by W. Murray Sexton

June 1994

I feel guilty about being HIV negative. So much of my identity is bound up with seeing myself as an AIDS activist that I feel like an impostor, as if only someone with HIV or AIDS had a right to be angry. Of course, I am an impostor, on the level of my concept of self, since I haven’t done a shred of activism in the five years since I fled from New York back to my native Texas (to escape AIDS activism, to recover from burn out -- really just to wallow in it -- to get a masters degree in Artificial Intelligence, to start -- and stop -- a little mapping company, to do freelance computer consulting, to drift in place). I used to be an activist, in groups with names that float in your cereal bowl, like CGLA, CUGLFOC, GHAP, GLASNYC, NELGSU, ACT UP, and ATR. At one point, I was an officer or a board member in nine of them, but that was a life ago.

When my surprise complementary first issue of POZ Magazine arrived in the mail, I wondered who in the AIDS activist community had kept my address after all these years. I haven’t written or called any of my old friends. It’s not that I don’t still love them and think of them -- I do. It’s that I’m afraid I might find out someone I love is sick, or sicker, or dead. Last year at the ‘93 March on Washington I learned that three one time acquaintances of mine had died when I saw their pictures on ACT UP posters with captions like “Killed by Red Tape,” “Killed by Inflated Drug Prices,” and “Died of Corporate Greed.”

When I read through (or rather, inhaled) the magazine, I saw pictures of so many of my old friends and acquaintances —  colleagues-in-arms — and saw their HIV statuses in print. I cried when I saw Stephen’s ad. We coordinated a three-day conference together. We once got arrested together on the steps of the Supreme Court. We often went to the beach. Before I saw the ad I didn’t know he was positive -- not that he hadn’t told me. It was fully two days later when I finally remembered seeing and tracing with my finger the “HIV+” tattoo on his arm at the ‘93 March, and I replayed in my mind his beautiful lilting voice telling me “I’m HIV positive.” In retrospect, I’m sure he had told me long before even that, and that every time I heard it, I had built up yet another layer of denial. Seeing it on his arm wasn’t enough to break through my defenses. Only seeing it on my own coffee table in 36 point type next to his photograph advertising a mail-order drug service was enough to do that.

Feeling suddenly mortal, I skipped lunch and went to a local drug treatment center for an anonymous HIV test. I won’t get tested at the local AIDS foundation, because too many people there know my name. I talked the ears off the unfortunate nurse who took my pseudonym and my blood. Please tell me that something else might have caused that episode of drenching night sweats a few months ago. I’ve heard that flu-like symptoms sometimes accompany seroconversion, and I had plenty of those since my last HIV test, despite my flu vaccine. By the way, this is just a bruise, right? These aren’t too swollen, are they? The nurse helped to divert my anxiety by giving me a TB test as well (at least TB has a cure, but isn’t that a reportable disease? I guess it’s OK, as long as you don’t have my name).

When my lab results came in two weeks later, the counselor I had spoken to before was on vacation. I hate breaking in a new therapist. The new counselor acted as though I should be so relieved to have a negative test result. Well, with the three-to-six month lag time between infection and detectable antibody, it did calm me about the night sweats, but there were still those two instances of less-than-perfectly safe something or other.

Why do you think you behave so self-destructively? She honed in like a hawk. Maybe I subconsciously resent being gypped of my activist credentials, since no amount of experience can substitute for the macabre imprimatur of authority that infection carries with it: the Virus as Diploma. And, inevitably, recurrently, there’s that six month window of uncertainty again: I want to know. I want to be absolutely positive that I am negative, but I guess some punning impish level of my inner being might settle for being just positive. Ultimately, isn’t fear of death merely a subset of fear of the unknown?

How would you modify your behavior if you found out you were positive? I don’t know. It’s not as though there’s one kind of safe sex for people who test negative and some other kind for people who test positive. Treating every encounter as a potential HIV risk is what safe sex means. I suppose that if I were positive, that would be proof that the kind of sex I’ve been practicing isn’t really as safe as I figured, so I would have to reevaluate what I do -- to avoid getting reinfected, but more importantly to make sure I wouldn’t expose someone else the same way. She didn’t like my placing more importance on whether I might infect someone else than whether they might infect or reinfect me. She seemed to think it was a matter of low self esteem, related to my guilt about being negative, while I felt it was just a simple matter of moral priorities. It’s one thing to decide what level of risk you are willing to accept in your own life, but quite another to do it for someone else’s. She seemed to think that a few sessions of therapy might convince me to use a condom during oral sex. I promise I will, as soon as I get a rubber throat. Still, all this is academic, right?, since I’m negative (or at least, I was negative six months ago, at the certainty threshold of the test). The evidence so far suggests that the kind of sex I’ve been practicing (and practicing) is pretty safe, except that the jury is still out on these last six months, and every six months there’s a new damn jury.

I had already freed up the rest of my day’s schedule so I would have time to cry in case the results had been positive. So instead of crying I went shopping, and I felt guilty about shopping even though I was negative, and I bought stuff I had wanted for awhile but didn’t really need, and then I went to the beach.

TM