HIV Negative

The phrase "HIV Negative" implies the diagnosis "HIV positive," a precursor to the AIDS epidemic which decimated the gay male population in the 1980s and beyond.  The stigma, still a force in some sectors of our society, delayed the mobilization for effective treatment when the epidemic first appeared in the early 80s. It took Ronald Reagan five years to even mention the word "AIDS," although the disease had been ravaging our community. His presidency set the tone of the national response: stigma and marginalization, insufficient funding, avoidance of public discussion, delays in research, funding, and education. As the epidemic conducted its scorched earth assault on gay America, the most at-risk population spun about in anger, despair, disbelief, and denial. The last of these, sanctioned by the federal attitude of indifference, was the deadliest. Victims participated not only in their own destruction but -- wittingly or no -- brought about the death of others. (Religious condemnation played its evil part as well.)

You might think that being HIV negative during the awful years before retrovirals made the disease a manageable condition rather than a death sentence felt like a deliverance, but you'd be wrong. "HIV Negative" portrays the terrible toll the disease took on all of us through the lens of a prequel to our short, "The Knowing." It covers the span of time from the early 80s, the honeymoon of Adam and Peter in first love and ignorance of the disaster that was about to befall, to the end of the decade which saw the dissolution of their relationship, the descent of catastrophe on their community, and their differing responses.

And yet, it is not a tale of unrelieved darkness. The bond between the two ex-lovers remains.

Website: www.shogafilms.com;
Instagram: shogafilms;
Facebook: facebook.com/shogafilms;
Twitter: twitter.com/shogafilms

Transcript

At the sound of the buzzer, Adam stepped through the green double doors to enter the chilly apartment building.  He hadn’t seen the lobby for three years but instantly recognized the color of curdled milk on the painted walls, the impersonal smell of stale laundry, the dirty row of mailboxes, some of whose locks had been forced and hadn’t been repaired—or were they different ones now? —in all the times Adam had come to this building.  It was the same building to which he and Peter had moved ten years ago, just as shabby back then as now, but to them both, still bathed in the innocence and infatuation of first love, it was a haven where the two of them made their flawed and intimate world. The flaws eventually drove Adam to other apartments, other cities, and other relationships, but for ye    ars, this drab, high-ceilinged building on the edge of a bad neighborhood was all he knew of domesticity.  And, being sentimental, Adam maintained his communication with Peter throughout his subsequent wanderings.  In some ways, Adam felt Peter had gotten the best of him, or at least the freshest piece of his heart.  

Adam climbed the three steps leading from the landing into the lobby.  He had a choice now: he could take the front stairway or the back.  When he had lived here, he always took the front stairs; he couldn’t say why.  High strung, he would leap the stairs two at a time, unless he were with Peter, who hated physical exercise and always climbed under protest.  God had been generous with Peter, and, in his early twenties, he was a man of extraordinary beauty.  Tall with silky black skin, smooth features, and a closely cropped beard enhancing the masculinity of his well-formed body, Peter turned heads. [My!My!My!] “Who is that magnificent animal?” an older man once asked Adam at a picnic of Black and White Men Together while Peter was playing frisbee in the tight jeans and a red tee-shirt. “That’s my lover,” Adam replied with proprietary warmth. Had Peter been into exercise, as was Adam, he could have become a legend in the gay community for his beauty.  His body was poised for the mesomorphic buffing that had become the gay ideal, but the gift of Peter’s body, Adam thought, had been bestowed upon a slug.  Peter’s only form of exercise was his manic dancing at the clubs, exuberant, as Adam remembered, but not artistic. Still, Peter was so beautiful back then that he attracted a lot of attention and attention was his life’s blood.  

Since theirs was an open relationship—a condition Peter imposed before agreeing to move in with Adam—he assumed that Peter had been fucking around a lot more than had actually been the case. Back in the early 80s, everybody was fucking around a lot—or so it seemed. The deaths that had come had come fast and mysteriously; Peter’s friend from West Virginia, a white trash pansy perpetually needy and perpetually unhappy; the up-and-coming manager at work whose presence at the leather bar and perfectly shaped chest shocked Adam in equal measure; the Black drag queen at the downtown club that he and Peter went to on an occasional Friday who lip-synched her ballads so emotively that men floated up from the audience to stuff dollar bills in her brassiere. All of them wasted so quickly, went to the hospital and were gone. It was only a matter of weeks. Each load of cum was like the click of a pistol in Russian roulette, but nobody knew what the rules of the game were back then. The disease had no name when the dying began. It was informally referred to as the gay plague when it was referred to at all. Nobody wanted to talk about it. In their ignorance, Peter and Adam were equally fatalistic. Since no one knew what the disease was or how it was contracted, what was there to do but to continue as one had and hope that the one was lucky?  

Adam hesitated at the front stairwell but decided to continue toward the back. His choice would take him past the laundry room. The door was open, as usual, and inside the plain white room stood the coin-operated washer and dryer. The laundry room was always open, and one night, early in their relationship, Peter had not yet returned from the bars and Adam couldn’t sleep. He dressed and came downstairs to do laundry at 3:30 in the morning. The hamper in their bedroom was overflowing. Since one had to babysit the laundry—unattended loads had been known to disappear—neither Adam nor Peter liked the chore, but it was less objectionable to Adam, since he could read on the hard bench that was the only other furnishing in the room. Peter never read. So even though it was Peter’s turn to do the laundry that week, Adam stuffed the clothes into two pillow slips and padded downstairs in his slippers. Just as the machine finished filling for the first wash cycle, Adam’s heart jumped at the sound of the front door opening in the lobby. He wanted to stick his head out but knew that if it were Peter, he would pass by on his way to the back stairwell. To his joy, Peter came striding by and stopped when he saw Adam on the bench.   

“Why are you up?” he asked in surprise.   

“I couldn’t sleep,” Adam replied lamely.   

Peter came in and lifted Adam to his feet, kissing him long and deeply, “Baby, were you jealous?”  

“I just can’t get used to it,” Adam said, holding Peter in a hug and nuzzling his beard. “I tell my mind that everything's OK, but my body won’t listen.”  

Peter started kissing Adam again, passionately, urgently. Adam lost himself in the sensation of his lover’s lips and body. All this man had to do was touch him, and Adam was instantly fired  with lust.   

“Baby, I always come home to you, don't I?”  

Instead of answering, Adam tightened his grip around the back of Peter’s neck and thrust his body rhythmically against that of his lover. Peter began massaging Adam’s cock and unbuckling his own pants.   

“Let’s go upstairs,” Adam said, when he came up for air.   

“No, here.”  

“The door’s open.”  

In response, Peter removed both his shirt and Adam’s and backed him against the wall opposite the washer, now churning with its load of clothes.   

“Let me at least close the door,” Adam groaned.   

“No,” Peter said, pulling the last of his clothing away and taking Adam’s cock into his mouth.   

It was some of the best sex Adam could remember.   

As Adam climbed the first set of stairs and looked down, he was newly struck by the black and white tile that dominated the corridors, a surprising elegance of design in an otherwise functional building. The floors always reminded him of a chessboard. From the landings, the wooden doors leading into the apartment wore the same dirty cream as the walls they sat in. In the filtered daylight of a winter afternoon, Adam didn’t take as much notice of the harsh light streaming from the bare bulbs provided for that  illumination but remembered what it was like to walk into the building at night. The corridors always seemed empty, and if he met anyone on the stairs or coming out of their apartment, the greeting exchanged was as bare and functional as the surroundings.   

“What’s happenin’, man!”  

“Hey!”  

When Adam lived there, he was practically the only white in the building. Peter was friends with a gay couple on the second floor, but they were into Black nationalism, and Adam wasn’t comfortable in their apartment. He felt like an eavesdropper and consciously made an effort to hold his tongue when Peter agreed that Jesus was a Black man lightened by Western propaganda or that the gay plague was really a whites man’s disease. Adam had been out of the apartment for three years by the time Karim and Asante got sick. Peter had been exclusively into whites before he and Adam had become lovers, but his taste ran darker as time went on. When their relationship moved into its final dissolution and they were no longer having sex, Peter was exclusively dating Black men. His new lover, whom he’d met at the baths shortly before the final break-up  was several shades darker than Peter himself. Monty was a dancer and, Adam had to admit, quite a hunk. Adam would have liked Monty for himself. His mixture of loss, lust, misery and anger kept him sexually inactive for months. Two years later, Monty moved back to Texas to be near his family, and two years after that he was dead. Peter had flown to Houston for the funeral. He didn’t get himself tested then. At the same time, there seemed little point in knowing one’s HIV status. There was nothing one could do medically but wait for the disease to announce itself. 

Adam continued climbing from the second to the third floor, eyes trained on the pale sunlight seeping from the top. Grey cement steps lined the four sides of the square stairwell. The checkered floor at the bottom was streaked with dirt and the dried evidence of the routine mopping. Adam was surprised to see a hypodermic needle creviced into a corner. There had always been drugs in the building, but people had been discreet. No shooting up in the hallways. Adam had been into drugs more than Peter; he smoked weed regularly. It was his way of relaxing. The only thing Peter did was poppers, which Adam had tried but hadn’t liked. They disoriented him, and he lost his erection. In this as in so much else they were incompatible. Once Monty had moved away, Peter had a lot of sex but no more lovers. Adam would visit Peter every time he returned to the city, and each time Peter would show him the photo album of conquests. They were all Black and some of them were obviously trade.  

“Why does a good-looking man like you pay for sex?” Adam asked.  

“Because I wanted it. I wanted it, and I couldn’t have it unless I was willing to pay for it, so I paid fifteen, sometimes even twenty bucks if it was good enough.” 

One boyfriend who did move in was injecting crack and began stealing Peter’s things. “I could’a fallen in love with that boy,” Peter told Adam, “but the crack made him too triflin’. I had to put him down, but I hated doin’ it. He was some of the hottest sex I ever had. The first night we were together, I wanted him to fuck me so bad! You know I was never much into gettin fucked.” 

“This guy was shooting up, and you let him fuck you?”  

“Bay-bee, he was worth it,” Peter said gleefully.  

Now it was believed that if you managed the disease properly, you could prolong the period between the initial infection and the onset of illness, but Peter still didn’t get himself tested.  

“I hope you used a condom,” Adam said.  

Peter smiled implishly. “Teeters,” he said, using an old nick-name from their early relationship, “you are the whitest white boy I ever knew.”   

Adam was on the landing of the third floor now and stepped into the hallway. On this floor, for some reason, the wooden doors had been painted brown. He heard his steps reverberate off the walls, smelled the familiar odor of stale grease,rounded the corner of what had been the last turn to their apartment, The door at the end of the hall was ajar, and Adam could hear the noise of the television coming from behind it. Since Peter had buzzed him into the building, he knew Adam was on his way up. As Adam approached, he wished himself fervently into the past, even into the familiar irritation he felt when he would hear the laugh track  from the other side of the door as he arrived home from work. He knew when he walked in that he would find Peter full-length on the couch dressed in boxer shorts in the overheated apartment watching I Love Lucy. And the T.V. would be on all evening, driving Adam, after dinner, into the bedroom, where he tried to read or write. Occasionally Peter would call him into the front room and ask him to watch a show with him, but Adam usually refused, considering commercial T.V. to be a wasteland. When Adam thought of how mismatched they were living together– few friends or interests in common–he was amazed at the power of infatuation, how it had kept them together for the time that it had. Not that they hadn’t argued. There was plenty of that. But the sex afterwards made the arguments worthwhile. And even after they broke up, there was still sexual tension between them. When Adam came to visit, they slept in the same bed. Adam wanted Peter, even though his former lover had grown flabby over the years, but Peter kept their occasional reunions platonic. Once, on a visit four years ago, Peter had wakened him in the middle of the night stroking his hard-on. “Damn, Teeters, you feel good!” he exclaimed. Adam rolled into his arms, and they began making love, but Peter wouldn’t kiss him. “I’m not into that anymore,” he said. Adam was disappointed, but they continued to make love until Peter rolled him over on his stomach.  

“You’re not going to fuck me without a condom, are you?” Adam asked.  

Peter immediately blew up. “Just forget it!” he said angrily. “The whole thing was a mistake!” 

Adam tried to talk about it, but Peter refused. “Go to sleep, Adam. I-I-I got to go to work in the morning.” 

And then, on Adam’s last visit, Peter had gotten his revenge. The last time Adam had been through the brown door of the apartment, he’d furiously banged out with his suitcase. Adam had come for a long week-end in the city and they had planned to spend Sunday together. On Saturday night, however, Peter went out to the bars while Adam was visiting other friends. Late  that night, Adam was awakened when Peter came into the apartment with a trick. Through the bedroom walls, he heard thudding and fumbling, followed some ten minutes later by loud groans and muffled cries of “no!” The voice was not Peter’s. Adam considered dressing and leaving but reasoned that there was no place for him to go in the middle of the night. Miraculously, he fell back to sleep. The next morning. he woke to find Peter in the kitchen and a short, stocky Black man with a heavy beard sitting on the couch. Adam instantly labeled him street but figured he wasn’t trade. Peter pretended as if everything was normal, and the Black stranger pretty much ignored him. Adam felt angry but couldn’t decide if he was justified in his emotions. After all, he was a guest. Once it became clear, however, that Peter was not going to send the trick on his way and spend time with Adam, he gave into his anger. He felt embarrassed listening to the two Black men enter the exploratory talk of sex partners who were now discovering one another’s lives. It was a conversation from which he was completely excluded.  

Finally, he called Peter into the bedroom. “I thought we were going to spend the day together. I’m leaving tonight, you know.” 

“You’re always leaving, Adam. I really like this guy. I don’t want to kick him out. If you don’t like it, you can leave.” 

Attempted pin and escape. It had always been like that between them. In spite of the fact that they had been split up for seven years, they turned immediately to their old scripts. Adam was a wielder of emotional blackmail; Peter refused to knuckle under.  

And that had been their last direct communication. Through a mutual friend Adam learned that Peter had met someone – a recent Cuban immigrant -- and had settled into a relationship.  According to the friend, Arturo was new to the life, and Adam thought cynically to himself “fresh meat,” but he recognized the familiar jealousy that attended so many of his emotions around Peter. Living on the other side of the country now, it was easier to put that mess to a temporary rest. 

And then, unexpectedly, at 2:00 a.m. Adam’s phone rang. 

“Adam …” Peter was sobbing uncontrollably. 

“Baby, what is it? Get hold of yourself!” 

“Arturo died.” More sobbing. 

Adam didn’t need to ask what had killed him. He let his former lover cry for a while, then asked, “Are you all right?” 

“He moved out of our apartment! Wouldn’t tell me where he’d gone. I couldn’t find him until he’d been hospitalized, and even then …” More crying. “He just passed!” 

“Baby, I’m so sorry!”  

Adam did feel badly for Peter but wondered why he was taking this death so hard. He’d been much calmer about Monty’s death. A cold thought clutched at his heart. “Peter, are you all right? Were you guys …?” The question dried up. He couldn’t ask what he wanted to ask.  

There was no need to backtrack. In the throes of his grief, Peter hadn’t noticed Adam’s fumble. Adam let Peter cry himself out, murmuring in a soothing manner, “It’s OK; I’m here. It’s OK, I’m here.” 

In subsequent phone calls, Peter told him that he that he’d always been the top and was pretty sure that he was safe that way. Adam wanted so badly for Peter to be negative that he didn’t challenge him on it, didn’t suggest that he get tested. Adam remembered the agony of his first test, not knowing what his status would be. The anxiety grew during the week between the blood draw and the return for the results. He couldn’t sleep the night before, and the fifteen minutes he spent in the waiting room of the clinic were unspeakably tense, amplified by the presence of other young men smoldering in similar fear. When his name was called, he braced himself as he walked into the cubicle. “You’re fine,” the gay man said as soon as he sat down.  Was he a medical aide or some kind of volunteer? “The test came back negative.” 

Peter was numb, barely took in the admonitions and recommendations. Condoms … alternatives to anal sex … regular testing. Over the next few days, the knowledge that he was negative settled over him like a fine ash. There was no relief. Too many of his friends were dying or lived in fear. 

Three months after Arturo’s death, Peter called with the   news that Adam was dreading.  

“Does your family know?”  

“I don’t want them to know. They’ll just say it’s God’s punishment.” 

“But your mother …” 

“Adam,” Peter interrupted savagely,  “if you make any attempt to contact my family, I’ll cut you off!” 

“All right,” Adam said placatingly. But the idea of doing nothing was unbearable to him, “I’m coming out,” he said suddenly. 

“Why? It won’t make any difference.” 

The depth and obstinacy of Peter’s despair shocked Peter into a declaration he hadn’t planned on making. Because I still love you! 

“Adam …” A note of despair crept into Peter’s voice. “Don’t start crying. I don’t need that.” 

“I gotta hang up, Peter. I’ll call you back.” 

“I’ll be here. I’m not going anywhere.” 

“Peter, I’m coming out.” 

“Come if you must.” 

As Adam pushed the apartment door open, he was instantly enveloped in a blast of heat. Peter was laying on the couch, watching Perry Mason. A plastic tray of half-eaten chicken and rice delivered from a volunteer organization sat on the wooden coffee table. Peter was dressed in draw-string pants, an off-white tee-shirt and a ratty black bathrobe. He greeted Adam’s arrival with a look of combined wariness and self-absorption.  

“Hey, how’re ya doin’!” he said.  

Adam walked over to hug him, but Peter didn’t sit up, so he had to bend to an awkward embrace around the shoulders. He didn’t look as bad as Adam expected. He was now as thin as when Adam had met him, which meant that he had lost forty pounds, but he was not the emaciated frame that Adam had feared to see. His skin color was still good, a chocolatey butterscotch, his face still unlined, still handsome. The eyes, however, were defeated; they used to be Peter’s most attractive feature, lit up with buoyancy. His whole air was listless, and the smell in the overheated apartment was one of despair. This was a man who had received the diagnosis as a death sentence.  

Suddenly Adam felt overcome by the stifling atmosphere. “God, it’s hot in here!” he exclaimed and began ripping his clothes off, down to his white undershirt. The disease followed him whenever he went. When it became clear that the coastal cities were furnaces for the plague, he had moved to a small city in the Midwest where no one had yet been diagnosed. In a few years, however, the deaths came there too, and they were no longer confined to distant acquaintances. More and more people turned out to be infected: friends from the past, business colleagues, boyfriends and would-be lovers. Some refused to talk about their condition and died in lies about cancer and T.B; others hustled through endless rounds of doctors, hospitals, episodes, and drugs; some traveledin periods of health; some danced agonizingly on the edge of death, only to be pulled back by antibiotics and willpower; some went vegetarian; others found God; some claimed they were cured; others cried they’d been wronged. So many, there were so many. And the disease pulled Adam ever further into the oven; first acquaintances, then friends, then good friends, and now Peter. And what about him? How could he maintain his condition as his community melted into death? Every act of love was a risk of infection. He could not remain so cold, and yet he was fearful.  

“It’s so damn hot in here!” he said again.  

The wary coals in Peter’s eyes flamed into anger. “You’ve just come in from the outside,” he said. “I don’t need any grief from you. If you’ve come to judge, you can go out that door and down [the] those stairs the way you came.” 

At these words, Adam looked at him, stricken. For the first time, he opened himself up to the possibility of feeling Peter’s pain, and the prospect terrified him more than the thought of his own death. “No,” he said, bringing his hand up to his forehead to wipe off the sweat that had suddenly beaded there. “I can’t go back.  How can I go back?” 

He felt his heart pounding, working furiously to pump the common blood to every cell of his dying body.