Remembering & Passion

I sat in front of the computer, running through my morning routine of email and Facebook while getting ready to face my day.  It was the third post down on my Facebook feed.  I had forgotten it was today, and I was instantly disappointed in myself. 

Today is World AIDS Day.  Yes, it isn't the trendy cause of the moment.  Yes it still carries a huge social stigma. Yes, it still scares people to talk about it even after all these years.  Yes, it is still a huge problem. Yes, we have gotten lax in teaching our children, friends and family about this disease and the infection rate among teens and young adults show this. 

But for me, it is real.  It is personal.  It is urgent.  It is everyday. What my father shared on Facebook was the post below, which I wrote in 2008.  It is just as important today as it was then. With a little updating, I wanted to share this again today.
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To this day, I can see the picture in my head a clearly as if it had been yesterday. Tom Brokaw was a regular member of the family at dinner time and he did most of the talking around the table. The 10 inch color TV with its extended rabbit ears sat in the corner of the kitchen next to my chair. It was my friend and my lifeline to the world out side my ridiculously small town. I was always on the outside looking in because I was “different”. No one knew it but my family and a few other select people, but I felt like I wore it on my chest. My biological father was gay. I had grown up knowing that and internalizing every insult, condemnation, joke, and hurtful word that came from most everyone in my life.

That night, Tom got all serious. He started talking about this new disease but it was “only” killing homosexuals. That was his intro, loosely translated to my hypersensitive teenage ears. I don’t remember the rest of the story specifically because I remember staring at my plate trying not to cry and repeating to myself over and over and over “I hope that doesn’t happen to my father.” I remember curling up in bed that night and crying myself to sleep. My father had just come back into our lives after many years absent and here was this horrific thing that was going to steal him away again and then everyone would know my secret.

For a long time, I pushed it aside, moved on with my drama ridden existence. It was easier and less frightening to ignore it. My father came to Maine for a visit in 1989. I was so scared of getting "found out" and being singled out because of who he was. During his visit, he called my brother and I to sit around the kitchen table with my mom to talk. I don’t remember the words, or any of the conversation afterward. All I remember is my father telling us he was HIV +. My world stopped. Everything I knew at that time was filtered through the bigoted ears of those in our community and what little tiny information I could gain from the network news. In other words, next to nothing. I was sure my father would be dead before the end of the year.

I immediately started writing for information, finding any little bit I could to learn about this and keeping it all stored safely away where none of my friends would see it.  In those first years, my father was living in a large city where he qualified for drug trials and was places on AZT and a variety of other drugs as soon as they were brought for testing. The risk of trial was worth the result. He remained healthy.

I finally broke my silence at summer camp between my sophomore and junior year of high school. I was sure everyone was going to hate me and ostracize me when they found out that I was a kid with not just a gay parent, but an HIV+ one. Instead, those around me gathered me close and hugged me while I cried. Not one of them walked away. It changed everything.

Not long after, I found my voice. I talked to people at home about it. My junior year, the most amazing thing happened. I met another teenager who was in the same situation. His step father had contracted and died with AIDS. His mother was positive. My voice got louder, and a lot more pissed off. During my senior year of high school, I did work with the Names Project AIDS Quilt and spoke at several events. People started listening. No one ran away.

When I went off to college I was probably a bit in-your-face with my anger and information but I was passionate about my new found freedom to speak, to share and to try to educate others. Three friends and I took an overnight bus to Washington D.C. to see the Names Project AIDS Quilt in its entirety. My friends had never seen a panel of it, let alone the thousands of panels together. Standing on a rise with my arms around my friends watching the staff unfold each of the sections in the early morning sun still plays clearly and easily behind my eyes. I found panels for people I had known who had died. My friends finally understood the toll this disease took. They saw first hand how many lives were gone and how many lives each of those dead had touched.



I am blessed and fortunate. My father has been HIV+ for 20 23 years now. His viral load is still zero. We have had other health scares, but his HIV continues to be quiet. He is now in his sixties and just as crotchety and stubborn as ever. I am grateful to the doctors and scientists who have given so much to give us the advances that have brought him this far.  So many years ago, sitting around that table, I never thought he would be around to see me graduate from high school let alone be at my wedding and meet his grandchildren, yet here he is. I finally feel like I can stop measuring his life in milestones he didn’t miss.

So what do we do now?  We can push our lawmakers to advocate for stem cell research and to keep the research programs and medical trials funded. We can educate our children starting at a young age about what HIV and AIDS is, how people become infected, and how to keep themselves safe. We can talk to each other and remember. We can embrace those around us as they go through this horrific disease so no one else has to live and die alone or afraid. There is so much to be done, but unless we each find our voices, it will not get done.

Please take the time today to remember those who have died and to keep those living all over the world with this horrific disease in your thoughts. Take the time to speak for those who do not have a voice. Take the time to educate yourself so you can educate others. Each voice, even if it shakes, makes a difference.