How I Lost My Faith . XX - I only have two years??

In 1988, I officially tested positive for HIV. There was still a great deal of confusion as to how the virus was transmitted, and among Jehovah’s Witnesses, no none spoke of it except in the context of victims’ paying the price for their immoral lifestyle, in keeping with the first chapter of the Bible book of Romans:

For God’s wrath is being revealed...against all ungodliness and unrighteousness... Therefore, God, in keeping with the desires of their hearts, gave them up to uncleanness...even the males left the natural use of the female and became violently inflamed in their lust toward one another, males with males, working what is obscene and receiving in themselves the full recompense, which was due for their error...God gave them up to a disapproved mental state... [and it goes on in like manner] – Romans 1:18-28

This I believed: not that God had inflicted homosexuals with a deadly disease, but that we were paying the price for our own immorality, exposing ourselves to disease and death as a natural course of our unnatural lifestyle. It wasn’t God’s fault; it was our own, as result of our own choices.

But the Bible also offered forgiveness and mercy for those who forsook their sinful lifestyle and embraced “the Truth.” The story of the Prodigal Son gave me hope that maybe, even after many failed attempts, I could return to Jehovah God and become acceptable to Him.

After leaving Glenn, I moved in with a Witness couple I’d met four years before when I first showed up at the Kingdom Hall in the dead of winter. It was quite an interesting experience, with six boys all going through their “terrible teens”, but it worked for a few months...until the Great Pendulum swung back the other way and I found myself back in the darkness of gay clubs. I moved in with a gay friend in a basement apartment while working for 7-Eleven as an Assistant Manager, which provided health insurance, which I hadn’t had for quite a while. I remember being really depressed, though, and the doctor prescribed Nortriptyline, to which I was apparently allergic, so he switched me to Prozac; I’ve been on that one ever since.

I may have been a complete disaster spiritually, but physically I was doing fine; I rode my 10-speed bike everyday, walked a great deal, ate well and felt great; I was in good enough shape that I could have pretty much any guy I wanted. But you know, sometimes ignorance is bliss...

I’d told my doctor about all of the confusion with my HIV tests, so we decided to test it one more time, and, simply out of curiosity, run a new, expensive test called a “T-cell Count.” I’d never heard of it, so I said, “Sure, why not?” and gave it no more thought...until the tests arrived a couple of weeks later. Healthy people have T-cell counts in the high hundreds, even thousands, but the government had determined that a count below 200, coupled with being HIV-positive, meant you were automatically diagnosed with AIDS and considered disabled.

My first T-cell (CD-4) count was something like 85. That didn’t really register at first, until the doctor told me, “That means you have AIDS.” Then he said, “You have two, maybe three years to live.” That was the general prognosis for AIDS patients in those days.

Many people who’ve been diagnosed with AIDS can remember the place, day and time of their diagnosis; I cannot. Everything went gray. I remember it was in the summer of 1989, but other than that, time seemed to stop altogether.

TWO YEARS???

THAT’S ALL THE TIME I HAVE LEFT TO DO ALL THE THINGS I NEED TO DO??

WHAT HAVE I DONE TO MYSELF??!!

WHAT AM I GOING TO DO NOW??

Basically, I would never see my 30th birthday.

Unlike most people at the time, the only question I did not ask was, “Why me?”  I knew exactly “why”: I'd been a total slut in the early days of my coming out, exposing myself to whatever was out there.  

 

Many so-called “Christian” churches were (and some atill are) preaching that AIDS was God’s judgment against homosexuals, payment for their unspeakable sins against God.  Even many of my gay friends at the time blamed God...but that's one thing I’ve never done. It was not God who made me practice unsafe, promiscuous sex; it was not God who gave me gonorrhea and crabs over the years, and it was not God punishing me when I found out I had AIDS.  All the responsibility for my actions fell squarely on my shoulders; God had nothing at all to do with it! 

 

I was suddenly forced to face my own mortality. I was going to die, there was no question about that, but in what manner would I do so—as an anonymous statistic in a hospital bed, or as someone with hope in a future of unending health in the Paradise Earth in which I still believed?  I chose the latter, and resolved once more to return to the Kingdom Hall; I only had two years to get baptized and Pioneer and and help as many others as I could to find the “Truth” and finish all the things I’d dreamt of over the years as one of Jehovah’s dedicated, baptized Witnesses.  That meant that I had to do everything “NOW!”

And so the Great Pendulum swung back to the right (the “Christian” side), and I was determined to keep it there for what little time I had left, so I could be assured of a resurrection in God's paradisaic New Earth to come.