What do you think the meaning of your life was?
Hard to encapsulate. It was more than it appeared. There are resonances of what I went through that helped others to make it through their own struggles and journeys through this disease, but there were also family and soul-growing reasons I went there to stand in this role and tried to make a difference with what I was doing, except that I didn’t mean to do anything except to live my life normally to be in school to have friends and a job and a girlfriend one day and to grow old in a normal happy life. It wasn’t to be as I had wanted it to be. What was to find me was more than my family could handle sometimes and I felt very guilty because I knew in one way or another I had brought this on myself and on to them. I knew that in my lifetime I hadn’t done anything wrong, but that there was some plan with this involved and I had had a hand in it. I was helpless and didn’t know what to do for them or for myself or for my friends, I only hoped that was I was enduring would somehow help someone else. By the time I died I had so many friends and so much support that I knew it had to be good in some way. My mom has had endless support since then too and I am so glad for that. Nothing makes it easier but support makes it bearable.
What is your view of AIDS at this point?
It’s interesting, because it is a unifying and yet polarizing disease at the same time. But it was meant as a unifier – for people who normally wouldn’t mix, to get together, help each other fight against the disease. It hasn’t happened yet, as it was intended, but it has happened a great deal and it will have been a good thing, amongst the darkness of it.
Is there an end in sight?
Not for a while, but people are learning to live with it, and more importantly, to recognize people living with it as not an aberration in the world but just like everyone else, with a bad disease. Not bad for having it, just unfortunate and in need of human loving. And many are getting it now and many are living long lives with it, and it has helped to break down the barriers between the straight and gay communities. Someone like me needed to get it and have it be public in order to show that you don’t have to be gay and that it wasn’t a gay disease or punishment. It wasn’t punishment at all. Those who got it volunteered for it, in order to bring the world to a greater good. God bless all of them. God bless everyone still working through it all. They will be cared for, and they need not feel their lives were wasted. They are doing important deeds there.
Do you have any messages to pass along?
Only this: There are no accidents. People are in their circumstances because of agreements they made before led to them to fulfill their contracts. Anything they can do to help other people through the pain or through their prejudices – especially their own – they should do. Be human. Feel the pain and disappointment of what is happening to you, but remember you still have time to be and do great things. Sometimes the smallest things become the biggest. Start ripples. Make them far reaching. Start small and watch it grow.
