December 1, 2005
In April 2003, Colin Robinson, Executive Director of the New York State Black Gay Network asked me to consider editing a collection of narratives written by HIV/AIDS prevention advocates revealing their thoughts and feelings about the failure of HIV prevention efforts targeting black man who have sex with other men. This project was Colin's brainchild, and he shared his idea with George Ayala, who at the time was the Director of Education at AIDS Project of Los Angeles (APLA), but now works at Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York City.
What we, Colin, George and I, delivered was a sterling collection of narratives by academics, cultural workers and writers who had considered HIV/AIDS from a personal perspective. Over the course of six busy months, Colin and I shaped, edited and finished Think Again, a collection of narratives by men of African descent who experience (well, practice) same sex desire sharing their thoughts about the impact of HIV/AIDS on their lives. The book was distributed to community-based organizations, featured at pride celebrations and at conferences throughout the United States, as well as in London. The book was free.
Overall the slim volume of 12 narratives (11 essays, a short story, a poem and an introduction by Colin Robinson and George Ayala) was well-received. In October 2003 the NYSBGN and APLA jointly published Think Again, the latter of which handled the design and layout of the book and printing costs. The initial printing was 10,000 copies. The front covers and inside art featured work by Lyle Ashton Harris, self-portraits in photographs distinguished by character, energy and style.
Some people were offended by the covers, a photograph of Lyle as a boxer, dripping with sweaty, reeling as if he was knocked the fuck out…or Lyle in drag, hair in a twisty afro, lips pursed, hands raised in victory as if he just snatched a trophy at a ball. In the “Drag Lyle” photograph there’s a wooden box in the background affixed with two stickers labeled “corrosive” (a metaphor?) We received more complaints about “Drag Lyle” than anything else. Why that image, most questioned. One writer I love but now at whom I cast a weary eyeball intimated that the cover seemed stereotypical (of what?) and that though she was the furthest thing from being homophobic, she was certain that her gay friends would probably be offended by it. Well, I was one of her “gay” friends and the only thing I was certain of was that not only had she not read the book, but that an image of a man in lipstick and a corset trumps the blood, sweat and tears of eleven writers and two fantastic editors whose intentions were perhaps a little naïve. The images were to entice and provoke, not obscure or be the point. Few talked about the quality of writing itself, a diverse and startling group of narratives that refuse simplicity or the precise summing up of prescriptive measures around HIV prevention. Writers Roderick A. Ferguson, Herukhuti, G. Winston James, Kevin Trimell Jones, Khary Polk, Kevin Quashie, Charles Stephens, Tim’m West, Marvin K. White, and Vincent Woodard, the editors, and myself created a timeless anthology that will ultimately be recognized for its insightful writing. When I think about “readers” who ranted about the cover art and apparently missed the opportunity to engage some of the best minds writing today, I am saddened and think that it was perhaps easier to focus on an “image” rather than the reality of HIV/AIDS and its indelible imprint on our often minimized lives.
While cleaning my bookshelf the other night, I found a copy of Think Again and thumbed through it, a “revisitation” with hesitation. Two years have passed. Would I still like this book? The essay I penned, “Use a Condom and Live,” is not likely to end up as one of the greatest literary feats of 21st Century’s—as I wrote it under duress and between lying on Barnes and Noble’s floor, occasionally reacting in horror to many of the submissions I was charged to edit and select—but what it does, and quite effectively, is represent how I felt then and now about HIV prevention outreach. It is an honest piece (gratefully shaped by the critical eye of Colin Robinson) and I am surprised at how much more I like it now. Snippets of my essay are interwoven with this meditation in red.
“I have never believed anybody’s HIV prevention advertisements. These pitiful ads featured folk who look healthier than me telling you to keep your drawers on and don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it. And live. To do what? Be careful, be warned, or be sorry, the posters screamed. The ads were filled with white men, even while people of color were becoming infected at a rate double that for whites. But once the market-minded took to crayoning melanin into the picture, I’ll admit they caught my attention. The men of color featured were some sexy motherfuckers.”
Two years have passed and I still feel the same: HIV prevention efforts continue to miss the mark. The soap opera goes something like this: the Centers for Disease Control drops (highly debatable) statistics, and the black queer activist community goes wild and broadcasts “we are dying, we are dying, we must do something.” So we schedule, we meet, we talk, we disagree, we develop programming that we think will get men of African descent to use condoms, or at least think again when it comes to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Conferences, symposiums, town hall meetings, Friday Night Forums, dozens of books, articles, essays and poems later, I am not sure if we are asking the right questions, or if there are even “right” questions to be asked.
“Being black, male, and homo, I have always been suspicious about who might actually love and care about me. These feelings are the result of a steady diet of racism and homophobia, emotional and physical violence for the last – well, fuck it, all of my conscious life – in the streets where I, black boy and sissy, roamed; in the schools where I, black boy and punk, learned; in the church where I, black boy and pansy prayed; and in the home where I, black boy and faggot, lived. I have been given no reason to believe that anyone gives a good goddamn if I live or die. From early on, the media, my schooling, and far too often the men, women and children in my neighborhood, have taught me that I am expendable.
So how am I living?”
Condom use has its advantages, but raw sex feels good, a little too good, if you ask me. But I know what I am supposed to think and practice. Condom = life, and raw sex = death. This is current popular thought about the matter. Still, I don’t think that it is as poignant as we’d like to believe. You see, the idea of HIV infection is scary, but living a life full of fear and self-loathing is worse, simple realities that allow HIV infection to become an issue in the first place, like homophobia, racism, among other stresses. Maybe that’s why there is a “bareback” movement, and folks who believe HIV not only manageable, but inevitable, because maybe it is. It has to be.
“HIV prevention has always been problematic for me because the gesture itself seems disingenuous. Forgive me if it is hard to believe, not to mention take seriously, the notion that someone wants to save my life. What would be the point? Wouldn’t all those self-righteous bastards who think I shouldn’t exist in the first place just breathe a sigh of relief? I feel like the world watches me fuck, and then bets on how soon I will die. Since the late ’80s, I have been both ambushed and abused by HIV prevention advertisements – in magazines, on billboards, at bus stops, on flyers plastered on walls and stapled to telephone posts. Ambushed because I always felt I was caught. The message I got was that gay = AIDS, which I thought would eventually = me. Riddled with insecurity and anxiety, I stopped looking at them. Abused because the ads only succeeded in making me scared; scared to be, scared to love, scared to let myself be vulnerable to other men.”
The HIV/AIDS organizing community is filled with men and women who are either HIV positive or who have known someone who had died of AIDS complications. If I were such an activist, perhaps I would be on a crusade to stop AIDS as well, full of fervor and righteousness. AIDS is a hellava homewrecker, literally, and like most life-threatening diseases, it can be all-consuming. I know men and women, who are infected with HIV, and I have lost friends. Still, what intrigues me most is how we manage dis-ease in our lives as people of African descent, and not just HIV/AIDS. Thoughts crowd my mind about life and the history of dis-eases. When will AIDS have the social currency of cancer? Remember when having cancer was the unspeakable? People would just die in the dark until a confluence of medical advances, public awareness, and time made cancer “speakable.” I propose that when AIDS becomes as “normalized” as cancer in the minds of the world’s population, that’s when the efforts of HIV prevention advocates may become realized.
I also wonder how HIV has benefited people’s lives. How many directors’ salaries of community-based organizations rely on the spread of HIV? How many pharmaceutical companies and their stockholders sleep comfortably at night while their bank accounts swell because of the spread of HIV? How many AIDS related deaths have reduced the ever increasing population worldwide? Not all is doom and gloom in the Age of AIDS.
I also wonder how many stories we haven’t heard or read that do not fit into the “life is good and death is bad and that HIV/AIDS is a bad thing” narrative. Surely there are men and women who have different stories. Why haven’t we heard from them? What insights would they offer? How could these stories shape the way we approach HIV prevention? Surely we need new perspectives.
Recently Colin Robinson published “Shhh Homophobia Causes AIDS,” (Pulse Magazine, a Gay Men of African Descent publication) a poignant meditation on the state of HIV prevention among men of African descent who practice same sex desire, and how homophobia contributes to the spread of HIV. I read the piece and concurred that homophobia has definitely made me weary, tired, depressed and has been corrosive to my soul.
“HIV by far ain’t the worst thing that could happen to me; being black and homo was rough enough. But I decided to live regardless.
Live and do what?
Live and watch things die. I came of age when black same-sex-loving men didn’t know sex without a condom, despite the fact that we also had media of all sorts exploding with sexual images that practically begged everyone to drop their drawers and do it, do it, do it till you’re raw. We came of age in a time when love was a dangerous thing. Our desires were teased by a sexual revolution that passed us by a decade, and that would never come back. We were witness to a generation of beautiful black men of all shapes, sizes and girths, many of them lovers, men who were supposed to reflect and guide us, gatekeepers of information who, without the protection of information, grew sicker and sicker and eventually expired. We watched as some of these men slipped quietly back into the closet. We watched our own young lives become criminalized as likely carriers of a virus. We watched and, thanks to racism and homophobia, not too many of us disagreed.”
Over the last five years of my life I have had the displeasure of sitting in meetings with several clueless, ignorant and downright shady men, many of whom head organizations “designed” to save my life and wondered if I were in the twilight zone. Essex Hemphill was not thinking of creating an organization to save his life, chock full of self-hating men who don’t like each other. And I think: Stay alive for this gesture, Steven, at least they are making it, but then really, I can’t fake it. This faux support, a superficial connection with someone handing me a condom who doesn’t like me, saying my life is worth it, but I know needs the statistics to obtain more grants from the CDC or wherever to keep their ineffectual agency afloat. I am repeatedly asked to attend meetings in venomous environments more toxic than HIV to talk about HIV prevention. Talk, talk, talk. Talk about what?
“I know (and love) a brother who manages a support program for same-sex-loving black men, who gather once, sometimes twice, a week to share our experiences around being black and gay. I’ve attended a few of these meetings. HIV is always an issue. Somebody either has it or they are terrified that they will get it. I am one of the terrified ones. The majority of the time I sit quietly, my hands prayered between my closed legs, thinking about the intriguing things being said in that small room. Typical comments include: “I don’t trust black men.” “It’s hard to be with brothers because they have so many problems.” “Black men need to _____ [fill in the blank].” I look at the brown faces of the young and not so young, the broken down and the arrogantly simple. All are frustrated. Most are like me – reserved. One night, an HIV-positive brother discloses his status to the group, and talks about how hurt he is that his father hates him because he is gay and HIV-positive. It is often the pain of being outcast – not love – that binds us together in this room. This pain colors our outlook on the world and each other.”
Today I think about those who have HIV, full-blown AIDS, those who have passed, those who are yet to be infected, and those driven insane with fear of catching the disease. A sense of detachment overcomes me, not love or sorrow. Perhaps it is too much to feel that pain when I am not exactly clear about what it entails. Is it that United States continuously fails its citizens regarding comprehensive health care? Is it because AIDS is still considered a gay disease? That most of the prevention outreach efforts target men, not women? That knowing about HIV/AIDS does not mean one will not or cannot put one’s self at risk? That constant awareness can make one chronically paranoid?
Most of my adult homo life I have fought HIV – or rather fought catching it – and I am tired. Tired of thinking that every sexual act I engage in puts me at risk. Tired of lying when I meet a man to whom I am attracted and, upon finding out he is HIV-positive, finding a way to gently destroy our budding attachment. Tired of feeling alone and scared, and as if this is my lot to contend with for the rest of my life. Tired of fucking a man and itching with the resulting shame, shame, shame. Despite repeated bouts of self-imposed celibacy, designed not just to keep me safe but to punish me for having desires for men, my dick could usually stand only a few weeks’ beating before I again sought sexual gratification with another brother. Someone who would open his mouth and ass and receive all of my frustration. And each and every time I fucked, I was doubly ashamed. Ashamed that whatever was out there would get me because I fucked men. That HIV would swoop down on me and end it all, slowly, painfully, mercilessly. Yet, for nearly twenty years I have remained out of its clutches. I practice safer sex now. I use a condom, and I live.
Maybe we are not asking the right questions because there are no right questions, and certainly no right answers.
This is what I am living with. This is how I live.
The online version of Think Again is available here.