A-LISTS living positive by paul montero The DevilMade Me Do It
THE EASY TARGET I was 24…still insatiably worried about my appearance—and my social standing in the gay community as a result of it. It makes my skin crawl just remembering how deeply I would let people’s vapid opinions matter to me. Anyway, I was browsing my usual “dating” site, when a familiar face popped into my inbox. I’d seen him around before. Tall, chiseled, masculine—all the meaningless characteristics that assured me I’d never get his attention. Until now. Looking back, I’d forgotten how endearing he was. Versatile, open to
experimentation and blessedly local. (There’s something so right about a f- buddy who lives within jogging distance). Plus, he was the most handsome longshoreman I’d ever seen—a much-needed shot in the arm to my fickle self esteem. Upon meeting, he was a total gentleman—and even better- looking than his pictures. It didn’t take long for things to develop physically.
THE SUAVE SUITOR Sexually imaginative, dripping with stamina…and best of all, compli-
mentary and convincingly genuine. This guy was without a doubt well out of my league. And yet here he was, holding me and only me in our afterglow. Kissing MY forehead instead of any of the thousands of exemplars of online manhood he could have chosen. “Whatever it is I’m doing right…whatever he likes about me, I’d better not screw it up,” I thought. “Keeping him is prior- ity one.” So when he proposed we try barebacking, and he assured me that he was
negative and had the test results to prove it, it was an easy decision to make. He really knew how to appeal to the little devil on my shoulder. “If a guy as gorgeous as him is sticking around, it’s for a good reason,” I thought. Hell, he even had the angel on my other shoulder singing 1960s Motown love ballads.
It was only a matter of time before my boyfriend and I discussed my sero-conversion.
We’d touched on it before, but never like this. The probing questions…the psycho- analysis of each bad decision. Yikes! Before now, I’d never really had a reason to really think about WHY it all happened in the first place—to analyze the series of red flags being rationalized away. From the first day I found out at the clinic, I convinced myself never to look back,
dwell…or even have an emotional breakdown that would tip off my friends and family. Even now, two years after my diagnosis, I have yet to lose my wits the way my paranoid HIV-negative-self predicted I would do years earlier. Sure, there have been a few tears here and there—mostly with the help of Jim Beam, Jack Daniels and Jose Cuervo—but no depression, change in eating and sleeping habits…nothing that a typical case like mine usually endures. That’s when it hit me, “I still haven’t faced it.” I had convinced myself so thoroughly that I needed no release or closure, that ev-
ery part of me believed it. Clearly my boyfriend’s questions needed to be answered A.S.A.P.—not just for his peace of mind, but also to alleviate any unseen emotional pres- sure points of mine. So what did happen that January, when I began that misguided affair with the infamous Todd?
THE SHOE DROPS That’s when I discovered the quickest way to make a guy disappear, though not for good. Tell a guy he means something to you after only a few weeks, and you’ll scare him around a corner. He’ll still come around for a few bites of the good stuff now and again. But tell him you got positive HIV test
results and inform him that he’s the only guy you’ve been with for months, and you’ll likely never see him again. At that point a nasty, angry e-mail (or voicemail or post-it with a knife sticking through it) may as well seal the deal and provide you with the closure he’s too much of a coward to offer. Now it may seem quick of me to conclude it was in fact he who infected me. But seeing his many online profiles—some claiming to be HIV positive, others saying nega- tive—as well as the revealing talk with one of his current hookups about how Todd still tells sexual partners that he’s negative, the evidence stands. After all, how many people have the same screen name anyway? So why did I do it? I guess I let the little devil on my shoulder convince me that I needed to bareback in order to be deserving of love. Once the angel smacked me around and showed me how to stop being a shallow victim, that’s when I really started to deserve it. Amen.
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RAGE monthly | OCTOBER 2010
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