If You Ask Me...

Looking at my Facebook feed tells me it’s been a big news week for the worlds that overlap the ven diagram of things that appeal to LGBT people. Some LGBTs focus on politics, some on celebrities, some on LGBT issues, some on sex, most follow the big world news and some love zombies. In the last six or seven days, we were one attack of the undead on a major metropolis from hitting the LGBT news superlotto.

50 in 50

Improbably, considering the way I lived for several years in my 30s and early 40s, I'm going to be 50 in 50 days. Even though I've been sober for more than six years now – therefore less likely to do something that would lead to an early demise – I'm a little surprised that I've gotten so close. I never expected to live to be 50. Well, at least not from the time I was about 23.

Ask just about anyone who was gay and in his 20s in 1987 and you won't find a ton of us who expected to live this long. And you will find a lot of us who didn't. More than 25,000 people died of AIDS in the US in the 80s. I couldn't find stats on how many of them were gay, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say it was a lot. The original name for the disease was GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency). I remember reading an article in the paper about it in 1982 or 1983. I wasn't even 20 years old and hadn't even acknowledged to myself that I was gay, and already I was terrified of dying.

Please Support My Walk in the AIDS Walk San Diego 2011

The last time I walked in an AIDS Walk was 2001. How did I let ten years go by without lifting a foot to participate in an event that I had done annually for the ten previous years? It’s hardly a mystery where the first six of those years went – up in smoke as it were. Even though I didn’t start using crystal meth until 2004, there were other drugs on the way to that one. And with every passing year, the idea of spending an entire Sunday morning without doing any became less and less palatable.