vacations to Eyam, Derbyshire where my grandmother used to live.  It’s a beautiful, historic village in the Pennine hills, full of old stone houses and even a hotel on the English haunted inns list, The Miner’s Arms.

Hundreds of years before my grandmother lived there, Eyam had faced terrible stigma and death too.   In August 1665, some cloth was delivered from London to a local tailor.  He hung the damp cloth to dry and it released fleas that were hidden in the material - they were carrying the bubonic plague.  Within one week, the tailor was dead and many in the little village were dying.

Unlike HIV, the bubonic plague was caused by a bacterium and was passed very rapidly by the bite of fleas.. The village decided to isolate itself from surrounding villages and from each other.  The church services were held in a field and a well above the village was used for money to be dropped in the water by the villagers and, in turn, the nearby villages delivered food.  The Riley Graves on another hill lay testament to a mother who buried her husband and six children within 8 days - a sad and horrific tragedy.

However, for some reason when the village finally opened its self-imposed quarantine, a quarter of the villagers had  survived and there is a belief that it was for the same reason that some people seem to have a gene which gives them immunity to HIV (the gene has been found in the descendents of Eyam’s survivors).

The community spirit of that tiny village and their determination to overcome the odds and their own personal fear reminds me very much of the great courage of people with HIV.  Many HIV+ people have not only had to combat the ignorance of others but also decide as a community what steps they will take to network together and fight the disease.

This all leads me to believe when we are sick with a mutual illness, we find a bond and a new reality emerges.  In death, humans reveal powers of endurance and their resilience is at its best.  Alliances are struck and there’s a real sense of connection.  At a time of mutual isolation, there is kinship, respect and love.