To view these young men and say, in effect, “if only you saw all the death that I saw…” is a wishful fantasy that disturbs me on all sorts of levels, and it says far more about us than it does about them. Asking them to fear something they have literally grown to accept is as realistic as asking them to perform “duck and cover” drills in case Russia drops the bomb.
They simply relate to it differently, having come of age since the advent of successful treatments. Young gay men are more aware of HIV than my generation ever was. So frozen in time is our victimhood, it hardly allows for the facts of the here and now. It subtly blames our departed friends for their mistakes, and then tries to equate them with a new generation of gay men who are much too smart to buy into it. It projects our grief in the direction of those who bear no responsibility or resemblance to what we experienced. This statement misrepresents our lost friends and oversimplifies the state of HIV today. “If their friends all died like mine did, maybe they would think twice before having sex without a condom,” goes a typical remark, drenched in self pity and tenuous logic. Concerned but misguided gay men of a certain age hear whatever the latest HIV infection rates are, and they pull the AIDS Crisis Card. This kind of horror-by-proxy happens all the time.
Plenty of us are more than happy to rob graves, however, in an attempt to frighten gay men into acceptable behaviors. He was a man with the same passions and faults as anyone else, and I won’t use his death as a blunt instrument. Lesley didn’t perish so I could use him as a scare tactic. I will not dig up Lesley’s body and beat young gay men with his corpse. Today, there are little rituals I have to honor his memory, and I often write about him, the first of many friends lost to the epidemic.īut there’s something I will not do. Lesley was my closest friend to become sick in the 1980’s, and he fought bravely until his death from AIDS.