This Situation

I took off my bifocals and leaned forward incredulous that he would use such phrasing.

It's not like I chose a therapist who was a 75 year-old grandmother of 12 who never misses choir practice at First Baptist Church. I made a phone call to a therapist who I had met at our HIV Social Group. I didn't quite know how to broach the topic, so I just blurted out, "I think I need to see somebody and because we've...well...I don't think it should be you, but it has to be a man and he has to be gay because I don't want to spend any time bringing him up to speed on the basics." Then I took a breath. He gave me the name of My Therapist and said I'd be happy with the choice. He was right. I am happy. That's why I was caught so off guard by his choice of words.

I had managed, in over 8 years of knowing I'm infected with the AIDS virus, never to encounter someone who inferred that there was an element of blame in the illness. I knew they existed. I watched what happened to Ryan White and his family. I knew people personally who had been slapped with the same insult to complement their injury. I almost came out of my chair.

"Got myself into this situation?"
"GOT MYSELF INTO THIS SITUATION?"

I bothered to take him back down memory lane to the land of 1987, when I "came out". I was dating a pharmacy student who was a few years ahead of me in the process. He knew all about medicine and tests and things. He convinced me of the truth of the time: that the test available was unreliable. "As many false positives and negatives as true results," he told me. I believed him. Besides, in 1987's Kansas, we also believed that even if you tested positive - for real - there was nothing to do but prepare to die. The first AIDS treatment, AZT, was introduced that same year. Our philosophy was rather "Que sera sera". Why would you want to know if there was nothing you could do about it? So on we went.

"Well, that's a stupid argument", My Therapist Said.
"Come again?" I asked. "Come again?" is what I use in polite company when I'd rather say, "What the hell is the matter with you?"

It was 1987. Today's knowledge doesn't render moot the arguments of 20 years ago. It may have been stupid. It was stupid when people believed tomatoes were poisonous. We think so now. They didn't then. It was stupid when people believed the earth to be flat. They didn't think so then. It was what it was when it was. It was a different time. It was the time, for me, when patterns were set. By the time the consequences of those patterns were made manifest in my blood cells, the inevitable overshadowed the past in a big hurry.

I had never engaged in more than a moment's thought about who may have contributed the virus to my system. I didn't know. I couldn't guess. What was the point? If I knew, as I've written, I'd have blamed them. Better that I would never know. They were absolved of responsibility by their anonymity. And if they weren't guilty, I couldn't possibly be. I was sick, not guilty. If I had become ill as an unfortunate consequence of the pursuit of love and happiness, I couldn't engage in regret. To do so would be to renounce who I was, in a way. So I've focused on going forward since that day in 1998 when I found out that I had skipped right past HIV+ and landed in an AIDS diagnosis.

My Therapist backpedalled, "I mean, if I went to the grocery store and someone with a bazooka mowed everyone down, I would have put myself in that situation."

"Nice try," I said. He gets points for pulling out, I suppose. We discussed the practice of "barebacking" = sex without condoms. We talked about intimacy and all the arguments that surround it. I intimated that I was squarely in that camp. I know the arguments. I know the judgments. I know about "superinfection" and all of the new reasons for prophylactic segregation of you from me. I can't mount an impassioned defense of the practice. I don't feel the need to do so. Everyone makes the decision for themselves.

I just don't think blame, guilt, or stupidity attend that decision. I don't. I know that it seems blame-worthy and stupid and stacked with guilt to make that decision. But no one deserves to die because he chooses to be intimate with someone who - from ignorance, fear or malice - delivers the death knell to his immune system.

I acknowledge that I was there when I got the virus. I partnered with someone in all of the decisions we did or didn't make. To infer, though, that there was some sort of death wish afoot because no one reached for the condom is to oversimplify to the point of stupidity. How's that for a judgment? Infection doesn't happen without a decision made - somewhere along the line - that enables the attack. But retrospect doesn't render those decisions stupid or those people guilty. It's a disease. Can't we just be sick without being guilty or stupid to boot? Please? It's not a lot to ask.

I don't ask for anyone's sympathy - ever. I don't need their money or charity. I'm not a good commiserator over the woes that AIDS visits upon us. I ask only one thing - ONE thing. Don't blame. I'm the only one who has a leg to stand on when it comes to blaming for "this situation".

If I don't, you sure as hell can't.