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Once upon a time, I wanted to be a doctor. Never mind my terrible grades in all things science. Never mind that I decided this in my second year of college, after deciding that the music school that I’d wanted for years wasn’t for me. It was 2006. It was the age of Dr. Gregory House. 

I love a good medical drama. My mother, a nurse, raised me on ER and General Hospital, always pointing out all the plot lines that “would never happen in real life” but were really cool to watch on TV. My mother credits ER with pushing her toward her decades-long career in the operating room. So when I, a poor lost college sophomore who had gone to school to play French horn (French horn!) and found it wasn’t what I thought it would be, I did what I knew best to do and turned to TV. And on TV, I found House. 

House had it all: a painkiller-addicted doctor with a smart mouth and a slap-worthy face, medical mysteries solved via CSI-style case-of-the-week format, and a beleaguered crew of sidekick physicians whose instincts were never quite as good as House’s. I would spend each episode studying the setup and trying to unravel what the medical culprit could be before the ultimate reveal. Instead of realizing that what I might want to be was a writer with a good plot, I missed the mark and decided I wanted to be a doctor. 

Reader, I did not become a doctor. (That fizzled out after one year of biology classes and a stint working in a local nursing home.) But I remain a lifelong medical mystery buff. Here, then, are a few of my recent long-form favorites — enjoy the game of whatdunnit. 

Swamp Boy (Kris Newby, Now This News, October 2022)

One day, a 14-year-old boy with no previous physical or mental issues informs his parents that he is the “evil, damned son of the devil” and he needs to kill himself before he destroys them all. Thus begins the onset of a massive medical manhunt to uncover exactly what is causing the boy’s psychosis and physical symptoms, which include OCD, shortness of breath, chronic pain, frequent urination, intense headaches, the belief that he had green vines growing under his skin, the belief that he was a bird, and the belief that the family cat was ordering him to kill everyone around him — including the family fish. 

Complete with vivid graphic-novel-styled art illustrating some of the reported hallucinations, this piece has it all, including a father’s fight against the medical establishment and an ending you’ll never see coming. In other words, it’s about as close as one can get to a real-life episode of House. 

Meanwhile, back at home, now more than seven months after his son’s first psychotic breakdown, Scott could finally clear his mind, and began to focus his analytical skills on Michael’s case.

To the medical experts, his son had been a ten-inch-tall stack of paper annotated with clinical notes. Each expert had examined one piece of Michael—his brain, his stomach, his heart, his immune system, his gut, his spine, his skin, his eyes. Scott, meanwhile, was determined to analyze Michael as a whole. “I knew I had to figure out what was wrong, or I’d lose my son,” he said.

It was during one of his many conversations with doctors about Michael’s potential treatment that Scott had an epiphany: Maybe no one could help their son because they were treating the wrong illness.

What Happened to the Girls in Le Roy (Susan Dominus, The New York Times Magazine, March 2012)

On an ordinary day in Le Roy, New York, a high school cheerleader begins twitching. Another cheerleader develops tics a week later. And another after that; and another after that. It spreads past the cheerleaders and on to the art kids, a boy, kids in neighboring schools. Is there something in the water? Is it those mysterious bins labeled with hazardous waste from a nearby factory? Is it that strange orange ooze coming up from the ground on the football field? Or is it all in their heads? 

Featuring media vans, Dr. Drew appearances, familial finger-pointing, women’s least favorite H-word (hysteria), and a cameo from legal crusader Erin Brockovich, Dominus’s reporting takes us into the mystery that consumed a small Northeastern town, while still making the science accessible to lay readers. 

How could one person’s illness be reflected in another person’s neural pathways, playing a trick on consciousness, convincing the host that it originated in her own body? In the last decade, scientists have begun to explore the concept that regions in our brain once thought to activate only our own activity or sensations are also firing what are known as mirror neurons when we witness someone else perform an action or feel a sensation. Mass psychogenic illness could be thought of as the maladaptive version of the kind of empathy that finds expression in actual physical sensation: the contagious yawn or sympathetic nausea or the sibling who grabs his own finger when he sees his brother’s bleed.

The Pre-Pandemic Puzzle (W. Pate McMichael, St. Louis Magazine, August 2007)

No, not that pandemic. Pate McMichael looks back at the teenager who may have died of AIDS more than a decade before HIV gripped the nation. But where did the virus come from? How did a young boy who was not a drug user, had not left the state, and never received a blood transfusion contract a virus that wouldn’t be detected in the United States for another decade? Furthermore, why did the news break in the mainstream media before the scientists who first identified the strain even had a chance to understand what was in their lab?  

This piece combines two of my favorite things: a medical mystery and an ethical quandary. It pulls back the curtain on how the scientific establishment studies new diseases and how and when they release that information to the public. Add in that historical lens — doctors seeing a new and potentially terrifying disease in the 1960s, the echoes of Hurricane Katrina in Pate McMichael’s 2007 writing — and you’ve got a winner. 

A few years later, in 1973, Elvin-Lewis and Witte presented Robert R.’s case at a lymphology conference and published a journal article on his systemic chlamydia in The Journal of Lymphology. The paper they presented actually raised as many questions as it answered. Why had Chlamydia spread throughout the body, when it normally stayed near the port of entry? And why did this young man have these purplish, malignant lesions called Kaposi’s sarcoma, as the alert pathologist had discovered during the autopsy? Kaposi’s sarcoma was known as an old man’s skin disease, typically affecting Jews and Italians. The pathologist decided that Robert R. had an African variant that affected children and primarily targeted the lymphatic system. That decision suggested an intriguing question: How did a black 15-year-old from St. Louis acquire Kaposi’s sarcoma?

Doctor Donor Fertility Fraud (Kudrat Wadhwa, The Verge, June 2022)

A woman seeking her familial DNA for a clinical trial learns that not only is her father not her biological father, but her bio dad is actually her mother’s fertility doctor. All together, now: Yikes. Worse, she finds out that she is not alone; several other children conceived via fertility clinics have also discovered that their fertility doctors are their real fathers. One doctor, featured in the Netflix documentary Our Father, sired over 90 children. 

This piece grapples with ethical questions and hard-to-draw lines: Is it medical rape to inseminate someone with fraudulent sperm? Do these doctor-fathers owe their scores of children anything? Should these children, once the fathers are discovered, seek a relationship with their bio dads? And what if the bio dad wants nothing to do with them? What if these men fail to see their behavior as a violation? 

Not a mystery, but still riveting — and a good case study around the meaning of consent. 

Not everyone who is watching Our Father has a personal connection at stake, but they are drawn in regardless. Fertility fraud rivets audiences because it channels the mysterious allure of genetic inheritance, crossing it with the perverse power relations between a doctor and their patient. Conception — so often an intimate act — is made impersonal and medicalized in the context of the fertility clinic, and then made intimate again through the abuse of the doctor-patient relationship. 

Every child of fertility fraud is a baby who was desperately and deeply wanted by their parents. The exploitation of that desire is devastating; the fact that the body becomes evidence of the transgression is all the worse.

Sick To Our Stomachs: Why Does Everyone Have IBS? (Natasha Boyd, The Drift, June 2022)

If Rule 34 of the internet is that there exists porn for every possible interest, then Rule 35, according to Jo Piazza of the podcast Under the Influence, is that there exists an influencer for every topic — including diarrhea. 

Why yes, Hot Girls do have IBS, and you can hear all about it on TikTok, Instagram, and pretty much anywhere else there is to make money off of “bloating positivity.” (Truly, if there was ever a sign that we really are in late-stage capitalism, this has to be it.) But really, why do so many hot girls (and other mortals) have IBS these days? This essay takes a look at the history of digestive discomforts, all the way back to the 1700s when The Gentleman’s Magazine examined why all the “well-to-do Ladies” complain of stomach “[d]iagnosticks … neither visible or certain” and to our new era of “normalizing bowel function” (finally!).

It has a name, but not much else. IBS is a so-called “functional disorder,” meaning that it is a condition without identifiable cause. Unlike with inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis, patients diagnosed with IBS have no medically detectable signs of damage or disease in their digestive tracts. Essentially, IBS is diagnosed when tests come back normal; it’s what’s written down on a chart when there’s nothing else left to identify. Many people with IBS struggle with the implication that their symptoms are made up — especially as IBS both relies on self-reporting and presents differently from patient to patient. It is a catch-all term for a variety of gastrointestinal ailments, including cramping, bloating, intestinal gas, diarrhea, and constipation. Statistically, it affects more women than men, and is most common in people under 50. Regular exercise, cognitive behavioral therapy, yoga, and meditation have all been shown to alleviate symptoms. Even so, “IBS is not a psychiatric illness,” says Dr. Arun Swaminath, director of the inflammatory bowel disease program at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, “though stress and depression can make symptoms worse.” Despite its growing prevalence — IBS is the most frequently diagnosed gastrointestinal disorder — some doctors and digestive specialists question its utility as a medical construct, since the diagnosis does not elucidate anything about patients’ physiology or the causes of their discomfort. It is, however, very profitable: in the United States, the annual medical costs associated with IBS exceed $1 billion.

Lisa Bubert is a writer and librarian based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Texas Highways, Washington Square Review, and more.

Editor: Peter Rubin

Copy Editor: Krista Stevens

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In this stunning excerpt from her new book “Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco,” published at Guernica, Alia Volz remembers her parents’ underground marijuana brownie business in San Francisco, California, at the onset of the AIDS epidemic. Fifteen years before the first effective treatments were available on the market, “marijuana emerged as a palliative remedy for many AIDS-related symptoms, particularly for the nausea and appetite loss that accompanied the deadly wasting syndrome.”

San Francisco struggled under the highest density of HIV/AIDS cases in the western world. The first effective medication wouldn’t reach the market until 1996—fifteen years after Bobbi Campbell hung his warning in the window of Star Pharmacy….My mom joined the underground network of dealer-healers breaking the law to get soothing cannabis into bodies of those who needed it at the dawn of the medical-marijuana movement.

When my parents’ marriage collapsed in the mid-eighties, my mom and I moved back to the city full time. At nine, I was deemed old enough to help my mom bake. I tagged along on deliveries, which had become tours of sickbeds, and saw firsthand the relief our home-baked edibles brought.

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Svetlana Kitto | Longreads | February 2020 | 6 minutes (1,503 words)

Writing the Mother Wound, a series co-published with Writing our Lives and Longreads, examines the complexities of mother love. 

* * *

My parents sat us down on the edge of their bed to tell us they were separating. There was a shimmering hologram sticker of blond-haired and blue-eyed Jesus in a white robe on the door of my dad’s bedside table. I had put my fingers over it many times, trying to take Jesus into my heart like I had seen on TV. Everything I knew about America I learned from TV. Please make sure my mom and dad don’t die before I wake up. Please make sure I don’t get kidnapped like the kid on Growing Pains. Thank you, Jesus. My dad also had pictures of Hindu gods all over the house and a small Buddha statue on top of his dresser, but there was nothing about them on TV. My mom was Latvian and Jewish, but none of that was on our walls. She deferred to my dad’s New Age Englishness, and that was that.

While my parents talked to us, holding our hands and being uncharacteristically gentle, my sister cried, and I felt something inside me warm up. I stared at my mom’s pink suede and snakeskin heels on the shoe rack at the foot of the bed. She didn’t wear them anymore because they “destroyed” her back. I wanted her to wear them so badly! I didn’t want them to hurt her back and I didn’t understand how a back could hurt. My dad’s back had a hurt too, both of them had “bad backs.” I thought this had to do with them being more like old people than young because of all the drugs they had used before getting sober when I was 5. I didn’t understand that my mom was really young. She was a really young person who wanted to be with her friends. 

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After my parents separated, my mother moved my sister and me into a tiny one-bedroom on Laurel Avenue in West Hollywood. Down on Sunset Boulevard there was the Laugh Factory and Greenblatt’s Deli and the Coconut Teaser, a place for grown-ups I knew. What did grown-ups do in places? Up the street the other way was Fountain Avenue and the mouth of Laurel Canyon where I went to elementary school, just on top of the hill. After school, I rode my bike up and down our block, and one day, on the corner of Fountain and Laurel, I had my first existential crisis. I looked up at the sky and thought, overwhelmed and slightly horrified: I am me. I was 9. 

It was a Los Angeles childhood so a lot of our time was spent in the car — a beat-up gold Corolla with a Die Yuppie Scum bumper sticker on the back. My grandmother had given my mother the car to help her start her new life, separate from my father. If it was hot, the windows would be rolled down and the AC on. My mom would either be smoking or rolling a cigarette, which she could do with one hand. We would drive all over Hollywood running errands and visiting her friends, many of them sober, some of them still using, almost all of them gay men. All the first people I loved outside of my family were gay men. 

My mom’s best friend, Al Babayan, was the first person close to us to go. He was Armenian and had spent most of his childhood in Glendale in Los Angeles. He had slept with Stephan, who everyone knew had HIV. Al loved the Smiths; he was very sensitive. The first thing he would do when he visited us was check on our German shepherd Maya and make sure she had water. 

* * *

I was very concerned about my mom’s romantic life. On the phone I would hear her say, “I’m just so fucking lonely.” I’d seen her break down in traffic, in the gold Corolla. “Your fucking father. Your fucking selfish father.” And it was true that my dad seemed to be fine, as the months went by piling on the girlfriends who looked nothing like my blond Jewish Latvian mother — women with names like Theresa Sullivan, Shannon O’Donoghue.

Still, I couldn’t understand my mom’s loneliness because she had so many friends and so many people who loved her and, as a result, loved her girls. Eeda and her girls had many places to go on the weekend. In the summer, my mom’s friend Tracy invited us to swim at her parent’s mansion in Santa Monica Canyon. It belonged to Tracy’s mother, who was the famous Hollywood actress Jean Simmons. She was never there when we were so we could play hide-and-seek in all the bedrooms and eat Chicken McNuggets by the pool.  

All of my mom’s friends had a different car to ride around the city in, looking out for meters that had leftover money in them, windows down and air-conditioning on at the same time, music blaring. If it wasn’t classical music, it was Massive Attack or Prince, whom my mom and her friends loved the most. He can play every instrument, Mom said. They were the same age. He’s a genius. You can’t tell if he’s gay or straight and it doesn’t matter, she said. Everyone wants to have sex with Prince. I would rewind the tape to play “Little Red Corvette,” “Kiss,” “I Would Die 4 U” over and over, and we would all sing. I’m not a woman / I’m not a man / I am something that you’ll never understand.

One day, my mom and I were driving to our bank in West Hollywood when I had a brilliant idea.

“Mom!” I said. “Why don’t you just be with a gay man? There are so many that you like!”

My mom paused. “Sleeping with a gay man would be like blowing your brains out with a shotgun right now,” she said gravely into the rearview mirror, shifting the car into park.

* * *

The year Ryan White died, my mother moved us to a new apartment in a gated community called Park LaBrea. She had been promoted at the production house, and we were driving around in a newly leased Volkswagen convertible. Now, Tim or Tracy or Joelle would pile into the car and we would drive to the beach with the top down and the AC on. Al came over to our new place once before he died. He and my mom got into a fight. She knew he had fixed by the burn mark he left on the toilet. “No junkie wants to be told they can’t use,” she said. I remember going to see him in hospice care in Studio City. My sister cried and I thought about our dog, Maya. I wanted to cry so my mom knew I cared.

There was Daniel, whose rich parents bought him a house in Laurel Canyon with a beautiful pool that was like a dark lagoon with jets that pumped warm water. My mom had told me that Daniel’s parents bought him lots of things because they felt guilty, because they had never accepted their gay son and now he was going to die. Daniel’s skin was pocked, which I associated with his HIV, but I later learned they were actually acne scars. Daniel took lots of pictures of Eeda and her beautiful daughters by the pool and told me I looked like a Pre-Raphaelite painting. 

There were people who were friends of both my parents. Tim McGowan was one, and with him my mother’s relationship was a little rockier, probably because it was too much based in a shared bitterness toward my father. There was Bruce Almeda, a pastry chef from the South who called my dad Ma Bell because he was always on the phone. There was my dad’s friend Jimmy Drinkovitch who planned to commit suicide before he got really sick. He made a promise to his lover that if he killed himself he would tell him first so that they could go together. But in the end he didn’t tell him.

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With the deaths of Al and Daniel, my mom had lost her two closest friends. When she was working as an editor on the movie Mo’ Money, she met a successful music supervisor, who was also her boss. She wasn’t interested in him at first. But he wouldn’t leave her alone, she said. And eventually: He has nice calves, and he’s nothing like your father. He wanted her to quit her job and let him take care of all of us. Soon we were living with him and his two sons in a big house that wasn’t ours in Santa Monica. My mom started drinking again in secret. I was a teenager so I wasn’t paying attention to her anymore. I started drinking too.

* * *

Also in the Writing the Mother Wound Series:

‘A World Where Mothers are Seen’: Series Introduction by Vanessa Mártir
I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive, by Elisabet Velasquez
Frenzied Woman, by Cinelle Barnes
Tar Bubbles, by Melissa Matthewson
‘To Be Well’: An Unmothered Daughter’s Search for Love, by Vanessa Mártir
Witness Mami Roar, by Sonia Alejandra Rodriguez
Leadership Academy, by Victor Yang

* * *

Svetlana Kitto is a writer and oral historian in NYC. Her writing has been featured in The Cut, Hyperallergic, New York Times, Guernica, and VICE. She’s currently working on a novel called Purvs, which means “swamp” in Latvian and is the name of the country’s first gay club.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Kate Walter | Longreads | Month 2019 | 7 minutes (1800 words)

“Want to go to Woodstock with me?” my boyfriend Joe asked.

“Yes!” I screamed at his offer. I was a 20-year-old student at a conservative Catholic women’s college in New Jersey. Joe was my guide into the radical 60s.

We’d met at the Jersey Shore when my sorority rented a house in Belmar, a party town. Joe was four years older than me, already out of school. He had a job, his own apartment, a motorcycle and long hair. My father disliked him. It didn’t help when my mother found my birth control pills in my dresser.

Joe was over six feet tall, with black hair and dark eyes, kinda hairy and a bit chubby, a bear — not my type at all. He had wire-rimmed glasses, like his idol, John Lennon, and wore vests with fringe. Since Joe was the music editor for The Aquarian, a popular underground newspaper, we became regulars at the Fillmore East. Nothing could have kept us two rockers from the three-day music festival in the lower Catskills.

That was so long ago, Joe and I were both still straight. Years later, in the 70s, we came out — first him, then me. (No wonder the sex wasn’t so hot.)

I’ll never forget how early Thursday morning, August 14, 1969, Joe picked me up at the Jersey Shore. Then we drove to East Brunswick to connect with his brother and his brother’s girlfriend. They followed us in their car.

Joe drove his black Kharman Ghia convertible, a two seater with a tiny trunk. The tents and backpacks with sleeping bags were in the bigger car in our little caravan upstate. Joe’s Italian mother, a great cook, packed enough food in the cooler to last for days. Good thing because the local stores and restaurants sold out. We never expected to be trapped on this big muddy field with roads blocked, the Thruway shut down.

“Hippies Mired in a Sea of Mud,” read the Daily News headline. No wonder my parents were worried.

***

When we arrived that evening, vehicles were lined up for miles along Route 17B, the road that led to the site in the town of White Lake. We ditched the two cars along the roadside, slipped on our backpacks, grabbed the cooler and tents, and followed the crowds to Yasgur’s farm. No one asked for our tickets.

On Friday, we had plans to meet our friends, Terry and Leslie, who drove up separately. Terry had been drafted into the army, which meant going to Viet Nam. He was scheduled to leave that Monday.

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As Joe and I trudged up a ridge toward the information booths, I remembered the fun times the four of us had at the Jersey Shore, where they’d played matchmaker for me and Joe. What if Terry didn’t come back? Cresting the hill, Joe and I saw the mobbed tables and hundreds of people waiting to use the pay phones. I didn’t call my parents, as promised. I felt rebellious.

It was so crowded we could not make out anyone. We found a spot to watch the music, which provided a decent view when Richie Havens opened the festival with his rousing version of “Freedom.” I was excited as I viewed the freaky crowds. At my religious college, I’d felt like a weirdo, but here were tons of kids like me with wild hair, dancing free form, love beads flying. That night it drizzled and then poured while we huddled together. We lit matches during Melanie’s performance, and laughed with Arlo Guthrie. Drenched, we retreated to the tent.

On Saturday morning, Joe and I slid down a muddy road and we bumped directly

into Terry and Leslie. We hugged and made plans to meet later.

Saturday afternoon, we all sat together, singing along to Country Joe’s “Fixing to Die Rag.” I could not imagine what was going through Terry’s head as we sang along, Be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box. One two, three, what are we fighting for? Don’t ask me. I don’t give a damn. Next stop is Viet Nam.

It was rainy and slippery, and we were soaked all the time, even in the tents. Our sleeping bags got soggy and I didn’t sleep much. But who wanted to rest while the super groups of rock were playing all night? Everything was behind schedule with the show stopping when thunderstorms and torrential rains hit.

I drank red wine and bummed cigarettes, smoking more when I hung out with Joe. Nobody from our crowd had pot. Joe thought his brother was bringing half an ounce, but his brother thought Joe had it. At first I was pissed. Then I realized it didn’t matter. The crowd passed joints around during the music. We knew better than to take any of the acid.

Santana’s jam on “Soul Sacrifice” was explosive. I was dancing and air drumming along

to the band’s hot Latin percussionists as Carlos Santana’s guitar riffs cut through the air. Joe bounced in his grassy seat, but I jumped into an impromptu conga line snaking around our section.

Around midnight, trying to stay awake, Joe and I got up and boogied to Credence Clearwater Revival. After their set, we retreated to our leaky tent, exhausted. We could still hear the music, so we hung out near the flap, drinking wine and listening. Janis Joplin whipped herself into a frenzy on “Piece of My Heart” and “Ball and Chain.” I loved Janis and wanted to be watching, but we’d been out in the rain and mud for 12 hours.

I slipped on my last dry T-shirt and passed out. We were too tired to do more than kiss good night. The next morning, we crawled from the tent, dirty and thirsty, when the Jefferson Airplane jolted us to life, Grace Slick ripping into a fantastic set with “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit.”

We left Sunday afternoon, with no dry clothes left. I was wearing Joe’s bell bottoms, rolled up. He had brought more outfits than me. The concert was still going on. I wanted to stay longer, but he had to work Monday and it was a long hike back to the car. I left the Woodstock Festival feeling incredibly high and elated.

We turned on the FM radio as we got closer to the city and heard that a million people had attended the festival. Something inside me shifted. I felt powerful. Together Joe and I had been part of history.

***

Three years after Woodstock, Joe and I were walking through the woods when he told me he liked men and didn’t want to keep stringing me along. He explained how he’d gotten out of the draft by telling a shrink he was gay. (I’d wondered about that.) He apologized for the deception and said he hoped we could be friends after I got over being mad at him.

I was upset about losing my boyfriend, but we remained close. A few years later, when I came out, having gay male pals made the transition easier. Joe escorted me to gay bars and was my queer wing man, hooking me up with my first lesbian lover.

I moved to the East Village, cut my hair short and began freelancing. Joe got a crew cut and contact lenses. He lost weight and quit cigarettes. Moving to the Upper West Side, he worked as a trade magazine editor. I thought we’d hang out more, but he was involved with his Fire Island friends and I lived downtown with my partner. We stayed close over the years. He lived for his summer house in the Pines and loved the rampant sex.

It’s hard to conceive now how innocent we were at Woodstock. At the festival, we were terrified about our friends getting killed in an unpopular war in a foreign country — although Terry got a last-minute deferment. We had no idea what other kinds of dangers lay ahead: Twenty years later, right in our backyard, the AIDS epidemic wiped out a generation of gay men, including Joe. If the government had been more responsive to finding a cure for this plague in the early ‘80s, Joe and I might be attending Woodstock reunions together.

***

In August 1994, I went back to Yasgur’s farm on the 25th anniversary of the Woodstock Festival. It wasn’t the same without Joe. For many years, my former partner, Slim, and I had rented a rustic cottage in Sullivan County 20 minutes from the field. That Saturday we took off for White Lake, where 50,000 people were camped (illegally) for the reunion, a far cry from the original 500,000. (It turned out the initial radio report we heard in’69 citing a million attendees had been wrong.) This time we parked close to the site. Local bands played on a rickety stage. Rumors flew that The Stones would show up. They didn’t.

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As we walked around, I remembered how Joe felt so connected to the scene that he thought he’d die at 27, like Janis, Jimi and Jim. He was relieved when that birthday passed.

Visitors made little shrines with stones, crystals, flowers, love beads, photos, notes. I spotted an ACT-UP sticker. A local artist set up a huge piece of poster paper, urging those who attended the original festival to sign our names and record a message for those missing this reunion. I wrote:

Joe & Kate 69

Kate 94

Joe fought a two-year battle against AIDS, filing stories until the end, and dying at 43 in 1989. When I visited him in the hospital, I made him laugh. At his funeral, a priest called him “Joseph.” I wanted to scream, “His name is Joe!”

At the concert site, I imagined Joe coming down the path. I thought it might be fun to return, but it depressed me. I felt old. I felt queer. Everyone looked straight. I wondered how many others who attended the festival later came out like we did?

It hit me that the Stonewall Riots and the Woodstock Festival occurred the same summer, 1969. Stonewall got less publicity, but now it seemed clear that the six days of fighting in Greenwich Village were more prescient and impactful than three days of peace and love.

***

In the summer of ’69, I was a naive college kid who had my mind blown at the most memorable concert of my generation. Fifty years later, I still recall Joe when I hear The Who. He loved their lyric, “Hope I die before I get old.” Tragically, he fulfilled that classic rock-and-roll wish.

* * *

Kate Walter is a Manhattan-based freelance writer and the author of the memoir Looking for a Kiss: a Chronicle of Downtown Heartbreak and Healing.

Editor: Sari Botton

Colin Dickey | Longreads | June 2019 | 13 minutes (3,573 words)

I remember my first encounter with the work of Félix González-Torres, even though most of the details are fuzzy. I don’t remember which museum we were at, nor which piece, exactly, it was. I don’t remember the year, though it was sometimes in the early 2000s. Sometimes the way memory works is through a very tight precision that exists in a sea of imprecision.

It was one of his many takeaway pieces, one of the stacks of paper — a heavy stack of large, poster-size paper, each printed with the same image — and the public was invited to take a sheet. I remember Nicole explaining to me how the weight of the stack of paper was the same as González-Torres’s lover, and slowly, one by one, the stack would be diminished by visitors taking sheets away one at a time. González-Torres’s lover, who had died of AIDS, as would, eventually, González-Torres himself. The stack would wither and diminish but it could be replenished by the museum’s curators. Nicole took one of the prints — I can’t remember what was on it, which image or block of text — and we moved on.

The weight is the important part — the idea of a body. Félix González-Torres made work about the physical space of a body, and how that body could change and wither by disease, or how it could be reconstituted in different ways. So many of González-Torres’s works involve subtraction. Perhaps most famously were his mountains of candy — often the exact weight of his lover Ross Laycock, or the weight of González-Torres and Laycock together — where viewers would be invited to take a piece of candy and eat it, this small thing that made up the weight of the body of González-Torres’s dead lover becoming part of the bodies of the audience.

The stacks get replenished, the candies get replenished. Unlike actual dying bodies that waste away and never come back, in González-Torres’s work there is a constant, if false, sense of renewal and regeneration. Meanwhile the thing you take away, that stays with you. I don’t remember the details, but I remember the physicality of this thing, Nicole rolling it up into a cylinder, cradling it so it wouldn’t get bent or damaged, taking it back home with us to our apartment, this object that now was with us. I remember the weight of something so small, a piece of paper, that could accumulate in a pile to equal the weight of someone. How bodies are heavy but they can waste away, a little at a time, losing weight in increments no bigger than a piece of paper. I remember us carrying home that piece of paper, and I remember thinking about everyone else throughout the city carrying their own prints from that same stack, how we were carrying this ideal weight of Ross Laycock through the city as we went about our lives.

In the wake of death, the beloved becomes the only addressee, the only public.

Today, you can buy prints from González-Torres’s takeaway pieces on eBay: things that people once picked up for free are now listed for $80, $250, $8,000, even $12,000. Because anything offered in a spirit of generosity or in a spirit of grief will always be eventually converted into capital. That print that Nicole picked up out of a pile almost two decades ago might now, I realize, be “worth something,” with all the contradictory implications of that phrase.

At some point, though, Nicole got rid of the print, because we never got around to hanging it on the wall, or maybe we just didn’t have space. Every so often you have to go through your clutter and throw out the stuff that doesn’t matter, stuff you don’t have space for anymore. You can always get another print at another museum exhibit, after all. Or maybe Nicole didn’t throw it out, maybe it’s still rolled up in cylinder somewhere, locked away in storage, as good as forgotten. Who’s to say? Where are all these pieces of our past, bits of shiny and beautiful and temporary and fragile things, where are they now, these dead, inert, lifeless things that are also the fragments of the loved ones we’ve lost?

*

I am thinking about all this now, again, in the wake of reading T Fleischmann’s book, Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through: An Essay. It is a memoir of sorts, but it is also an engagement with González-Torres’s work, which emerges as a vein that runs through the body of the book. It exists in a continuum of books like Bruce Boone’s Century of Clouds, or Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe, books that navigate using a constellation of objects of desire or longing, a constellation that they keep returning to from different points of access. Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through follows, vaguely, two relationships, and — just as Glück uses Margery Kempe’s religious devotion as a lens for his own desire and experience — Fleischmann’s memoir-ish passages are counterpointed by lyric passages about González-Torres, whose work acts like a refrain, an anchor, a motif, and a point of departure.

That being said, Fleischmann recently told Mattilda Sycamore in Bomb, “If you’re reading my book to learn about Gonzalez-Torres, for example, you’ll probably be disappointed. I want to engage with his work, and a number of other topics, without necessarily suggesting that I have something definitive to say about them, pushing against some forms of knowledge.” So that’s maybe important to say up front, that this not a book of scholarship, or a book with an argument per se. As its title indicates, Fleischmann’s book is about bodies moving through time — how they crash into each other, how they fuck, how they move apart, how they lie still next to each other, sleeping.

The opening image is undeniable: Fleischmann on a bus from Buffalo, New York, checking the dating app Scruff, “where the hills and plateaus offer just blips of men. Most of them are stationary, so the bus’s crawl puts them at steadily increasing or decreasing proximities, of two hundred miles and then one hundred and eight, of one hundred and eighty and then one hundred and sixty, of eighty and then ninety. One guy seems to travel a similar path, a similar speed, either following me or preceding me, thirty-one miles away, thirty, thirty-one.” It is an image that defines the movement of the book, the way bodies get close, then far apart, then disappear, to be replaced by other bodies that likewise come and go. One thinks of E. M. Forster’s “Only connect!” There can be no you, no me, not given the impermanence of our bodies. The only thing immortal is connection itself.

Early on, Fleischmann offers an aesthetic manifesto of sorts for the work to come, writing “I’ve been getting bored of metaphors anyway. I’ve decided that I don’t like them because one thing is never another thing, and it is a lie to say something is anything but itself; it’s ontologically and physically impossible in fact, not even apple and apple can be each other.” This rejection of figurative language runs through the entire book, creating a language that’s pure, precise, and stubbornly insistent. Things exist as they are, rather than being over-dressed by ersatz artistry. Which is not to say that their sentences are not striking in their poetry: “At the orgy I touch my hair, I go and pee, I feel a nipple hard against my own. My inclination is to say something about a door here, a metaphor of a door, but instead I’ll say that when I lick Jackson’s thigh his sweat tastes like Jackson’s sweat.”

This prose stands in contrast to González-Torres’s work, much of which was deliberately, explicitly metaphorical: candies for bodies, lights for bodies, prints for bodies. Anything and everything except the body itself, the body of Ross Laycock, whose body is gone. Fleischmann’s working method circles González-Torres’s like a double helix, two very different means of navigating loss and longing.

*

For González-Torres, loss and longing began and ended with Ross, who was not only the subject of much of his work, but also, he explained in interviews, its audience. “I think at times my only public has been my boyfriend, Ross,” he told Robert Nickas in 1991, the year Laycock died. Four years later, he reiterated this to another interviewer, Ross Bleckner, who asked, “So are you in love now?” González-Torres responded, “I never stopped loving Ross. Just because he’s dead doesn’t mean I stopped loving him.” When Bleckner suggested that “life moves on, doesn’t it, Felix?,” González-Torres asked him what he meant. “It means that you get up today and you try to deal with the things that are on your mind.” To which González-Torres responded, finally, “That’s not life, that’s routine.”

To insist on the universality of grief, after all, is to insist it has no politics.

On its face, this reaction seems natural enough. In the wake of death, the beloved becomes the only addressee, the only public. All that matters is the person you can’t reach, the person who can’t respond. You who are reading this, you who have also lost someone, you, too, are thinking only of that person you lost, and as long as you are under the siren spell of grief, that is the only person you’ll ever speak to.

It’s why every culture has its own prohibitions to keep the dead from coming back, to keep ghosts at bay, to keep revenants in the ground. Rest in Peace is not just a wish for the dearly departed, it’s also a command: Please don’t come back. Behind this superstition is a desperate desire to be allowed to move on, to be allowed to finally let go.

But Félix González-Torres didn’t let go. He never let go. He followed Ross.

The utterly insular, hermetic nature of González-Torres’s work makes it both urgent and disorienting, like happening upon a stranger sobbing and lost in their own grief. As Fleischmann writes,

The spare nature of Gonzalez-Torres’s art is not just an opportunity to face the power of our own imaginations,
to extrapolate what we will from the taste of a candy,
but also an occasion to honor that part of the artist’s life that
I’ll never know.
He makes something of his desires, but that does not grant us
any right to those desires,
only to the specific thing he has shared with us.
You can’t touch the dancer.
Why did you think you could?
Who told you that you have that right?
Just love people for who they are, and for all the things they’ve
chosen to keep away from you.

González-Torres’s work, like grief, is that which is insistently public at the same time that it’s intensely private. It invites association, empathy, connection, while violently refusing all these things at once. Yes, you too have lost someone, but how you dare you compare that loss to mine?

This dual motion, of being welcomed in and pushed away, runs through much of González-Torres’s pieces. In Untitled (Perfect Lovers), a pair of identical battery-operated wall clocks are mounted next to each other. Though they start out synchronized, inevitably one battery will run down at a different speed than the other, and the clocks will slowly fall out of sync. Eventually, one clock will die even as the other continues to tick on.

More and more I’ve come to see this piece as emblematic of the way grief works: there are two clocks, the one which is the time of the regular world, and the one that is the time of your grief, and they are not in sync, and even as one slows down, the other keeps on, mechanically, unstoppable. Even as you want to bring everything to a halt, this other clock does not stop.

So I identify with González-Torres’s clocks. I feel a kinship. But this is dangerous, because this art is not only about grief, nor it is not about just anyone’s grief. When Ross Laycock died in 1991, he was one of some 130,000 Americans who had died from AIDS, many of whose deaths might have prevented if not for the criminal negligence of the government. It’s dangerous to denude González-Torres’s work of its context: the AIDS epidemic and the deaths not just of anyone, but of gay and queer and trans people in particular. One can be deep in mourning and still understand that González-Torres’s depictions of death are not for you. To insist on the universality of grief, after all, is to insist it has no politics.

Death is at once an intensely personal, private thing that belongs only to the dying and those that love them and a public event. The deaths of the people in Fleischmann’s life, “more and more every year, always,” are, they write, “not singular, but the toll of capitalism and hate, which accrues.” Even a death of old age, of natural causes, one that does not involve massive health insurance bills that can’t be paid, a death that does not come at the hands of racist cops, a death that doesn’t happen in an ICE detention center — these deaths, too, are political, because they only exist only for a certain subset of us. The so-called Good Death is a privileged death.

Death is the moment when our relationship to power is finalized.

González-Torres’s insistence that his work was only for Ross Laycock is a means of reclaiming the politics of Laycock’s death and González-Torres’s own work. This work is not for you, because loss is not universal, no matter how much grief may try to trick you into thinking that death is the great equalizer.

It’s a difficult lesson to heed, even for those who knew González-Torres and remain supporters of his work. In a 2010 article for Representations, Adair Rounthwaite traced the steady depoliticization of González-Torres’s art as his posthumous fame continued to grow. The focus of Rounthwaite’s essay was the Venice Bienniale of 2007, where the American Pavilion was devoted to González-Torres, a feat that came about through the work of curator Nancy Spector, who worked with González-Torres during his lifetime, and who put together the proposal for the show, Felix González-Torres: America. In her proposal, Spector de-sexed and de-queered González-Torres’s work, presenting him instead as a defender of “the integrity of our democratic system,” an artist whose works “defy simple categorization.” As Rounthwaite suggests, the State Department ultimately chose González-Torres because he was “widely recognized as a politically correct choice, whose place as an influencer of younger generations and as a politically engaged artist is already secured, but whose art is framed as totally flexible in its meaning, and whose biography is reduced to a narrative trajectory that falls reassuringly within homophobic cultural narratives about gay men and AIDS.”

The clocks of Untitled (Perfect Lovers) are also keeping time for political death, for political grief. “The AIDS epidemic is over” is a thing you hear people say; they mean that it is no longer a political concern, it is not a thing that merits discussing or mainstream activism. (“At this point,” González-Torres said in 1991, “to recall history seems impolite.”) After a while, the clock that marks the urgency of a death runs down, and the specifics of that person’s relationship to power is lost. What’s left is the other clock, which originally bore only half the meaning: a canonical artist, a figure whose death has been stripped of context, ticking on and on.

Given enough time, any ghost can be depoliticized.

*

Compare this to Fleischmann’s use of the concrete, of language devoid of metaphor, and the insistently physical nature of their descriptions. There is no misreading of figurative language or rhetorical artifice in Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through because, by and large, Fleischmann avoids such techniques. The problem with metaphor is that it’s imprecise, and it’s subject to manipulation and misuse. Many of González-Torres’s works can be made a metaphor for freedom, or self-reliance, or democracy with the right kind of blinders on. Fleischmann’s words resist the seduction of metaphor. Jackson’s sweat is not a door of any kind.

For Fleischmann, existence is political; simply being a body is a form of resistance. “The police state wants me dead to make sure their children don’t end up like me, so I guess every time I fuck and I’m happy and I do what I want I would like to call that an anti-state action. The people I love alive — yes, we weaken the state.” It is both enough by itself and also not enough: “But also every time after I have felt pleasure and played pool with a bunch of transsexuals and smoked weed and then eaten a taco and gone home, when my body is at its best, then I need to set myself to contributing to the coalition, which is already underway, which has kept me alive, the work of liberation being one of the ceaseless things.”

Jackson’s sweat is not a door of any kind.

It is this spirit of generosity that makes Fleischmann’s book so luminous — a generosity towards the queer body and its existence, a generosity towards the work of activism, a recognition both of the work that needs to be done and the work that is being done. A generosity towards language, the generosity borne of reciprocation:

When Gonzalez-Torres speaks of infecting power, he speaks of power spreading.
An individual viewing his art can be transformed, having been implicated and involved in it,
taking home a sheet of paper, tasting sugar, feeling.
A person in the world who has been affected by the pain of another is an agent of change.
A person in the world who has been affected by the joy of another is an agent of change.
A person in the world is an agent of change.

Throughout Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through, longing, absence and grief are counterpointed by moments of ecstasy and joy. In an amazing moment, Fleischmann collaborates with the artist Benjy Russell on a project, involving a mirror set on a card table in Russell’s yard: “The mirror shows sky, and beside it we set a ladder and his photography equipment.” Then, the pills: “We dump all our prescription drugs onto the reflective surface, bottle after bottle. The pills are tan, light yellow, two shades of blue, one of red, a pale pink, and a paler pink with a purple hue. When they are all mixed together they look like pills, generically, unlike when they are in the bottles and seem direct references to our survival.” In the context of their individual pill bottles, this medicine has economic value and signification, but poured into a pile, the individual pills take on a new meaning. “We are here to shape the pills into letters,” Fleischmann continues, “which takes time, and so we chat all morning about them. Thousands and thousands of dollars worth of medication, they are the most expensive material we have used to make an image.”

Chatting and moving at a slow pace, punctuated by digressions that, the two decide, “are the most important part of our process,” eventually a word emerges. “Benjy and I use maybe one hundred pills. Post-Scarcity, they spell out. The word is multihued and large…. The image shows only pills and sky, and it appears as though the word is floating above us. Post-Scarcity, it says, composed of more than one body like all bodies are.” Formed by an insanely expensive cocktail of drugs, the words, reflected against the clouds above, suggest that it might be possible to take the raw materials of this world, currently contextualized around capital and accumulation, and pour them out and re-arrange them into something more liberating. It’s a fleeting moment — the pills, after all, have to be collected and re-sorted, with Fleischmann commenting that categorization “isn’t how we acknowledge difference, but rather its enforcement, difference leveraged to keep things apart that could well be together.” But still, even fleeting, it’s one of many moments in Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through that suggests some other world, some other reality that might be possible.

In one of Gonzalez-Torres’s works, Untitled (Go-go Dancing Platform), a platform for a dancer is set up in the gallery, a small plinth ringed with lights, and once a day a dancer arrives, unannounced, wearing silver lamé shorts, to dance for five minutes to music of their own choosing, wearing headphones so only the dancer can hear the music. A private dance that is not for the audience.

After five minutes, the dancer leaves. You never know when the dancer will arrive; part of the piece is not knowing. Which means that most of the time you’re in the gallery you’re waiting, consciously or not, for the dancer to arrive. You hope to arrive at the museum in time, and you hope not have to wait too long. Without the dancer, it doesn’t feel like a full work — it’s just a platform, a space for a body that’s absent. So you stand there, waiting, in an empty room.

And then after a while you realize that this is all wrong, the way you’ve been thinking about things. The room isn’t empty. You start to realize that the piece is also about you, about how you inhabit the space — and that yours is the body you’ve been waiting for.

* * *

Colin Dickey is the author of Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, along with two other books of nonfiction. He is currently writing a book on conspiracy theories and other delusions, The Unidentified, forthcoming in 2020.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

New York is an outlier in Lou Reed’s discography. The 1989 album—his fifteenth—is arguably his most straight-forward, track after track of stunningly simple music, just featuring a few guitars and Reed’s deadpan and utterly dry cutting lyrics. 

Not everyone appreciated that rawness. Upon hearing the album, John Cougar Mellancamp commented that New York sounded as if an eighth-grader produced it. “But I like it,” he added. The record quickly transformed into a critical darling, hailed as a return to form for Reed, whose standing seemed to shift several times a decade since debuting with the Velvet Underground in the late 1960s. Anthony DeCurtis, who would later write a biography of Reed, gave the album four stars in a review for Rolling Stone, proclaiming New York to be “the rock & roll version of The Bonfire of the Vanities.”

In fact, the fourteen songs on New York — which runs nearly an hour — are fierce, poetic journalism, a reportage of surreal horror in which the unyielding force of actual circumstances continually threatens to overwhelm the ordering power of art…Reed sees New York as a microcosm of the rest of the country, the hardest hit and therefore most devastated victim of eight years of Ronald Reagan.

It also may be the most personal of Reed’s work. New York looks at the artist’s birthplace and home, and the result is a portrait of a city ravaged by economic and structural inequality, cultural malaise, racism, and AIDS. As he sings in “Romeo Had Juliette,” the record’s first track, “I’ll take Manhattan in a garbage bag, with Latin written on it that says, It’s hard to give a shit these days.” Reed is holding a magnifying glass to the city’s ills, chronicling them song-by-song as a way of illuminating the lack of empathy and humanity that pervaded the country throughout the 1980s, a decade that included an epidemic, the birth of needlessly punitive prison sentencing, and the growth of a wage gap.

Whenever I listen to the album, I am always struck by “Halloween Parade,” which is arguably my favorite of all of Reed’s songs. While the album thematically balances a backward-glancing nod while ultimately progressive—”and something flickered for a minute, and then it vanished and was gone”—this track is overly nostalgic, which is rare for Reed, while also sentimental and sweet. The song is nominally about the annual Halloween Parade, an event born in the mid-1970s and one that used to snake through Greenwich Village, but Reed intersperses evocative lyrics with remembrances of friends lost.

“This celebration somehow gets me down, especially when I see you’re not around,” sings Reed, as he recounts Rotten Rita and Johnny Rio and the other friends no longer living.

The song’s dirge-like quality also relates to the aura of death hanging over NYC in the 1980s: through 1989, when the album was released, nearly 19,000 New Yorkers had died due to the complications from AIDS—5,000-plus that year alone. As Reed narrates the costumes and characters of that year’s parade, he remembers better times. He never specifies whom he lost—”This Halloween is something to be sure, especially to be here without you”—and that only aids the listener slip into one’s own past. But this song doesn’t encourage solipsism—rather, it is a call to action. In a truly fantastic and insightful interview with Rolling Stone‘s Jonathan Cott in 1989, Reed said,

How many people have to drop dead from AIDS? Why do they think that’s not going to spread? Do they have to wait until AIDS works its way to the suburbs before the great middle class rises up and says, Ohhh! Well, everybody should be saying Ohhh! right now. These are very scary and treacherous times even though people seem to think that everything’s OK.

Reed and political activism don’t often go hand-in-hand, but on New York, and especially with tracks like “Halloween Parade,” Reed is railing against an American society that has failed to live up its worldwide standing. Reed notices this lack of humanity existing in an America that seemingly fails to care about its fellow citizens, and that is at the forefront of New York. He told Cott, “There’s this vicious non-caring or, in some cases, a cavalier non-caring under the guise of something else. It’s a complete disregard for the other guy or woman or child, and a complete rejection of any kind of humanity and an unrelieved viciousness for laughs.”

The album is ferociously direct, which was an intentional decision: he spent three months working solely on lyrics, and then months afterward revising, with the goal of crafting songs in which listeners “could really hear the words…that was the raison d’être for this album.” As such, this album is arguably the most confrontational of Reed’s entire catalogue. As he told Cott, “This is me speaking as directly as I possibly can to whoever hopefully wants to listen to it. If someone accuses me of attacking my former image and says: “Oh, but you once said….” then all I can now say is: “And what did you once say? And what did we all once say? And what might I say tomorrow?””

The kicker of “Halloween Parade” speaks to that sentiment—”see you next year at the Halloween parade.” Life goes on, and we with it, but what we must do to ensure that the present doesn’t continue to become the future? Speaking with Cott, Reed referred to Ronald Reagan’s administration as “eight years of rape,” a feeling that has translated through the first two years of the Trump administration. DeCurtis’s review of New York wonders whether the album will age or become an artifact of a specific place and time—”the album is so compelling an expression of the historical moment that it’s hard to tell what it will sound like down the line”—and the leap in similarities between Reed’s late 1980s frustration and the same anger and fear and worry our society is currently expressing at this moment isn’t significant. Decades have passed, and while the nominal issues might have changed, the underlying tensions still linger, and are perhaps even more raw. New York is an album with transcending themes, and its spirit of non-complacency and activism is generational thanks to songs like “Dirty Blvd,” “Romeo Had Juliette,” and “Halloween Parade,” a track that I hear differently each listen.

Minda Honey | Longreads | June 2018 | 11 minutes (2,763 words)

In December, when a creative agency asked me to participate in a regional Volunteers of America public service announcement encouraging my fellow community members to “know your status,” I said yes. A hesitant yes, but a yes. At least once a year, I make it a point to enlighten myself by asking my gynecologist for a full screening for sexually transmitted infections, including an HIV test. But I’m more of a safe sex bronze medalist than an all-star. My 17-year track record of requiring men to wear condoms during intercourse is only nearly flawless, my trysts with unsafe sex more recent than I’d like to admit.

A retrospective on my vagina’s contact with bare penis: When I lost my virginity — It was over and done with before I could utter any questions about using protection. There was time the condom slipped off — it happens. Or at least it did that one time. In an encounter with that same man, who I’d casually been sleeping with for a long stretch, he sweet-talked me into letting him take the condom off mid-act. I want to feel you, he’d said — I’d felt terrible afterward. I knew better than to trust these hoes with my sexual health. There was the spontaneous Halloween makeup sex in the back of a minivan with a guy I was kinda in a relationship with. Immediately after, he accused me of trying to get knocked up because I’d always been so vigilant about condom use, nevermind that a jobless, carless rapper living with his brother’s girlfriend’s parents isn’t my ideal baby daddy material. There was the man I was seeing who made a fuss about it every single time, whining he couldn’t come with one on, so half-asleep, I finally just let it happen sans condom. Shortly after, I learned he’d been cheating on me. And, I assume, he’d been doing the same sort of whining in the other woman’s bed, being sexually reckless with us both.

And, more recently, when after a 12-hour stretch of drinking, I fell into bed with a man and nodded when he asked if it was OK, even though I knew I wasn’t OK with going without a condom. Every time we hooked up after that first time, I felt weird about insisting he wear one, so I didn’t ask him to. Even though changing your mind is totally allowed and asking can be so simple and I’m sure he would have complied, it just felt complicated in ways that feel dumb now. This lapse in judgement happened to overlap with my period deciding to be six weeks late and my new gyno calling to tell me my IUD might have shifted and might not be effective. After two intravaginal ultrasounds (and a negative pregnancy test) it was determined that, LOL, my IUD was actually where it was supposed to be all along.

I worried that doing the PSA would make me a hypocrite. Who was I to encourage others to engage in safe sex when there were times I hadn’t? I reasoned with myself that I’d read enough inspirational quotes on Instagram to know my humanity wasn’t a byproduct of my perfection but rather of my mistakes. So I decided to do the shoot anyway, because I was someone who knew what it was like to be so distracted worrying about the possible long-term consequences of my split-second decision not to require a condom that I couldn’t even enjoy the act itself. I was someone who’d felt bashful about asking to be tested because heaven forbid the medical professional I pay to look after my reproductive health, and who I was required to see once a year to re-up on my birth control pill prescription, know that I, an adult woman, was having sex outside of a monogamous marriage for purposes other than conceiving a child. I was someone who was tired of always being the enforcer in the bedroom. It made me feel like a finger-wagging mom-type: “Eat your Wheaties, do your homework, wrap it up!”

Why does it typically fall to women to act as safety patrol during hookups with men? I mean most of us sat in the same weak-ass, fear-based Sex Ed class in high school. We’ve seen slides of all the worst-case scenarios of what could happen, dare we embark on anything beyond abstinence together. Let’s just say if I’d left it up to partners to uphold condom use, I wouldn’t even be a bronze medalist in the safe sex Olympics. I wouldn’t be a competitor at all.

Black women represent one of the fastest growing demographics for new HIV cases.

Blessed be the men I’ve slept with who came prepared with a condom in their back pocket, their wallet, or at the very least looked at me and asked, “Do you have …” Honorable mention to those who simply suited up when I passed them a prophylactic. It didn’t even occur to me that the rest weren’t worth my time until a friend a few decades older than me pointed out how disrespectful it was for a man to treat a request to use a condom as an opportunity for negotiation. I didn’t even realize I had the right to have hurt feelings over men who didn’t have my best interest —or their own — in mind. When consensual sex is the bare minimum, asking for anything more can feel like a luxury in your 20s.

***

For the video shoot I was asked to wear something that made me look “writerly.” I wore a black pencil skirt, a peach sweater with puffy short sleeves, and a black-and-gold silk scarf that I tied around my neck in the style of a wealthy woman having her portrait painted. I was asked to choose a location that somehow spoke to my being a writer. We settled on an office I work out of a few times a week with large windows that allow for ample sunlight. I faked typing a few sentences and looked intently at the gibberish on the screen of my laptop as if it were of great importance. I write for the LEO, an alt-weekly, so we spread around on the table a few copies of an issue with my face on the cover. The head of the production crew had said my name was suggested for this PSA for two reasons: I do fundraising for the LGBT center at the local university, and I’m Louisville’s relationship advice columnist. I gave her a third: “And Black women represent one of the fastest growing demographics for new HIV cases.”

“I didn’t know that,” she said.

Me neither, before I stumbled across that information on Twitter, in 2010. I was living in Orange County at the time, and my doctor’s office was in Laguna Beach, 45 minutes from my apartment. I mean really, if you’re going to have a someone all up in your lap why not do it from the lap of luxury? I liked this doctor because he was particularly generous with the freebie birth control samples. (This was a time before the Obamacare mandate that health insurance providers cover the cost of birth control. With the samples, I was saving a good $60 a month.) His waiting room wasn’t filled with cheap furniture and outdated magazines. No, this one had cozy chairs and only the most recent glossies on deck. In the exam room, there were soft cloth garments to slip into and velour booties over the metal stirrups. The window in the exam room looked out onto jungle-like foliage instead of hot parking lot pavement. All this grandeur put me at ease. I was relaxed and still overly trusting of medical professionals.

That particular visit, as my gyno gave me my annual pap smear, we gabbed about my job and then somehow we got onto celebrities. I laughed when my doc said he could never be one. “Too invasive.”

“Yeah, I know the feeling,” I joked.

At the time, I had yet to overcome my fear of needles, so I asked him how crucial it was I do an HIV test with my STI screening. He said, “I mean are you sleeping with people who are going to Vegas every weekend and having unprotected sex with 50 other people?”

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what any of the people I was sleeping with were doing when they weren’t sleeping with me, but that was such a highly specific and highly unlikely scenario that I decided to pass on the test. Maybe the wealthy white patients he saw in his posh office across the street from the ocean didn’t need to worry about things as pedestrian as sexually acquired diseases. I just can’t imagine the advice he gave me was the same advice being doled out to the mostly Black and Brown patients at the Planned Parenthood 10 minutes from where I lived.

I’d tried to go there once. The lobby was drab and overcrowded. There was more than one person sobbing in pain, a couple gripping each other’s hands who looked like they’d cut class to be there, the young woman clearly pregnant. The clinic was so overbooked the receptionist told me you just had to show up and wait all day to be seen based on urgency. Who had time for that? It certainly isn’t Planned Parenthood’s fault they’re underfunded, and for many people Planned Parenthood is the only health resource they have.

There is a clear class divide in the quality of health care we receive, but also in how we’re perceived by our doctors. Years later, I moved to Denver and unbeknownst to me until I’d arrived, I’d chosen a doctor’s office in a lower-income part of town. The receptionist spoke down to me for being five minutes late to my appointment and told me I’d have to wait for the next available appointment, which happened to be only 10 minutes after the appointment I’d just missed *eye roll emoji*. The doctor was dismissive of my health concerns and behaved more like a sullen teenager working the ticket counter at a movie theater than a highly trained professional. Her nurse was a platinum blonde Eminem circa the Marshall Mathers LP who stank of cigarette smoke when he came in to take my blood, looked at the tiny veins in my arm and said he’d “do my best.” Still afraid of needles, I left and had my blood drawn at a lab instead, by a woman who seemed confident in her skills.

A few days after my visit to my Laguna Beach gyno, I saw the stat about Black women and HIV. I’d just been hanging out on Twitter, seeing what my favorite rappers were up to and tweeting nonsense probably no one was paying attention to, per usual. Most likely the stat was pulled from a Washington Post piece that was already several years old. Some days social media feels like an albatross around my generation’s neck, but it’s also where I frequently find myself learning, through links and stats from friends and strangers, about health risks specific to Black women. For example, without Facebook I wouldn’t know that my race and gender mean that I’m more likely to die in childbirth, that my odds of developing fibroids are triple white women’s odds, that I’m more likely to have my endometriosis misdiagnosed, and that the Gardasil vaccine I’d spent years feeling guilty about not getting probably wouldn’t have protected me because it doesn’t offer protection against the strains of HPV Black women are most likely to get.

This ignorance is not for lack of medical access on my part. I saw a gynecologist for the first time at 14 because of a period that left me wailing in pain. Since going on birth control at 19, I’ve seen a gynecologist at least once a year for the past 14 years. I have a family history of fibroids and I’ve fainted and vomited from cramps, but never once has a gynecologist done more than suggest I take an over-the-counter painkiller. No doctor has ever initiated a conversation with me about fibroids, polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), or endometriosis. Social media shouldn’t be my primary source of relevant medical information. Dr. Facebook isn’t cashing my co-pay. And yet, it’s fallen to Black women to keep other Black women informed about our specific health risks through tweets, status updates, and Instagram memes, despite the fact that the “father of modern gynecology” built his body of work with our literal bodies.

***

That one time that the condom slipped off? It happened shortly after seeing that tweet. I couldn’t sleep. I knew I had to get tested. I knew the guy I’d slept with most likely hadn’t been, since he was such a vocal advocate of unprotected sex. My risk level felt high. Still afraid of needles and obsessed with upholding a certain image — I was the type of woman who always shaved before my annual exam, lest I offend my gyno with my hirsuteness, but did it a week in advance so my hair would be grown back in enough that it didn’t look like I’d shaved specifically for the occasion — I couldn’t go see my usual doctor. I needed to find a place that did swab tests and where no one knew me.

I found a clinic in Long Beach. I assumed they would swab the inside of my mouth, then I’d wait in the lobby for my results. I was wrong. A clinic counselor led me back to his office. There he asked me several questions about my sexual history and mental health. He wanted to know what I’d do if my results came back positive. I’d thought a lot about that in the days leading up to my appointment. I’d grown convinced I’d end it all.

This was nearly a decade ago, and I was so ignorant about HIV/AIDS beyond what I’d seen in movies, which mostly revolved around gay, white men. The first time I’d learned anything at all about the history of the HIV epidemic was as a sophomore in college, when one of my professors showed Angels in America in class. No one was talking to Black women about HIV/AIDS or telling our stories unless it was part of some sensational homophobic/biphobic/transphobic plot about Black men on the “down low.” That had been the first time in my life that getting tested for HIV felt like something I needed to do, all thanks to a tweet.

I talked and talked into the camera until I found the right way to say that no matter the outcome, knowing your status matters.

The counselor appeared used to this response. He launched into a story about a woman who’d found out in the ’80s that she was HIV-positive after she happened to catch her husband on a talk show discussing what it was like to live with AIDS. How she’d been going to the doctor for various ailments and no one could diagnose her. “But it’s not like that anymore,” he assured me. “You can now live a long, full life with HIV/AIDS.” He handed me a pamphlet.

“I believe you,” I said. “But I think the stigma is what I couldn’t live with.” I knew shame and how to release myself from that feeling, but stigma felt bigger than me. It felt like societally sponsored shame. Straight privilege had cast this veil that, for the most part, protected my dating life from judgment and hatred. But the veil also means that instead of HIV/AIDS simply being a health issue, much like abortion, it’s treated as a moral issue. To maintain the veil means that straight, middle-class women like me don’t need to know about HIV/AIDS. To admit otherwise would be to reveal your humanity and the humanity of those on the other side of the veil. The veil is stitched from lies that to be gay is wrong, that to be gay is to be promiscuous, that to be promiscuous is to be deserving of sickness and death. Seeing through the lies isn’t the same as lifting the veil; that requires a collective effort. It requires being vocal about LGBTQ+ rights and recognizing the importance of LGBTQ+ history. It requires a cultural shift away from the stigma that has allowed the HIV epidemic to take the lives of 700,000 people over the past three decades.

These thoughts were on my mind while filming the PSA. Somewhere on a hard drive, probably with footage of some kid’s first birthday party and shots of your fave big business’ humanitarian efforts, there’s footage of me rambling into a camera about my need to find the right words when talking about the importance of knowing your status. Words that wouldn’t amount to finger wagging or add to the stigma around HIV/AIDS. I couldn’t travel back in time to that night to avoid that condom slipping off, nor to any of the moments I’d engaged in unprotected intercourse. But in the present I could make the right choice, the responsible choice, and get tested. We all should.

***

Although my test came back negative that day, it did lead me to becoming more educated about how HIV affects Black women. I now have people in my life who are HIV-positive. Their lives aren’t that different than the lives of other people I know. They went to college, they have careers they can be proud of, some are in relationships with loving people. While their status hasn’t robbed their life of fullness, it has made their life more complicated in certain ways. The health benefits and high-paying salaries provided by the careers they’re proud of have become even more important.

I talked and talked into the camera until I found the right way to say that no matter the outcome, knowing your status matters. Knowing just puts you in a better position for making life decisions. That line didn’t make the final cut of the commercial.

There are mere seconds of me spliced in with other faces you might know from around town. The commercial probably runs between ads for car dealerships with salesmen screaming at you like a carnival barker — Step right up and get yourself into a new or used Honda Accord! — and promos for the next gun show passing through town. It has that soft, washed out, sun-faded newspaper look most local TV commercials have. But I’m hoping it’s enough. That by merely showing my melanin-rich face among all the other local faces encouraging our community to get tested, it will be enough to cross the digital divide and reach Black women who maybe don’t have high-speed internet or constant access to, and time for, social media. And that more of us will find the power in knowing — the power to make informed choices about our health and our lives.

Bonus: Listen to our interview with Minda Honey on the Longreads Podcast here:

Previously:
Politics as a Defense Against Heartbreak
A Farewell to Fuckboys in the Age of Consent Culture

* * *

Minda Honey is writing An Anthology of Assholes, a memoir about dating as a woman of color in Southern California. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky.

Editor: Sari Botton

Minda Honey | Longreads | June 2018 | 11 minutes (2,763 words)

In December, when a creative agency asked me to participate in a regional Volunteers of America public service announcement encouraging my fellow community members to “know your status,” I said yes. A hesitant yes, but a yes. At least once a year, I make it a point to enlighten myself by asking my gynecologist for a full screening for sexually transmitted infections, including an HIV test. But I’m more of a safe sex bronze medalist than an all-star. My 17-year track record of requiring men to wear condoms during intercourse is only nearly flawless, my trysts with unsafe sex more recent than I’d like to admit.

A retrospective on my vagina’s contact with bare penis: When I lost my virginity — It was over and done with before I could utter any questions about using protection. There was time the condom slipped off — it happens. Or at least it did that one time. In an encounter with that same man, who I’d casually been sleeping with for a long stretch, he sweet-talked me into letting him take the condom off mid-act. I want to feel you, he’d said — I’d felt terrible afterward. I knew better than to trust these hoes with my sexual health. There was the spontaneous Halloween makeup sex in the back of a minivan with a guy I was kinda in a relationship with. Immediately after, he accused me of trying to get knocked up because I’d always been so vigilant about condom use, nevermind that a jobless, carless rapper living with his brother’s girlfriend’s parents isn’t my ideal baby daddy material. There was the man I was seeing who made a fuss about it every single time, whining he couldn’t come with one on, so half-asleep, I finally just let it happen sans condom. Shortly after, I learned he’d been cheating on me. And, I assume, he’d been doing the same sort of whining in the other woman’s bed, being sexually reckless with us both.

And, more recently, when after a 12-hour stretch of drinking, I fell into bed with a man and nodded when he asked if it was OK, even though I knew I wasn’t OK with going without a condom. Every time we hooked up after that first time, I felt weird about insisting he wear one, so I didn’t ask him to. Even though changing your mind is totally allowed and asking can be so simple and I’m sure he would have complied, it just felt complicated in ways that feel dumb now. This lapse in judgement happened to overlap with my period deciding to be six weeks late and my new gyno calling to tell me my IUD might have shifted and might not be effective. After two intravaginal ultrasounds (and a negative pregnancy test) it was determined that, LOL, my IUD was actually where it was supposed to be all along.

I worried that doing the PSA would make me a hypocrite. Who was I to encourage others to engage in safe sex when there were times I hadn’t? I reasoned with myself that I’d read enough inspirational quotes on Instagram to know my humanity wasn’t a byproduct of my perfection but rather of my mistakes. So I decided to do the shoot anyway, because I was someone who knew what it was like to be so distracted worrying about the possible long-term consequences of my split-second decision not to require a condom that I couldn’t even enjoy the act itself. I was someone who’d felt bashful about asking to be tested because heaven forbid the medical professional I pay to look after my reproductive health, and who I was required to see once a year to re-up on my birth control pill prescription, know that I, an adult woman, was having sex outside of a monogamous marriage for purposes other than conceiving a child. I was someone who was tired of always being the enforcer in the bedroom. It made me feel like a finger-wagging mom-type: “Eat your Wheaties, do your homework, wrap it up!”

Why does it typically fall to women to act as safety patrol during hookups with men? I mean most of us sat in the same weak-ass, fear-based Sex Ed class in high school. We’ve seen slides of all the worst-case scenarios of what could happen, dare we embark on anything beyond abstinence together. Let’s just say if I’d left it up to partners to uphold condom use, I wouldn’t even be a bronze medalist in the safe sex Olympics. I wouldn’t be a competitor at all.

Black women represent one of the fastest growing demographics for new HIV cases.

Blessed be the men I’ve slept with who came prepared with a condom in their back pocket, their wallet, or at the very least looked at me and asked, “Do you have …” Honorable mention to those who simply suited up when I passed them a prophylactic. It didn’t even occur to me that the rest weren’t worth my time until a friend a few decades older than me pointed out how disrespectful it was for a man to treat a request to use a condom as an opportunity for negotiation. I didn’t even realize I had the right to have hurt feelings over men who didn’t have my best interest —or their own — in mind. When consensual sex is the bare minimum, asking for anything more can feel like a luxury in your 20s.

***

For the video shoot I was asked to wear something that made me look “writerly.” I wore a black pencil skirt, a peach sweater with puffy short sleeves, and a black-and-gold silk scarf that I tied around my neck in the style of a wealthy woman having her portrait painted. I was asked to choose a location that somehow spoke to my being a writer. We settled on an office I work out of a few times a week with large windows that allow for ample sunlight. I faked typing a few sentences and looked intently at the gibberish on the screen of my laptop as if it were of great importance. I write for the LEO, an alt-weekly, so we spread around on the table a few copies of an issue with my face on the cover. The head of the production crew had said my name was suggested for this PSA for two reasons: I do fundraising for the LGBT center at the local university, and I’m Louisville’s relationship advice columnist. I gave her a third: “And Black women represent one of the fastest growing demographics for new HIV cases.”

“I didn’t know that,” she said.

Me neither, before I stumbled across that information on Twitter, in 2010. I was living in Orange County at the time, and my doctor’s office was in Laguna Beach, 45 minutes from my apartment. I mean really, if you’re going to have a someone all up in your lap why not do it from the lap of luxury? I liked this doctor because he was particularly generous with the freebie birth control samples. (This was a time before the Obamacare mandate that health insurance providers cover the cost of birth control. With the samples, I was saving a good $60 a month.) His waiting room wasn’t filled with cheap furniture and outdated magazines. No, this one had cozy chairs and only the most recent glossies on deck. In the exam room, there were soft cloth garments to slip into and velour booties over the metal stirrups. The window in the exam room looked out onto jungle-like foliage instead of hot parking lot pavement. All this grandeur put me at ease. I was relaxed and still overly trusting of medical professionals.

That particular visit, as my gyno gave me my annual pap smear, we gabbed about my job and then somehow we got onto celebrities. I laughed when my doc said he could never be one. “Too invasive.”

“Yeah, I know the feeling,” I joked.

At the time, I had yet to overcome my fear of needles, so I asked him how crucial it was I do an HIV test with my STI screening. He said, “I mean are you sleeping with people who are going to Vegas every weekend and having unprotected sex with 50 other people?”

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what any of the people I was sleeping with were doing when they weren’t sleeping with me, but that was such a highly specific and highly unlikely scenario that I decided to pass on the test. Maybe the wealthy white patients he saw in his posh office across the street from the ocean didn’t need to worry about things as pedestrian as sexually acquired diseases. I just can’t imagine the advice he gave me was the same advice being doled out to the mostly Black and Brown patients at the Planned Parenthood 10 minutes from where I lived.

I’d tried to go there once. The lobby was drab and overcrowded. There was more than one person sobbing in pain, a couple gripping each other’s hands who looked like they’d cut class to be there, the young woman clearly pregnant. The clinic was so overbooked the receptionist told me you just had to show up and wait all day to be seen based on urgency. Who had time for that? It certainly isn’t Planned Parenthood’s fault they’re underfunded, and for many people Planned Parenthood is the only health resource they have.

There is a clear class divide in the quality of health care we receive, but also in how we’re perceived by our doctors. Years later, I moved to Denver and unbeknownst to me until I’d arrived, I’d chosen a doctor’s office in a lower-income part of town. The receptionist spoke down to me for being five minutes late to my appointment and told me I’d have to wait for the next available appointment, which happened to be only 10 minutes after the appointment I’d just missed *eye roll emoji*. The doctor was dismissive of my health concerns and behaved more like a sullen teenager working the ticket counter at a movie theater than a highly trained professional. Her nurse was a platinum blonde Eminem circa the Marshall Mathers LP who stank of cigarette smoke when he came in to take my blood, looked at the tiny veins in my arm and said he’d “do my best.” Still afraid of needles, I left and had my blood drawn at a lab instead, by a woman who seemed confident in her skills.

A few days after my visit to my Laguna Beach gyno, I saw the stat about Black women and HIV. I’d just been hanging out on Twitter, seeing what my favorite rappers were up to and tweeting nonsense probably no one was paying attention to, per usual. Most likely the stat was pulled from a Washington Post piece that was already several years old. Some days social media feels like an albatross around my generation’s neck, but it’s also where I frequently find myself learning, through links and stats from friends and strangers, about health risks specific to Black women. For example, without Facebook I wouldn’t know that my race and gender mean that I’m more likely to die in childbirth, that my odds of developing fibroids are triple white women’s odds, that I’m more likely to have my endometriosis misdiagnosed, and that the Gardasil vaccine I’d spent years feeling guilty about not getting probably wouldn’t have protected me because it doesn’t offer protection against the strains of HPV Black women are most likely to get.

This ignorance is not for lack of medical access on my part. I saw a gynecologist for the first time at 14 because of a period that left me wailing in pain. Since going on birth control at 19, I’ve seen a gynecologist at least once a year for the past 14 years. I have a family history of fibroids and I’ve fainted and vomited from cramps, but never once has a gynecologist done more than suggest I take an over-the-counter painkiller. No doctor has ever initiated a conversation with me about fibroids, polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), or endometriosis. Social media shouldn’t be my primary source of relevant medical information. Dr. Facebook isn’t cashing my co-pay. And yet, it’s fallen to Black women to keep other Black women informed about our specific health risks through tweets, status updates, and Instagram memes, despite the fact that the “father of modern gynecology” built his body of work with our literal bodies.

***

That one time that the condom slipped off? It happened shortly after seeing that tweet. I couldn’t sleep. I knew I had to get tested. I knew the guy I’d slept with most likely hadn’t been, since he was such a vocal advocate of unprotected sex. My risk level felt high. Still afraid of needles and obsessed with upholding a certain image — I was the type of woman who always shaved before my annual exam, lest I offend my gyno with my hirsuteness, but did it a week in advance so my hair would be grown back in enough that it didn’t look like I’d shaved specifically for the occasion — I couldn’t go see my usual doctor. I needed to find a place that did swab tests and where no one knew me.

I found a clinic in Long Beach. I assumed they would swab the inside of my mouth, then I’d wait in the lobby for my results. I was wrong. A clinic counselor led me back to his office. There he asked me several questions about my sexual history and mental health. He wanted to know what I’d do if my results came back positive. I’d thought a lot about that in the days leading up to my appointment. I’d grown convinced I’d end it all.

This was nearly a decade ago, and I was so ignorant about HIV/AIDS beyond what I’d seen in movies, which mostly revolved around gay, white men. The first time I’d learned anything at all about the history of the HIV epidemic was as a sophomore in college, when one of my professors showed Angels in America in class. No one was talking to Black women about HIV/AIDS or telling our stories unless it was part of some sensational homophobic/biphobic/transphobic plot about Black men on the “down low.” That had been the first time in my life that getting tested for HIV felt like something I needed to do, all thanks to a tweet.

I talked and talked into the camera until I found the right way to say that no matter the outcome, knowing your status matters.

The counselor appeared used to this response. He launched into a story about a woman who’d found out in the ’80s that she was HIV-positive after she happened to catch her husband on a talk show discussing what it was like to live with AIDS. How she’d been going to the doctor for various ailments and no one could diagnose her. “But it’s not like that anymore,” he assured me. “You can now live a long, full life with HIV/AIDS.” He handed me a pamphlet.

“I believe you,” I said. “But I think the stigma is what I couldn’t live with.” I knew shame and how to release myself from that feeling, but stigma felt bigger than me. It felt like societally sponsored shame. Straight privilege had cast this veil that, for the most part, protected my dating life from judgment and hatred. But the veil also means that instead of HIV/AIDS simply being a health issue, much like abortion, it’s treated as a moral issue. To maintain the veil means that straight, middle-class women like me don’t need to know about HIV/AIDS. To admit otherwise would be to reveal your humanity and the humanity of those on the other side of the veil. The veil is stitched from lies that to be gay is wrong, that to be gay is to be promiscuous, that to be promiscuous is to be deserving of sickness and death. Seeing through the lies isn’t the same as lifting the veil; that requires a collective effort. It requires being vocal about LGBTQ+ rights and recognizing the importance of LGBTQ+ history. It requires a cultural shift away from the stigma that has allowed the HIV epidemic to take the lives of 700,000 people over the past three decades.

These thoughts were on my mind while filming the PSA. Somewhere on a hard drive, probably with footage of some kid’s first birthday party and shots of your fave big business’ humanitarian efforts, there’s footage of me rambling into a camera about my need to find the right words when talking about the importance of knowing your status. Words that wouldn’t amount to finger wagging or add to the stigma around HIV/AIDS. I couldn’t travel back in time to that night to avoid that condom slipping off, nor to any of the moments I’d engaged in unprotected intercourse. But in the present I could make the right choice, the responsible choice, and get tested. We all should.

***

Although my test came back negative that day, it did lead me to becoming more educated about how HIV affects Black women. I now have people in my life who are HIV-positive. Their lives aren’t that different than the lives of other people I know. They went to college, they have careers they can be proud of, some are in relationships with loving people. While their status hasn’t robbed their life of fullness, it has made their life more complicated in certain ways. The health benefits and high-paying salaries provided by the careers they’re proud of have become even more important.

I talked and talked into the camera until I found the right way to say that no matter the outcome, knowing your status matters. Knowing just puts you in a better position for making life decisions. That line didn’t make the final cut of the commercial.

There are mere seconds of me spliced in with other faces you might know from around town. The commercial probably runs between ads for car dealerships with salesmen screaming at you like a carnival barker — Step right up and get yourself into a new or used Honda Accord! — and promos for the next gun show passing through town. It has that soft, washed out, sun-faded newspaper look most local TV commercials have. But I’m hoping it’s enough. That by merely showing my melanin-rich face among all the other local faces encouraging our community to get tested, it will be enough to cross the digital divide and reach Black women who maybe don’t have high-speed internet or constant access to, and time for, social media. And that more of us will find the power in knowing — the power to make informed choices about our health and our lives.

Bonus: Listen to our interview with Minda Honey on the Longreads Podcast here:

Previously:
Politics as a Defense Against Heartbreak
A Farewell to Fuckboys in the Age of Consent Culture

* * *

Minda Honey is writing An Anthology of Assholes, a memoir about dating as a woman of color in Southern California. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky.

Editor: Sari Botton