HIV/AIDS
AIDS is an inescapable fact. We know people who have died; some of us have cried for loved ones until we have no tears left. We tend the sick, wage war with government and medical bureaucracies, raise funds, publish black humour journals, and buy passion fruit flavoured condoms. We know what it's like to be tested or to decide we don't want to be. Most of us understand terror. We know this is about us. Each of us has his/her own AIDS story to tell. Our artists and composers and playwrights and filmmakers are doing the private dark work of creation that gives a public voice and a permanent record and a universal face to our inside view of the workings of this plague. Death and tragedy and injustice beg for meaning to be made. Sometimes there is none. Sometimes human learning is the only possible saving grace. AIDS has sped the passages of a whole generation of gay men. Some, like time-lapse flowers, withered and died in a breath. Some are braving chronic illness day to day. The rest of us look on with old eyes. We are the victim heralds of something we didn't create. We now have utter responsibility to live more preciously: we and all our fellow inhabitants of earth who teeter together at the perilous brink.
We are all living with HIV and AIDS.
From 'A Few Tricks Along the Way' by Gary J. Stern.
