(no subject)

[jlh]

I heard a shocking statistic today, and it made me think of an old friend.

Jeff was a year behind me in high school. He had floppy blond hair and brown eyebrows and sort of looked like George Michael. Which was okay, since it was the mid-80s. When our two classes took a trip to Washington, DC, he and I sat next to each other on the bus sharing one set of headphones, listening to The Cure instead of the tour guide. We had school band together (he played percussion, I played saxophone). We went to tons of concerts; that's about all there was to do in Portland if you were under age. We saw Simple Minds, and Corey Hart open for Rick Springfield, and Bon Jovi open for Ratt. Jeff and C____ were the only friends I invited to my family graduation party. I still have a picture of him talking to my niece Sunny, who was then about seven.

The next spring, Jeff became the first guy my age to come out to me. In a sense, he was my first fag, and I was his first hag. He was about to go to the University of Miami and couldn't wait to get out of our stupid little town, just like me the year before. We went to a Sting concert. We wrote to each other over the next year and saw each other that next summer, too.

The Christmas of 1989, I saw Jeff back home. His face looked a lot thinner but he had always been a bit round of face so I just assumed he had lost his puppy fat. But that April, he was back home, feeling very ill indeed. By the time I came home late that June, he was confined to bed. Before I left for school again that fall, he was gone. Just like that.

The statistic? In a recent study of young gay and bisexual men in urban centers in the US, 77% of those who tested positive for HIV didn't even know they were positive.

Some of you are too young to remember when AIDS was a quick death sentence like it was for Jeff, too young to remember when people were dropping like flies all around us. AIDS is not a rite of passage. AIDS is not a chronic but manageable disease. AIDS still kills people every day. Some don't respond to the cocktail of protease inhibitors and other drugs; for others, it stops working. It affects all of us, regardless of gender or orientation. So protect yourself, and get tested if you think you should.

(And now, I'm giving the soapbox back to johnwalton.)

Comments

[thalialuna.livejournal.com]

You know what's interesting? Just last night there was an item about how there may be a new vaccine for AIDS that may be ready in a few years time. Then I realised I hadn't heard a lot about AIDS for quite some time. I remembered the ad. campaigns on the telly with families getting knocked over like ninepins by a grim reaper figure with a bowling ball. I remembered the harrowing stats that used to come out of Africa that we no longer hear. I remember the mass rallies that were always being reported on the news and that are either no longer being held or are no longer being reported - must be old news.

Then I log on today and see your sad story about your friend and your concern that people are forgetting about it. Sometimes it scares me how much the Muses' minds connect in such a timely manner. How sometimes we're thinking about the same things or feeling the same things at roughly the same time. Anyway, that's a side issue...

I don't know where all the awareness campaigns about AIDS went. I don't know WHY they went but they certainly are gone. In fact, herpes gets more air time now - as much as AIDS used to get and herpes doesn't kill. Maybe the AIDS campaigners ran out of advertising money. Maybe the government lobbyists are more interested in Herpes than AIDS now. Maybe people just plain don't want to think about it. I don't know. There are a lot of things I just don't know.

Hmm.

[bluebyrd.livejournal.com]

Only yesterday I heard about this AIDS congress being held right now, somewhere in Europe, I believe; the news mentioned that in some areas of Africa, three out of four deaths are AIDS-related, and that it's the education system that suffers most from casulaties amongst the working population. But I can tell people aren't as concerned at they were in, say, the early nineties.