The Path to Lemonade
Traveling from bitter to sweet
by Jim Pickett
So many HIV writers, yours ever so truly included, have belched, vomited, shat, and otherwise expelled countless, limitless nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, modifiers, dangling…um…participles, hyperbole and conjunctions, all in slavish service to the mantra—“HIV really sucks.”
Yes, yes, we know, it really does. Who can argue? HIV sucks. Really. Mucho. AIDS sucks the bag big time and to the max. It totally doesn’t rock, ya know what I’m sayin’? It’s not the way anyone wants to roll. It stinks. It’s lousy rotten. It’s out, it’s not the new black and ya know what? It ain’t on my friends list.
Right?
Illness, suffering, death, disaster, silence, patents, stigma, shame, poverty, politics, pain, anger, despair, decline, discrimination, drugs, needles, sinful, side effects, denial, lies, ideology, criminalization, pathological, punishment, irresponsible, hedonistic, risk, racism, sexism, homophobia, homelessness, hunger, judgment, lack, lipo, vulnerability, disenfranchised, disproportionate, disparities, co-occurring, co-morbidity, co-opt, whore, slut, junkie, faggot, innocent, and deserving.
Is the only way to describe our HIV/AIDS narrative through a deficit lens? Is the hyperbole of crisis and destruction the only way we can explain, understand, and rally around the enormous needs, the extraordinary injustices, and the complexities of this nasty, brutish, and cunning epidemic?
Well, we also go the other direction, don’t we? In the story of AIDS we not only talk of whores, but of heroes, and there are indeed many “asset” words we utilize, words like selfless, tireless, brave, courageous, brilliant, visionary, leadership, strength, fight, truth, power, responsible, and you get the idea.
So I want to discuss the lemonade I can trace directly to the years after the HIV virus entered my bloodstream, and my life. So much beauty, so much meaning, so much value—all because of HIV.
First, and quite concretely, the beast has led me to a career in which my voice and my talents were allowed to develop and shine. Before I entered college as a freshman in 1984, I took a test that was designed to survey my strengths and characteristics and point me in a career direction best suited to me. The results at the time horrified me—the computer spit out “social worker” and “minister”—and I could not have been more disgusted. I proceeded to major in business, mass communication, English, film, linguistics, and theatre before dropping out and heading to Chicago for a new life—that of a waitress. Long story short, that led to working in the alternative press. After doing a seven-year stint at a sassy, “predictably unsavory” local gay magazine as editor, writer, and ad-sales ’ho, I hesitantly accepted a contract with the health department to write stories about real people living with and impacted by HIV (“The Faces of AIDS”). This would never have happened if I had not started writing about my own HIV experience in that sassy mag. Without HIV I could still be writing gossip and snarky commentary—not that there is anything wrong with that—but HIV helped me find my voice and vocation (not unlike a social worker or a minister, really) and for that, I am eternally, and at every moment, grateful.
HIV has opened my eyes to the world. I have had the opportunity to know a Native American grandma in Oklahoma who became infected with HIV through sharing needles. I also met a young African American woman serving time in a Topeka prison, and advocating from within for access to treatment and care. How would I have ever met such incredible, interesting people without HIV as a common denominator?
| HIV has forced me to separate the bull from the shit, make priorities, get real. |
I’ve met so many smart, passionate, fascinating, infuriating, inspiring, delightful, devious, and hilarious people because of HIV being in my life—I simply can’t imagine what my world would be like without them. Maybe a few less headaches, sure… but give me a migraine over milquetoast and Pablum!
I have to wonder if I’d ever have gone to Laramie, Wyoming, or Kearney, Nebraska, without the viral impetus. Probably not. And that would have been too bad, really. I probably wouldn’t have gone to Cape Town, South Africa, or New Delhi, India, either. Or Spain. My first trip outside of North America was to Spain and was given to me by a lovely man named Leon here in Chicago who takes folks on tours of Morocco, Portugal, and Spain. He attached no strings. He merely wanted to thank me for my work as an HIV advocate and invited me along on a tour—free, a gift. That two-week trip to Barcelona, San Sebastian, and Madrid in the fall of 2001 led me to falling in love with not only that country, but a man in Madrid to whom I had a crazy year-long affair. It also ignited a passion for world travel—both by plane and by armchair. Thanks, Leon. Thanks, HIV.
HIV has forced me to separate the bull from the shit, make priorities, get real. It has made me political. It helped me comprehend how being jaded and cynical is a lazy, entitled, arrogant, elitist luxury that I didn’t want to pay for any longer. HIV has allowed me to value every moment of every day. While I fail at all the above early and often—I no longer do so without knowing. The process of knowing is among the greatest of HIV’s gifts.
The journey that HIV set me on now 13 years ago also led me to meeting a man who I truly believe is the one for me. Never before have I felt so deeply calm and in love at the same time. We met just last year, months after my 42nd birthday and weeks after what I guess can be called a nervous breakdown, complete with hospitalization in a Fairy Farm. Sure, there were lots of “loves of my life” before Kevin—but hindsight tells me those were all two’s and three’s—some of them devilish, some of them quite lovely—but none of them right, or the one. None who accepted me as I am, none who were capable of comforting and being comforted, none who were honest and clear and ready. And none who wanted to play Scrabble all the time, adored maps and exploring new places. Might I have found him without HIV in my life? Probably not. The events that unfolded after my positive diagnosis would have been profoundly different if that diagnosis had been negative. Thanks HIV.
HIV-free I’d probably still be smoking. And running around dance clubs til all hours, dabbling in the letters of chemical entertainment, and acting crazy. Or not. I do know that without HIV, I wouldn’t have trained for four marathons and completed three. I know I wouldn’t have been in the delivery room of the International Rectal Microbicide Advocates. And I wouldn’t have missed Hector, Eric, Paul, Larry, Gigi, Rocky, and Dan when they died. And so many more.
Yes, the day I found out I was positive was singularly the worst day of my life. And it continues to hold that dubious record. But without that day, where would I be?
Likely not thanking HIV for so much good that has come my way.
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