AIDS: A Love Story

AIDS: A Love Story
Part One of a Two-Part Series
by Lisa Woerly

This is story of love. It is not a story of religious beliefs or societal morality. My story is one of compassion and empathy, not one of pointing fingers or saying "good riddance." It is a story of friends holding hands, giving hugs, and wiping away tears. I cannot write about all the friends I've lost to AIDS over the last fifteen years--that would take me dozens of pages. But I can write about two very special men whom I loved very much and whom I miss very much. Yes, they were both gay and one of them was also an intravenous drug user. But they were my friends and I lost them to AIDS. This is my love story.

"During 1999, HIV-associated illnesses caused the deaths of an estimated 2.6 million people, including 1.1 million women and 470,000 children under the age of fifteen."

1983 was my junior year in high school. Considered underground at the time, bands like Bauhaus, The Cure, and U2 spoke to my disaffected group of friends. We were all creative; interested in writing and theatre, we stumbled across one another and hung on for some semblance of understanding. Artistic empathy was hard to come by in a small farming community. In fact, empathy was hard to come by for anyone who was considered different in my small, conservative Illinois town of 20,000 residents.

My friends and I had many friends from the university who were willing to let us hang out with them. So by the beginning of my senior year in the fall of 1984, I did not spend much free time with anyone under the age of twenty one. Flamboyant male hairdressers, university theatre majors, budding musicians, and local poets defined the group of people whom I called friends.

Low whispers began stirring throughout our circle of friends about a disease that was only attacking gay men. We were all afraid to speak openly about what we were hearing and reading. This "gay disease" seemed to only strike big-city gays. My gay male friends thought they had nothing to worry about, and I thought that I did not have to worry about them either.

The nightly news reported a brief 60-second synopsis of new AIDS developments each Monday through Friday. Ronald Reagan refused to utter the word. Rock Hudson wasted away before our very eyes. It seemed to be a virus that attacked white blood cells. It seemed to be transmitted via blood and bodily fluids. It seemed to attack only gay men. No one knew how the virus had originated, how to treat it, and why it decimated peoples' bodies as if a nuclear explosion had internally gone off until only a wasteland of humanity remained.

But it was destroying men in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City in increasingly horrific numbers. But one night in 1985, while at my friends' house for a dinner party, I noticed a brown spot on the neck of my host Tom. He hid it the best he could with a turtleneck pulled high on his neck, but from my seat next to him it was unmistakable.

"An estimated 16.3 million people have died from AIDS since the epidemic began. 12.7 million were adults, including 6.2 million women. 3.6 million were children under the age of fifteen."

Tom hadn't been feeling well for months. He was often times lethargic, his skin was turning pale and transparent, and he was losing weight. His partner Gary was terrified but unable to admit to himself that what he feared was true. Several weeks after the dinner party, Tom quietly announced to a select few of us that he had been diagnosed with full-blown AIDS.

Some people drifted away after Tom's announcement. They were busy, school was really hard that semester, they were traveling a lot--the excuses were never-ending. I tried not to harbor resentment and disgust that people could so callously desert Tom. I tried to understand their fear. After all, rumors started daily about how AIDS spread. You could get it from sharing a drinking glass, you could get it if the infected person sneezed on you. Of course, none of these transmission fears proved accurate, but people believed them because they were too scared not to.

But deserting Tom and Gary was not an option for me. Once or twice a week, I would stop by their house with coffee and donuts. On good days, Tom and I would slowly walk three blocks to the town park where we'd sit on a bench and feed the pigeons. We didn't talk much; I was nervous about saying the wrong things and Tom had turned reflective. Silence was a blessing for him, so we made the perfect couple.

Life continued on for me. I finished my freshman year in college and I went back to my waitressing job full-time for the summer. Responsibilities consumed my daily life but I continued to make the time to visit Tom, who was by now confined to a hospital bed in a larger city an hour's drive from my house. This hospital was slightly more familiar with treating AIDS patients than was my hometown's hospital; at least this hospital had actually treated one other AIDS patient before Tom. In 1986, you were still required to wear a body suit if you were going to be in contact with an AIDS patient. I would put on the mask, hairnet, jumper, gloves, and booties before entering Tom's room to appease the hospital staff. I kept the mask on because I was fearful of giving Tom my germs, but my gloves came off so I could hold his hand.

Just before my fall term began in 1986, Tom died. His official cause of death was attributed to heart failure.

All quoted statistics are attributed to Centers for Disease Control (CDC).