Then in 2006 and 2007, I took some comedy classes with an area comedian named Mike Irwin. I was still nervous on stage, but I liked doing it and received some laughs. I always looked innocent and very nice, but when I got on stage, I made some risqué jokes. I asked Mike once for advice because I felt awkward talking about sex with an older audience. Mike told me, “Don’t worry. Old people have fucked.” Mike passed away in 2008. I wrote on the funeral’s guestbook page that I went from somebody who nobody could imagine doing comedy to making people laugh in a stand-up comedy show.
Then, in December 2008, Albany-based comedian Greg Aidala started an open-mic comedy series every Sunday at the Lark Tavern. I would open every set I did by saying, “Yeah, so has anybody ever tried to pick somebody up and you know you’re not getting anywhere? Like, they say, ‘Luke stop; Luke, leave me alone,’ or ‘Luke, if you talk about feeling my boobs again I’m going to have to tell Mom.’” It usually went over well. I loved doing comedy because I was an outsider all of my life, and I loved to see people in the audience smiling and laughing. Stand-up comedy shows were a great way for people to forget all their problems and just laugh. I was only heckled a few times. I got called Charlie Brown by a woman who thought I looked like the Peanuts character, and when I did a set about the slang term tea bagging, one gay man was offended and said, “No balls in my face.”
I graduated from nursing school in May 2010. While most college graduates who graduated in 2010 struggled to find a job, in March 2010, two months before I finished my degree, I already had a job offer. In May 2010, I began working as a registered nurse at a hospital on a floor that handled all sorts of medical issues, including some HIV patients.
In October, I noticed that one HIV-positive patient had visitors I recognized from the gay dating/hookup sites. I had seen these people online, but I’d never talked to any of them. When I saw the patient getting discharged, I recognized the guy picking him up—he was somebody I’d had sex with twice.
I was nervous. But since I’d never come out to anybody, I just kept it to myself. Somebody I had a random hookup with was very close to somebody who had full-blown AIDS. I always used protection but was still afraid. Luckily, I got tested for HIV soon after, and it came back negative.
There still wasn’t much that could keep me from looking for hookups. I was a virgin until I was twenty-four, and now there was so much opportunity to get with other men, thanks mainly to the Internet. Only a month after my scare, I was again on the gay site Adam4Adam.com. I started chatting with somebody who was muscular and tall. Pat said he was looking to hook up and wanted me to come over. He said his roommate was going to be there, but that he would be sleeping on the couch.
When I got out of my car, I noticed that Pat was very good-looking—even better than his pictures promised. Most people I met online weren’t as good-looking as their pictures. I was excited as I walked into his house, and he had me wait in the kitchen for a few minutes. Then I heard a voice from the other room. “Hey Luke, what’s going on?” I couldn’t see who it was at first, but then I saw that it was Jake, an HIV-positive man I’d met through another friend a few years earlier. Jake was nice, but he was careless and had HIV and past histories of syphilis and IV drug abuse. I went over and talked to him for a few minutes.
Jake ended up being a big cockblock—even bigger than if I’d seen Chris Hansen from Dateline NBC. In the back of my mind, I kept thinking to myself, What am I doing here? I’m not going to hook up with somebody who I know could be HIV positive, and if he’s good friends with Jake, he probably made some bad choices like Jake did along the way.
Pat then brought me into the bedroom. I didn’t tell him that I knew Jake was HIV positive. I always respected people’s boundaries and didn’t tell anybody anyone had HIV. Preventing STDs and the transmission of HIV is everyone’s responsibility and cannot be blamed on just one person. Pat still wanted to have sex, and I told him that I was clean, got tested routinely, and wouldn’t have sex without a condom. Then I turned the tables and asked him if he got tested or was clean. He wasn’t going to ask me about any type of disease; he just was going to have unprotected sex with an anonymous partner. He really wouldn’t give me an answer. Finally he hesitated and said, “Yeah, that’s fine if you want to use condoms.” Then he left the room. While he was outside the room, I noticed some prescription medications near the bed. I never thought I’d be the type to
