When HIV seeped into my life
This is a story of grief. Not the grief of losing a parent. I’ve lost both, and there are plenty of books written about that. Not the grief of breakups, friend death, death of a loved one. There are words for those losses.
I’m writing about the grief that seeps into your soul and heart and mind, but that we struggle to find words for. The grief that we get told is small and not really ours to have. I’m writing about the impact of multiple losses to a community on an individual. On me.
In 1983, when I was in 8th grade, joke punchlines changed from herpes to AIDS. In 1989, when I was a sophomore in college and coming out as a lesbian, I was at an LGBT youth group, watching a gay teen sob his eyes out and tell the group how he had been raped and now had HIV. A few months later I was on the ‘L, and for the first time someone told me one-on-one that he was HIV+.
I don’t know why, but I was pretending to listen but couldn’t really hear him. I regret that I couldn’t be present in that moment. The gay newspapers were filled with obituaries of young men who died of “complications due to HIV/AIDS” or some other similar phrasing. I remember being excited when one died of an asthma attack. I was so tired of people dying of AIDS. I remember seeing people visibly sick at gay pride celebrations.
In college I ran into a friend on the bus. He said he was on the way to take a test. I told him that I hoped he passed. He said he did, too, and then I realized he wasn’t talking about academics.
When a friend of mine came out, his first love turned out to be HIV+. They had safe sex a few weeks after their first date. He said afterwards with great sadness in his voice, “I didn’t want my first sexual experience to be so closely tied to death, but it was.”
I went to the 1993 March on Washington. I ran into an old college friend. I asked about a mutual acquaintance.
“He’s sick,” he said, his face twisted because he didn’t want to say why this man was sick, but we both knew the words he couldn’t say.
One cold November day in 1994 I went to a local gay bookstore to hear David B. Feinberg read from Eighty-Sixed, perhaps one of the greatest novels ever written about the impact of AIDS on the gay community. When I arrived, the store was closed. A handwritten paper sign on the door announced that David had died two days before.
Businesses closed mysteriously when their owners were too sick to carry on. Artists stopped producing art. Bartenders disappeared. People disappeared from the dance floor even though the music hadn’t stopped.
I’m sure there were many more instances when HIV seeped into my life even if it never got into my body. Those times when I was told that it was just one person who I barely knew, an important loss to their loved ones but not supposed to be that important of a loss to me.
And through the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s all queers, positive or not, received the message that if we died we wouldn’t be missed, that if we were sick we weren’t good enough for the government to care. We were too dirty to be touched.
The whole situation reminds me of my grandfather’s experience with the Holocaust. He survived the Holocaust by not being in Europe in the 1940s. He had left Poland, eventually landing in the US in the 1920s. While his family was being shipped off to concentration camps and their death, he drove a truck and delivered groceries in Chicago. While his sons became child actors, his people were dying.
I don’t think he had any illusion about ever going back, but I’ve always wondered what it felt like to know that your family, your village, your community, your synagogue, everything was gone. He never talked about his life in Poland or what he had lost, but when I decided to study abroad in Poland he lost his temper. I’d never seen him lose his temper before.
“Jews do not go to Poland,” he yelled. “They leave Poland.”
Because of the Holocaust, my father never knew most of his relatives. He didn’t even know their names. When he visited Warsaw, he walked through the streets crying, but could not explain why.
I sometimes walk past buildings in my hometown of Chicago that once housed gay bars or some other gay community institution. I cry, but I’m beginning to realize why.
There is a school of thought that says all Jews are Holocaust survivors no matter what their own experience or their family’s experience with that tragedy. My grandfather survived the Holocaust because he was miles away. He’s like the guy who didn’t go down with the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 because he called in sick to work that day. He’s like the Syrian who was studying in Europe when the bombs started falling who doesn’t know when he’ll be able to go home.
He’s like me. I’m like him. He didn’t have a number tattooed on his arm, but he was a Holocaust survivor.
I am a survivor of the AIDS crisis even though HIV is not in my body. I survived because I am a lesbian, but I grieve for what we — my community — has lost. Every loss, no matter how small a part of my life, pains me. And when there are so many small losses, they become so big. My grief does not detract from those who lost their partners, children and spouses to this disease. My grief is additive, and it is mine to have. Each individual is more than just the people closest to them, and we must fully feel our losses — all of them — to truly heal, as a community and as individuals.
I feel like now I should have some call to action, some five-step plan for healing. I don’t. All I have is a name for the grief I’ve been struggling to find words for. And that, for the moment, will have to be enough.
Elizabeth Andre is the author of Tested: Sex, love, and friendship in the shadow of HIV.
Elizabeth Andre writes lesbian romance, science fiction, and paranormal adventure. She is a lesbian in an interracial same-sex marriage living in the Midwest. She hopes you enjoy her stories. She certainly loves writing them. If you would like to support her work, become a member of her Patreon or subscribe to her email newsletter.
