Why I'm Still HIV-Negative

Firstly and foremostly, I count myself plain damned lucky. Secondly, I was never really all that sexually active, even when I could have been, and maybe should have been--I was young, good-looking, healthy; but then, as now, I spent most of my time reading, thinking, walking, and listening to music. Thirdly, largely as a result of my reading and thinking, I was acutely aware of the historical anomaly of there being, for those brief golden three decades of my youth and young manhood, no incurable and fatal sexually transmitted diseases. "We are lucky," I would say to anybody who would listen, "it scares me to think how lucky." Fourthly, I was living outside the primary areas of contamination (in Spokane) when the plague hit. I remember the night at a "Family party" in the early 80's when my friend and mentor Bill Weaver showed me an article in (I think it was) Psychology Today about the new "queer cancer." Fifthly, my Guardian Spirit actually had a hand in keeping me safe--as the following anecdote will illustrate:

In July of 1980, when the Virus was spreading in San Francisco, Key West, and New York, but nobody knew it yet, and I was still trim and beautiful, I took the train to San Francisco to visit my friend Gary Darling and to attend the San Francisco Opera production of Don Giovanni, with Cesare Siepi singing the title role--impossible to describe the magic of that voice, or the excitement of hearing my favorite opera in company of an entire operahouseful of people who knew the opera as well as I did--and who even laughed at the jokes in the rapid Italian of the recitativi. Musically it was, as I had hoped, the high point of my life. But sexually I had a terrible time. During the several days of my visit I went to the baths, the clubs, the exhibition bars--the raunchiest, randiest that ever they were--and I did not once get laid. Every night I would go out determined at least to get fucked (What, besides a little hygienic preparation, could that cost me?), and every morning I would come back to Gary's apartment and crawl into bed beside my friend and dear sister utterly defeated and totally unrequited. What was wrong with me? I felt like the worst failure in the world. Finally, rather than face more such humiliation (not that I was being rejected--I just couldn't get into it), I gave it up and took the train back to Spokane....

And on the way back--If I were making this up, I would have made this part of my trip to San Francisco, not from--I stopped and stayed for a couple of days at Crater Lake. Those who don't know the Pacific Coast, who don't know the vulcanism that underlies the land from Western British Columbia to Northern California, who suppose that Crater Lake is just a lake--those who are not from the Pacific Northwest--cannot conceive what it is to immerse oneself in the still, awful presence of that place. I spent the night on the rim (8,000 ft.) seeing the mid-summer stars overhead and reflected in the lake. The next morning I descended into the crater of the long-ago explosion of Mount Mazama and took the tourist excursion boat around the lake filled with frigid liquid sapphire. When the boat stopped at Wizard Island, I skinned down to the the bikini swimsuit I'd worn under my clothes (How slim we were in those days!) and jumped in off the dock. The near-freezing water was brutal, punishing. I stayed in only for a couple of minutes, coming out of it feeling that I had braved an incalculable force and luckily been annealed rather than destroyed. And so, I think, my Guardian Spirit was appeased or satisfied.