AIDS Out Here

It's time to talk about some elephants that have overrun the living room. Finding love is hard enough in the best petri dish, but it's time to acknowledge that sometimes we set ourselves up to lose.

I chose almost two years ago to abandon my sanctuary in San Francisco for rural domesticity in Kansas. Beyond the blue state/red state differences, any moron can see how love might be more hard to locate in these parts. (Note to Brokeback Mountain fans: This is not 1963. We are not schtupping otherwise straight cowboys behind the Piggly Wiggly and crying in our hat for what might have been. OK...once maybe.)

I have AIDS. That's not a blogging revelation. But it is a dating reality. In San Francisco, it seemed, you're either assumed to be "poz" and it's "no big deal", which always struck me wrong (because it's been a Very Big Deal), or you're required to be HIV+ to meet someone's dating criteria. When I lived on the west coast, I would joke with my friends in Chicago (who think they are quite cosmopolitan, mind you) that you can sum up the difference between San Francisco and the midwest quite simply: by online profiles. In the midwest, you notice that men tend to note the 2 or 3 things they might do if the planets align and your cologne is nice. In San Francisco, you have to list the one or two things you absolutely will NOT do under any circumstances or else you're fair game for whatever you failed to preclude. AIDS in Kansas is a Very Big Deal, particularly in the Dating Game.

I'm lucky, though. I have disposable income, despite my disability, to travel to places where conditions are different. Connections are made. Needs get met. The internet can stream porn into damn near anywhere for the purposes of self-satisfaction. And love reared its wily head once during an 8-day retreat to Puerto Vallarta, but I learned that only fools and children make that mistake twice. Trinkets you can pack in your carry-on bag. Lovers don't tend to make the cut.

It's not impossible. The Good Doctor asked about my friends. Two of my best friends have all of the above: AIDS, residences not far from mine - and one is 20-some years in recovery. Talk about stacked odds. They inspire me. They also make me want to heave bricks at them. Who gets that lucky? We honored their 12th Anniversary together a few weeks ago. Sometimes your friends' successes are tricky to interpret. They're either an indictment of your own failures or a promise of your potential. I haven't decided which one this represents. But I am hopeful, if nothing else, in the face of steep challenges. So I'm probably more inspired than anything. Here, in a red state, two gay men -- with AIDS, one in recovery, and 12 years of partnership. I know some of the right people.

We often joke about "The Good Old Days" when you got your diagnosis, cashed your life insurance, ran your credit cards to The Max and went to Greece and Italy for your final months, leaving some hackneyed travelogue and a mound of debt to your heirs in one final "Fuck You" to the planet Earth. We joke a little less heartily about those of us who ran up the debt, cashed the insurance policy and went to the doctor where we swallowed a protease inhibitor for the first time and were magically granted 20 more years to pay off Mastercard and enjoy projectile vomiting and diarrhea - sometimes concurrently. And lest anyone think differently, the steady Chinese Water Torture of drip, drip, drip that represents our own guys dying of The Plague is still ongoing. I live in Kansas. I can name six men I know personally who have died in the last 18 months from AIDS or related conditions. In Kansas.

I carry on, however, undaunted by the unlikely prospects and shoddily stacked odds. If it can happen for two lonely cowboys in 1963 on the cusp of the Summer Of Love, surely Kansas can bring me a Brokeback Moment or two worth talking about.