Follow-up to "I'm fine!"

Ten years ago I wrote a First Person profile for AEGIS: I was 21, had recently opened up about HIV after a decade-long silence that began the day I was told I had the virus, and was full of teenage spirit. I posted a website called MY PET VIRUS, used chatrooms as a way to meet people and disclose my status, and started writing a column for POZ Magazine called "Positoid," a word I created to describe myself as someone living with HIV.

I wasn't quite sure where the decision to speak about HIV would lead me, but I knew that my life would never be the same again. And that hunch proved to be the truth when, two months after telling my best friend about life with my pet virus, I was interviewed for what would become a cover story for the national HIV/AIDS magazine, POZ. My first trip to New York City. So what if I rode my pet virus to get there?

Aside from finding my niche and a place in society as a carefree, wise-cracking young man with HIV, I also found love. In 1998, the local AIDS Service Organization contacted me, explaining that a college student wanted to interview someone who was living with HIV, and that's how I met Gwenn, a fellow HIV educator. We've been together ever since, traveling the United States educating on college campuses, appearing on MTV's World AIDS Day programming, even going to London to represent our country in a BBC documentary.

In the last ten years I've met so many people, fellow positoids (some who have since passed to spirit) and young negatoids (people who are HIV negative, like Gwenn) who raising awareness on their own campuses. The job of enlightening people that, through the use of condoms and safe sex, they can protect themselves is taxing; you want everyone to just get it at once so you can move on. But there's always a new crop of young people who aren't getting the word in public schools. In HIV/AIDS, the job security is good, unfortunately.

About a year after I came out of my AIDS closet, I was in New York City at a diner with a friend. I'd just started my Positoid column, and was still beaming with pride over my decision to open up about HIV; I'd tell anyone about it whether they cared or not.

A couple of tables over sat the famously volatile Danny Bonaduce. Without hesitation, I went up to say hi, because I've always found him to be quite funny, and when Danny asked what I did, I didn't hesitate to tell him about the Positoid column and how I'd been infected with HIV as child through tainted blood products.

"Tough way to get a gig," he said.

I downplay so much in medical life, but I guess Danny's right. At times, it has been tough. But I've always been surrounded by love, with my family and now with Gwenn as my wife partner. Ten years ago, when I wrote that piece for AEGIS, I explained that "I plan on hanging around a little longer." The line was tongue-in-cheek, but deep down I wasn't quite sure if I'd be around in ten years, which may have explained the urgency in splashing my life story out there in as many ways as I could. I'm healthier now then I was then, and it's probably because I take my own health as seriously as I take the need to educate others about HIV/AIDS.

On that note, I'll do my best to have some interesting things to share in ten more years. Which, I am sure, will be here before we know it.

Positively Your's,
Shawn Decker

Visit Shawn & Gwenn @ http://www.aboyagirlavirus.com
(Shawn Decker's memoir, MY PET VIRUS: The True Story of a Rebel Without a Cure, is published by Tarcher/Penguin, and is in bookstores now. Read an excerpt at POZ.com: http://www.poz.com/articles/1666_9602.shtml

To learn more about the book, visit http://www.mypetvirus.com