When I was a teenager, I had two very dear family friends — uncles, really, though not by blood. Their names were David and Gary.
David and Gary were brought into my life through my mother’s research and Gary’s activism — my virologist mother’s HIV research, which led to HIV advocacy, which led her to bring HIV+ AIDS activist Gary first to one of her lectures at her university, and then later to bring both Gary and his partner David into our family’s life.
It is impossible for me to overstate the impact that Gary and David and had on young me. While I don’t think they were the first queer people I had ever met (pretty sure my great-uncle Charlie was a closet case, at least around his family), they were the first openly queer to really play a major role in my development. The first openly queer people whose vacation house I got to hang out at, the first openly queer people who picked me up from school, who invited me to tend their garden with them.
Gary and David both died when I was still teenager — David first, in April 1997, and Gary almost exactly three years later, in April 2000. They were both only 48 years old when they passed. On World AIDS Day, I feel their loss more intensely than at any other point in the year.
On World AIDS Day, I also marvel at the fact that HIV+ people in my life now live lives that would be unrecognizable to David and Gary. Instead of daily cocktails of dozens of different medications, my friends today need only take one single pill a day to manage what is now a chronic illness. Their partners can protect themselves from infection with a similar regimen. To call this development miraculous is not an overstatement — it is, truly, a miracle. (Less miraculous is the fact that this level of healthcare is often only accessible to people in wealthy countries, and that for many HIV+ people around the globe, it is as though these advancements never happened.)
I think about that miracle — about the fact that within four decades, HIV went from a poorly understood automatic death sentence to a manageable health condition that need not interfere with one’s quality of life — a lot. There were many things that made it possible, and yet one of the most impossible was getting people to see HIV as an infection that was worth fighting in the first place. One of the biggest hurdles in achieving that miracle was getting people to see queer life as worthy of saving*.
And yet: it happened. It happened far too late for far too many people, but it happened. That knowledge is something that gives me hope.
There is a lot that can be said about the bisexual connection to HIV — about the fact that it was, in many ways, the HIV crisis that gave renewed visibility to bisexuality; that fearmongering around the virus often involved positioning bisexuals (men in particular, but also women) as vectors of disease, conduits that allowed HIV to pass from the gay community to the straight community, from the straight community to the lesbian community. There is a lot to be said about how panic around HIV was used to vilify, not just gay men, but bisexuals as well. And yet today I would prefer not to.
Today I would prefer, instead, to focus on hope. The miracle that is modern HIV treatment resulted from a massive campaign to present queer life as something worth saving, a massive campaign to destigmatize queerness and render queer suffering visible as human suffering. It was hard. It took a lot of work. But it happened. And if it happened once, it can happen again.
Hopefully it will not require a deadly epidemic to help us overcome the rot that is biphobia.
* Standard disclaimer that the idea that HIV is a “gay disease” is inaccurate; anyone can get HIV and in much of the world it is straight people, not queer people, who are the primary victims
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