I can't remember a time I was not tested. I first went with my friend Reed Jones, whose Skimbleshanks picture I've posted here in many, many threads, after a friend of his, a beautiful model from a very homophobic family in Wisconsin, got tested after being admitted to St. Vincents with what turned out to be Kaposi's. Reed'sfriend came home from the hospital and just stayed in his studio apartment until he died.
Reed's test came out positive, which was shocking, since he was the image of strawberry-blond all-American health and dancer-fitness. Mine came out negative, which I assumed was a mistake. I read everything I could find on false-positives and went back and got tested again. Also negative.
Reed said, "I hope you stay that way"--and that was what we both thought: that it was just luck that made me negative, that it was only a matter of time, that whatever was surely inside me came out in a blood test. For a few years, I had no sex at all, like Paul Rudnick's Jeffrey, but once a year, I would get tested. And each time, I felt guilty that I was still "healthy" and my friends were "living with AIDS."
Meanwhile, I went to Act Up meetings and demonstrations and helped my friends get through stomach symptoms and opportunistic infections and thrush and name their last remaining T-Cells (Peter dubbed his "Mary" and "Ethel"--and unsurprisingly he was not the only queen to do that), and go to doctor appointments and memorials. Slowly, I started to have sex again, and date again (in that order, of course), I entered into a few relationships, and practiced "safe sex," until we started calling it "safer sex."
And then Reed died, and then Peter. We had a memorial service for Reed on the set of Cats at the Winter Garden--long before Paul Rudnick made a joke out of that--and Betty Buckley and Mandy Patinkin and Debbie Gravitte (still Shapiro) and Ashford and Simpson performed. And we had a memorial service for Peter at the Little Theater (now the Helen Hayes) and Chris Durang and Sigourney Weaver and Paul Bartel and Paul Rudnick and Jonathan Sheffer performed.
And still I got tested, year after year. As the years went by, I started getting tested for 40-something things, like cholesterol and blood pressure and prostate and colon cancer. Whatever it was that was going to get me, I wanted to know before it got me.
Then I met PalJoey'sPal in 1994. He had just spoken at the memorial service for one of his best friends, a doctor, while his other best friend was getting sicker, an astonishingly tall, muscular drag queen with beautiful Cherokee-red and African American black skin.
And a year later, there were protease inhibitors, and the dying ended. People were doing "drug cocktails" and they just stopped dying. And a year after that, the party drugs changed, and people were doing "alphabet drugs" like C, E, G, and K. And then came T.
And that was when the curve reversed--and the infection rates and seroconversions started going up not down: the drugs that were keeping people alive were encouraging others to get infected.
And, honestly, I don't think anything will change until the vaccine comes. If it ever does...
Updated On: 1/2/08 at 04:13 PM
