Ramblings of An Aging Gay Guy

When I was diagnosed with HIV I knew things would be different. I knew there would be so many changes in my life, from the serious to the mundane. An HIV diagnosis in 2007 was treated very differently than it is today. Back then the clinical thinking was to delay meds until it was clinically necessary, meaning until the accumulative degradation of your health due to HIV had decreased so much that meds were the last resort. Basically you got sicker and sicker until meds were necessary to save your life. My t-cell count was almost to the point of an AIDS diagnosis before I began meds. I literally threatened suicide to get my doctor to put me on meds. Of course, at the time I had 4 different infections happening concurrently so my threat back then was not idle by any means. Today that has changed. Now the clinical guidelines are such that a person goes on meds as soon as they receive an HIV diagnosis. This is critical for many reasons, some of which were only recently discover...

So tomorrow is our annual family reunion. I have not been to one since the year before Mom died. She was my last and only connection to our extended family. I don’t say that to be disrespectful. Our extended family only got together once a year. The only exception to that is if someone died. Otherwise...crickets. There was never any warm and fuzzy phone calls. No lunches with anyone. No checking in with people to see how they were doing. It’s just how things have always been. Which is at odds with how Mom and Memaw was towards us. Maybe that is why they both were so different than the rest of the family, more warm, more nurturing. I always felt as though my grandmother’s family were looked at as outsiders to the proper Southern Baptists that comprise my extended family. You see, when my grandmother was a very young woman, she moved to Cincinnati when she found out she was pregnant. In the 1940s being pregnant and unwed was looked at much like people look at transgendere...