HIV '94

He was the door manager at one of NYC’s hottest clubs. He was the man whose ass you kissed to get past the velvet ropes and enter into drug madness. A beautiful boy with shoulder length black curls and a smile that could melt your heart. Ruling the scene at twenty one years old. I started dating him and we got along great. He was in love but I was not which I didn’t realize until years later. Maybe he’d say the same if he had lived long enough. We were both young skinny rock and roll fags and back then that was still punk rock. Everyone kept telling me.

DUDE, HE’S HIV POSITIVE. HE’S POISONOUS. BE CAREFUL.

People think they’re doing you a favor by exposing something tragic about someone else. I didn’t care if he was or wasn’t. People turn vicious when they’re scared of something because they can’t understand it. This was back when there were no meds, no assistance, no chance. The closest thing to hope was AZT and that sounded even worse than death. Everything is government controlled, you know. Thousands and thousands of people were dying from this new disease called AIDS. The entire world was scared. No cure just horrible death. Turns out he was positive.

AND STOP AND TAKE A MOMENT TO REMEMBER AND MOURN AND HONOR
THOSE WHO DIED.

Testing positive for HIV was still a death sentence. Man will die a horribly painful death weighing in at eighty five pounds on a hospital bed and no one by his side. There’s nothing that can be done. A huge wave of death. A deathwave. Thousands and thousands and thousands of victims. A mass homicide.
I was the last person he spoke to...on the phone. In the end he beats it by jumping off the eleventh floor of a hotel parking garage in the French Quarter. That was crazy. That was heart breaking. Worst of all, that was unnecessary because new medical breakthroughs were unleashed on the masses less than a year later.
There was literally hundreds of people at his funeral. A sea of fishnets, combat boots, and died hair. I was the widow. Ha ha. That’s so funny! Actually, I was fucked up on some pills that somebody handed me the night before. He would have wanted it this way. Wouldn’t he have?