How I Lost My Faith . XVIII - “Do I have ‘IT’ or not??!”

The winter of 1986/87 was very hard on me. After two years in Denver, I’d acclimated to a much drier climate, but the winters back east were very humid, and the cold ate into my bones. Six months into my stay at home, at age 23, I began developing arthritis in my hands, and it became intolerable. I was prepared to move back to Denver in February, but decided to stay until the summer after my godmother wrote me a short letter in which she all-but-pleaded with me to stay a few more months to help care for my sickly godfather—and, for the first time in my life, she offered me an apology:

“I’m sorry for everything.”

It was only four words, but I knew to what she was referring and that she meant every word; that was enough at the time to allow me to forgive a great many things; not everything, mind you...that would come much later.

That spring I made Dandelion Wine for the first time, and it was the bomb! One day, I was drinking a couple of glasses of the finished product, when my godfather called to me upstairs to ask that I watch the store for a while so he and my godmother could go into town. When I stumbled out of my room, he started laughing—I was “drunk as a skunk,” as they say! That homemade wine kicked my ass, and, before he passed away a couple of years later, my godfather would chuckle whenever he thought about that day. I managed to get through the shift okay, though; fortunately, it wasn’t a busy store, and all the customers were local people I knew well, so I just told them I’d gotten drunk on homemade wine and they laughed.

After turning my back on Jed and the bar scene, I began thinking about the possibility that I may have finally picked up the HIV virus—not necessarily from Jed; it could have been any one of the possibly-hundreds of men I’d encountered over the years since coming out of the closet in 1981, but his situation began to worry me. I previously wrote that I hadn’t really thought about HIV or AIDS in a long time, but I don’t think that’s entirely accurate, since I remember getting tested at least twice in Denver before backing home, and each time it came back negative. This time, however, I wasn’t so sure, so I decided to have the test done at a clinic in nearby Fredericksburg in the spring of 1987.

After a couple of very long weeks of anxiously waiting, I finally got the call: I was positive. Great! At first, it didn’t really bother me too much. After all, I’d had gonorrhea and crabs a number of times over the past six years, so what was one more? I knew it would only be a matter of time, considering how many guys with whom I’d had unprotected sex over the years.

A day or two later, however, the clinic called me back and informed me that I’d been given someone else’s results and that mine had actually come back negative. Negative? How the hell could they have mixed up the results? What if that first call had completely devastated me, leading to attempted suicide or something? I knew a few guys back then that would have responded that way and ended their lives before receiving that second “I’m so sorry we made a mistake” phone call.

Fortunately, my response was not so severe; I basically just took it all in stride. After all, if I was actually HIV-negative, I had nothing to worry about, right? And if I really was HIV-positive, what could I do about it, anyway? It was a veritable death sentence back then, and I was not ready to die; I had way too many things that I needed to do—but I couldn’t do them in bum-fuck Virginia, so I began making preparations for my return to Denver.

I began making contact with Glenn and a couple of Witness friends back in Colorado. I’d been going to the Kingdom Hall here in Fredericksburg off and on, but there was no one I could trust with my new secret. Back then, every straight person I knew, including Jehovah’s Witnesses, was terrified of being in the same room with an HIV-infected person, so I told no one there. In any case, I needed to be sure before I told anyone.