My Life with AIDS
Here’s a shocking fact: I’m a middle-aged man. I know it sounds like a pretty run-of-the-mill achievement, but it is not. I have been living on borrowed time for a quarter century.
You see, I was infected with HIV in 1981. This year, I celebrated my 50th birthday. I’ve lived with the virus so long now that I don’t even remember what it was like not to have it. The best medical knowledge had me on death’s door by 1995. My first partner crossed over that portal in 1989; he’s one of literally hundreds of friends, loved ones and colleagues whom I have watched die from AIDS over the last 25 years. No, by all rights, I should not be here to see 50.
And yet, here I am. I could fill a lifetime’s worth of reports and publications speculating on what blessings have sustained me all these years—and I’ll spare you that. But I know one thing that’s surely helped keep me going: My determination to beat this darned virus, not just in my own body, but in the communal body of Black America.
Like me, the AIDS epidemic has a shocking birthday this year. It was 25 years ago today— June 5, 2006, the date we release this report—that Dr. Michael Gottlieb diagnosed a strange illness among five of his white gay patients at University of California, Los Angeles. Since then, AIDS has become a defining issue of our time, particularly for Black folks.
The statistics, no matter how many times I speak them, are worth repeating: Nearly half of the more than one million Americans estimated to be living with HIV/AIDS are Black. We represent over 56 percent of the new AIDS cases among youth. We’re nearly 70 percent of the new AIDS cases among women.
No one expected HIV to be around this long, any more than they expected it of me. And those two facts have me thinking about the next 50 years.