The New York Times - October 14, 2007
Erasmo Guerra**

Most important, no more two-week wait, which was an insufferably long amount of time to judge yourself and bargain with destiny. Now I'd learn my status in 20 minutes. The test had advanced so much that a single drop of blood could determine whether I had H.I.V. antibodies, just as diabetics check their glucose levels.

My counselor insisted that the pinprick test was accurate. The clinic had used this test to screen more than 4,000 patients, he said as he swabbed my index finger. The puncture was quick and painless. He grabbed what looked like a needle and placed its large eye on the bead of blood to fill it. Dropping the needle with the blood into a plastic vial, he turned to me and said: "The next 20 minutes are yours. You can step outside if you like; just be back in 20."

In the clinic waiting room, I gazed out the window at the gray Manhattan sky. Carlo, the Filipino photographer I'd been seeing, lived on the next street. We'd agreed to get tested so that we could feel safer as we took more liberties in the bedroom. As responsible as we seemed, the counselor warned that a single test wasn't precaution enough - but it is a risk that too many of us are willing to take.

On the waiting room wall, a poster announced a vaccine trial program at Columbia University: "Imagine a world without AIDS. Here's your chance to help - and become part of history."

At 35, having come of age during the AIDS crisis, I could not imagine a world where the disease didn't exist. The next 20 minutes may have been mine, but the last 20 years had belonged to fear and survivor's guilt.

I remembered one night 13 years earlier in south Texas at a place called Tenth Avenue, the only gay bar for miles around, when my cousin Juan came up to me and said, "Mito, I just wanna tell you one thing. ..."

My cousin wore tight jeans and laughed easily and loud. He was often cashier of the month at the grocery store where he worked. He was also the kind of nice guy who took care of the younger members of the family. That night at Tenth Avenue was the first time Juan and I had seen each other "out" in public, and when he said "be careful," he was looking out for me.

I shrugged off his words, like the know-it-all 22-year-old I was. I figured out what he was trying to say only a few months later when my mother called to tell me that Juan had hanged himself with an electrical cord. He was 26.

He had been H.I.V. positive, infected by the man who was then his boyfriend, and he had begun to have symptoms. Desperate, he must have thought it easier to kill himself than to endure the slow death of living in the macho Mexican-American culture in which we'd been raised, a place of borderline panic where people believed that you could get AIDS from infected straight pins rumored to be imbedded in the seats at the local movie theater.

Be careful, he'd said, and I have been, especially in a city as wild, casual and anonymous as New York. When I moved here in 1993, at the age of 23, I'm ashamed to say, I turned my eyes away each time I spotted yet another gaunt-faced man, his cheekbones swollen into exaggerated relief. I couldn't bear to look at billboards that advertised H.I.V. medications as casually as the new season lineup on television.

I GOT tested as often as twice a year, despite the pain of the needles and the two-week wait. I've been tested so many times that I feel as if I will forever be pulling the shrapnel of hypodermics from my arms. I was careful to the point that I dropped lovers, even the man who I felt was the love of my life, if they were cruising parks at midnight, and not taking care of themselves and, in turn, me.

Recently, my first boyfriend announced that he had become H.I.V. positive. And just this past spring, when that love of my life, now living in New Mexico, passed through town and we met up at a dinner party in the West Village, he told me he too was H.I.V.-positive.

That day at the clinic in Chelsea - a year before it would be reported that blacks and Latinos made up 81 percent of new H.I.V. cases in New York and two years before a report showing that H.I.V. infections among New York men under 30 were up 33 percent in the past six years - the counselor called me into his office and told me that my test had come back negative. Thanks to how careful I'd been, I wasn't surprised.

Afterward, at a lunch place around the corner, as I listened to the song playing from the overhead speakers, I recognized the voice of Kelly Clarkson. All that summer I'd sung along to her pop hit "Since U Been Gone," and I hummed the refrain of this new song, "Because of You." But as I stared out the window, I wasn't thinking of Carlo. Instead, in the dim reflection of the glass, I saw myself, and beyond me I saw my cousin Juan in his tight jeans.

Because of you

I never stray too far from the sidewalk

Because of you

I learned to play on the safe side so I don't get hurt

As I listened, tears stung my eyes. The Chelsea boys around me must have thought that I was mourning a lover from my romantic past.

** Erasmo Guerra is a novelist and essayist.

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