As a child, I attended a private school on the outskirts of Downtown Oklahoma City, mere blocks away from the relatively new Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Some days teachers interrupted class to lead a coordinated drill, taking us into the hallways and instructing us to sit with our backs against the wall, heads facing down with hands on the back of the neck. It meant nothing to us, for there was no association with it other than stepping out of class; it was playtime. That changed one stormy afternoon. On the playground, the sweet smell of Oklahoma winds perfumed the air while the heavy clouds of a dark and somber sky made the afternoon as dark as late evening. Pulsing strobes of lavender and blue glowed through the clouds, followed soon by a low rumble of thunder, as a deity of tempests growing angry toward blasphemers. Our play was interrupted by shrill whistles and stressed teachers hurriedly gathering the oblivious children. They rushed us into the halls, trying as calmly as they could to have us take our drill positions; their own fear was evident to the children. The building creaked as heavy winds battered its old bricks; joining in this chorus was the haunting aria of the blaring wail of sirens rolling across the city to a crescendo, then waning in intensity, followed by the next wave, like a banshee-song. Somewhere in the area was a tornado, though being inside we could never see it tearing across the city—it existed in our minds as a horrid monster somewhere out there, coming for us. The chaos that followed these storms meant my mother was often much later than usual to pick me up from school, the sky black by that nighttime hour, adding to anxious uncertainty. These prairie storms were often a show-of-force on nature’s part—icy hail falling amid late spring’s balmy warmth; veins of lightning racing across the sky, bursts of light bright so bright that night became day for a split-second; freezing rain falling from winter clouds, glazing any surface it touched, instantly entombing the world in slick ice. Those drills, I learned, were not a fun break from schoolwork—they were a necessity for something to be feared. Fear manifests itself from an early age.
I attended this school in the late 1980s until 1990, when we relocated to New Mexico due to my father’s career. Trying to recall life at that age yields many blanks, though I do have recollections from then—a girl named Sarah who I thought should wear a peach wedding dress; smuggling to school a contraband toy, a verboten item by school policy, a plastic Soggie I found in a box of Cap’n Crunch while staying at my aunt’s house the night before; going dressed as Beetlejuice one Halloween; my mother pulling over to the side of the road one day to cry after being overwhelmed. And one time I found a fun toy by the fence of the school playground—a discarded hypodermic needle. I played with it a little before someone tattled to a teacher that I had a toy. The horrified teacher grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me into a bathroom to vigorously scrub my hands. I didn’t know why at the time. It was not as blatant as a tornado. Unbeknownst to me, only a few years earlier while I was still in the womb in the third trimester, the CDC had identified a new virus—HIV. In the background of my childhood, this disease was ravaging many adults of the 1980s, though I was far too young to grasp what a virus was and how one worked, let alone the cultural nuances and complexities of one like HIV. This virus was not a shock to the cultural system thrust onto me as it had to older generations: I was born into a reality where it existed; I have never known a world without it.
Life in Albuquerque by the latter half of 1993 was, for me, a tumultuous period. I was an awkward outcast entering middle school. By this point, I had just had my first formal sex ed class at the end of elementary school the preceding spring, and puberty hit hard and fast that summer. It was also a time of starting to grasp sexual politics, and that there were indeed non-heterosexuals in the world, though I had an unpleasant introduction to the notion while reconciling my feelings with middle school society. On campus was some discussion of homosexuals, though never in the classroom; among classmates, the topic was brought up only as an inferior group, one worth nothing but ridicule and revulsion. One would be forgiven to think he or she was the only one of his or her kind in existence; an isolated and lonely specimen, fitting for the ambient, empty expanses of the state. The deserts of New Mexico held their share of secrets: the ancient songs of the adobe pueblos, a supposed crash-landing from another world, the toxic sands of Trinity, American defense innovated in government labs, and now me. My following year was hardly an improvement. Only just over four years removed from Oklahoma I was relentlessly mocked for my accent, especially with phrases from the widely popular Forrest Gump, as children quoted the film in an exaggerated, slow Southern drawl. Today, there is not a trace of that accent in my speech. At the time, Oklahoma still felt like home to me, hence the crushing devastation I felt when I entered math class in April 1995 to see the teacher watching the news of the Murrah Building near my old school smoldering in ruins following a terrorist attack—vengeance for the Branch Davidians; the siege of Waco. It was a despondent feeling to see something so close to home against the apathy of my classmates. Months later, over summer break I visited Oklahoma City and heard on a local radio station a version of Live’s Lightning Crashes spliced with sound bites of the many lives forever changed that April day, and I visited the grounds to see makeshift memorials at the blockade—stuffed animals fastened to the chain link fence, floral wreaths and bouquets, heartfelt messages on cards; the scene a mosaic of sentiment, mourning, and grief. More reasons to fear.
Middle school sex ed requirements went beyond the male-female dichotomy and the biological functions of their respective organs. Now we learned of STDs, of which HIV was covered in detail. By then I had known what HIV was, as this virus had long had a spectral element to my developmental years, always being there. Internally, I felt even more damned. Per the schoolyard chatter, this was by all accounts a “gay disease.” My health teacher tried to correct that inaccuracy without actually addressing that gay men existed, relying on the tragedy of Ryan White, who had died only months before I first arrived in Albuquerque. In my mind today, my hope is that he wanted us to see that viruses are less discriminatory than humans, and that he could not by law discuss gay issues in the classroom. I never had closure as to why he presented HIV the way he did, but I viewed him then as a raven-winged angel. This was, however, a time when the virus was still widely associated with gay men, a group that had failed to gain wide acceptance and tolerance in much of America. Based on my limited exposure due to demographics, infancy of the internet, and general unease with going to a library to read about the reality of a gay identity, it seemed that if one were a gay male, HIV/AIDS was inevitable and that through transitive identity politics, albeit illogical, by not contracting it one would not be gay. Socially it was difficult enough with relentless bullying from the mere assumption and accusation of homosexuality. Whether they really knew or not mattered little—it made all my years of middle school torture. I asked myself every morning if that would be the day nothing would happen. Or would it be childish name-calling? Or was it a day with a group of toughs ambushing me after school?
I completed a single semester of high school in Albuquerque before a second job transfer sent my family to Phoenix. It was an odd juxtaposition: moving from the eccentric quirks of a town that fully embraced its unique heritage to a surreal simulacrum of a city, where there stood an endless suburb of repetitive stucco and red tile roofs amid a place with a vaguely Southwestern flavor. It was here though, beginning in 1997, that I at long last heard homosexuality referred to with more acceptance. Bullying came to an abrupt end following this move. Perhaps it was a greater degree of tolerance. Perhaps it was because by this point I had grown more reserved and wary. Whatever the case, I dared not discuss it with anyone. The haunting menace of HIV seemed to disappear; I was more self-absorbed with my feelings and desires. This changed only three years later.
College. Out of state. Back to Oklahoma in 2000. That was an all-around awkward time—the state, I realized, was no longer home after a decade away; it was also my first experience with independence. I was miserable here, lost in life. It was then, however, I entered my first relationship despite vowing to transfer schools after my freshman year. Young and naive, I chose the love that sprang from this source of hate. In time, the topic came up: HIV testing. My first test ever yielded extreme anxiety and fear, forcing me to face mortality. Everywhere I went it felt always like Death stood silently behind me, his patient gaze beneath his cloak focused on my soon-to-expire soul, readying his scythe to reap me as a stalk of pestilent wheat. The results came back days later. Negative. Relieved as I was, Death leaned to my ear and whispered that this served as a lesson; he would be back later. My relief was short-lived. Only weeks later I woke to the news of the World Trade Center in New York aflame. On television I watched the towers smoke and burn, then collapse to the streets of Manhattan—thousands of lives tumbling down with the concrete and steel. During this frightening time I took comfort in having love in my life and living together to make a home, a safe place to find refuge in this new world. Three days later he said, “this isn’t working for me anymore.” The following few months in Oklahoma were most unpleasant, living out the semester together with that ex. It was a descent through the Gates of Dis, beyond its city walls aglow as Venusian rocks in the Hell-heat, past the tombs from whence tormented screams of the violent sounded; I ventured deeper through these circles to reach the columned halls of the infernal, stately palace at Pandæmonium—from there, the steep ascent to purgatory before paradise.
I returned to Arizona to complete school, but felt as though life had been completely torn down and needed to be rebuilt. I felt alone in the world with no direction, feeling my way around in the void in search of the way forward. I began the arduous coming out process and branched out in search of a beacon welcoming me from the darkness to a promised land. Meanwhile, as I unlearned the world and learned it anew, I took comfort in the rich philosophies within literature, as I majored in English:
“Hail horrors, hail infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell receive thy new Possessor: One who brings a mind not to be chang’d by place or time. The mind is its own place and in itself can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.”
“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
I was shaped in part by academia, finding solace and comfort in the libraries and class halls as if the university had become my home. Off campus I worked retail part-time, and the rest of my time I deeply invested myself in volunteer work with a political action committee to advance queer rights in Arizona. This begat further volunteer opportunities, guiding me as Charon across Stygian waters from my former life to the next. The exposure took me from an underground world of deception and discretion to a visible community of open authenticity, putting me in contact with the full range of the LGBTQIA+ spectrum and educating me on subcultural norms and social issues. It was at this period in the early 2000s that, for the first time in my life, there was humanity to HIV, not just a textbook explanation. As with the unseen tornadoes of my childhood, it had always been a looming monster I could not visualize. HIV now had faces. Names. Stories. The monster was much less intimidating. However, after years of stigma and lack of medical advances to slay the monster, this elusive disease still made me squeamish and uncomfortable; it was not something I could take lightly if ever I caught it. The virus may not have infected my body, but the years of entrenched fear of it infected my mind.
After graduation, I moved to South Korea for work. Over that year, little did I know how profound its impact would be. The bright lights, the food, the customs, the exciting pace of life, all things about the country seeped into my psyche like clever hobgoblins who impishly rearranged my perspective and interpretation of the world. Upon my return to Phoenix, a place that once felt like home had become a desolate wasteland, as if altered by sorcery. My attempt to reclaim the life I had before my time in Asia failed; I returned to South Korea within a year in an effort to reset, an effort that somewhat worked in the end, but at a great cost to me after my return to Seoul. Around this time I attended graduate school between, during, and after my sojourns, but struggled to choose a concentration within English literature. It took only one class project to guide me: queer theory. Not only could I arm myself with knowledge and applications for the real world through practical education, but I could have that last college experience to learn more about myself and my place in the world. Among the literary works I chose for my thesis was Tony Kushner’s masterpiece Angels in America. Its rich queer symbolism and beautiful dialogue were inspiring reminders that literature is not a dying art, that one could still make words an aesthetic.
Delving into the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, the play was a reminder that over two decades later the world still had not overcome this pandemic. Beyond that, characters from the play spoke to me from many angles, as if a mirror to my life; after my second stay in Korea, something was still off in Phoenix. Reading the play for my thesis yielded a piercing, poignant bit of advice: “This is a retreat, a vacuum, its virtue is that it lacks everything; deep-freeze for feelings. You can be numb and safe here, that’s what you came for. Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.” And there I was, hiding in the shadows, avoiding my potential. It was an ill-fated, yet revealing vacation that July 2008 that triggered an epiphany: I went to Russia by way of New York, spending time in both places. The trip to Moscow was a disaster, resulting in an early return to and longer stay in New York—the latter city seemed to invite me to be more, to reach my fullest potential, to be what other locales until then had suppressed. I knew I had to leave Phoenix after graduation that year.
I had made plans for the world in 2008, but as is life, the world made other plans for me. As I wound down my final years in graduate school, the global economy collapsed. It made the call center at which I worked harder to leave for something more relevant to my career goals, and one fateful date night that September made it harder to consider moving away from Phoenix. We hit it off right away and weathered the crippling economic storm together, building love, a life, and a home. When others I had known before would have left the instant the slightest inconvenience struck, he stuck around—so he did when the recession claimed my job in March 2010. Following that event, a Gestapo-like law eerily reminiscent to those stories my grandmother shared of her childhood in Austria put the spotlight on Arizona. To me, in the midst of this turmoil, it was a cruel indicator of the state’s priorities. After a serious discussion with him, my boyfriend and I drafted plans to leave the state behind for greener pastures. Month after disappointing month passed, jobs were scarce, no progress was made, the future became bleak. Much later, the governor spoke to the cameras again—her scarecrow hair framing the mummy-like skin on her face, a sinister smile and smirk on her venomous mouth, ghoulish eyes cold and deadly as Medusa’s stare—she happily announced an early ending of unemployment benefits to Arizonans. Within weeks, all my options exhausted, I was forced back to Oklahoma to wait out the recession. In the garage of our apartment building in April 2011, I gave my love a goodbye and got in my car. He walked off in tears. I left for the open road to leave the state, driving away in silence.
After moving, we remained together long distance, meeting three times following my departure. I felt our love was strong enough to traverse the desert, mountains, and plains; galactic even, crossing the stars if need be. Months prior to leaving Phoenix I attended a birthday party with my boyfriend, meeting his close friend and coworker at the airline—a gracious, warm, and kindhearted soul, the sort one cannot help but to love. Later in the year after relocating to Oklahoma, I received a call. My boyfriend was listless, in shock. This friend had been murdered, his death quickly saddening every life he touched. My love’s life had changed following that incident, his personality now different and distant to me while finding camaraderie and family in his coworkers, our future eroding away as a violent sea at Poseidon’s command to a fragile and weak sandbar; we parted ways thereafter.
By early 2012 I returned to work after nearly two years without, the toll of the recession reducing what I had built of life to nothing. February, ten months away from the next forecast apocalypse. I visited my lonely grandmother, though not enough. She served me Kaffeehaus-style coffee black as a new moon midnight and lit a cigarette, its silvery blue plumes whirling and eddying about as she entered a trance and spoke in her thick Viennese accent: fond stories of returning to Austria as an adult and picnicking in the midsummer Alps; lying to her father about going to confession when she had been meeting my Comanche Nation/American grandfather stationed in Vienna after the war; following the Anschluss, a strange man she would see while walking to school, her parents complaining to authorities about him. She commented she never knew what happened to him, paused, remained quiet, muttered regrets in German, and changed the subject. In her final years, she had stories to tell, and only wanted someone to listen. By this late point in life, she had become a recluse afraid to leave the house. The grandfather of mine had left her long before my birth—he followed the cadence of his tribe’s war drums and the deafening thunder of their painted horses’ hooves to the theater of war in Europe, yet could not face the challenges of matrimony and fatherhood. More to fear.
I went through that time in Oklahoma blankly, living as a husk—the shed exoskeleton of a spider, a spindly casing vaguely resembling a living thing. As reality sank in that I was single again, I only barely looked into the local gay world from a safe and protected shell, as a turtle peeking out from within its carapace. After nearly four years in a relationship, the reality of HIV returned. I found myself unwilling to put myself in any situation in which catching it could happen, including dating. But I began seeing an unusual new term gaining prevalence, one I had not seen from the shelter of monogamy: PrEP. This term was growing more common, but it was new to me. In my time removed from the single life, advances had been made in the fight against HIV. More strangely to me was its apparent effect on culture, as HIV seemed to have changed from a frightening menace plaguing the gay community to something treated with nonchalance. This deadly scourge had been a shadow on my life and it seemed now in the early 2010s that the battle had turned. Greater than the virus though, my deterrent to any romantic aspect of my humanity was the suffocating reality of my personal setbacks as the struggling economy clawed its way from out the ruins. I thought back to my ex, and that I had put off plans for love once. I would not repeat that mistake this time around; I would revisit that much later after improving my situation first. As I drifted through life there, I watched from isolation as the world passed me by, as others achieved the happiness and goals so unattainable to me. Instead, I recalled Dante: “There is no greater sorrow than to be mindful of the happy time in misery...” This was not the life I had planned for myself.
Almost ten years after making that decision to make a more desirable life for myself, after much frustration and disappointment, I made the move to Los Angeles. Dedication and ambition paid off, and the city nurtured, soothed, and healed me. This was, however, until a mysterious virus began to spread rapidly across the world. COVID-19. I heard some vague comparisons of it to the HIV pandemic that had been skulking in the background since the day I was born. I could only imagine that this fear and uncertainty was how older generations than mine felt as cases of HIV/AIDS swept across the country, claiming one life after another, friends and family. Merely hearing the news of it, bombarded by media panic, seeing the unnerved people around me, all of it took me back to the hallways of that school as some unseen force outside loomed. HIV had always burned in my mind as a terrifying thing; COVID-19 was oddly not bothering me. Although I avoided exposure all my years I realized too that HIV also seemed less frightening—I had evolved over time. I began to grow wary and uncomfortable with the swift sociocultural response to COVID, as lambs to the slaughter; a new-found land of the lotus-eaters content with lockdown. So fixated were people on the unknown that the world collapsed around them, unnoticed. The job that took over a year to get was lost within minutes. The life that took ten years to achieve, threatened; a scorched earth campaign to the life I built. Flashbacks to that last long-term unemployment period. I apply for a replacement job—I am everything they want, yet never quite good enough. Try as I might, I never can seem to get ahead. Accursed as if by the mischievous deeds of the god of witches, his worshipers dancing around him in a ring by the flickering light of candles, casting spells in his name; black magic binding me to misfortune. I am hungry. I see the tone in my body, flesh outlining bones and veins; body by malnourishment. I hear the hollow bromide every day, “we’re all in this together.” I cannot and do not believe it. People with six-digit salaries encourage my attrition from their mansion grounds, their words falling fast and sharp like guillotine blades to a tender neck. Let them eat cake. Fiddle while Rome burns. A bustling city has been rendered desolate. I am reduced to a walking shadow, trying to revert a Heav’n-turned-Hell.
AUTHOR BIO:
I have always valued the written word as an underappreciated aesthetic. I feel I'm an unending patchwork wandering through life, collecting pieces of the world affixing them to me to make who I am, who I will become.