My Body The AIDS Factory

It’s 1985, I’m 12 and convinced I’m manufacturing AIDS in my own body. It has been twelve years since the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality as a mental illness from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. But it will be years, maybe decades, before I believe there’s nothing wrong with me. With AIDS, I wonder if I’ll ever have a sense of being "okay." That summer I simulated sexual intercourse with Phillip Doherty, a sinewy neighbor and classmate whom I admired for the way his electrical cord veins wrapped around his muscled limbs as much as for his willingness to escape to his family’s basement to experiment with our burgeoning adolescent sexuality. I was sure that our recent sexual activity yielded disastrous results – the long dormant virus was activated by our crude simulations and desires. It had come to claims its hosts. Betrayed by a faulty immune system and overloaded by my deviant ways, I’m sure my body is turning against me. Just like the withering men with AIDS on TV and in the papers, I’ve engaged in "homosexual acts." I’m "promiscuous" -- as quick a path to death as any imaginable. I begin a full fledged war against myself between -- "I’m good, I’m okay, I think" and what the world was telling me, "No you’re a faggot and you’re going to die." I couldn't bear it. I didn't want any of those labels; although I wasn't so sure I had a choice. Being gay and AIDS was becoming inextricably linked, as was sex and death, and there was no one to help make these distinctions and separations. I traversed the landscape of stigma and shame that would become a second home. It wasn't enough that I spent much of my time denying my burgeoning sexual interests in boys, I was also negotiating pathology and death. Sick people get sick – it made sense. I spent much of the next few years worried that I, along with my neighbor, was responsible for creating a disease that would ultimately kill us. In 1985, when the world watched Rock Hudson whither away, I figured I was next.