It Wasn’t a Sin, I Have Cancer
November 20th, 2021, getting back to my computer, after friends just left, we watched a show together, its name: “It’s a Sin”. The release was in January.
I had kids at home with me since the beginning of the pandemic. It meant little work got brought to an epilogue. My neck was stiff—of little importance with the current state of the world. A hotel room for the time being remained quiet. Anyone that knows me, knows what had to come out of moments of quietude. I was going to think; I was going to think far too much. I was going to head and neck deep into that shit. I’d soon write some more after that.
My father used to say: You can fix everyone’s ignorance. Some are just too comfortable in it. Some don’t care to be educated through the fog of it. It isn’t your job to do so… Still, I thought, if I could open just one person’s eyes… I try to advocate for things that are right. I speak up for things and the issues that matter. Maybe I don’t make a whole hell of a difference in the way things are. But if I can make them, even one person sees things for what they are, I’d feel like I succeeded in something worth mentioning.
Something in early summer. I walked to the park with my kids, both to get some fresh air, hoping to ward off my offshoot’s tedium and indolence. Upon reaching our destination, the kids went off in every direction—a well-earned exhale would be celebrated shortly before a mother with her small child approached me. It didn’t take long before the subject of COVID was presented. Half-listening, my attention veered from my kids playing with others. It had been sometime since they had experienced such things, pre-Covid it was something we put little thought into. Privilege. Most of us have always been able to lay claim to being well insulated. Not knowing real fear or hardships. Short-lived was the not completely listening, sun beamed, times bygone. My son appeared in front of me. Before I could get a word in, the mother assertively stated, “I will not be getting my son vaccinated next school year. If they try to force him, I’ll be pulling him out. Because you must’ve heard by now… the AIDS virus is inside the vaccine. I don’t want him catching AIDS” My brain had no time to marshall all thoughts into a proper. "Are you fucking kidding me right now?" And believe me when I say this was no joke. This wasn’t a meme. Or an off-putting YouTube vid. This was real life. She was completely serious in her stance. I had no time to unload all the facts, education, and common sense that I normally could muster in that moment. Dumbfounded. I looked at my son, wide-eyed, in befuddlement. It was time to head home, to teach them about the way things really happened.
There were too many on social trying to draw lines between AIDS and COVID. How COVID was far worse than AIDS. Doing so completely trying to erase the history of the LGBT community. I was tired of reading it online. I was tired of having conversations with those that refused to be educated. For those that were all too comfortable in their ignorance, for those that preferred their bigoted agenda, and everything that settled in that very narrowed box.
The people who had HIV and AIDS, especially in the early days, were shunned. When the disease was found to exist, there was no name because they had given no name to it. But it affected gay men primarily, it was geometrically multiplying with people, among people who didn’t want to talk about it, because of those who were involved, who suffered from it. And those people who are gay men faced a very different situation in the early ’80s than they do now… The COVID-19 pandemic, as awful as it is/was, is a very different situation. This is just facts, it’s the truth that doesn’t care who believes it or not. The LGBT community also had trouble getting money to do anything to fight back against the AIDS epidemic. There’s been no problem getting money to fight back against COVID, is a very good thing, I might add.
The first Canadian case was reported nine months after AIDS had first entered public consciousness, in the summer of 1981, as a “rare cancer” found in 41 gay men in New York and San Francisco. Today it would be a little like people dying of COVID without a virus being isolated, and so there was a lot of uncertainty and unknown about who had it or who didn’t have it. By the time the virus was discovered, the epidemic was already widespread throughout the world… Cases were doubling every five or six months. Initially, it was very difficult to get people’s attention.
AIDS and COVID-19 are spread in very different ways, and both public health crises required unique responses geared towards different populations: AIDS prevention measures focused on education around condom use, socializing safely and safe sex, compared to COVID-19 prevention involving education about social distancing and wearing masks.
The major differences [between getting infected with HIV and COVID-19] are the modes of transmission and the duration of infection; HIV is transmitted through sexual contact, in blood, and mothers to newborns. It lasts forever, and it’s inevitably fatal. In the absence of therapy, when you’re infected, you’re infected for life. It’s not transmitted through the air like coronavirus, but coronavirus can be beat in three weeks mostly, in most people, unless they die.
In contrast to 2020s almost round-the-clock media coverage of COVID-19, it took a high-profile celebrity case to make the general population realize how widespread HIV/AIDS was becoming. The first major turning point in AIDS awareness came on July 25, 1985, when actor Rock Hudson, a friend of the Reagans, revealed he had AIDS, and died two months later. President Reagan took this public health crisis more seriously after learning of Hudson’s diagnosis.
Neglect, shame hindered AIDS, and stigma until that point. Wide use of condoms and distribution of sterile needles to addicts could’ve stalled the epidemic. But conservative politicians had hampered efforts to encourage such measures.
Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or “AIDS”, is a chronic condition that interferes with the body’s ability to fight infection and disease. The human immunodeficiency virus causes it. There are no bacteria or strands of HIV in the booster vaccines.
There is never a correlation that can be drawn between the AIDS epidemic and COVID. You will never be locked away. You haven’t watched as everywhere and every day, friends, relatives, acquaintances, and partners are dying because of your choice of whether you want to listen the science. This isn’t a ‘Twilight Zone' where everyone in the community just starts disappearing. Cause it was the pastor at your church who just wasn’t there one day. It was your favorite mechanic. It was the guy who did your fucking hair. They just stopped existing.
Those with HIV can live long, full lives because of science and the contrivance of better medicines. Just like/unlike the COVID vaccine. Both diseases are one of the same, though. They brought one disease to the crescendo via stigma and shame and lack of resources, dearth of headlines, withholding of money. "My rights, fake news, choices, and conspiracy theories" poison the other. A vaccine can help — we are now equipped with information—there are those, still, that still refuse to grab onto it.
Today there is a choice. There is help. Don’t forget, such things as these haven’t always been available to all of us.
My thoughts raced back there, amongst the opening of the elevator door just outside my room. People had been walking past and talking. I suppose, for some, their worlds remained worry free even then... It was an existence I hadn’t been part of for a couple of years—especially with all that misinformation sailing around. Beyond that big-heavy metal door there was a virus… indistinguishable still was the ignorance. The hate online — the uniformed comparisons — and fear. I needed a break. Not the kind that was deserving of a hotel room and lentil salad. But I needed to turn off all the stuff.
***
For those of you that disregard UK’s impressive catalogue of movies, tv series, you are doing yourself a great disservice. The dramas far surpass those of big-budget-Hollywood options. And this would be an example of brilliant television. It depicts the lives of a group of gay men and their friends during the HIV/AIDS crisis in the United Kingdom. The show received critical acclaim for its emotional scenes, writing, performances, and accurate depiction of HIV/AIDS. The show also created an upsurge in HIV testing. It was the most nominated show at the 2022 British Academy Television Awards. Russell T Davies, the writer of It's a Sin, the Channel 4 drama about the HIV/Aids epidemic in the late 1980s, has revealed that the death of Colin, one of the show's characters, was partly based on the death of his partner. Also, the memoir Love from the Pink Palace was used to putting this together. We can find here it, written by Jill Nader.
After some begging of my dearest friend — his cousin who is a doctor—who has been helping me with my cancer diagnosis referrals, since early 2022 and a mutual friend to come watch this series with me. They relented. I had watched this series three times at this point. As straight men, I thought they’d benefit from a watch. They had never been educated in the history of it is never too late to learn; I thought. Things had been said to me over several years — things that were offensive to me and many others—things that needed to be corrected; they were my friends. I wanted them to understand. If they had been just another mother on the playground, I would have just walked away a long time ago. I would have turned them off. I wasn’t wanting either as a solution.
The doctor quickly assured me he was aware of what AIDS was. The disease, the medications taken today, by name. The symptoms of the disease. I said nothing more. I just pressed ‘play’.
We watched the whole season. I was to be checked out by 12. I called the front desk to ask if we could stay until 12:30.
I went back to typing with two of them sitting on the couch beside me. The other one in the Mayhall Upholstered chair across from me. A box of Kleenex was on the marble table in the centre. I did my best to answer questions to answers they had zero insight on.
We got to the final two episodes. I felt the couch shaking underneath me. Tears were streaming down their faces. I passed a napkin to each. I tried to console them where I could because that’s what people do when they love each other.
The ending arrived. They thanked me for watching it with them. They had shared with me that “I think every straight person should see this program, especially men. For all this time… I have felt that I have taken healthcare for granted. I have taken my friends and family for granted. I have taken my partner. That will change now.” This is I have promised that would pass along, if they ever gave me a sounding board to do so.
I am here now to say that I have may have cancer. It may be in an early stage. This doesn’t take away though the fact that I am thankful for all my friends and family’s' support. I am thankful for those that love me for who I am, even though that has taken a lot of work from others to get me to the place I now find myself in.
Thank you to the older LGBTQ community. Thanks to the brave activism against inequality and injustice. Here we are still dealing with the COVID-19 global pandemic—a novel virus we know little about that has threatened hundreds of millions of lives around the world. It sounds familiar, right? But now we've seen many medications being tested to treat the virus, and within just a few months, several therapies have made it into development, now are out there helping people. We can all thank the activism of the HIV/AIDS community for the speed at which the pharmaceutical industry reacted to this latest epidemic.
***
Thank you to the science community. Because of you, we don’t have to rely on groups of SAHMs on social. Thank you to K.J., my friend and long- time HIV survivor who signed off on this little essay of mine.
This was a creative non-fiction essay I created during the pandemic. I had submitted this piece to a magazine where it was placed semi-finalist category. It proved itself cathartic. Cancer, the state of the world and mistruths all felt overwhelming. It was something I was attempting to rectify. All events in the essay occurred.
**Names, people and certain details mentioned in this essay have been changed to protect their privacy.
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