After the meeting, I went up to him. He told me that, after two decades, he had left the Christian brothers only one year earlier. “I was thinking, where do I know this kid from?” Shawn said. He’d recognized me too, and since his coming out, said that he’d run into more former students at the local gay bar than at football and other athletic games. I joked with him about how in tenth grade he gave me a strange look after we had to write down our cultures during a campus retreat; when he looked over my shoulder, he saw that I’d written “white trash.”
A few months after I went back to my job at the workshop, I began applying for other jobs. While I was upset that I didn’t get the job in prevention at the AIDS Council, I decided to apply for a case manager job there. I interviewed for the position and was offered it, but I ended up turning it down. It wasn’t that much more money than my other job, but the main reason I turned it down was that I didn’t want people to think that since I worked at the AIDS Council, I was gay. Sure, I was gay, but I didn’t want anybody to know that. I didn’t see myself as a flamboyant gay man. Plus, I had a disoriented view of people with AIDS. I thought of them as needy and as criminals, and I thought the work would be frustrating. Still, I struggled with turning it down, since there was a part of me that realized that people with AIDS struggled with the same alienation that I had gone through.
Shortly after I decided to turn down the AIDS Council job, I actually thought about my life in perspective. I realized that I was just like Senator Larry Craig; somebody who people think is gay but denies it. I decided to attend the support group more often in the hopes of overcoming my feelings of self-hatred and internalized homophobia.
That summer, I realized no matter how much you try or what you do for others, you can never make somebody like you. You can never make somebody change, no matter how hard you try. The only person you’re guaranteed to wake up with every day is yourself. At the end of the day, you just have to believe that what you do is right and the decisions you make are ones that you can live with. I realized that I didn’t want to keep on going through life trying to make everybody like me and paying too much attention to what people thought of me.
Since I felt bad turning down the AIDS Council job, I decided to start volunteering. I wondered, What would happen if I died tomorrow? My obituary would say, “Well, he did his best to try to please others.” I thought that I could turn all my years of self-hatred into something positive, so I started volunteering with Steve Kozlowski and his wife, Mary. For the past fourteen years, the couple organized book sales and even had a thrift shop dedicated to helping people with HIV/ AIDS. By 2007, Steve and his wife had raised over $500,000 for the cause. As of 2012, the couple has raised over $750,000 for people living with HIV/AIDS.
As part of my volunteer work, I stocked the thrift store’s shelves and worked the register at book sales. It didn’t help me come out of the closet, though, and I still had difficulty meeting people who were interested in developing a relationship. I continued to post profiles on gay websites. By now I was not only fooling around with guys I met online, I was having sex with them as well. I always used condoms, but I decided to get tested again. In fact, I routinely got tested every six months. I didn’t want my family to see my name on a quilt some day on World AIDS Day. Each time I would go to a different place, and never my own physician’s office. I felt like too much of male whore. Luckily, everything always came back negative.
I once got tested at an AIDS Council location off-site at a bathhouse in Troy, New York. I immediately recognized the HIV counselor, as he was in the interview I had a few months earlier. He was the one who, when I mentioned anal sex, began to scream, “That’s gay!” During our session, he told me he was gay and didn’t care what others thought, since he was definitely not a stereotypical gay guy. He even told me to make sure I looked at other guys’ balls for any rashes, lesions, or lumps before I did anything with them.
Another time, I went to Planned Parenthood for testing. I used my insurance card to process payment. I later found out that men can’t just go to Planned Parenthood. My insurance kept rejecting my claim and threatened me before I finally paid the bill. Now I can laugh that Planned Parenthood almost ruined my credit.
At one of the early meetings that I attended at the support group, I observed a good-looking, middle-aged man named Mike who went to almost all the meetings. I couldn’t figure out why exactly he was there since he had a partner and seemed very happy and was always smiling. Nothing ever discouraged him, and he rarely said anything bad about anything or anyone. Mike would always try to give me advice. After a few meetings, he disclosed to the group that he was HIV positive and had been for close to twenty years. When I heard him say that, my eyes jumped in the back of my head, since I had never known anybody with HIV or AIDS.
Even though I stopped attending
