Why I left work in HIV/AIDS
(or the real reason they don’t want this negro around)
Here I am sitting 16 miles outside the Cincinnati, Ohio area jobless after 6 months. For those of you who don’t know, I left the city of Memphis as Fannie Lou Hamer put it “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Having gained 60 pounds in five months (I had hit 301 pounds), constantly making doctor’s visits for this or that ailment (how he kept track of my weight gain), the two of us in a tug of war about high blood pressure medicine which I get over 250 pounds, acid reflux, pained knees from too much weight, headaches, not to speak of my back, fluid retention that made me miserable, panic attacks and days where I just couldn’t get out of bed. Anger turned inward.
I was working primarily with black gay men who were having hard times adjusting to being gay, as much as if not more than, being HIV positive. I’d be a lie (and the truth wouldn’t be in me) if I said I didn’t love working with those guys, the vast majority of which were young enough to be my sons and often got on my last nerve more concerned about Beyonce or who lost last night on American Idol than saving their own lives.
I also enjoyed working with those few young African American women who came in to be tested sitting on pins and needles, our collective two heads working the dude over who possibly infected them. We were a tag team beating him up and cussing him out, stopping ever so often to unfold fists for prayer to Jesus for a negative result, and once praying hands were split, we’d ball them back up to box him up and down the ring again. It was a 20 minute stress reliever and serious, cries just behind the laughter.
I’ll never forget the last young African American lady who came in practically in tears that she might be…. I got to hear her story and made it my business to keep her encouraged. Hell she could have been my niece or sister or cousin. Hell as far as I was concerned she was blood and I had her back. She got her negative result but I also had to remind her of her responsibility which she soaked up knowing we’d been sisters in the trenches for a little while.
As a side note, I often wonder about my praying clients who I figured must know I was gay and wanted to ask on more than one occasion: When you leave are we enemies in the name of the Lord? But I didn’t push it. It wouldn’t have been “professional” no matter how human (and real) my question would have been after she’d hugged me tighter than tight in relief. I did my job and I got to support another human being to a place of peace.
I must admit even when I got a positive result I loved being in the trenches with my boys too. They came in all kinds of packaging: effeminate, super over compensating macho, in the closet to nobody, but themselves (especially their mamas who they often colluded with in a lie rooted in the loss of love or banishment from whole families or beating by brothers or cousins). They were always preoccupied by the most superficial things. Their pecs or stomachs or hair “did right”, how they looked and making it to the club or drag show. They could pop their asses better than any hoochie mama I’d ever heard tell of and could make a microphone or stripper pole out of a broom stick and work it. Dysmorphia out the wazoo, they’d fight you if you said anything even remotely critical (no matter how true) about their church and pastor or their mama who refused to look at them let alone speak; rarely did I see anyone so sensitive about Dad.
I’ve often told the story about the African American young man (he was really a boy and that’s what really hurt my heart) who came in and got a positive result back. When I was talking to him in post counseling he practically confessed that he was supposed to be infected because (1) he was gay; (2) he was black; (3) he was young and all of his friends were positive and he didn’t want to be the outsider again; (4) God hated gays and HIV was our due—we were cursed from the start! I broke his face when I explained to him that I was 46 at the time and was not positive. I confused him as much as he left me dumbfounded.
My HIV status is a piece of information I rarely share with anyone. The only time I’d disclose was when a positive client is disclosing under the assumption that “We” used when my client feels comfortable, are dealing with the exact same issue. To disclose to me in tears and gnashing of teeth would be unfair if I didn’t disclose that I’m not quite the sister or brother they envisioned bearing witness to their hurt or shame or testimony. It’s a betrayal to my mind so I find a place in the conversation to intersperse the truth gently. I’ve never had anyone to change their mind. Often they were amazed and delighted that someone who wasn’t positive would even listen to them or not judge. Normally, I just let people assume that I am.
I came too late with my years and my testimony for that young man. That was one of those times when I had to do some personal inventory about my own banishment or should I say estrangement from the black gay/sgl community, some imposed upon me and some self imposed.
You see I don’t fit in the black sgl community or the other gay community. I won’t say larger gay community because it gives a false sense of white society being the point of reference for who I am and my choices when it’s not. The whole wide world has that honor.
I don’t fit with the white gay community because they think I’m too pro black because I’ve been vocal about their own narrow vision that reeks of assimilation more than justice to me which can leave some people out of the equation. To exemplify this, a few years back a local university was doing a study on gay parents of adopted children which I am one. I was like oh I can do this and get my two cents in on what it’s like to be a gay adoptive parent. Reading further along in the flyer I had overlooked that they were looking for couples for their study. I, being a single parent was somehow not worthy of being counted in their study. The researchers’ real goal was not gays having adoptive rights, but proving to the white heterosexual community that we can make two parent homes too, in effect stable, at least in ideal. We all know of two parent homes not fit for human beings to thrive from parents to child so two doesn’t always make it better or right. I didn’t correct or scold letting them have their Eden’s dream of equality, their homage to the establishment. I guessed us single parents were to set our faces against the window panes of their idyllic homes with envy. I’d rather throw a rock. I realized a long time ago, I didn’t fit their great white agenda which is an allegiance to their parents and their values, not justice for the sake of justice. And don’t mention the gay marriage thing. It probably puzzles me more than straight people because I’ve seen straight couples that would give wrestle mania a run for its money on a Friday night after payday. I saw supposedly divinely sanctioned heterosexual couples that should never have married in the first place, shot gun or not. That should have torn the divorce court door down to sign papers like parting shots at the end of a particularly cruel civil war. Hell I’ve never even been on a date before let alone got to imagine setting up house with the white picket fence and 2.1 children. At almost a half century, I’ve never been in a relationship. Me and the brothers just don’t get along like that and inter racial dating with a white man just never peeked my interests.
The issue with the black sgl community is much more complex and is legion so instead of giving you the ugly details of that drama I’ll just give you the why I don’t fit list: (1) I’m not height/weight proportioned. I don’t go to the gym 3-4 times a week like so many lovelorn on Match.com. My Ms. Girl will slip out in mixed company and she has a temper; (2) I don’t claim to be a bible totin’ and quotin’ Christian (which has gotten me in trouble and some cat clawing fights with church queens, their pastor’s armor and bible bearers, singing, weeping and wailing at the altar for Jesus to let their punk asses in which I refuse to do. As far as I’m concerned, God’s gone have to take what She made and get over it; (3) I can’t buy into the sin/redemption of Christianity even if I were heterosexual (which still gets me into tooth and claw fights with the church queens and the reverends and an occasional Grandma (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been called demon possessed and confused); (4) I can’t stand clubs and the freaks come out at night hours (I had a son to raise and get sleepy by midnight); (5) I can’t stand intellectual pretense and I have several degrees. I’m talking about those guys who think because they have degrees, can use deconstruction and Derrida in sentences that they’re somehow above the common punk herd; (6) the black gays are stunned when the ole folks of the community have made me so mad that I lose my religion (oops I don’t have any). I should say, my Southern bred manners and cuss them out for hurting my feelings and assuming because they were older they had a right to; (7) I want play dumb or closeted (even if I could) to win a “real” man who only calls after the witching hour and his girlfriend or wife is sound asleep; (8) then there is that group of black sgls who think I’m too smart i.e. white acting and assume I must be or am waiting on my prince to come—a white man—to save me from the doldrums of our colored lives.
That’s the nutshell of my estrangement from the community. I just don’t fit and I’ve got a bit too much of my ornery Mississippi red Mama in me. She wouldn’t go along to get along either. And maybe I’m more like her than I realized.
From time to time she was mistaken for a white woman. She kept a little white boy back in the day that was going on about niggers. My mother incensed told him, “I’m a nigger,” which shocked the hell out of him. I never got to ask if she kept that job or got fired. My mother was a hoot who’d sat up with the preacher and cussed him out on hallowed ground for an incident involving my middle brother. She cussed Harrie Mae Simon out, a paragon of the black bourgeoisie in Memphis over my sister at Magnolia where she was the principal. My father, more about middle class values and fitting in— educated, a postal worker, and a braggart (which my mother frowned upon)—was horrified; he got cussed out too. She just wouldn’t act right and hated pretense with a passion. She was the one who distinguished to me that there was no difference between white niggers and black niggers; as far as she was concerned a fool was a fool was a fool no matter their race, class or gender and she’d tell them so. So you have to understand that I got my “ain’t gone kiss yo ass” stuff honest.
Well being up North, jobless and not working in HIV I have to realize something when after having an interview for an HIV job up here in Ohio, I just don’t fit into the kind of negro they need working in this area. You can just tell by the way some white folks look at you, under brow, head cocked and drawn up like they’re waiting in quiet panic to swat a cock roach that’s invaded their pristine kitchen. That kind of seeing is a skill you learn growing up in the South where the sense of racism is sharpened down to a keen spirit of discernment and not necessarily a confrontation; learned from your own who marched through many a back door like soldiers on a mission after sweeping the front and dismissed the word nigger as if they were talking to somebody else.
At 48, maybe I’m just too old and seasoned to play the HIV game. Looks like the rules don’t favor me much these days. The CDC and local agencies are really making HIV out to be a young people’s disease because of infection rates among the 13—24 age group as if they live in a vacuum. I guess the rest of us are either immune to infection after 25 or we’re totally irrelevant in the scheme of things; if we don’t know any better by 30, we ought to just die off is the message it sends to me.
Nobody seems to be paying attention to what I see and experience all the time. Young black sgl guys approach me, but I don’t quite speak their language nor have any remote interest in pop culture which seems to be the brick and mortar of their identities.
I prefer James Baldwin over Beyonce, morphogenetic field theory interests much more than Survivor, the Discovery or History Channel over BET, Toni Morrison over Black Gay Chat, imagination and intuition over facts, engaging conversation over idol gossip about who slept with who and how big it is. I prefer theoretical speculation over who was in the furnace with the prophet Daniel over somebody’s infallible word of God.
Often I find that they’ve lacked mentoring (not that I had it) and want somebody to “show me how to do like you, show me how to do,” as Stevie Wonder sang. I must admit I have backed away most often not wanting their Mama or Daddy looking to kill me for “turning them out” as we’re often accused. Hell, I don’t want to turn them out. Just turn them inward to the realization that no matter what any so called holy book says, a Petri dish, a genetic sample, what their folks say; that they have just as much right to be on the planet as anybody else. No explanation needed. Your soul copyrighted the day of your birthday. It’s insane for anybody to ask you for a permission slip to walk the halls of life on your own terms. So many of the young want the whole package in sexual affirmation too and when I can’t respond properly they take it as a cosmic rejection. (I’ve got my baggage too). I do understand but, I can’t replace the love the world has denied them nor would I try. It’s too huge a job and I’m bound to fail and I don’t like failing.
But does the CDC and so many of these agencies understand the need for holistic affirmation. Not to just tell somebody to not have sex, but to teach them the whole value of their sex, the genitalia and teach them how to connect being a part of an affirming community as a counter against soaring infection rates. But I forget the CDC can’t put love and culture, history and mental health and human frailty, the heart and affirmation in a Petri dish. How can you measure it? Nobody knows how to harvest intimacy and give it away or sell it on aisle 19 at Wal-mart. It just isn’t science. It’s only reality. It’s how people feel.
So nobody stops to look at the youngsters going after older guys like myself who not having dealt with their own stuff i.e. hurt, pain and rejection and have no sense of a historical or human connection and are not likely to use condoms. Why should they? Every message and signal they get all day is that they don’t matter; the same as the young guys, but much longer. All that’s left is kamikaze sex from young to old and back again.
When sitting with my guys every day and in trainings like Many Men Many Voices, I saw clearly what the real problem was. It wasn’t sex. I heard people say both out loud, under platitudes and jest that nobody loves or wants me or I don’t know how to love and what do us older heads say when we’re on the kindergarten page of that instruction book too.
And race is an issue by and of itself. I’ve watched agencies more often run by straight or lesbian white women who have no idea in their wildest dreams what it’s like to be colored gay me. They have no idea when they have an agency full of white people what it’s like to come in and see nobody like you. They have no idea what it’s like to sit and try to bridge some common ground with a white counselor who in his or her ignorance (but well intentioned) says that race doesn’t matter and we’re just all people under the skin. We’re all just the same. And they’re right until you’re walking down the street in your black skin with a hoodie on or get followed through Macy’s because you’re black and have dreadlocks and hear the undercover say under his breath, “it’s a faggot.” You’ve gone from one kind of criminal who might snatch and grab the Sean Jean jeans and make a mad dash for the exit to a waiting car of thugs to a criminal who might snatch and grab a set of Martha Stewart collection cookware and make a mad dash to a car full of hungry queens. Can’t win for losing.
Some of those same white women have no idea what it’s like to be a black man in America and dependent upon the demographics will hire black males to be out front to pull in other black males. If you’re black and gay that’s a plus! I know I’m being used in such a fashion but where you run into problems is when the white female thinks she knows more than you do not only about black folks but about black gay men and you find yourself in a tug o war for control over who black sgl men and women are and how they don’t fit into the nice CDC guidelines. Real people rarely fit into nice neat categories and nobody believes they do but scientific theorists.
They’ll speak to high heaven about CDC policy and what we’re supposed to do and the initial test results for this or that intervention or prevention program which you find yourself wondering who they tested it on because seemingly it has little to do with the young black guy who came in for testing whose uncle is “turning him out” and on to threesomes with his girlfriend. Nephew is confused trying hard to figure himself out and prove to the only father figure he’s known and respected that he can hang and not use condoms as they take turns because only faggots get AIDS (nobody ever says HIV).
Contrary to popular belief, I’m a man—a black man. I’m a sgl man. I instinctively know what’s going on with him. He’s questioning and his uncle (only a few years older and more like a brother) is aware like me that there’s something “different” about him. And in his honest concern to save his nephew from a life of faggotry, getting screwed in the ass like a bitch, and public scorn of their family name, he must expose him to the only affirmation of manhood he knows: Pussy. And he’s bold enough to show him in real time on the spot; “show me how to do like you, show me how to do.” It haunts. I understand and don’t say, but let him know that even though his test results came back negative I’d love for him to come back and see me and talk about whatever, whenever he feels like it. I never scold the brokenhearted, their esteem already on the ground. How could I? Tears welled up in his eyes for more reasons than the fear of HIV. He’s afraid of who he is. I never intimate that I’ve read his tea leaves. I feel for him not as a CDC statistic or a potential infection risk which I know is where he’s headed via his uncle’s best efforts and his own fear around his sexuality. Where is this in the intervention book? Such knowledge is written in the heart. Outside the book and the box, maybe I am too old for the game.
I may be black and gay but I get the nephew and my heart goes out to him. I would even say I love him and like his uncle I want to protect him too. He really does need it. I get this overwhelming desire to hold him and rock him back in time to the first of us enslaved on these shores and let them tell him, show him the shackles and scars, sing to him the hurt; how high a price has been paid for him with flesh and blood, not money, to contemplate himself. Inappropriate. Unprofessional. Rocking folks to the ancestors isn’t something of value in the HIV prevention world skating into a wall like a car on black ice, desperate, grasping at straws and redirecting its efforts to the assumption that all our black asses including black women are outright heading toward positive. Looks like they’ve thrown up their proverbial hands and people of color and women will pay the most for that easy surrender.
Now no longer at the agency, I wonder if the nephew comes back will he see me the betrayer, having struck out North, no star to guide me, abandoning him. Will he be as honest with the next person as he was with me, dropping his guards, confessing his shame, asking for guidance with his eyes not words he’s never been taught by another black man.
I’ve lost my little brother, whose angst is so deep because he can’t figure where he wants to stick it (or be stuck for that matter and I honestly believe looking back on it that the youngster is bi or that other emergent species the CDC hasn’t even sighted—the “if I’m feeling him/her I’m down” crowd, both male and female). As is often the case with emergent behaviors there aren’t many rules, certainly not to protect hurt feelings or be concerned about HIV rates as the thing is too new, unnamed and nebulous as a community.
That young man and being an HIV/AIDS counselor taught me that judgment was so irrelevant in the face of learning. That anguished young man along with the other one who came back positive have taught me so many invaluable lessons about what it means to be black and gay or questioning or bisexual or whatever in the early 21st century. A change is going on. When I’ve spoken at public forums/panels about what I’m seeing my heart sinks to the collective gasp of a room full of black folks who think our children have lost all sense of direction, moral fiber and biblical home training and gone to hell in a safer sex kit.
I’m seeing a bunch of young people questioning the limits set in response to racism, sexism, abuse, antique church views that have really served no one, outright unadulterated ignorance and mean spiritedness. The younger generations ought to question us, but we ought to have some honest answers and guidance not rooted in our own unresolved issues around sex and sexuality and regret. I owed my young brother my ear and to listen, not judgment, to see what it was he was trying to work out and support him in that process whether he comes back and tells me he’s straight, crooked or turned around exclusively to his own sex. That’s really what HIV counseling should be about, helping the person find themselves so they’ll know they are worth protecting. Not towing the line of fitting people into boxes so we can get the grants and money and are so totally lacking in love and compassion for that person’s all too human journey.
And let me say this about black folks running agencies. We can be just as much the problem when we don’t understand the nature of power that has historically undermined us. It can shift forms and races and genders and sexual persuasions, not respecting the neat boundaries of pain we’d like to fence it in. Power is a spirit and dependent upon the strength of character or lack thereof it can always corrupt in the presence of a victim and in the victimizer’s fear of a loss of control of a reality that doesn’t even belong to him or her. Which of us can control the sun or the turning of the earth? We can barely get a grip on a feeling. But human beings so often in the face of fears, their own and their groups whether racial, regional or national, succumb to it; to be anything but the outsider and the stranger.
Racism comes out of a distorted view of power and perception—we (whoever that vaunted group is at that particular time in history) are the real human beings not those other different people. It’s about power when you don’t feel good about yourself or have lied to yourself about your own importance in the scheme of things that you, black person, become an honorary problem too, sometimes worst. I can’t tell you how many so called black leaders I’ve met who haven’t or refuse to grapple with their fears and shortcomings. The need to dominate and mentally or verbally strong arm people into towing the line with their good opinion and berate them if they differ is the same distortion of power that created slavery and said women didn’t have souls. It’s still an ism (racism, sexism, isms…isms…isms). Just different drag for that day. To be black and make a criticism of the black or gay community is not betrayal. The truth is the truth no matter what quarters it comes from. The test is how you handle it. As I stated earlier, my mother taught me about critiquing everybody when she saw white niggers and black niggers and put them all in the same trick bag of fools. None of us is helpful if we come through the door assuming we’ve got the answer and the person sitting across from us is void of any good conclusions about their life or pat them on the head like a good dog. It’s a lesson people of color have had to learn but so many of us have forgotten thinking we’ve got the degree or have bought into our own hype about being a “success” and reaching for “excellence.
Don’t let me forget my straight black guys who’ve come for testing to sit in my chair and they have been legion. It’s amazing how people can get over their street props homophobia and the biggest macho man ever will slump down in my chair to tell me why he’s really there. HIV testing brought him in of course, but it’s so fulfilling to watch that brother prodded by my questions plot his way through the last 6 females he slept with (and he’s married), most of them black, with which he’s used no condoms to figure out why he can’t keep it zipped up. He rises up moving to the edge of the chair contemplating himself and his behavior tracing the long road of personal history back to the same hurts and distortions his sgl brothers have suffered differently. Contrary to popular belief all men aren’t dogs. I’ve seen brothers tear up, and come clean trying to work out their father’s issues with their mothers through women who don’t even know what truck him them and why. I’ve sat with straight guys at three hour intervals, through lunch and breaks, to figure he’s not his mama’s savior thirty or forty years later and he’s not his daddy son. He’s his own man. And no amount of saving women with his sex will make him or her whole. He realizes she’s not the damsel in distress. He is. His journey to himself must be his own with few guides in this world and plenty of tricksters even amongst women who want him to be the big strong man! I remind him he’s only human.
I’m good, with no counseling or public health degree, but not fit for today’s HIV/AIDS climate.
So you see I’m becoming painfully aware that I may be obsolete, a has-been, a relic from the past who needs to be put out to pasture, my mind burnished to a fiery glow in a black gay man’s pain and experience.
It’s tough out here being colored gay me. I’ve seen some things in my day that no one seems to see as valuable.
I also have to take inventory of my stuff.
The older I’ve gotten the less bullshit I can tolerate. Sociopaths and fools find me a loose cannon and difficult. I speak my mind, won’t tolerate abuse, refuse to abuse, won’t scream at other adults in the workplace, will not be screamed at, expect adults to act like adults and children like children. Trouble doesn’t’ have to make you bad as the blues singer crooned, but it will give you a piercing eye for mundane evil in everyday life, deception, the simple quality of joy and an honest heart. And a quick tongue dividing the lie from the truth and discerning where the two are so completely intertwined they’re better left alone for time and God to tease out with her comb.
It’s hard living in your truth.
In the end, this I know, my heart was in what I gave and not for grant money, numbers and bragging rights (which my mother would frown on from West Tennessee cemetery). I know supporting those guided to me was crucial in some round about mystical way having nothing to do with HIV. Strangers that they were, I loved them all.
Obsolete, maybe I need to simplify life at 48 in a bad economy and stand at the I-275 exit with a homemade cardboard sign that reads: Will work for food.
© 2012 Conrad R. Pegues
