The first HIV test I ever took was at a community health clinic when I first started college. There was no way I could have tested positive, if you know what I mean, but still, I spent the next few days waiting for the result and worrying that I would be surprised.
Even in my teens, feelings like I was fated to be a virgin for life, I convinced myself that HIV would affect me somehow in some profound manner at some point in the future. One Christmas, I asked for an AIDS bracelet, a $20 sterling silver band with a portion of the proceeds going to the "Until There's a Cure" organization. I can't even remember how I heard about it, but I know I wore it proudly, thinking that it was my own subversive way of coming out before I actually came out. I equated it with a rainbow flag or pink triangle on my backpack.
Because I grew up and came to terms with gay sex in the 90's, I found it near impossible not to connect homosexuality with HIV. Sure, the eye of the scare was behind me by the time I even knew what it was, but the echoes reverberated. Almost every gay movie I watched dealt with HIV, every gay book I read. It became subliminal: a character coughs, gets sick, sweats at night, and I knew.
So I began wondering if someday, that would be me.
I was so keenly aware of the disease, yet lacked any substantial education about the matter, that I concocted phantom symptoms for myself. I'd absent-mindedly bash my knee against a table, and the subsequent bruise would be the onset of Kaposi's sarcoma. Feeling warm at four in the morning was an episode of night sweats. Every cold, every flu was a sign of seroconversion. I lived as though HIV had a personal vendetta against me, was determined to break me down, even if I gave it few opportunities to do so.
But more importantly, I believed that its vendetta was not only with me, but gay men as a whole. Gay men don't get bruises. Gay men don't get the flu, don't feel malaise, don't wake up kicking off covers in the summertime. Gay men get HIV.
HIV played as big of a role in my sexual identity as sex and identity itself, and I eventually found that I could not, and never could, separate the two. In my head, HIV was nothing but a tragic end reserved for gay guys (again, lacking in any substantial education) to cut short the time they have to spend with the loves of their lives. Kind of like what happened to Nicole Kidman at the end of Moulin Rouge. HIV was my consumption, and I was terrified that I would meet my Ewan McGregor and then pass out to my death during a big Bollywood-inspired stage number.
Nowadays, I am more informed about HIV, AIDS, STDs, and all the other acronyms that gay men are flooded with from day to day. I understand that my body will not immaculately conceive the virus just because I am gay any more than my brain will spontaneously rewire itself with math skills just because I am Chinese. And HIV is not the death sentence it once was.
I think of all this because yesterday, over 2,000 bike riders took off from the outskirts of San Francisco to begin their 550-mile journey to Los Angeles as part of the 10th annual AIDS LifeCycle event. These riders raised over $13 million that will go toward HIV research and providing services to those affected by the disease.
On Twitter this morning, I read an exchange between people who were debating the possibility of ever finding a cure. The prevailing opinion states that the money is so great for those who develop the treatment options that they would never spend any money or effort toward developing and implementing an actual cure; corporations outweigh individual needs.
I don't know if I believe the conspiracy theory. Could be true, hopefully false. Either way, it doesn't change how so many men and women saddled up on their bikes, trained for months, raised an amazing amount of money, and then rode off en masse on a cloudy morning on their way down a good length of California. I have to believe that therein lies a power than can, and eventually will, triumph over any obstacle: virus, corporation, or otherwise.
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