HIV Superstar!!

I was on a billboard. I was on a billboard for AHF as one of the new faces of HIV. Smiling and Healthy and Muscular, I was part of their campaign designed to reach out to the increasingly relevant African American demographic. On buses, billboards, and magazines all over the city next to big red block letters that read “AIDS Healthcare Foundation”, there was my face staring me down with Xerox green malevolent eyes that seemed to say, “Hey, remember me? We have AIDS.” And then he - me - it - would continue down Santa Monica blvd; gleefully hanging off the side of a # 4 bus, broadcasting my face, his face, our face to the rest of the world. I had officially gone viral. (Get it, gone viral?)

I’d be having coffee at Starbucks in West Hollywood; writing in my leather-bound notebook - looking all intellectual and datable; and a cute chubby redheaded stranger in a form-fitting bright blue t-shirt would come up to me and introduce himself: “Hi I’m Mark!” and just as I would begin to imagine our wedding pictures and create lists of names for our little curly haired mixed race children, he would add “Sorry to interrupt, but are you that guy with AIDS?” And heartbroken I would put on a bright polite smile and say “Yup, that’s me: the guy with AIDS; nice to meet you.”

It was like that episode of “Friends” where Joey gets an add campaign for “STD Awareness” and all of sudden the sexiest guy in the world has no sex appeal at all because everyone thinks he has herpes or syphilis or gonorrhea; and so the shenanigans ensue as he’s desperately trying to explain to everyone and anyone that will listen that he’s an actor and that it’s not real…. “I don’t have an STD!!” he screams… Cue the laugh track and go to commercial. Accept for me there is no laugh track; this is real. I do have an STD; in fact I have THE STD; I have AIDS - and like it or not, I’m that Guy.

One of the 10 x 10,000 foot wide billboards with its all white backgrounds and all black faces stood on the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax across from Sony Studios where my best friend works as a DVD distribution executive. She’s all cool and unflappable like Ralph Machio with Double D’s; or a diminutive James Dean - dressed in a black tie, white shirt, and matching black sweater vest and wingtip shoes; always leaning to one side with a cigarette, like the first lesbian to grace the cover of GQ. She’s what you would call a butch dike badass; but while my smiling face was floating across from her warm wood corner office, I would get daily pictures on my cell phone of her gesticulating like Donald Duck in a happy tantrum, or pointing out the window like a two year old at a balloon, or grinning like an idiot as she bragged at a gaggle of well dressed unimpressed co-workers: “That’s my best friend on that billboard out there. Yeah Him - The black guy with AIDS!”   

My mother carried copies of the add that she tore out of the LA Weekly. She kept them tucked away it in her favorite lime green pocket book, and if by accident she would come across one, pull it out, and like a magician in a magic act - TA DAH!! - She’d present it to startled waitresses while we ate burgers and fried macaroni cheese balls at the Cheesecake Factory at the Grove. “That’s my son” She’d say in her southern Baptist drawl pushing the crumpled paper into their face “Isn’t he handsome? I’m so proud of him… He has AIDS.” And the waitress would blush and nod. “Would you like more diet coke mam?”

I was an HIV Superstar!

That year AHF the largest AIDS medical care provider in the nation asked me to march in the Los Angeles Pride Parade. Their was a huge float, and music, and an army of about a hundred other little infected marchers… but they put me in the front about 30 paces ahead of everyone else - holding a banner of the add which had become a billboard, with my face on it; and wearing a t-shirt that read “Stay Negative” with the invisible postscript, “Because it’s already to late for me.” And I smiled and twirled and screamed my HIV pride to the masses, because I’m that guy… the one with AIDS: The Beautiful green eyed black guy living and thriving despite those three little letters: H. I. V.

I was on a fucking Billboard and I don’t care who knows it! 

So imagine my surprise when I found my tongue sticking when I met Juvy. Juvy is a five foot two inch Phillipina Jehovah’s Witness: with long black hair and round little librarian glasses that remind me of Velma from Scooby doo. She is warm and soft spoken and kind, with that bright up-beat optimistic energy that true believers always seem to have.  And every time I go to pay my rent, I pull up a chair and talk shop: Jesus talk like you wouldn’t believe. 1 Corinthians 13:13; Galatians 5:22; the mysterious lands East of Eden where Cain found his wife; the complex relationship between Job; The Devil, and God; and the scriptural passages in Mathew and Mark that hint at the idea that everyone may already be saved.  We go on like that for hours: intricate intellectual stories of salvation, magical imagery, and metaphysical poetry that most people barely understand let alone, care about. But here we speak the same language.  And let the record state that that bitch knows her shit. Not the bullshit watered down diarrhea they preach from the pulpit, but the real shit you find in the bible. The real “Love thy neighbor,” “According to thy own faith let it be.” shit! I love her. She’s just the landlord’s assistant, but because of her my rent was lowered to satisfy my section 8 requirement.  The section 8 that I have because I have AIDS. Did I mention that I have AIDS? It’s kind of my thing; I was even on a billboard.

But guess who doesn’t know this? Juvy doesn’t - Because I haven’t told her - And she’s asked…  “So Corey, why do you have Section 8? Don’t you have to have a disability? You look so healthy.” And instead of putting my hand on my hip and flipping my imaginary blond wig to one side and proclaiming in my best gay boy voice. “Bitch I’m on a motherfucking Billboard!” I giggle, throw my eyes hard against the office carpet floor and say something cute like you’d think I was too pretty to be on disability huh?”  Or blush demurely and hide truth with more truth. “I am very blessed.  I have” I pause, “a disease that a few years ago brought me very close to death; if you would have seen me at that time in my life you wouldn’t have recognized me; and so now, most of my time and energy is spent just trying to keep myself from going back there…” and suddenly there is gravity in the room. Suddenly there is atmosphere, silence, and shame in the room. My thoughts are revolving around themselves; there is a vacuum of space where my fearlessness used to be; and in the air there are dust particles of things left unsaid brushing softly against our multi-ethnic skin.  And she nods, touches my hand, and never brings it up again. Because this she understands: Miracles and resurrections have become the fabric of our conversations. Being stricken by a tragic and incurable decease and three years later having no visible signs of such a horrible and unspeakable plague is nothing I would ever have to explain to her: Those are things that are synonymous with God, and Grace, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit.  But what I can’t seem to articulate, and what I don’t think I would able to defend, is how one gets to be celebrated on a billboard just for being an addict and a whore; and letting hundreds of men fuck him bareback in a bathhouse downtown… So instead I change the subject, tell a joke, and begin another round of conversations about forgiveness and prayer and the origins of original sin.