My Bit For AIDS Awareness
It was World AIDS Day last week, and here I am just getting around to commenting on it. Always a day late and a dollar short.

It’s a day set aside to remember those who died of the disease as well as raise concern for the millions of people around the world who are living with it.

I know AIDS well. I watched it devour my friend Steve Tracy. He went from a handsome young man to a virtual invalid in the space of three years. He died of kidney failure in September of 1993.

Steve had the misfortune of being young, handsome and gay in the late 70s and early 80s, long before anyone knew there was such a thing as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Nobody in 1980 had any idea there was a new disease out there that could wipe out the body’s natural immunity and that it was passed on through sexual contact.

What I remember most is how Steve became like an old man–weak, sick, complaining. Worse yet, he had to deal with losing friends. He was always going to funerals and memorial services. And he was only 33 when he died.

In one of the supreme ironies of the universe, my daughter Alysoun was born on the second anniversary of his death. It’s always a bit strange for me, every September for the last ten years, I’m planning a birthday celebration for one very happy and excited little girl, all the while reminding myself that Steve’s family is preparing to mark another painful anniversary.

I miss my friend. We both had a passion for movies and I’m sure we saw hundreds of them together. We were both writers and malcontents, and thought ourselves far more clever than we actually were. Even now, I wish I could talk to him about the current political climate and the latest highly acclaimed film.

There are so many things I’d like to tell him. What it’s like to give birth. What it’s like to finally find the right guy and have a life together. What it’s like being a mom.

After he died, I pretended he wasn’t dead, he’d just moved to San Francisco. But he is dead along with millions of other men, women and children all over the world.

These days, there’s the perception that AIDS is not such a big deal any more. There’s no cure, but it’s manageable. There are drugs to take care of it. Kind of like diabetes.

Except taking the drugs means following a strict regime, requiring dozens of pills taken at exactly the right time. It’s not easy and it must be done for life. Miss a dose and the virus becomes resistant to the treatment. Then there are the side effects, which include nausea, gastric problems, liver toxicity, nerve damage, diabetes, high cholesterol levels and unusual accumulations of fat in the neck and abdomen. It’s not easy and it’s not pleasant.

There’s also the problem of new strains of the HIV virus which are resistant to the current drugs in use.

Seems like these days, AIDS is a problem in Africa, not in the US. But that’s not true. It’s still here and people are still getting it. There have been at least 39,000 new AIDS diagnoses each year since 1989.
Whether it’s because of youth’s belief in its own immortality, or the misconception that getting AIDS is not a problem, young people are actively participating in behaviors that can lead to HIV infection, such as having unprotected sex with multiple partners. And yet we’re so worried about sending the “wrong message” that we refuse to teach high school students about condom use.

I don’t want to talk about the merits of teaching abstinence over practicing safe sex. I just wish that people who are so intent on holding the moral high ground could understand what it’s like to lose a son, a daughter, a sister, a brother, a father or a mother to a disease that can be prevented.