By Justin Hayford
Frank may sound crazy. But every Wednesday night he comes here to talk with people who understand his dream all too well. They are members of a support group for gay men who are HIV negative. Some, like Frank, are struggling to remain uninfected. As HIV prevention specialists around the country will tell you, Frank’s dilemma isn’t rare. For many gay men, worn down by 15 years of devastating plague, finding the inspiration to protect themselves against HIV infection can be a tremendous challenge.
“I don’t like the name of the group,” a first-timer who introduces himself as Mark begins. “‘It’s Positive to Be Negative.’ I think of the inverse. I don’t want it to be us against them.”
One man tells the story of a group of friends who all live in the same apartment building and who went together to get HIV tests. Only one tested negative, and from that day forward he found he could no longer look his friends in the eye.
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Resentment against uninfected men seeking professional support has not disappeared in the year or so since such services began in Chicago. Jim Stolz, director of gay and bisexual programs at Stop AIDS, says the men in his agency’s group often feel guilty about showing up and frequently disappear after only a few sessions. “People say to them, ‘What do you guys do, sit around and talk about your retirement plans?’” Mick Santiago has experienced similar reactions. “When I tell people I’m part of the group, their most common response is, ‘Why? You should be so grateful.’”
The world that AIDS stole from Frank was hard-won. He grew up on the near northwest side in a traditional Catholic family, the middle child of three. Like a lot of men growing up in the 1950s, gay or straight, finding a healthy way to express his sexuality was a challenge. “Every time I masturbated I would go to confession,” he says with a little laugh. He fell in love with his best friend in eighth grade, a love he kept strictly to himself. As a sophomore in high school, he met a neighborhood boy who would sleep over once in a while. They’d lie next to each other, touching tenderly and never saying a word.
In 1968 he left the army and returned to Chicago, where he found only two or three gay bars operating. “It was kind of fun being gay back then,” he says. “It was like having a double life. You’d be with your friends in society during the day, and inside part of you knows that on certain nights of the week you go to this gay bar, with these wild, deviant type people there. There was an adventure to all that.”
