Dangerous Liaisons : Young Gay Men Know All About AIDS and HIV, Yet They Persist In Having Unprotected Sex. Here, Some of Them Say Why.

Gabe, at 18, represents a kind of mystery. Not that Gabe, if you met him, would seem particularly mysterious. He lives at home with his parents, makes medium grades in high school, earns gas money bagging groceries at Safeway. On the surface, Gabe appears almost too ordinary to contain any sort of mystery.

But the questions arise when Gabe describes his recent past. For two years, Gabe has slipped into his car on weekend nights, and some school nights, to escape his parents’ suburban world. Still nothing unusual about that, except that Gabe happens to be gay. On his forays from home, he heads for bars, parks, coffee shops, anywhere he can meet older men. And have sex.

In fairness, Gabe sees himself as searching for something besides sex; love perhaps, or, as he puts it, “a relationship where people fall for each other and then stay together.” But what he finds is sex. Gabe has had sex hundreds of times with dozens of men. Many dozens. And here’s the mystery: During the two years in which Gabe has committed virtually every variety of sexual coupling with different men on different nights, he has never introduced the subject of safe sex with any of his older lovers. Nor, except on rare occasions, have they with him. In his search for love, Gabe can hardly remember stumbling across a condom.

Gabe knows about AIDS. He knew about it when he began his active sexual life at 16. He lives in a town on the San Francisco peninsula where AIDS is hardly kept a secret. Nor is Gabe mired in the kind of family that would create a kid bent on self-destruction. He views his life with good humor and often makes fine distinctions on points of personal behavior.

Yet he voluntarily and repeatedly engaged in unprotected sex with men whose chances of having HIV could be conservatively estimated at one in three. Gabe does not claim that his lovers forced him or even pressured him to forgo precautions. He just did it, willingly, and never thought about it afterward. In his words, “I didn’t think about it.”

What to make of Gabe? His behavior could be seen as an attempt at some subtle suicide, but Gabe does not believe it to be so. He enjoys life too much, he says, and has his own explanations that will be presented later. In truth, Gabe’s behavior largely remains a puzzle.

For reasons that no one really understands, a generation of young gay men--not even men, really, but kids about to become men--seem to have turned away from the fundamentals of safe sex. They, like Gabe, appear to have abandoned caution, acting as if a decade of sexual education about AIDS had never taken place.

For several years, researchers have suspected that this rejection of safe sex was occurring. Then, a study by the San Francisco Department of Public Health in 1991 confirmed their fears. The study found that gay men between the ages of 17 and 25 consistently engaged in high-risk sex. And the younger the men, the riskier the behavior.

Among the men aged 23 to 25 in the survey, nearly 30% said they recently had unprotected anal intercourse. Among the men 17 to 19 years of age, the rate rose to roughly 43%. As for unprotected oral sex, about 82% of the older group said they had taken part, and the figure went up to a little more than 90% for the younger crowd.

Finally, the study showed that the rejection of safe sex was taking its toll. In the 23-to-25 crowd, 10.4% turned up HIV positive. Among the 17- to-19-year-olds, the HIV rate jumped to 14.3%. In other words, the younger kids, who had less time to get infected, produced an HIV rate almost 40% higher than their older counterparts.

That study, which focused on young gay men in San Francisco, may reflect what’s happening on the national front. Last month, in its final report, the National Commission on AIDS underscored the problem, stating that “while HIV transmission among older men who have sex with men is sharply reduced from the early ‘80s, transmission continues at high levels in younger gay men.”

As of March, a total of 978 AIDS cases have been reported to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control among men age 13 to 24 who have sex with men. While this may not be a number of epidemic proportions, officials are concerned that the number of cases will take off.

AIDS researchers have offered several explanations for the increase in unsafe sex. The young, they say, often see themselves as immortal and take terrible risks with their lives. And many have not developed the confidence or social skills to introduce the subject of safe sex with their partners.

While those theories offer some enlightenment, they assume that all generations of the young behave the same. But the San Francisco study has proven otherwise. It revealed that the youngest group of men are taking more risks than did the older groups when they were the same age. In other words, each group of young men is behaving more dangerously than the one before. No answers have been offered by researchers for this acceleration. And so the mystery remains. In the following article, several young gay men try to explain what the experts cannot. They represent a variety of backgrounds and experiences. Some have confronted the worst news about their lives; some have gotten lucky. Each tells his story in his own words.

JEFF

Jeff is 19 and lives in West Hollywood. He grew up in Los Angeles and , until recently , lived with his parents. He plans to enroll in college.

My parents found out I was gay a few months ago. I had just turned 19 and was living with my mother in Bel-Air. I guess you could say they reacted, like, hostilely. What they did was kick me out of the house.

My mother found out on her own. One day she read through my diary while I was gone and and she found some stuff in there about the experiences that I had been having. So when I came home, she didn’t waste any time. She said she knew I was gay and then she looked at me and said, “I didn’t raise my son to be gay. I want you out of the house.” She gave me some money and then said I had to leave.

It was like, just get out of my life, you know?

Up to that point I had gotten along with my parents fine. They are divorced and I lived six months with one and then six months with the other. That was the arrangement spelled out in their (dissolution) contract. My parents are both pretty high-powered people. They have married each other three times. (He laughs.)

They both work in the industry and I had always figured it would be OK with them about being gay because they are surrounded by homosexuals all the time. They’re both producers and they work with these people constantly, so I didn’t think they--at least I didn’t think my mother--would have a problem with it. In fact, I met some of my first lovers through my parents. They didn’t know it at the time, of course. (He laughs.)

I would meet men who came to the house or when they were invited to one of their parties. I would just be there, you know, because I was their kid and I would end up talking to these guys and sometimes we would have a relationship.

Anyway, it turned out not to be OK. I was totally surprised. When my mom told me she had read my diary and knew I was gay, I said, “Well, you’re friends with gay men. You work with them all the time and that doesn’t seem to be a problem.” She just gave me a look and said, “This is different. You’re my son.”

I left the house that same night. She had given me a thousand dollars and pretty much said she never wanted to see me again. So I left and the first night I spent at a hotel. That was a scary night because I didn’t have any idea how I was going to live. It turned out I got lucky. I found a place at the (Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services) Center and that’s still where I live.

Up to that point, I hadn’t talked to my father so I called him one day at his office. I said, “Why don’t we have lunch and talk about this?” But the way my parents are, they don’t have the time. Everything is done at their convenience. My father said, “You know, I don’t really have the time to discuss this right now.”

And I said, “That’s fine.” That’s not what I was feeling, but it’s what I said.

I think a big part of the problem was the fact that my diary had described some of the men I met at their parties and the experiences I had. I think that really freaked them out, the idea that I was meeting these men through them. Also the fact that they were all older guys.

During that whole time, I almost never practiced safe sex. I knew about AIDS. I remember Rock Hudson dying when I was about 12. That’s the same year I had my first sexual experience. (He laughs.) I knew AIDS was scary and I knew people were dying. I think I just never connected it to me. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with my life.

I remember there was this guy I met at (one of my parents’ parties) that I really liked. I got to know this guy and pretty soon we had a relationship. I’m not the type of person who has sex on the first date but after a while we were doing everything. Everything that was unsafe.

Also I figured that this guy was older and he knew what was right. He never mentioned safe sex.

And that’s how it always went. All through high school, AIDS was never an issue with me. In my junior year, I remember reading about AIDS in Newsweek and it described how bad it was. Even then I didn’t change. I don’t know why, really. I knew, and then I went out and did everything.

Not so long ago, I finally changed my ways. I met this guy who taught me about safe sex. Actually, he called it “safer sex.” I met him through my father. As usual. (He laughs.) He’s 34 and works in Washington on health-care issues. Anyway, he changed everything. He was the first person who said, “Look, you gotta be real careful about this stuff.” He showed me how safe sex works, and we tried it his way.

I know I’ve been lucky. I’m still healthy and don’t have HIV. Almost all my friends have done the same thing--exactly the same--and some won’t be so lucky. I think it’s possible that my generation could be wiped out. So many of them are going to die in their 20s.

And I think it’s mostly because we think, “Hey, I’m young and I’m safe. I don’t sleep with every person in the world so there’s nothing to worry about.” And we think that if we have a relationship, there’s no problem. We don’t realize that the relationships won’t last and that people don’t always care about you. It’s so stupid, but that’s what kids are. Stupid.

I don’t know what’s going to happen with my parents. It’s possible my mom’s starting to adjust to the situation. We are talking a little bit on the phone. So that’s going better, and maybe in the fall I will start college. I want to study film history and, yeah, eventually work in the industry. In fact, I’d like to be a producer. My father’s a producer, you know.

ALEX

Alex grew up in Azusa with his mother and a succession of her boyfriends. In his early years at school , he was regarded as a budding athlete and a bright student. But at home, life became intolerable and he ran away at age 11. In the years that followed, he alternated between return visits to his home and life on the streets of Hollywood. Alex is now 18 and lives on his own in Los Angeles. He has AIDS.

I met the man who gave me AIDS in front of the gay and lesbian center (in Hollywood). A lot of people don’t know how they got AIDS, or at least they don’t know exactly who gave it to them. I do. I was standing outside the front door of the center around 7 in the morning. I had been up for two days straight.

This guy walked up and started talking to me. He was older and sort of good-looking and I knew he wanted sex. After a while, he invited me up to his apartment and I said OK because I was so tired I didn’t care. I figured I would go there, give him what he wanted and then get some sleep.

And that’s how it worked out, except I ended up staying there and we became lovers. Wayne had a really easygoing way about him and he seemed sincere. We got along real well. I liked Wayne. No, I loved him.

He let me live my life the way I wanted, except now I can see that he only had one purpose for me. I was like this young thing that he kept around so he could have his fun. At night he would buy me something to drink so I would get loaded. My favorites were vodka and schnapps. He would go buy it and I would get so drunk I forgot my own name. And then I’d let him do anything he wanted. I never asked him to use a condom because I was nearly passed out from the liquor.

I’m not saying I didn’t like the life we had. At the time, I thought it was great. I told myself, “Hey, this means I’m really grown up. I can make my own decisions, get drunk when I want, have sex, everything.” I was 15 and I really wanted to feel like I wasn’t a kid anymore.

This had been going on for a few months when one day I was hanging out and talking to some of his friends. And they said, “Don’t you know Wayne is HIV positive?”

Of course, he had never told me that. So I went out and got tested and the results came back positive. I mean, I knew before they told me. When I came in for my results, they told me I would be seeing a social worker rather than the doctor. And then I really knew.

After that, I made Wayne go get tested. It was stupid because he already knew and I knew he knew but I wanted to make sure. And he was positive.

I’m not in touch with Wayne anymore. (I turned him in and) got him charged for sodomizing a minor, contributing to the delinquency of a minor and statutory rape. I didn’t even have to go to trial. He pled guilty. He did less than a year, and he’s out now.

But even before Wayne, I never practiced safe sex. I didn’t know condoms existed. I mean, I knew about condoms. I just didn’t know what they were for. And even if I had known, it wouldn’t have made any difference. I just thought, “I’m so cute, and I’m so good in bed, nothing will happen to me.”

That’s the way a 15-year-old thinks. They can’t deal with a reality like AIDS. Death and dying is something that seems so far away, they can’t connect it to themselves.

You would think the older gay men would let them know (about protecting themselves) but they don’t. When I was 13 and 14, I was having sex with doctors and lawyers and stockbrokers, all these successful kinds of people in their 30s that I would meet in West Hollywood. And not once did any of them say anything about a condom.

Maybe they think it can’t happen to them, either, because they’re successful and drive around in BMWs. But they’re gonna be next.

JASON

Jason works with homeless youths and counseled young gay men for an AIDS agency in San Francisco for a year. He is 24, an old man compared to the men he counseled. But Jason’s history resembles those of his clients, and he believes he taught them valuable lessons.

One night, when I was 14, I was hanging out down on El Camino (a major thoroughfare south of San Francisco). A guy pulled up in a four-door Cadillac and asked if I wanted a ride. I said sure.

When I got inside, he offered me 60 bucks to give him head. You have to understand, I was pretty old for a 14-year-old. I remember thinking, “Sixty bucks for a blow job? Not bad.”

Anyway, that’s how it all started. A little later I decided to come up to San Francisco to make some money selling myself. The first night I got there, the very first night, I turned a date with a cop. Two cops, actually. Undercover. So they busted me. At first they thought I was an adult and they were gonna let me go but then they found out I was only 14. So they made me call my mom to come get me. And she wouldn’t.

They ended up keeping me for a month and a half at a guidance center and then transferred me to a juvenile detention center.

You could say that, for the next five years, I had no concept of safe sex. I did just about everything that should have gotten me infected. I was a prostitute off and on, and even when I wasn’t doing that I was still having unprotected sex.

I knew about AIDS, of course, but at that time I couldn’t conceive of worrying about something that would kill me in 10 years. I mean, 10 years seemed like forever. I had a bunch of other things that worried me a lot more, like where I was gonna get drugs and how was I gonna survive the next couple of weeks. There are times when I think about those years and I go, “Wow, there must have been a guardian angel behind me for a long time.”

You know, I have friends who can tell you the one time they had unsafe sex. Somebody f----- them without a condom just once and now they’re (HIV) positive. And, of course, I am not infected. I see them and I can’t, I just can’t ask myself why that happens cause it makes me crazy.

I finally got myself straightened out around 1988. I quit drugs and started to get educated about HIV and then started wondering what I was going to do with my life. And a friend suggested I apply for a job as a counselor for homeless runaways, so I did and I got it. Ever since, I have been dealing with young kids and the issues of HIV and AIDS. I can tell you there are problems out there.

A lot of times, younger gay men say things to me like, “Well, the older guys got to do the bathhouse stuff, where there was wall-to-wall men and just sex everywhere, and we don’t get to do it.” And you see them (young men) getting real tired of a situation where everything is no, no, no while their bodies are saying yes, yes.

Now they’re being told that they should use condoms even for oral sex, that it’s a possible route of transmission. And these young guys say, “OK, first you told me I couldn’t f--- and now you’re telling me I can’t do the one other thing I like.”

We just tell them that the numbers suggest there is some risk from unprotected oral sex. But you know what? I don’t know anybody--from my co-workers to my clients--who has safe oral sex, if that means always using a condom. People just aren’t willing to do that, even though statistics show that some people have been infected through oral sex. There is just some kind of line that people draw (with safe sex) and they won’t go beyond it, even though they know that they have increased their risk.

More than anything else, I see people getting worn down by constantly being reminded that sex is associated with death. Young men ask themselves, “Do I want to be around when all my friends are dead?” And part of me says that’s a really rational and relevant question. I don’t think necessarily that it’s a healthy decision to go out and have unsafe sex. But I can understand how it happens.

You have to find some way to let people express themselves sexually without killing themselves. You know, there are still sex clubs around. There’s a couple in this (Castro Street) neighborhood that replaced the old bathhouses that were shut down. I think in some ways the clubs are a good idea. They have posters about safe sex and condoms and referral cards, all the things you do not get exposed to if you go out in the bushes somewhere.

Like, we have a place called Eros (a safe-sex club). It has monitors who work there. These places get people to talk about the issues. Not talking about it is the worst thing you can do. And, you know, there are still parts of the community that don’t talk about it. I have some friends who are very--have you heard the term A - gay ?--it means very materialistic, very dressing nice all the time, brunch, that kind of stuff.

So one of the members of this group came to me and said, “You know, I have some concerns about my health.” He had just tested positive. And we don’t know each other very well, so I said to him, “Why don’t you talk to your friends about this?” And he said, “Oh, no, we don’t talk about that.”

My reaction was, “How can you not talk about it? That’s the only way you’re going to stay alive.” It was very startling to me at the time but those people are out there, right now, just pretending the epidemic doesn’t exist.

KURTIS

Kurtis, 22, was born in Vietnam. When the war ended, his family migrated to the United States and prospered. Kurtis has lived in the Bay Area most of his life and last fall enrolled as a first-year student at a local law school.

About a year ago I went to Hawaii, and that changed a lot of things for me. I went there to set up an apartment for my mother. She asked me to go over first and it turned out I was there by myself for about four months. I had a lot of time on my hands and I got into the bar scene for the first time in my life.

Before I went to Hawaii, I had this belief that there was no way I could have sex with somebody I don’t know very well. I had never done any one-night stands, ever, because I regarded it as very dangerous behavior. But in Hawaii I had a lot of time and I started going to dance clubs. Usually I went to this place called Hula’s that was right near Waikiki.

In a gay bar, the most difficult thing is to make the connection with someone you’re attracted to. That’s the first thing I learned. Eight out of 10 of us are afraid to make the first move. The first thing you want to do is make eye contact and see what happens. If he looks at you too, then you know you’ve got semi-approval to move closer and maybe offer to buy him a drink.

That happened to me one night after I had been going to this bar for several weeks, I met this guy and we started talking. I was really interested in talking to him and at that point I knew I would go back to his hotel if he asked. That’s when I realized that if the passion is strong enough, your standards about careful behavior will go out the window. When the attraction goes beyond a threshold level, you will ditch those standards.

It turned out the opportunity was missed that night because he didn’t ask me. But eventually it happened. It wasn’t a one-night stand; it was more a one-day stand with someone I had met the night before.

He was coming to my apartment, the one I had set up for my mother. Before he got there, I kept wondering if I had the courage to ask him to use a condom. I didn’t know this guy hardly at all, you know, and I didn’t know how he would react. I kept saying to myself, “You’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do it.”

Finally, after he had been there for a while and things got going, I told myself, “OK, it’s now or never.” So I said, “You know, we have to use a condom.” And then I went to get it. It turned out--and I didn’t realize this until afterward--that he thought that meant I wanted anal sex. And I didn’t. So when I came back with the condom, there was this misunderstanding. I had to tell him, no, I didn’t want to go that far. He was fine. He said all right, and we just had oral sex.

After that, the whole question of safe sex got more complicated for me. The question really isn’t, do you practice safe sex? The question is, what risks will you take under what circumstances? Because everybody takes risks, no matter how small.

It’s like, after he left my apartment that afternoon, I started worrying, “My God, I kissed him. Was I going to get AIDS? What if my gums had been bleeding?” I was going through all this agony and I finally told myself to relax, that the chances were slim, and that’s how I rationalized it.

You can say, “Well, that wasn’t much risk.” But it was a risk to some degree and that’s the kind of decision you are always making. (Shortly thereafter, Kurtis returned to the Bay Area.)

I have a lover now and the same kind of thing came up with him. About a month after we met, he said he wanted to have unprotected anal sex. And he was really adamant about it.

At that point we had told each other our sexual histories and we had gone in for our tests but we hadn’t gotten the results back. We really didn’t know for certain that we were both negative.

Anyway, not with my best judgment, I gave in. The decision was made in the heat of the moment and I think I was curious, too. I had never done it without a condom and I figured, “Well, why don’t I give it a try?” Also I told myself, “I probably won’t like it and I’ll make him stop real fast.” You know, you always come up with a rationalization for what you do.

Afterward, I really worried. I told myself, “You shouldn’t have done that, what if you get AIDS because you slipped up this one time?”

I realized that I did it partly because I wanted to make him happy. Also, I wanted to express the fact that I trusted him and that I believed he hadn’t done anything risky in the past.

Most of the time, those reasons would be classified as very good reasons. You know, you want to make someone happy and you want them to know you trust them. And that’s where safe sex gets complicated. All the emotions that get connected with sex and affection become dangerous and you have to be aware of that temptation all the time.

The young men that I know mostly are from (the university), and on the whole, you could say they are more privileged than average. Verbally there is a consensus that you should be practicing safe sex. I mean, everyone knows all the rules. But individually, people will make other decisions. If you really like someone, you will take more risk. If you are desperate on a particular night and really want to have sex, you will compromise. Or even, in some cases, you might say to yourself, “Will I get a ride home if I insist on using a condom?”

I don’t know anyone who can say they never, ever take risks. Almost everyone does it at one time or another. But because we’re young, we don’t think we will die because of it. We think we will be lucky and dodge the bullets.

ANGELO

He arrived in Los Angeles 18 months ago from Denver with virtually no money in his pockets. He now lives at the g ay and lesbian center in Hollywood. Angelo is smart, ironic and 21. He plans to go to college when he can save the money.

I love to tell my friends that my first sexual experience was with a girl, and it’s true. I was in high school and decided to have sex with a girl so I could be sure I didn’t like it. At that point, I wasn’t positive I was gay and this seemed a good way to find out. So I did it, and the best I can say is it wasn’t awful. I mean, I didn’t want to throw up afterward. But after that, I knew I was gay.

My mother is OK about my being gay but my father still won’t acknowledge it. I remember the night I told him; we were fixing the toilet in the bathroom. I kind of suggested I might be gay and he went crazy. He was yelling at me and then he picked up a knife and started chasing me around. He was trying to stab me or something or make me say I wasn’t gay. Anyway, I got mad and I started taunting him, saying, “I’m a girlie, I’m a girlie, I like guys.” That was a wild scene. We don’t talk about it anymore.

So far I’ve had sex with 10 or 12 men, a pretty small number. What I’ve found is, I can’t have sex with anyone who is my friend. It’s like it’s incest or something. So I only do it with people I don’t know. If I see a guy I like, I’ll lay my rap on them. Usually I won’t have sex that night. I’ll wait for a week or so. The only requirement is that they are somebody new, people I don’t know.

When we do have sex and I see things are getting serious, out comes the condom. I have it in my pocket. Once a guy saw the condom and said, “Do we really have to use that?” I said, “Yeah, we do,” and he just sort of shrugged.

I know that I’m probably unusual with the condom business. Most people my age don’t take it as seriously but, for me, condoms have been the thing from the beginning. I don’t find it difficult and it doesn’t affect sex. I don’t mind condoms at all.

People always laugh at this, but the reason I use condoms is my parents. They drilled it into me when I was younger, especially my mom. She just preached condoms over and over. Somehow I got the message.

The funny thing is, her preaching started before I told her I was gay. I think she must have suspected.

GABE

He attends high school in a well-to-do community south of San Francisco. He is 18 and plans to go to college to study psychology.

I guess you could say my first gay experience happened in the third or fourth grade. We were living near 18th and Guerrero (in San Francisco) and I was going to this Catholic school. One of my good friends was a kid who lived down the block and went to my school.

His mom ran a dry cleaners on the block where we lived, and it had a back room where we used to hang out. One day, I don’t know, all of a sudden we started fooling around. It wasn’t real sex, just kind of playing with each other. That was the first time anything like that happened and I remember thinking, “This is weird. Weird and nice, both.”

After a minute, his mother started calling to us and asking what we were doing. We yelled back that we were doing our math homework and we just started shouting out mathematical equations. We were laughing and shouting out these equations at the same time.

That kind of stuff went on all through school but I didn’t really have any idea it meant that I was gay. I just knew I was different. Even as late as the sixth grade it just didn’t add up to anything in my mind. I didn’t know what the hell was going on.

Then one day another guy called me a faggot. I was thinking, “What’s a faggot?” I knew it was bad, that’s all. Man, I didn’t understand anything back then. After a while, of course, I figured it out. For several years I kept thinking, “Why me?”

Now I’m a senior in high school (and he graduated last month) and no one knows I’m gay. I didn’t tell anyone, none of my friends, no one except for one teacher. When I transferred here in my freshman year, I knew I didn’t want to go through that stuff anymore with people calling me names and all that bull. My high school is very upper middle class and a lot of the parents are conservative and puritan. I knew, if people found out, the situation would be worse here than before, so I built this shell around me. I started asking girls on dates just to make it seem like I wasn’t gay, and I didn’t dress gay or anything. And it worked. Even today, no one knows I am gay and I don’t plan to ruin things by letting people find out.

When I turned 16 and got my driver’s license, life really changed then. Always before, I had been stuck in my own town. After I got my license, I could go all over. There’s this truck stop up on (Interstate) 280 and I knew it was a gay stop. Up to that point, my sex life had been pretty limited. I had never had anal sex because I was afraid of it. I was absolutely scared of it for some reason.

And so I went to this truck stop and I met this guy. He was the first guy I had ever really, you know, liked and talked to and stuff. I thought he was just perfect. We went down to the beach that night and laid down and we were just together. We didn’t have sex. But after that night I knew something had changed.

I started going out more. For some reason, I figured it would turn out the same way as a straight relationship, where people fall for each other and then stay together. You do things together and spend time together and have a relationship. My experience was totally different. I would meet somebody and think he was perfect and we would go someplace and have sex. Then it was over. The next night I would try to find someone else, and if I was lucky, the same thing would happen.

Pretty soon I was doing everything. Anal sex, everything. I got a fake ID so I could get into the gay bars. It never failed. I’d get picked up by a guy--they were usually older guys in their 20s or 30s. We’d go back to their place or somewhere and just do it. I loved the sex and thought, “Boy, this is great.”

I never even thought about safe sex. For me, AIDS wasn’t an issue because I thought it was something that happened to older guys. From the very beginning, in all the stories about AIDS, the people with AIDS always seemed real old. So I just categorized it as something that didn’t happen to young people. Now I understand that was really dumb.

And I knew about condoms. I would see the ads or people would hand them out. And, you know, in that whole time, I never asked one guy to use a condom. Not once. I thought if I brought out a condom, the other guy would decide he didn’t want me. I think I didn’t exactly have high self-esteem. You know, when you’re called a fag and all that, you start to believe that something is wrong with you. So I could picture me saying something about a condom and these guys refusing to have any sex at all and walking out the door. And I mean I was horny, so. . .

Every once in a while, I did actually use a condom. That was when the other guy would say something. It didn’t happen very often. Sometimes they would bring it up and I’d be, like, OK, fine. I just couldn’t bring it up myself.

During this period when I was going out all the time, I was pretty promiscuous. Christ, probably I’d meet about 10 to 15 guys a month at bars and parks, and (I’d) have sex with them. In all that time I didn’t worry. I was just having a good time. At one point, when I was still 16, I decided to go have an HIV test. I was just curious. It came back negative, so I figured, “Great, that means I’m doing everything right.” I remember the clinic gave me a big bag of condoms but I never used any of them.

About a year later, I decided to get tested again. That was last year, in April. April 22nd of 1992. I went in, and the results came back positive.

A lady gave me the results. She was very sympathetic and told me about some support groups. I remember thinking, “Gabe, you have f----- up big time. You are now going to die.” After the lady finished talking, I walked out of the clinic and just went, “Whooo . . . 17 years old and you are going to die.”

Since then, my life turned around 360 degrees. There was one night when my mother and my two older brothers found out I was gay. I told my mother and she told my brothers. Everyone cried and they said they still loved me. The only ones in my family who don’t know are my 9-year-old brother and my father. My mother said my father would kick me out if he knew.

But so far I haven’t told them about HIV yet. It just seems too much right now. I haven’t been sick or anything.

Sometimes I think that if I hadn’t been so alone when I was 15 and 16, none of this would have happened. I was so scared of letting anyone know I was gay that I didn’t have anyone to talk to and tell me I was doing everything wrong. At the time, it felt like I was the only kid in the world like me.

Now, of course, I totally do safe sex. A little late for me, but at least it means I won’t be infecting anyone else.

At first, I thought I would be real depressed because I was HIV positive. I mean, I’m not going to be around for very many years, right? But it turns out, I’m not depressed at all. And the most interesting thing is, I’ve become very intrigued by death. I don’t want to commit suicide or anything, it’s just I’m so curious about what’s out there after I die. I want to know what it’s like to leave this world and go somewhere else. Somewhere new.

When I was a little kid I used to dream about heaven. Sometimes it was a real dream and sometimes a daydream. What I pictured was this golf course, this humongous country club, and all the men were dressed in tuxedos and the women were dressed in evening gowns. All day long everyone played golf and every once in a while they would sit down underneath a tree and sip tea.

And that was heaven, I guess. I loved it and always wanted to go there. And I don’t even play golf. (He laughs.)