Ramblings of An Aging Gay Guy

I wish I could remember what it felt like to be happy.  

Nobody ever knows they are in an abusive relationship until they are in the very thick of it.   Like a sledgehammer,  realization hit me yesterday,  when I was watching something on TV.   I was watching 20/20;  there was a story about a brilliant hand surgeon in Texas,  who was a monster behind closed doors.   Nobody believed he was a monster, and yet he was a sadistic repeat offender.  But...nobody wants to believe they have ended up in such a preposterous situation.   I am smart,  intelligent...I see things for how they truly are,  or at least that's what I used to believe about myself.   Now,  I don't even know what is real anymore.   There is so much mistrust and acrimony between us,  it's hard to see the forest for the hundreds of petty trees in the way.   Every day is a study in pettiness.  Everyday is the game we play,  trying to pretend one of us doesn't ...

I know it's been a little while since I have posted anything.   Since I completed my Coursera HIV class I allowed exhaustion to overcome me.  I was so focused on my class to the exclusion of almost everything else.   I also left a very toxic job at Physcians Regional Hospital (owned by a shady company called Health Management Associates) in Knoxville, TN and began work at a much better company.   You may have heard of HMA before,  as they are currently under investigation by the SEC;  also,  they were featured on 60 Minutes for their questionable business practices.  It seems as if I was not the only HMA employee to think something was a bit off at that place. The environment at HMA was probably the most toxic place of employment I hate everyone ever been in.   I had one director who was very obviously attracted to one of the coworkers on my team.   There was speculation they were having an affair.  This s...

Sometimes I wake up at night and I do not know who I am or where I am.  A feeling of panic comes over me, I feel so lost, adrift.  This feeling and this blankness of mind lasts for 5 or 10 seconds, long enough for myself to become worried.  Then, like a slow, faulty breaker switch, something flips inside and I slowly start to come back to myself. It is not a very good feeling, but at least it passes. But...sometimes I feel something like that in the daytime.  Sometimes I wonder how I got to where I am, how I got to this point.  I forget all of the good things in life and become depressed.  I see my failing relationship in stark counterpoint to the happiness I used to feel.  And then that triggers a tsunami of regret that washes over me, for having made yet one more bad decision in my life. I sometimes think I stumble blindly through life, barely grabbing on and hanging on to something before I lose my footing and stumble again into the next situa...

The challenge for the new Safe Sex 2.0 effort will be trying to capture the attention span of someone who only lives life and thinks in 140 characters.  In this Internet age, we in the HIV+ and HIV- (basically that is everyone) have been given the dual-edged sword of the Internet as a tool for advocacy and outreach.  The internet is definitely useful in finding the answer to almost anything, and it has exponentially increased the means by which information can be disseminated to the masses.  However, the internet has also created vast, huge, and deep canyons in between us, where we are only as connected as our wi-fi signal allows us to be. Back in the “old days”, we in the older gay community used to go to gay bars.  At those gay bars there were bowls of free condoms.  They were right there on the bar or by the door so that they were always on hand.  Back then, we cared about protecting our community.  Back then it was not as controversial or offen...

I have been living with HIV since 2007.  Throughout my life since my diagnosis, I have been in and out of steady employment, as my diagnosis coincided with the downturn of the economy.   Even when I had steady employment, I still found it difficult to be able to afford the copays, deductibles, medicines and labwork required with modern HIV treatment.   When a person begins on HIV medication, they must remain on that medication for the duration of their lives.  We can NOT go on and off medicine.  We can NOT miss even a single dose of medication as the HIV virus would mutate quickly and the medicine would no longer be effective.   Too often, the systems in place for care fail those of us with HIV.  Applying and remaining on state and federally assisted Ryan White programs or ADAP require a great deal of paperwork, time, and hassle.  I have never had a quick and easy experience applying for Ryan White assistance.  I am happy to know t...

Being an HIV advocate means straddling two different, diametrically opposed worlds.  Engaging in battle on two fronts, much like a war, I advocate for both HIV+ (us) and HIV- people (them).  Each battle has it's own challenges and rewards, some of them immediate but most of them are unknown or more long-term in the rewards. And the idea of us and them reverses depending on which side of the fence you live on. It is sometimes hard to juggle two hats - fighting for those with HIV and fighting for those who do not have HIV.  Both groups of people have their seperate challenges.   People who perceive themselves to be HIV-negative (1 in 5 do not know they have HIV) believe they are not at risk for HIV.  HIV is something from the 80’s, they say.  I can just take a pill and be fine, they say.  I am not someone who could get HIV, they say.  But all of these assumptions are false and are based on ignorance or they chose to keep their head in the sand...