By Justin Hayford
As the man in the blue tank top begins lifting a huge stack of weights, Richard (not his real name) begins his workout. He last injected himself with testosterone and Deca-Durabolin seven days ago, and he’s due for another shot when he gets home. Although he has the bulky upper body typical of someone on steroids, he’ll never achieve the size of the other guys in the gym. Richard is battling HIV-related wasting syndrome, and the steroids he injects are prescribed by his doctor to help him maintain the weight HIV would otherwise drain from him. He comes here every day; if he doesn’t work out, the steroids will just add fat to his frame. Like many gay men steeped in a muscle-crazed culture, he admits that using steroids was a great temptation before he had a medical excuse to start. “I was glad to get a diagnosis of wasting syndrome,” he says, without a hint of irony. “I could finally use steroids. I could look like everybody else. Except when you think about it, that’s not everybody else. It’s wanting to look like the A crowd.”
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Since his insurance pays for his steroids and his syringes, he doesn’t need to share. And since he knows his HIV status and understands the risk, he wouldn’t anyway. “But there are a couple of guys in my building who don’t know their status, and I know they’re shooting up,” he says. “When I lived in New York it was very common to see guys shooting up in the locker room, sometimes sharing needles. I once saw four guys inject off the same needle.”
Richard estimates that three-quarters of the guys at his gym are using. “You can tell when a body is on steroids,” he says, pointing at guys as they move from exercise machine to exercise machine. “It’s a different muscle type, a different skin type. And testosterone makes the nipples protrude–the whole areola sticks out and points down a little bit. They call it ‘bitch tits.’”
This new site opened a year ago. “We’ve known for years that a group of needle users that is often overlooked is the steroid users,” explains TPAN’s executive director, Dennis Hartke. “We realized that here we are, we’ve been here 11 years, they trust us, they come to us for safer-sex information–maybe now they will come to exchange their needles rather than sharing. And we felt that these are people who are probably comfortable walking into our office building–but might not be comfortable walking into a van in an alley to get needles.” Without the TPAN site, the nearest needle-exchange location would be in Uptown, where the CRA’s silver van parks every Sunday afternoon at Wilson and Clifton, a decrepit corner known to the locals as “blood alley.”
It’s also a message Hartke thinks too many people–and not just the gym boys–have missed. “I’m not sure that the, shall we say, upscale illicit-drug injector sees that risk. Because the risk is always associated with people on the street, with ‘dirty’ people. It’s the same way we were led to believe that only ‘promiscuous’ sex spread HIV in the early years of the epidemic. So the businessman who shoots up can think, ‘The person I’m sharing needles with, he’s an executive. He couldn’t possibly have HIV or hepatitis.’ The real problem with the crowd we’re trying to reach is that they don’t understand that they should be reached.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Andrew Epstein.
