The AIDS Generation: Stories of Survival and Resilience

266 Pages·2013·0.93 MB·English

by  Perry N. Halkitis

The AIDS Generation
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The AIDS Generation:
Stories of Survival and Resilience
perry n. halkitis
3
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Halkitis, Perry N., author.
The AIDS generation : stories of survival and resilience / Perry N. Halkitis.
p. ; cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–994497–2 (alk. paper)
I. Title.
[DNLM: 1. Acquired Immunodefi ciency Syndrome—United States—Personal
Narratives. 2. Epidemics—history—United States—Personal Narratives. 3. HIV
Long-Term Survivors—United States—Personal Narratives. 4. History, 20th Century—
United States—Personal Narratives. 5. History, 21st Century—United States—Personal
Narratives. 6. Homosexuality, Male—psychology—United States—Personal Narratives.
WC 503]
RA643.8
614.5′99392—dc23
2013023760
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Dedication
For my two Roberts
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CONTENTS
Foreword ix
David France
Preface xiii
CHAPTER 1 30 Years and Counting: The Story of AIDS in the Gay
Community 1
C HAPTER 2 The Men of the AIDS Generation: A Study of Gay Men
Surviving AIDS 14
C HAPTER 3 Enter HIV: Disease, Diagnosis, and Devastation in the
Pre-ART Era 56
C HAPTER 4 Surviving AIDS: Strategies for Managing a Life
With HIV 94
C HAPTER 5 And Then Middle Age: Gay Men Aging With HIV 138
C HAPTER 6 Resilience: A Lifetime of Living With AIDS 190
References 219
Index 235
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FOREWORD | By David France
Shortly after 10 a.m. on December 18, 2012, my old friend Spencer Cox
drew his last breath. He was 44.
He hadn’t looked very healthy when I saw him 7 weeks earlier. There
was an unusual greenish tint in his skin and he appeared to have lost
weight. His clothing—oversized jeans and an old blue plaid shirt with
buttons missing—billowed over his crooked frame, which once had been
so admirable. This poor impression was further enhanced by the pirate’s
patch he wore over his now nonfunctioning left eye, and the smell of too
many cigarettes.
He spoke of feeling run down, an understatement it turns out. What killed
him was old-fashioned AIDS: no CD4 cells, a viral load in the millions,
and fl uids fi lling his lungs—this, despite the fact that he’d lived over half
his life in HIV care and personally knew the world’s top infectious disease
doctors and researchers. In fact, as a veteran AIDS activist he helped those
researchers study and then roll out protease inhibitors, the game-changing
drugs that hit the market in 1996 and fi nally slowed the dying. But when
friends gathered at his apartment to pack up his belongings—that funereal
routine from the ’80s and ’90s—they found bottles of unopened medicine.
Inexplicably, Spencer had gone off the pills.
Why had he done that? There was much hand-wringing among family
and friends, but not among people who saw what Spencer saw, who had
been through what so many of us had—events that Perry Halkitis and the
men whose voices he amplifi es in this volume describe in explicit detail.
We are survivors of the plague years in America from 1981 to 1996, when
death came cold and often, a world-gone-mad era when hospitals would