I was born a blackboy in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1979 when many gay blackboys believed the arrival of a mysterious gay cancer in the early 80s was strictly a gay whiteboy’s disease. The white media had them convinced that a whiteboy from Quebec City, Quebec, an airline steward who spent considerable time relishing the spoils of the world — particularly the coastal hubs of gay sex life in San Francisco and New York — had brought AIDS to the United States.
Though he was identified anonymously as “Patient O” — the letter “O” meaning “outside of California” — then mistaken for “Patient 0” because that’s what happens when you can’t tell an “O” from a zero, and finally “Patient Zero,” the man who would be seldom known to the world by his given name, Gaétan Dugas, had become the antihero in the AIDS saga. Though how was it possible that a single whiteboy brought a fatal virus into the United States? Medical scientists found in Dugas’s address book what they believed to be the answer. They learned that Dugas had had sex with the men listed in his address book. They learned that the men in his address book then had sex with other men. They learned that those men then had sex with other men. And then other men. And more and more men traced back to Dugas were having sex. Many of those men, as a result, had become mysteriously ill from a virus that medical scientists termed GRID, or Gay-related Immune Deficiency. But when confronted with this information, sources claimed Dugas didn’t accept that he had a communicable disease, let alone GRID, even when he showed symptoms similar to his infected sex partners. Instead, one of the symptoms—a purple lesion behind his ear that was subsequently cut off and biopsied—was revealed by his doctor to be Kaposi sarcoma, a type of skin cancer. So Dugas believed he had cancer. And cancer couldn’t be transmitted sexually. So Dugas continued to fuck as he always had, claiming to have had 2500 sexual partners over a 10-year period, 250 lays a year. Even when doctors implored him not to. He wouldn’t even wear a condom. So Dugas, according to myth, continued to enter those crowded discos, surveying the compacted bodies while exclaiming to himself and to all, I am the prettiest one, and made his way among the throng while denying that he carried inside him a malignancy that would reduce all that glitter to dust. And the hundreds of men who believed he was the prettiest one, they would bed him again and again. By the time Gaétan Dugas died in 1984 from complications due to AIDS he would do so amid rumors that in the cubicles of those bathhouses and sex bars, he would dim the lights dimmer so his accumulating lesions did not show the effects of the disease he swore was cancer, insisting upon having a body lie there with a can of Crisco and a bottle of poppers so that he might luxuriate in the looming conquest. |
And when sex was over, Dugas would brighten the lights to point out the lesions to his partners and say to them, I’ve got gay cancer. . . I’m going to die and so are you.
But Gaétan Dugas, we know now, was not Patient Zero, but somebody to blame. Whiteboys who made it impossible for me to realize how close I was to becoming yet another infected blackboy tipping the balance so that HIV became less and less a whiteboy’s disease. Nevertheless, as I was coming of age, and as far as those blackboys who were having sex with other blackboys knew, the men Dugas infected were all white, and that meant something.
Weren’t whiteboys, for so long, the poster children for AIDS? It was no wonder those blackboys believed I won’t catch it. I can’t catch it. And by the time I became sexually active in the late 90s, I was fucking other blackboys who believed the same. By the early to mid-2000s, I’d gone buck wild. I tried crack for the first time, then gave it up for cocaine. I used cocaine to seduce straight boys at parties from twilight to sunup. I seduced the straight boys with bottles of wine and dinners for two, pretending to have the kind of relationship that couldn’t last. I gave up pursuing the straight boys and instead went for the sure thing, one-night stands with as many men as I could meet in bars, but especially those who hid behind computer screens scouring my numerous online profiles, sending chatroom friend requests—all of us wanting more drugs, more liquor, more sex to fulfill the thrill of being reckless. Gradually, these one-night stands became a feast of whiteboys. Whiteboys whose profile tags read: BLACK COCK TO THE FRONT OF THE LINE. Whiteboys who sent messages with pictures of their assholes, begging to be plowed and cream-pied. Whiteboys for whom I was the satiation of a dream. Whiteboys who made it impossible for me to realize how close I was to becoming yet another infected blackboy tipping the balance so that HIV became less and less a whiteboy’s disease. Whiteboys whom I might one day be looking for. Whiteboys who might one day be looking for me. |
Darius Stewart holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa and an MFA in poetry from the Michener Center for Writers. He is the author of three chapbook collections, including The Ghost the Night Becomes, winner of the 2013 Gertrude Press Poetry Chapbook Competition, and his essays appear or are forthcoming in Appalachian Heritage, Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, Barren Magazine, Gargoyle, and storySouth. He is the 2020-2021 Provost Visiting Writer in Nonfiction at the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City with his dog, Fry.
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