Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2001. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
San Francisco Chronicle - Monday, June 4, 2001
Sabin Russell
Businesses were closing. "I realized I was the only one working there who was HIV-negative."
He practiced safe sex, religiously then. But after five years behind the bar, Whitehead realized he had an alcohol problem. He quit the job, but the booze followed him. He dabbled in speed, then moved to injecting it.
"I practiced safe sex, more or less," he said. "After a while, it was less and less."
Close friends were dying of AIDS. Friends were also moving away. Whitehead, always vaguely ashamed of his homosexuality since his days at Sunday school, became reckless. He felt himself slipping into depression. He would hide in his apartment for days at a time. He abandoned safe sex. He stopped taking the test for HIV, which had always come up negative.
Fifteen years into the epidemic, despite knowing all the dangers, Whitehead put himself at risk.
"The things that were happening around me were overwhelming, and I was overwhelmed," he said.
On June 18, 1998, Whitehead took a train to his father's house in Fresno. The man who had refused to speak to him for three years took him in and pointed him toward help.
Back in San Francisco, Whitehead for the first time sampled the array of services that had been battling the epidemic for nearly two decades. He stopped drinking and using drugs. At the Haight-Ashbury clinic, he finally had his blood tested.
Not only was he HIV-positive, his T-cell count was dangerously low. His body was infested with microbial parasites. His virus count was off the charts. Whitehead had AIDS.
The disease that had stealthily infected tens of thousands of San Franciscans before they even knew of the virus had notched another one - this time a 30-year-old man fully aware of the danger.
"I was really depressed, and probably didn't want to live any longer," said Whitehead. "I can say that now. I wasn't conscious of it while it was going on. "
The Haight-Ashbury clinic linked Whitehead with the Plus Seminar at the Stop AIDS Project, where he met other newly infected gay men. He connected with the AIDS Legal Referral Project, and cleaned up his credit. In October 1999, the Positive Resource Center found him an office job with a health care consulting firm.
He's still there today, clean and sober, at peace with himself, and living with AIDS.
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