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Back to Introduction and History, or back to the Main Menu... I will do my best to address large issues that affect the entire community, but I will have to start by explaining various concepts from the viewpoint of who I am - a 43-year-old gay male with a long-term husband, and a predilection for leather. In addition, I'll add that I'm HIV-negative, and have had sex with over 1,000 men (and a few women) during my lifetime, though I stopped my wild escapades after my friends started dying of AIDS. I've lost over 100 friends, best friends, acquaintances and ex-lovers to AIDS. I miss all of my dear loved ones who died before their time, and I wish I could bring them back. For many years, I spent my life in a holding-pattern, dreading the loss of more friends. I felt that if I started investing in new friends, then they would eventually die too, so I simply stopped allowing new people in. The feelings I was having were the result of "incomplete grieving" - one dear friend would die, and before I'd be able to process that massive change, then more would die. I never caught up, so I went numb to protect myself from further pain. This is something that I believe has happened to a large part of the community - I see isolated, ill-at-ease folks who have lost loved ones, shutting themselves off into mental bomb-shelters of all sorts. In the case of those among us who are HIV-positive, there has been the recent development of the new drugs. They haven't stopped the epidemic, but they have transformed it into something new and baffling - We want the old phase to be over, but we're not sure what the new rules are. Gay men are still dying of AIDS, despite the protease inhibitors, but they are keeping their illnesses very private, and the younger guys aren't exposed to the bald truth of how AIDS is still affecting us and killing us. There has been a lot of press about barebacking, which drives the generations even further apart - To those of us who have been through the flames of the epidemic, barebacking with strangers is the opposite of caring about our brothers. As a friend of mine remarked recently, he has the "Lazarus Syndrome" - His lover died of AIDS a few years back, and he himself had been close to death. The new drugs brought his life back, and he still hasn't figured out what to do with it. He had made no plans to grow old, and he just lives from day to day in bare existence. He dates men now, but can't involve his heart deeply. I told him that I had successfully completed a class on grieving techniques, and it had greatly helped me deal with a few individual losses, and I believed that it would help him complete his feelings for his lost life-partner. However, the workshop would not help either one of us to finalize our grief over what we feel is a lost generation. There is something else we can do - we can look around, take stock to recognize who is around us, acknowledge that they share our feelings of loss and our desire for community, and draw the tribe back together. It's time. We really have lost our tribe. Many folks died, and in the midst of the epidemic, others scattered to other towns, to die with their families, or to try to escape the horror. The survivors have lost track of each other over the years, but I'm feeling a gravity-like effect drawing us back together. Back in the 1970's, there was a powerful, positive and seemingly relentless upward trend in community, self-pride and political power. That was shattered with the effects of AIDS, and the right-wing spared no time in kicking us while we were down. We can spend years being victims, struggling with these problems... or we can choose to draw a line, cross over it, and take charge of our lives and our community. A year ago, I made some big changes in my own life, and now I'm working to bring our community of survivors together - it's much easier than I ever expected, because I have found that most folks sincerely want to see positive change. I'll be talking about my discoveries in future articles, and it's all good news. Onward to The Need For Daddies...

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