Before I die, I want about ten years of living on medication; a regimen of about 15 horse-sized pills full of caustic toxins to be taken four times daily. I want my time to be segmented into quarters, enslaved by an electronic beeper that "reminds" me that I must get swallowing within minutes, no matter where I am. I want ten years of constant diarrhoea and frequent nausea and a strange fatty transmogrification of my body shape. I want around ten years of feeling that I am a walking bag of poison, careful not to get cut or grazed, reluctant to travel away from home, to withstand the suspicious glances at customs as they rummage through my pharmacy of a suitcase. Most of all, in those ten years, I want to endure that special feeling of anxiety as I meet each potential partner to come to know, by weary experience, that the only way to ensure some real contact without that cringe-making moment of revelation and irrevocable fear is by being immediately upfront about my HIV status. Gradually, over time, I want HIV to become part of my identity, how I present myself to the world, and to give people an excuse to drift away, muttering that it's not right to be proud of being sick, that gay pride isn't sick pride being gay is not a sickness, surely. Gradually my friends will become only those with HIV or AIDS, with the odd maverick mystic or caretaker thrown in who's excited by the opportunity for vicarious suffering. I will learn to search for fuckbuddies, playmates, and avoid lovers for involvement becomes unbearable with those who keep on dying, or with those who live so fast that no rest is possible, no calm, no peace every day will become a search for sexual excitement through variety, an escape from contemplating mortality. I will become a card-carrying member of the tribe of Death-Defying Warriors Against Mother Nature, and each day alive and fucking will be another blow for survival, for twisted glory. We will all be James Dean, hurtling glamorously and sexily through the firmament, dying inside.
I want the experience of being ushered into a small carpeted room with a filing cabinet and a potted poinsettia on top and a tired but pleasant face indicating the chair for me to sit in. I want her to make a show of ruffling through a manila file until I'm ready to hear what I've already guessed. I want to hear her say that the results of my blood test have come back positive, which means that I have the antibodies to the HIV virus in my system. I want her to patiently but pointedly ask if I understand what she has just said, and I want to politely tell her that I've known about AIDS ever since I was 24, when the panic hit Dublin. When the panic hit me. I'll give her a weary smile and shrug my shoulders. She will suggest counselling and advise considering the combination therapy as soon as possible. I will of course comply, for I have joined the ranks of the afflicted now, as I have long wanted, and all the care and attention that the state can provide will be gratefully, if ironically, accepted. My mission, Jim, as I've chosen to accept it.
I want my skin to go weird and inflamed and my tongue to go yeasty and for a strange purple blotch to emerge just behind my ear. I want strange dancing specks to distract me when my eyes get tired, and to get cold sores on my nose and left cheek and to wake up in the middle of the night wrapped in sodden sheets. I want to have everyone I meet tell me how much I've lost weight until I get tired of hearing it, and can't shrug it off any more.
I want to have sex with lots of men because I want to feel powerful and take risks in a western world that doesn't offer much meaning to my life. I want to defy convention and, instead of challenging it on the outside, risking mockery and shame, for some perverse reason I'm doing it on the inside, mocking and ridiculing the part of me that wants to be boring and have a safe and comfortable life. I want to turn the anger in on myself and not really care if someone slips his naked cock inside me without reaching for his pocket first. I want to make believe that it's more exciting that way, to get high on the fix of sex, to see how far I'll go playing this trendy game of barebacking, and ignore the hollow thud the next morning at the pit of my gut wondering what the Hell possessed me to be so stupid. I want to ignore my feelings so much that, somewhere deep inside, I decide that I'd rather give myself a daily struggle to survive an illness with my horny fellow tribe members, rather than face my own loneliness and rage. I will catch the fire in the eyes of those I fuck without a condom, who will not ask if I'm positive and I won't tell them. Adrenaline rush to beat the band. There's fire there's passion there's death.