WRAP IT UP FOR WORLD AIDS DAY

I don’t usually write about my job, but yesterday I was surprised to realize that today happened to be World AIDS Day, something I never would have forgotten the last couple years.Before I started a new position six weeks ago, I worked for a publishing house where I represented a handful of authors for speaking engagements. My biggest client in my two-year tenure there was a young woman named Marvelyn Brown. You may have seen her on ‘Oprah,’ ‘Tyra,’ BET, CNN, in a PSA on MTV, or as one of the “Divas on the Rise,” which aired during ‘VH1’s Divas Live,’ but if you don’t know anything about her, please let me introduce. Marvelyn is a beautiful 25 year-old African American woman who contracted HIV from her boyfriend at age 19.

He was her first love and she thought he’d do nothing to harm her, which is why when they consummated their relationship without any protection, she didn’t object. Since learning that she was positive she never remained quiet about her situation, as may have been dictated by her Southern and religious community. Instead she started her own consulting company, wrote her memoir ‘The Naked Truth: Young, Beautiful, and (HIV) Positive,’ and has spoken all over the nation and the world to young people, educating them about the importance of safe sex.

When I came out to my family, they didn’t have to figure out how to love me, but I can’t even remember how many times my mother asked me, “You’re being safe, right?” Her generation had been raised to associate homosexuality with HIV/AIDS, and it seemed normal for her to be concerned that I may have a heightened risk of being exposed to the virus. Though I tried to tell her that I wasn’t stupid, that my generation knew about the dangers and consequences, I couldn’t help but feel afraid myself.

It wasn’t that I had been engaging in unsafe sex, or that I thought that I someday might, but I didn’t know enough about its transmittal to really be sure. We all know that any sexual contact can lead to infection, given certain conditions, but it’s true that some are more risky than others. That never mattered to me though, since every time my college offered free testing, I was there, sweating out my 20 minutes until the nurse gave me the all clear and my heart rate returned to normal. Though I didn’t think that anything I’d been doing was ranked among the risky behaviors, better safe than sorry seemed like an applicable policy to follow.


Now that I’m an adult, living on my own, with no Health Center on site to remind about semi-annual check-ups, I’ve found myself slacking on this necessary and routine check-up. The lapses in judgment are farther and farther apart, and as far as risky goes it seems like my love life has become increasingly safe for network television, but that is still no excuse for me or any of us to become blasé about testing.

As gay men we live with the stigma that our community is plagued by promiscuity that leads to incurable disease. But that stigma comes with responsibility. We are responsible to take the necessary precautions to preserve our health and the health of our friends and lovers. We are charged with not only changing the perception of the world at large, but with fighting for funding, and policy changes that will ensure our loved ones already afflicted will receive the care they deserve and that one day HIV can RIP.

What scares me the most is thinking about what I would do if I ever found I was positive. Would I have the strength and courage to use my life to educate others like Marvelyn, or would I even be able to tell my family? I can’t say for sure. It’s sad to think about all the wonderful men and women we’ll never get to meet who’ve already passed on, but today we celebrate the hope that it will someday be a thing of the past. So take responsibility, get tested, and practice safe sex. If we’re going to makeover the world we all have to stick around long enough to see it happen.

B.B. Nichols lives and works in New York. He has been writing Everybody Does It since 2005.

Appeared originally on Homo-Neurotic.com on 12/1/09