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The first time I had sex with someone I knew was HIV-positive — past midnight, in a hammock on the beach — I felt as if I had slain an abuser who'd had complete and unsupervised access to me since my sophomore year of high school.
I was nearly thirty and had lived under the abuser's watch for fifteen years. I'd started coming out as a gay adolescent in San Francisco in the early 1980s, just as AIDS was revealing itself, and it quickly became impossible for me to dissociate myself from the epidemic. My tormentor was AIDS anxiety, but AIDS itself was like a fraternal twin. We competed for resources and wished the other were dead.
Through high school and college and into my late twenties, I was in a constant state of morbid anxiety. Depending on the course of my disease (officially diagnosed later as acute hypochondriasis, and more casually identified before then as survival guilt), I was convinced either that I had AIDS or was in imminent danger of getting infected.
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Out of one letter, I composed cantos of infection, epics of fear.
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I was much too smart to take comfort in my annual negative HIV test. I'd read a news story saying HIV antibodies could hide in the macrophage of the cell, escaping detection for years or decades. I was also a sufficiently critical consumer of medical information to notice, as the years of the epidemic passed, that AIDS "facts" had a tendency to evolve.
Unstable medical information is mother's milk to the hypochondriac. Take the term "safe sex," for example. At some point, they added a consonant to it, an "r" tacked onto safe, and out of that one-letter revision I composed cantos of infection, epics of fear. Oral sex commuted (as it still does) back and forth from one side of the safety border to the other, depending on the study, or the interpretation of it, or whether the interpreter's interest was in paring down infection rates by luring populations of gay men away from anal sex, or in giving a single skeptical neurotic a straight answer.
Either way, the medical establishment's flip-flops led me to believe that I wouldn't survive the epidemic. From the start of my adult sex life at age fifteen, I was remarkably adept at convincing myself that this guy whose cock I was sucking right then was probably not infected. In later years, when this illusion began to crack under the weight of statistical absurdity, I started disclosing my own HIV-negative status in an effort to prompt a disclosure from my partner in return. This didn't feel particularly honest, because I didn't actually believe my negative test results to begin with, but the practice always succeeded — at least on the superficial level of convincing me that I'd taken an extra precaution, while permitting me to suck ever-increasing quantities of cock. In cities where the proportion of gay men who were HIV-positive approached one in two, everyone's disclosure was always the same: negative.
Dipping into natural reserves of denial, I was far less afraid during sex than before or after. But these anxiety vacations inevitably came to an end. The next morning, or the subsequent week, the spider bite became Kaposi's sarcoma, the rediscovery of lymph nodes under my jaw — which were neither swollen nor tender except to the degree that I manhandled them like subcutaneous worry beads — an endlessly renewable moment of morbid speculation.
When I wasn't having sex, I felt anxious and guilty, unable to accept the fact that men just like me were dying gruesome deaths by the thousands and that I, by virtue of being a few years younger, had every prospect of surviving. To cope with this burden, I did my best to make myself suffer as much as I imagined they did.
Until that summer night I hooked up with Andrew Farley at Fire Island Pines. We'd encountered one another at a bar, out on the patio, and I'd had one of those alcohol-inspired re-evaluations of a college acquaintance. Andrew was not conventionally beautiful, but in a way that had eluded me in college, there was something lovely about him. He was tall, big-boned, with facial features I'm hard-wired to lust after: a broad mouth, thick lips, prominent ears, jet-black hair. His voice was low, musical and cigarette-gravelly, his conversation lively and intelligent. He put the moves on me in a way that was subtle enough either to ignore or enjoy. I found myself enjoying it, and shortly before the bar closed we left together.
Andrew beat me to disclosure. In the hammock where we'd been kissing for twenty minutes, as clothes began dropping to the sand, he told me that a few years after graduation he'd been infected. He thought he knew when, and by whom, but I was barely curious about the particulars. I was on the beach at Fire Island Pines with Andrew Farley, the two of us were in the hammock with AIDS, and, like all long-anticipated confrontations, this one had an immediacy and reality that seemed to exceed the dimensions of waking life. But it was not the nightmare I'd spent my youth imagining, because when the moment finally came, I was not afraid.
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Sex in a hammock resembles a game of Twister on a moving, three-dimensional mat.
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Andrew disclosed; I listened. And in a moment of unique clarity, I told Andrew that apart from being sorry he'd been infected, his being HIV-positive didn't matter to me.
I took a condom from my wallet and rolled it on, taking surgical care to keep sand away. AIDS aside, sex in a hammock on the beach is a complicated matter, and there were a few false starts. Most positions, for example doggy style, risk resembling a game of Twister on a moving, three-dimensional mat. After trying a few of these, I abandoned my place in the hammock with Andrew and knelt in the sand beside him. He lay on his back in the hammock and I swung him back and forth in time with my slow thrusting for a while, then held him to me and fucked him hard and fast while he jerked himself off until we came.
Orgasm famously puts things — one's partner, one's judgment, oneself — in a different light, and that is no less true when you know that the semen pooled on his chest contains a lethal retrovirus. That's it, I thought, in a kind of cowed reverence I felt again just recently when I encountered my first wild rattlesnake.
But this orgasm had not brought caution — that had been there all along. Nor had it brought depression or regret. I conducted a flash inventory of hangnails and paper cuts, then reassured myself that Andrew, considerately enough, had not come on me. I knew, with a sureness I'd rarely been able to muster after other sexual encounters, that I hadn't done anything in kissing and screwing Andrew Farley that put me at high risk of getting infected.
Andrew and I laughed about what friends would say if they knew about our hook-up. We ran into the water and laughed again. Maybe my laughter was nervous, but after a kiss goodbye, I walked back to my room feeling high and safe, sensing that the tryst on the beach had shrunk an out-of-control anxiety into lasting, rational caution.
The first time I had sex with someone I knew to be HIV-positive was a liberation from the anxiety produced by growing up with AIDS all around me, but nowhere near me. Men died by the tens of thousands everywhere in the world, but in my bed, they were always uninfected. I will never know if that uninterrupted procession of HIV-negative sex partners was the result of ignorance, coincidence, luck or lies.
To this day, at nearly thirty-four, I have never attended an AIDS funeral or memorial for a personal friend. The refusal of the disease to manifest itself directly in my personal life while it decimated the world around me produced an anxiety that reality never got close enough to constrain, one that virtually vanished in that hour with Andrew on the beach. Now I knew that, whatever this epidemic brought my way, at least I could face it with the confidence of having touched my adversary.
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It wasn't easy to face the guilt of being an avowed HIV-negative separatist.
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The first time I had sex with someone I knew to be HIV-positive was also my last. In several subsequent instances, twenty minutes of making out were followed by a disclosure of infection, but after that night at the Pines I could no longer say what I'd said to Andrew. It did matter that my partner was HIV-positive, not because I was irrationally afraid and didn't think I could have reasonably safe sex with him, but because after the age of thirty I lost much of my drive to have sex for its own sake. Now I was having sex in search of a boyfriend, and the one I hoped to find — the one with whom I hoped to spend the next six decades doing bourgeois, straight-aping things like making a home and raising children in it — was probably not going to be HIV-positive.
If I fell in love with someone who turned out to have the virus, that would be one thing. But I wasn't going to seek him out. Barring love at first sight, I wasn't even going to date him. It wasn't easy to admit this, to face the guilt of being not only a survivor but an avowed HIV-negative separatist. But I already had let guilt govern half my life. I had paid my dues, and I had paid them senselessly. Nobody had been cured by my misery; no one had even been comforted.
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Thoughts came hard and numb, like ice cubes cracked out of an aluminum tray.
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The next and last time I saw Andrew was the morning of September 11th, 2001, as I hurried away from the corner of Seventh Avenue and Thirteenth Street. It took me a moment longer than it should have to recognize him. He had aged too much, and his color was wrong: dark, with an unhealthy orange tint. His skin was drawn, his cheekbones too sharp. And though that day was notoriously clear and still, he wore heavy fall clothes. Thoughts came hard and numb, delayed in a moment's stupor and then all at once, like ice cubes cracked out of an aluminum tray: this is Andrew — he has AIDS — these are the side effects of his medication — we are going to touch. He put his arms around me as I described what I had just seen, and though I could not believe the words I spoke he seemed unsurprised by them, almost unmoved. He only wanted to know if I was going to be all right. n°
©2004 Paul Festa and hooksexup.com
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
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Paul Festa's essays appear in Hooksexup, Salon, the Best Sex Writing anthologies for 2005, 2006 and 2008, and other publications. He is the author of OH MY GOD: Messiaen in the Ear of the Unbeliever, which is based on Apparition of the Eternal Church, his award-winning and critically acclaimed film about the music of Olivier Messiaen. A violinist, he has toured extensively, given the U.S., Boston, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles premieres of Messiaen's 1933 Fantaisie, and performed with the Stephen Pelton Dance Theater and the North Bay Shakespeare Company. He is the official historian of the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco, and is revising a novel. More info at paulfesta.com. |
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