My knowledge of AIDS is limited to my own personal experience. I don't claim to be an expert and have never seen a friend die of the disease. Until I moved to Chicago, I didn't even know anyone who had it. I hadn't run across HIV, STDs, or anything else that might lay me out. I wasn't born during the onset of "gay man's cancer," I was born in 1992.
The first time I heard the word AIDS was in a required health class my freshman year in high school. I was so bored I had counted the dots on each ceiling tile when AIDS rolled in one ear and right out of the other. I didn't shrug it off, it fell to the floor on its own.
I hadn't come out quite yet, and the gray-haired Martha Stewart look-a-like lecturing me couldn't care less if I were informed on one of the world's biggest epidemics because she knew that none of us were sexually active, and as long as she really stressed the use of condoms nothing could go wrong in our little suburban town outside Seattle, Wash. So in the year 2006, AIDS didn't seem like much of a threat to me.
I think that my experience is echoed in one way or another by people of my age throughout the country. In the coming months, as I interview students on college campuses across Chicago for this special Windy City Times AIDS @ 30 series, we'll get a better idea of how my generation understands AIDS.
When I met my first love, Justin, as a high school senior, he was a year younger than I was and we had both already lost our virginity to older college boys. I hadn't used a condom—I would have done anything to win the approval of a boy. Any boy really, because I was out and damn ready to see what the world had to offer. But after having bled the first time I had sex I was terrified of sex altogether, and it had nothing to do with AIDS. So Justin and I dated for three whole months before we ever had sex. We didn't need sex, we were two teenagers who had found that someone that was just like our self and that was a bigger reward. We shared our struggles, and bonded over our losses. But as homecoming approached, we felt the moment—or the night—may be coming our way. That was when we turned to our parents with the big question, "Can I get tested?"
We had talked about it and decided that we should get tested together for STDs and HIV/AIDS because it was the right thing to do, and that trust made our relationship stronger. Getting tested became the keystone in our relationship, and let me tell you why.
When you're young, you have a lot of psychological issues about your own image, your presence in your community, among other things. When you're also an LGBTQ youth trying to figure out why someone wouldn't look at you in the locker room, that pressure builds up. Some kids are exposed to "gay" and know that's who they are when they feel it. Some kids just have "normal" hormones and don't know that "gay" is what someone will one day call them. It was all I had ever known, although I had sex with a girl when I was 16 because she seemed to be really turned on by me and if she rubbed it, well, it got hard.
But when the opportunity to have a relationship with another man arose in the midst of my complicated teenage life I couldn't imagine a more perfect thing happening to me. The tests that Justin and I got together all came back negative. We were poor teenagers, plus, we were in love ( or so we thought ) and sex felt a whole lot better without the rubber. In general, there was less fuss. And most importantly, we both knew we could do this as long as we wanted as long as we stayed one 100% committed to each other.
So the HIV test that was supposed to be a mature step forward for the two of us became the keystone of our relationship for reasons that no doctor would ever recommend. We relied on our sex to keep us together, because we would rather have uninhibited sex than sleep around with other guys. And it almost worked.
The hardest part of growing up as a gay teen is the lack of communication. No one teaches gay history, even when ( in a school where 98% of the population was white ) we celebrated Black History Month. Statistically, there were more gays in my high school than African-Americans. But I wasn't upset at the time because I didn't know otherwise.
It's the same thing with our knowledge of AIDS. Straight people have AIDS too, but it was only mentioned once in my entire upbringing. I wonder to this day, if I had been born with a stamp on my forehead that read "GAY," would my parents have taught me any differently? Would they have skipped the birds and the bees for something more pertinent like a discussion on AIDS?
I mean, the way Justin and I went at it you would have thought we were trying to get pregnant, but birth control was a pointless conversation between my parents and me. In one episode of Glee this season, Kurt asks his father to "read up" on gay sex because he would "like to be able to talk to his dad the way Finn does." This is something I've thought of often since getting to college, and it says something very important about the education I received as a young person on the subject. It's also significant to hear those words uttered on FOX, a network that typically leans to the right.
To my knowledge, the Gay Straight Alliance ( GSA ) I ran my senior year in high school now has more than 70 members. That's much more statistically accurate. Because of our GSA, Justin and I were allowed to attend dances and march around holding hands throughout my senior year. But we never thought of AIDS, HIV, or other sexually transmitted diseases as a topic for a GSA meeting. GSA is supposed to be fun, right?
Looking back, I wish we would have. I have since contacted my old GSA and asked them to have a meeting focused on safe sex. Someone needs to point these issues out to kids, help steer them in the right direction and provide the education critical to the health and safety of LGBTQ youth.
I also realized that I didn't have an older figurehead in my life growing up gay but I am sort of that guy to all the kids back in my hometown now, partly because I left for a "big city" a thousand miles away, but more so because I always treated everyone with respect and never laughed at a question. No one sat me down and told me that I had to use a condom, in case Justin broke our trust.
The day came when my high school relationship ended. It has been any number of months, depending on your individual description of the word "end." In the name of queens everywhere we had a true love-hate display of emotions that everyone from our friends to strangers in the park got to take part in. Our breakup lasted months, but neither of us broke our physical bond to each other until just before my graduation. It hurt like hell, and even his icy cold glare from across the crowd at my reception couldn't numb my pain.
Eventually, I moved here to Chicago after spending the summer away from home to avoid Justin. I began my new life alone, and he spent the rest of 2010 licking his wounds as he realized what he had just given up. I'm not talking about me; I'm talking about the priceless freedom of monogamy.
In gay culture, as I've seen in Chicago, monogamy isn't something associated with people my age. Perhaps that's why we have a reputation for not taking AIDS seriously. Perhaps it's the lack of education we received as homosexuals growing up in a heteronormal society. Perhaps it has to do with never coming face to face with an epidemic that was tucked under the rug before I was even born. I've grown up with the misconception that if someone is monogamous than the rest of their sex life doesn't matter.
Now, I always wear protection because I don't have the security of a virgin boyfriend and I don't know or trust most of the guys I sleep with. Everyone's knowledge of AIDS is a collection personal experience from their own life and the classroom. It's why my college LGBTQ organization hosts sex workshops and why I encourage kids and older mentors to forge connections. This article will certainly raise concerns, but I hope my own experience—one of borderline danger—will help educators and leaders in our community make informed decisions about what to do next.
Trevor Mauro, a freelance writer, is an architecture major at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. You can read his blog "On the Mark" for Chicago.GoPride, or hear him Fridays at 8 p.m. hosting The Monster Mash on WIIT 88.9FM. He was born and raised in Bellingham, Wash.
