A cautionary tale

I was in Seattle a few months ago, having coffee in a converted garage that is now a beautiful and trendy coffee shop. I lived there for a couple of decades and watched the city go from backwater to technological hub and what it is now is impressive and sad. It’s almost like that stage where your child goes from young teen to college, because before you know it, you are no longer buying them clothes and they are making fashion judgments that you might not agree with and in Seattle, there is no longer that sense of rundown specialness that was so easily cultivated in the moldy buildings on Capital Hill.

I was sipping my coffee hardly minding my own business and I magically met the nicest young man. Our eyes met as we both began to sip and we were smiling at one another as we both set our cups down. He is taller than I, darker than I and handsomer than I, so I both liked him immediately and hated him with fierce jealousy just as quickly.

I was in a hurry, on a cycle, with places to go. We exchanged digital information and I was off. He is certainly one of the sweetest men I have met in years and I am enjoying getting to know him. He is smart and funny and passionate about many things and he remains handsome and sexy and HIV positive and he is a good dancer.

I put that part in there, in the middle of that sentence, figuring you would not notice it. There is still a stigma about HIV that we all pretend does not exist. Prior to introducing him to a lovely older friend of mine she actually asked me if it was safe to shake his hand. There are drugs now that make HIV a sustainable disease. People live with it, like an elderly parent. It hangs around, making their life miserable.

My new friend knows how he got the disease, which is neither here nor there, because people get the disease being sexual and in America, being sexual is a taboo, which is a contradiction because in America sex sells just about everything. The only reason I bought an Ipod was because the sexy figure in the window appeared to be having so much fun and I too wanted to be a sexy figure in a window having fun, so I had to have an Ipod. Sex sells.

Sex is evil and will kill you, that is the other message we get. We should never have sex, there is a popular abstinence movement afoot in American high schools, generally the students taking part in the abstinence movement are the type of students who stood little or no chance of actually having sex anyway, so joining a movement regarding anything sexual was probably a wise move on their part. We have it both ways, all over the internet and on TV, sex is everywhere and prominent, and at the exact same time, there is this other constant drumbeat from religious hypocrites and right wing multi-married republicans demanding everyone but them wait until marriage before consummating anything.

My new handsome friend was in a long-term committed relationship. This is the problem with long term relationships built on love and commitment. Actually, there should not be a problem with such a relationship, but in the gay world, the problem arises, as it did with my new Latin friend, when his long term committed monogamous partner decided to be kind of sketchy. See, in the gay world, when a committed partner steps out on his committed lover, there is always a chance, a higher chance than in the straight world, that he just might bring home a life long, possibly deadly disease, thank you very much.

So here we have this gifted and beautiful young man, really just entering the prime of his life, dating a man he thought he would be with for the rest of his life, committed, hell he even had a ring from Tiffany’s, and then the test comes back positive.

What would you do? I actually asked him that. “I cried, a lot, I just cried. I threw him out when I got home. I knew he gave it to me, and he did not fight it, I had not slept with anyone else. It was all on him. He just disappeared. “ I asked, “have you thought of killing him?” He said that he had, that he still does, daily. I thought I understood the impulse.

I have had many married friends of mine, going through ugly divorces claim that if they could find a hitman, they would hire him to kill their ex-wife or ex-husband and when I ask them why, it is always something monetary or a house or car. “That bitch kept the god damned house, you give me a guys number, I’d pay ten grand to kill the son of a bitch.” I can’t tell you how many times I have heard something to that effect.

Imagine people have those sorts of deathly thoughts and passion over a car, or a house, or anything else that is fairly easily replaced. I wonder what their response would have been had they, during the divorce proceedings tested positive for HIV and the only person who could have possibly transmitted it to them would be the ex. I understood my new friends sense of deadly betrayal.

I was born with what I like to call a negative Karma. I am not sure if that is the proper term, but at some point I came to realize that I had this aspect of existence that I was responsible for correcting, to reverse that negative part and leave this world having cleaned it up to the best of my abilities. I was reminded recently that while getting even sometimes feels so right and is perfectly justified in the grand scale of things, what we leave behind is just more of that negative and damaged mess for someone else to rehabilitate.

I explained that to my new Seattle friend. He completely understood. I asked if he would still contemplate the terrible and tragic murder of his ex-lover. “A man can have his fantasies,” he said with the most noble of smiles creeping across his face.