What They Taught Me
probably a work in progress, spring 2003

 

I moved to San Francisco after college. It's not like the idea of sex with men was new for me, but I started thinking of it then as more a part of who I was.

Or at least, maybe.

Like a lot of twenty-one year olds, I wasn't exactly sure, but I knew I had crushes on men and women both, and I wanted to make sense of my desires.

I started attending a coming-out group where young men sat in a circle in a back room of a church. Together, we tried to figure out how we'd got there and who we were going to become.

We had grown up in ghettoes and wealthy suburbs. We were young military men with tucked-in shirts and neat haircuts, and extravagant queens who performed in drag bars, lip-synching diva songs. And a lot of other kinds of people in between.

None of us had much in common with most of the other people in the room. Except for this: when we were born, the first person to see our infant bodies would have soon announced "It's a boy!" The world expected certain things as a result. We were sitting in that circle because we defied at least some of those expectations.

I came from a liberal family where some older lesbian and gay relatives had been pioneers long before me. I paid some costs for sitting in that room, but not like most people. Any self-pity got humbled out of me quickly by the boys who were risking everything--their families, the towns they'd grown up in, their friends--everything.

They changed the way I see the world: I know now that the swishy waiter working at the cafe down the street isn't just a funny little character. Odds are good that he walked through fire to get there.

We sat in that room together in the early nineties. In those days, if you had HIV, antiretroviral drugs still just bought you a few extra months of life. Epidemiologists warned us then that men our age were taking risks that would bring a "second wave" of HIV infection.

At the same time, I started meeting people who survived the mass death of the first years of San Francisco's epidemic. Two different men told me, describing the people they'd known who died, "I stopped counting at 200."

Meanwhile, as I shared the experience of coming out, I made gay friends and became a part of the gay community. I met young women and men with HIV.

Knowing the experiences of my elders, I wondered when I'd start counting. And when I'd stop counting.

And so nothing seemed more important to me than trying to stop the spread of the virus. I started volunteering for a gay and bisexual men's HIV prevention group, and then working there. After a while, I stopped caring as much about my art, my filmmaking career, my future fame--all the things that, as a boy, I'd planned for myself.

In my new work, I wrote a manifesto, a call to action that became an advertisement for other young men to join us. "Love," I wrote, "means moving beyond self-interest, and transcending despair."

I'd learned that from the men around me. Many of the men I knew who lived through those first horrible years had fought back. With some of their women friends, and a few straight men, they'd taken care of friends and lovers; they'd organized protests; they'd started and nourished groups to fight the epidemic.

A few of them were out-and-out crazy, some were giant pains in the ass, some were geniuses. The vast majority were just ordinary nice guys.

What they all had in common was that in a terrifying crisis, they transcended despair. It was the bravery of my little coming-out group, but on a bigger scale.

Meeting these people changed my life. When I arrived in San Francisco, I expected to be a filmmaker; when I left, it was to become a doctor.

I also learned from my experience in the coming-out group that life doesn't easily follow plans. Or at least, it shouldn't. Along those lines, when I had serious relationships, I had them with women.

And medicine in the US advanced to the point where most of the people I'd feared would be dead are still alive. AIDS is still killing people. But in San Francisco, it's truly a different disease than it was when I arrived there.

But one thing that hasn't changed is that the boys of the youth group and the men who fought AIDS with me remain deeply a part of who I am. When their lives veered from the expected path and into rougher territory, they kept moving forward.

If I never kiss another man again, I will still have what they gave me. They taught me about courage. They taught me about love. It's an old story: following them into the struggle, I put aside boyish preoccupations, and became a man.

 

copyright 2003 joe wright