Pride should not be taken for granted.
It’s June, Pride Month. And we have so much to celebrate. As a gay man of a certain age, I hear and read a lot of things about the young LGBQT, gender fluid and gender non-conforming generation that lightens my jaded heart. The 21st century is indeed a new era for us, despite its myriad challenges and the impending doom of climate catastrophe for all, regardless of whom we sleep with.
Today, 27 countries have legalized same sex marriage. We still have 168 to conquer, but if you realize the Netherlands was the first to legalize same sex marriage in 2001, that’s significant progress. Transgender and non-conforming gender rights movements have also taken a front seat, with cable television series like POSE depicting the plight and courage of our trans community in full display. LGBQT people have shifted from a shadowy netherworld of covert love and fear into mainstream acceptance; recent polls show as many as 67% of Americans now support gay marriage as an legal right. Even Pope Francis has countered the Catholic Church’s long-standing denial of gay rights, albeit on eggshells. Though suicide and bullying rates among queer youth remains distressingly high, the opportunities to seek like-minded people and support have increased dramatically in great part to the advent of social media. It’s a very different time from when I first came out in the early 1980s.
But one thing hasn’t changed. HIV is still with us. Today, approximately 1.1 million people are living with HIV in the United States, with about 1 in 7 unaware they carry the virus. In 2016, around 38,700 Americans became newly infected with HIV. Gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men represent the greatest risk group, an estimated 26,000 of new infections per year. Treatment for HIV has resulted in high survival rates, much-longer life spans, and a disease that’s chronic yet treatable. Scientific data has now proven that HIV positive people who manage to lower their viral load (a marker of the amount of virus in the blood) to undetectable through treatment cannot pass the virus to others, even during unprotected sex. But the reality is that HIV remains an incurable and potentially fatal disease. The long-term effects of anti-retroviral treatment aren’t yet fully understood, though studies indicate HIV disease can accelerate aging, exacerbate kidney and liver malfunction, along with a host of other undesired results. It’s not a benign ailment despite scientific advances, and in some places in the world like sub-Saharan Africa, it continues to cause immense suffering and death.
I know this first-hand. In the mid-1980s, as HIV began to cut its dark swath through San Francisco, I was at ground zero of the pandemic. I lost 20 friends and three ex-lovers to the disease within five years. As I watched so many young and talented people, all on the cusp of their future, succumb to the disfiguring array of cancers, suffocating pneumonia, terrifying brain disease, and other bizarre ailments caused by the decimation of the immune system, I was unaware that by the end of the decade, over 22 million people world-wide would perish from AIDS. I couldn’t have possibly foreseen that while still in my early 30s, I’d not be dancing the night away in clubs or falling in love a thousand times, but rather be rushing from the bedsides of dying friends to ACT-UP meetings to protest the discrimination and rampant fear that fueled the epidemic, or that by 1995, when the so-called triple drug cocktail finally came out, impeding the virus’s progress in infected people, I’d find myself with only a handful of friends, male and female, left alive.
Today, HIV is still a stigma for many, even if there’s been progress because of ongoing, visible advocacy. HIV doesn’t discriminate based on sexuality, race, or gender: it’s an equal opportunity serial killer. But people still resist getting tested and some young people think that because we have pills to treat it, it’s no longer a threat. Prep, a treatment that can prevent HIV infection, is also available, if you’re fortunate enough to be able to access it.
Nevertheless, I’ve found that for many LGBQT youth, HIV is no longer the monster lurking in the closet. There seems to be far less fear of it, which is good, because fear clouds our judgement and the truth is, preventing HIV is easy if you learn how. We shouldn’t fear the virus. We should strive to halt it. We shouldn’t fear those who are HIV positive either, because study after study of long-term sero-discordant couples, in which one person is positive and the other isn’t, have demonstrated that healthy, vibrant sex and love can co-exist with the disease. What we should fear is ignorance and carelessness, the attitude that you can’t get infected because AIDS is so 1980s. Gay youth is particularly vulnerable to this misconception. Coming out is often still a painful process, rife with self-loathing and societal rejection. Embracing your sexuality can become an act of defiance that leads to risk. When we’re young and queer, we must fight to be who we are. We don’t see the future as clearly as those before us. We don’t recognize the lessons others have learned.
My plea to our new generation of LGBQT people is to never forget those who came before you, who fought and died by the thousands for the rights you now enjoy. Never forget our fallen, those who remain, or those still must exist in the shadows. Support and care for one another. Hold each other up and honor the memory of a time when we were engaged in a decades-long war for our very lives. The AIDS pandemic was a horrific time for our community, but out of its unimaginable losses, our pride was re-born. We refused to be vanquished. Because of us, the world was changed.
Celebrate Pride in all its incarnations. Be proud of who you are. Yet never think history can’t repeat itself. We must stay vigilant. Silence = death.
