Talking ‘Bout My Generation
I hear all about how guys my age are letting their guard down. I enjoy getting fingered as much as the next guy, but enough already. The following passages are not in any way meant to remove the ownership my generation should claim. I know it is my health, my choice and ultimately my life. I aim instead to add more to the myriad of reasons why infection rates are increasing in guy my age and slightly younger.
AIDS left us with a gap and injured as a community. As older men lost friends, brothers, lovers, and roommates, guys my age lost countless mentors. We, the younger generation, were left to fend for ourselves. The oral traditions, all puns intended, of our community all but completely stopped. There is an age bracket that was completely devastated. Those men should have helped out guys my age. Most guys my age didn’t get a hand in traversing the sticky mess that is the gay terrain. We, the younger generation, are left navigating for ourselves in a world that gets increasingly more complex.
I have been blessed to have been taken on by a wonderful group of men. One in particular refers to himself as my Auntie. They brought me under their wing and helped me navigate through what was an extremely overwhelming world. The big city homosexual can be a lot to handle. This city can feel so isolating and alienating. If it weren’t for those men I can say with all certainty that I would not be who I am today. My life, undoubtedly, would resemble an after school special. I ran around from bar to club six nights a week until someone who was caring enough to call me on what I was doing did just that. It was the voice of an older friend who watched so many go that route before me, who refused to watch another guy be taken in by those trappings.
A few of the bravest of these men have shared with me what it was like in the time back then, the time we don’t speak of. Some of them are positive some of them are not. They spoke candidly about the fears of not knowing. They didn’t know how it was transmitted. They didn’t know who would be next. They were never really sure what happened to those familiar faces across the bar they stopped seeing. Did he move out of town or did he get it too? Some people watched helplessly as their friend, disowned by his family, wasted away to nothing in the living room, stripped of dignity and pride, a skeleton on the couch.
That was not my life experience. I was born a few years before HIV was named. There is no time in my memory without the shadow of AIDS. AIDS wasn’t a gay disease to me. It was what killed the sweet boy Ryan from TV. He had hemophilia just like my best friend.
I have my own experiences which pepper my choices. Do memories of my best friend wasting away to nothing in his dining room affect me? Of course they do. Do they influence the choices I make? Inextricably so. Maybe that’s why I do the work I do. Maybe that’s why I try so hard to be as careful as I know how. Though I am sure that is just one of the many voices that make up my Greek chorus.
People my age are so fortunate by and large because we were spared that agony. We didn’t have to watch our friends stripped of status, youth, beauty and life. Most don’t have the gaunt face of a loved one seared in our mind’s eye to remind them what can happen. Instead we see guys take a seemingly innocuous handful of pills. We see the faces of long term survivors and think well; obviously it can’t be THAT bad, right? Who’s around to tell me otherwise?
I know that recalling my images of twelve years past still requires a deep breath and on tougher days a wipe under my eyes. Loss, be it personal or on the community level, is always difficult to process and express. So I understand why we as young gay men don’t hear those stories. They are out there if we look for them. We can hear them in the gay chorale movement in beautifully orchestrated requiems, and pieces meant to tell our stories. Gay cinema has offered us a few flickering moments in the dark, a glimpse of a time that was. There are books we can read in solitude and imagine what that would feel like if it were happening to me. These messages are wrapped up neat and pretty. The music neatly beaten in time, the movies flash images that seem dated and unrelatable, books are passing impressions that at best hope to be remembered a couple weeks after the turn of the back cover.
So few people really talk about what those days were like. There seems an unwritten rule about it. No one wants to bring up uncomfortable topics in polite society. In the discourse over Cosmos one should always avoid the overtly emotional. We speak in sanitized and edible humorous sound bites, meant to entertain and rarely to inform. Maybe we missed out on those real conversations. I guess you must have had them all before I knew I was supposed to be listening. Maybe everyone who lived those torturous days doesn’t care to go digging through the past, and prefer to keep past trials just that, past.
They say that if we don’t learn from history we are doomed to repeat it. I ask, how can I learn from a history that people won’t share? Where is our oral tradition? We, the younger gay men are floundering unguided and disengaged. We lost our mentors and no one has taken up the slack to tell us the stories of those who fell into the gap. I fear the outcome for my generation.
