AEGiS-BAR: Will it never end?

Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2001. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Will it never end?

Bay Area Reporter - June 21, 2001
Jeff Sheehy

Horror, frustration, profound sadness, but not pride, not this year ... that's what I'm feeling. Twenty years into the AIDS epidemic and the rates of new HIV infections are skyrocketing among gay men. I look around and I know at least three people who have become HIV-positive in the last year. They span generations: one in his 20s, one in his 30s, and one in his 40s.

All politically active and influential - they have contributed to expanding and maintaining the rights of LGBT folk. Smart people; they know how to protect themselves.

I just cannot understand how this is happening. Myself, I'm HIV-positive. While it has not been the death sentence or the slow downward spiral of illness and increasing decrepitude that I saw when I arrived in San Francisco 12 years ago, it's not fun and it's not easy. HIV has insinuated itself into every aspect of my life, just like the virus has insinuated itself into the genetic material inside the cells of my body. I pretend that I'm in control, but if I don't take my meds, I'm dead. I live with it, but that's about as good as it gets. HIV will kill me eventually if the side effects of the meds don't do it first.

I look around at my generation - men in their 40s - and I cannot imagine that any of us have not suffered over the last 20 years. And, still it continues: No light at the end of the tunnel, no silver bullet, no cure, no vaccine. It doesn't even seem like we believe in safe sex anymore - in our own ability to protect each other.

I look at these friends who are newly infected and I see fighters who typically never submit. But almost casually they have just surrendered to HIV. Is this the inevitable rite of passage for gay men now?

I want to blame someone. Is it the drug ads that tell us AIDS is not a big deal? Is it Poz magazine glorifying barebacking as a liberating upside to being HIV-positive? Is it homophobia? Or, is it gay men and their lusts for life, love, and sex?

We cannot say it's from lack of money - $16 million was spent for prevention in San Francisco last year. We cannot say we are disempowered. Gay men are in positions of power with the ability to influence what government and the nonprofit sector does. We cannot say we don't know what we're doing when we have unsafe sex. We have no excuses.

Plus we have no answers. At least I don't, and I don't think anyone else does either - not that I've seen.

If we cannot figure out a way to come together and stop HIV infections, I fear that gay men will be the lepers of the 21st century. Right now, the percentage of gay men in San Francisco who are HIV-infected is estimated to be somewhere between 20 and 30 percent. With escalating rates of new infections, what percentage of us will be HIV-positive five years from now? Would people be crazy to look at us as disease-ridden, sex-crazed pariahs?

The only thing I know is that the situation will change, and it looks from here that it will be for the worst. And that frightens me.

Jeff Sheehy is a longtime gay rights and AIDS activist. He is a former president of the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club.
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