For the record, I will admit here that I don't publish many diaries here; I mostly comment on things. If I'm going to publish a diary I try to limit myself to things I'm both passionate about and have actual have personal knowledge of, which limits me a great deal.
Secondly, when calls go out for diaries on specific topics, I tend to dither and put things off so I generally miss the gate. Witness my National Coming Out Day diary which I managed to post at 2 a.m. the morning after. Not exactly prime time.
This year, World AIDS Day falls on my first day back at work after a four-day weekend. So in a rare display of actual preparation, I've actually started this diary two days early. And I'm going to cheat a bit by lifting a some material from my own two-year-old debut diary on this issue. Continue on past the fold, if you would.
I have a long personal relationship with HIV and AIDS. Sometime early in 1983 I attended a symposium on the disease that was held at George Washington University Medical Center; at the time there were all of twelve recorded cases in DC. Later that spring, my partner Bob and I attended the first AIDS Candlelight Vigil on the Capitol Mall.
In May of 1985 I was hospitalized for an unrelated medical condition. While considering treatment options, my doctor wanted to assess the state of my immune system and, since I was( and still am) a gay man, and since the first actual test for HIV had become widely available just a few weeks earlier, he did the obvious thing. By the time I received the test results, I was long since out of the hospital and on my way to recovery. In the short run, there wasn't any practical reason to have my test results. Treatment options in 1985 were non-existent; the first FDA-approved medication for HIV was still a year away and safe sex was already a reality for any well-informed gay man. But since I was already primed to find out my status, I went ahead and did so. For reasons I will not go into here, I can't say that I was completely surprised to discover I was HIV-positive.
Previous to this I had been involved in the New York branch of the Hepatitis B vaccine trials from 1978 to 1984, which included quarterly blood-draws and the promise of free vaccination if the vaccine proved effective (it did). UCSF, the San Francisco arm of the trial, did very vigorous follow-up on their cohort, which produced important information on the progression of the disease. The New York study center wasn't that forward-thinking but they nonetheless offered to re-test the stored blood specimens of any trial participant who requested it. As a result, in 1987 I discovered that I had been living with HIV since sometime prior to May 29, 1981 (the date of the first blood draw that later tested positive).
In all probability I was infected in the middle of December, 1980. I had a very suspicious set of symptoms, which I assumed at the time was "the flu," just prior to Christmas of that year. It usually takes anywhere from six weeks to six months after infection to begin testing positive, using the most common form of test available at the time. Now, a fellow has a right to some privacy here, doesn't he? I'm sure you'll agree. Anyway, I won't go into the details but there are other reasons to think I was infected then.
The first person I knew of to be diagnosed with what was then loosely referred to as "gay cancer" (of course it was Kaposi's Sarcoma), received his diagnosis in the fall of 1981. He and two other people I knew were the first of my friends and acquaintances to die, all three of them in 1983. My friend Tim in Baltimore received his AIDS diagnosis only the night before he died.
I moved to San Francisco in 1986 and soon afterwards began a six-year relationship. Prior to the time we met, Mario had struggled for many years with alcohol and drugs (and in particular with IV methamphetamine addiction). He passed away due to complications from AIDS on December 4, 1992. The following April, there was a huge gay rights demonstration in Washington, DC. At about the time we were setting out to march from the Washington Monument to the Capitol Building, my previous partner Bob passed away in a hospital outside of Philadelphia.
To date, I have lost over 160 friends, neighbors, co-workers and acquaintances. Nearly one quarter of them died between early 1992 and mid-1994. It was a truly horrible time in my life as it was for so many others in my community and elsewhere. I attended a grief support group; then I attended on for survivors of multiple losses. I began taking AZT in 1991. Over the course of several years I took part in various clinical trials, including one for Saquinavir, the first moderately successful protease inhibitor. Once protease inhibitors achieved wide use, the flood of deaths began to subside.
In 1995, a friend of mine who, like me, was HIV-positive, announced to me that he was going to participate in the California AIDS Ride, biking from San Francisco to Los Angeles. This seemed like an arguably insane thing to do but I nonetheless agreed to give him some money which went to support the services of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. Donald-David continued to lobby me to participate in the ride with him. By the time I decided to sign up in the fall of 1998, he had likewise succumbed to AIDS.
From 1999 onwards, with one exception, I've ridden my bike to LA and raised funds every year, first on the California AIDS Ride and then on AIDS/LifeCycle, the event created to replace the commercially-produced ride with one that was managed directly by the beneficiaries. This coming June will be my tenth ride for AIDS. As always, I will be riding with the Positive Pedalers, a group of cyclists and support personnel who participate in rides for AIDS all over the US and elsewhere.
There are many ways to do things about AIDS. Being out there on my bike and visible as someone who lives with the disease is my chosen way at this time. Perhaps it's not the best thing I could do to be of use in this particular struggle, but I don't view this as a zero-sum game. It's what I'm able to do for now and I operate on the assumption that it'll do some good.
So, because World AIDS Day falls on a workday for me, on Sunday, I participated in a World AIDS Day bike ride of 28 miles. There were numerous such rides in various cities, all of them starting at 8 a.m. local time (why that time was chosen I actually have no idea). The distance of 28 miles represents the 28 years we have been living with this epidemic. Lucky for me, the weather in and around San Francisco was just fantastic. And much luckier for me to have been infected this entire 28 years yet still be alive and well. So many have been lost; so many lives cut short. If nothing else, I can dedicate my continued capacity to get on a bicycle and ride a fair distance to the memories of those who are no longer with us.