Self-Record

For Levester, Harbinger of New Love

I started out like all of us start out a coward, afraid. It is not to say that I am not afraid now. It is to say whether I am afraid or not I count less. I value myself more than I value my terrors. It does not mean I don’t have them. Once I take that position I can look at them and see what it is that they teach me.
—Audre

In December 2017, at forty-one years old, I was diagnosed with HIV. Earlier that summer, I had moved to Philadelphia from Upstate New York, where I lived for ten years; and I came to the city of brotherly love a bachelor shortly after the end of a long-term relationship. To say the news of my diagnosis came as a surprise would be a lie. I wasted little time settling into an active sex life in this corner of the world, and I was not on PrEP nor always using a condom as I had done fastidiously in the past. When I went to get tested this time I was anxious indeed, more anxious than all the past tests I’d received twice, sometimes three, four times a year the previous twenty years.

That’s not entirely true either. A few years back, one frigid Friday, I drove from Ithaca to Syracuse with needy speed, a giddy anticipation hurling me toward a weekend tryst. Outside of the relationship I was in, it was the first time I had sex without a condom. I paid this lapse little mind until Sunday morning when I drove back, again with great speed but now dreadful anticipation, from the Syracuse Crown Plaza straight to Ithaca Urgent Care to get tested and receive a thirty-day supply of PEP. False alarm, I was told a month later, a precaution well taken.

At the time I was racing up and down I-81 chasing sex I was still with my partner. By then, we had been together for over a decade, many of those years long-distance. The eve year of the millennium, when we met, I was twenty-three, he was nineteen. We grew up together, in effect, became men together. Over time our love and respect for each other became sacrosanct; and in due time a profound tender attachment and a kind of idealized beauty came to replace all sex, which we outsourced protective of other forms of intimacy. We took pride in how we licensed each other, how forthright we were about our individual sexual drives and needs, how we kept our own script. Sexual passion loses its intensity perhaps in all long-term relationships, even as love and friendship increase, but losing sex altogether in our thirties became untenable, the root of the end of our sixteen-year partnership.

I cannot do a full inventory of all the sex I had and the men I met casually during this pivotal interval of my life, although some rush forth with immediate force and felicity. Oh, the moan of those two friends in Harlem like the hum of hunger being satiated. Dagi’ye Dagi’ye Dagi’ye, the man in Addis Ababa who chanted my nickname as if it were a prayer. The guy in Syracuse who told me sharply, as I was undressing, “Do not take your socks off!” Another in Paris who said, with equal balance of command and entreaty, Comme d’habitude, “Suck it like it’s your habit.” Yet another in Syracuse who made me discover the sudden power of spit.

We have a memory bank of sight and sound and scent and taste and touch and weight, sensations of the flesh unleashed by sex that we can redeem at a second’s notice. Not all of it is imbued with intense pleasures that leave a permanent mark, of course; sometimes, bad sex or matchup can have its own persistent memory, too. Lord knows I’ve had my share of tragically mediocre sex, though much of it now resides where I think unremarkable dreams do. I’ve also seen from my share of mismatches, in this hyper-porn age, the divide between the theater of our smartphones and the reality of who we are; the schism between the pithy texts and titillating photos that advertise our personhood and body, and the complexity of how we be in the flesh. With a dose of honey and rue I laugh quietly, shake my head at my own petty antics and inadequacies as I do of others’.

I am most grateful no harm has come my way from any of the men I’ve casually met, and no harm from me toward them. I am equally grateful, fleeting, even transactional though they may be, these sexual encounters have given me an education as edifying as any I have received, which is to trust the flesh. An erotic prerogative I have learned to heed and to exercise in pursuit of a world where virtues of sensuality, joy, generosity, truth, daring, gratitude, and love reign supreme.

* * *

We cannot pick and choose how life educates us. We can be educable, however, by whatever tempest or calm, refined or ratchet experience life is certain to send our way. And crisis, which, if not here already, is around the corner or soon on its merry way. In a personal crisis like mine in December 2017 it helps to have resources to withstand the shock of the moment. What hit me first, when my doctor told me I was HIV positive, was confounding disappointment. Not directed at myself or even my foolish behavior but at the news itself—the nonfulfillment of the answer I’d hoped for and expected to hear and heard countless times my adult life: Negative.

Then came not all at once but staggered other emotions. The first thing I said to my doctor was, “Thank God it’s 2017,” overcome by relief of the present where diagnosis does not, need not, mean death. My Lord, my Lord, my Lord, gratitude for the forty-one years of precious life on this earth, for being the recipient of my family’s and friends’ fiercest love. Stabs of sadness, thinking, how will my love ones receive the news, and dread, how will I tell them? A tug of regret, Damn it, I know I should’ve been on PrEP. And all of a sudden before my eyes a gallery of my boyhood mates in Ethiopia who died of AIDS malfeasance, and, just as quick, I am choking up and holding down, first by force, a torrent of sorrow from engulfing this clinic room. Easy, I’m telling myself, as I do in such circumstances, easy, easy Dagi’ye. Minutes later, with throat hoarse from stifling out grief, “I know all too well about this disease,” I told my doctor, awash with my personal losses and the loss of so many I came to know intimately by way of vocation, having authored a book on the early years of AIDS.

Before I knew it, I found myself silently reciting Assotto Saint’s words: “I have no regrets. I did it all. The baths, the bars, the tracks. In Europe, in Africa, in the United States, in Canada. I did it all and I regret nothing.” Words fortify in moments like this, steady the spirit, because they anticipate and corroborate the event. I am grateful I had these words that could claim me and that I could summon, which meant I could accept my diagnosis without self-pity. And I knew pity was not mine to claim, to begin with, given a life buffered by good fortune. I had premium health insurance and saw a doctor of color at a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer health clinic; had access to the latest antiretroviral therapy that would soon make the virus in my body undetectable. I knew being diagnosed with HIV did not imperil my life or livelihood, as it does the lives of far too many people, like me, African, African American, gay.

Many thousands continue to die and many more are made to suffer alone, shamed and shunned, too poor to matter, denied the right to live. The level of personal and social misery still caused by this disease ought to temper any triumphalism about the end of AIDS. Atlanta to Addis Ababa, the staggering scale of poverty in a world hideously rich fuels the AIDS crisis. Hatred toward sexual minorities, and contempt for addicts, prostitutes, and prisoners, compound this crisis. Indifference to black pain aggravates this crisis. Outright and out-of-sight injustice; ignorance, zealotry, and cowardice; the lust for power, profit, and punishment exacerbate this crisis. A shallow, spectacle-driven media, and a faddish (and supine) academy, abet this crisis. A white gay world bent on going from outlaw to in-law perpetuates this crisis. The public estrangement of our private desires continues to keep this crisis alive.

The point of privilege isn’t to hoard it, or flaunt its trappings, or get trapped by its ruse of safety. No, I want to make privilege pay, even if only tendered in words. At this late date, how necessary it remains to say it: I’m gay, I’m HIV positive, knowing full well saying so comes with a hefty price certainly where I come from—disgrace, for sure; banishment or worse, perhaps—many have lost their lives for saying less. I don’t mean to be cavalier nor am I romantic about the lot I’ve been dealt. No, I love life and love too much to die just yet. And, lest I be mistaken, there’s nothing romantic about having twelve vials of blood drawn every few months and tracking your body like breaking news. No romance in being a ward of public health surveillance. No, there’s no romance in knowing your very life depends on the daily intake of a pill, which I do each afternoon at 3:15 give or take. Still, I am grateful: For being alive, for more love and life and sex to come, for these words, the celebration of which is itself the cause of consequence.