Ruby.

I started hearing the rumors of gay cancer.

I've been in the desert now thirty five years.

They're healing powers here.

Being queer and having sex is at the root of our.

Liberation from just beyond the lights of Los Angeles and steamy Palm Springs, California.

It's Mick Robert Bill just say, and this is silver Lining.

With the old Gays.

Welcome back, kids.

While you're still digesting last weekend's hot dogs and fireworks, we're here to serve you something even more explosive, a very personal new episode of silver Linings.

It's July and certainly heating up over here in Palm Springs.

So today we're going to cool things down a bit with a conversation about living with are in community with HIV.

Both Robert and I are HIV positive and open about our experiences.

The journey hasn't just shaped our lives, it's reshaped our community and in many ways, the world.

Since the beginning of the epidemic, over eighty eight million people worldwide have been infected with HIV, and about forty three million have already died.

Nowadays, with access to proper prevention and treatment, HIV is manageable, and most people with the virus can't transmit it to others.

Treated HIV can lead to the disease AIDS, and no cure exists at this time.

In the nineteen eighties, the virus spread rapidly throughout the gay community.

At first, there was no way to treat it, so during that time we lost a large number of gay men.

The backdrop of this crisis was terrible fear and vilification of our community.

As of twenty twenty three report by the CDC, approximately one point one three million people aged thirteen and older are living with diagnosed HIV in the United States today.

We want to share our stories because it is not only a part of who we are, but also an integral part of our community history.

I've been living with HIV for thirty eight years now.

I was diagnosed in early nineteen eighty seven, and when I was diagnosed, there were no treatments available other than AZT, a drug which was very potent and in itself was probably killing people.

And when I learned of my diagnosis, it was an enormous shock to me, and for several months I was processing what had happened to me.

When I first heard about it.

I was working in the interior design business in Showplace Square in San Francisco, and all of a sudden I started hearing rumors that the showroom across the street from us, one of his salesman's boyfriends had died of gay cancer.

And that's what it was called, Ben.

It was just gay cancer, and it shocked the life out of me.

I really didn't know what to think, and no one else really did too.

It was all in sort of a cloud kind of a thing.

And I was on the road singing, so I wasn't in the community then.

I wasn't even out.

But I actually knew about five people who had died from it, which was more than enough for me going through it with them.

I write about it in the New York Times.

There was an article about a group of men in San Francisco and Los Angeles and New York City who were coming down with a very rare form of cancer called carpos sarcoma, which was found only in men of Southern European descent whose immune systems were compromised.

And that's the first time I had read it, just like Bill had mentioned the gay cancer, and the cancer was carposi sarcoma.

As for me, I remember hearing about AIDS and HIV.

It was the early eighties living in San Francisco, and almost every day I would go down to the Castro and have breakfasts in one of the restaurants.

And it was during one of those times.

I think this was probably early nineteen eighty one, And one of the clearest memories I have in the early eighties is that one particular newspaper, Bar Bay Area Reporter began publishing an obituary column that started out with a few names every week.

So one of the exercises I think probably every gay person did at that time was looked at that obituary column.

To see who had died.

And that column grew until it was a whole page of the newspaper.

Yeah, you remember when they published the photographs of the first like one hundred thousand victims, people who had succumbed to AIDS, and they published it in Time magazine, and you went through it and just marked who you knew.

Yeah, you know.

One person put it, being queer and having sex is at the root of our liberation.

What I think HIV represents, it's the intersection of three things.

First, of being homosexual, that means being queer.

The second is that it is passed through sex okay, which defines us.

And finally, it is religion in societies persecution and murder of people like me.

You know, it wasn't until nineteen seventy four that the American Psychiatric Association officially removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders or mental illness.

Nineteen seventy four, I remember that year.

That was the year I graduated high school.

My entire lifetime, I have not only seen and witnessed discrimination, murder, persecution just for being who you are, but also a disease for which there is no cure.

By the nineteen eighties, when HIV swept across America, our Wurk government did nothing.

They did nothing, which sparked social protests because the only way we got the medicines that we needed, the care that we needed, and the protection that we needed is that we went into the streets.

You know.

Ronald Reagan was the president at that time, and it wasn't until well into his second term that he even mentioned the word AIDS, and that was at the behested.

Can you believe of Nancy Reagan so that's how I'm going to stop.

When it first became public that this disease was affecting the gay community specifically, one of the major assumptions that people made was that if you hugged someone or kissed someone, you could catch AIDS, and so it had a very repressive impact on people's affection towards each other, and also the health treatment that people were receiving, where when you did make it to a hospital or a hospice, that even the medical professionals were very reluctant to get very close to people who had contracted the disease.

And of course, as time has passed, we've learned that it's not that easily transmitted, Thankfully.

What I thought was the most disgusting thing was a conspiracy of silence.

I can't tell you the number of actors that I knew who were sick and went to the grave denying their diagnosis because they were too afraid of coming out.

And if you think there's a little bit of bitterness in my voice, theory is because I think of those people often and what wonderful persons they were, but they were so frightened by what society and the business would think of them, which was throwing you out the door and into this.

Yeah, and that.

Is what sticks in my mind period.

I just thought of one bad memory of a friend of mine who I went to college with.

I thought he was one of the sexiest guys on campus, dressed to the tea when I found out that he was HIV positive and then converted to being having aids his self denial.

I mean, you could see what he was going through.

And I remember being in West Hollywood in the pharmacy there, I don't remember the name of it, Capital Drug, Capital Drugs, Yes, with him picking up meds and he was just I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm going to do this.

I'm going to do it.

He wasn't living in a real world.

And I just remember just stopping and holding him and telling him is said, I love you so much, Curtis, but you're dying.

And he died.

It was hard, but he finally came to the realization that it was his ending.

And it hurt because I saw him go from this amazing person down too skin and bones.

But the thing was him coming to terms with himself, you know, it was it didn't have to do with anybody else.

Yeah, I had quite a few friends, very close friends, who did not tell me that they were infected with the virus.

And two of my friends had been to Macy's and saw my good friend Tom in the pajama department, and they got right back to me and said, you know, Tom has aids.

He never told me that there was a shame attached to it.

But I would have done anything to be able to jump in and help Tom right away, but he would not reach out to me and let me help him.

But he kept it all inside of himself.

Yeah, and I think that that's really what it was.

Today.

We're afraid of telling their friends, their coworkers, you know, because they had seen what had happened to the first victims, you know.

I mean there were mortuary companies that refused to take dead bodies.

It was horrific.

And you know, given the prejudice already that exists awards homosexuals in this country, it's like this really double edged sword that just sticks in your heart.

Yeah.

Does anyone have any stories where you've seen hostility expressed towards the AHIV community and people living with HIV I.

I did not, but I was living in San Francisco at the time, and if you found out that somebody had AIDS, you jumped in and you helped them.

People were helping each other.

Yeah.

San Francisco was probably at the forefront of trying to figure out how to best deal with this disease, and the care structure that developed was basically setting up a system of hospices, which were places where you could go to die and die with compassionate care.

For me.

Yeah, I mean there were did I personally see people attack people who had hivhes so you could hear it in the streets, but mostly I heard it in public discourse.

There was a senator from North Carolina I think his name was Jesse Helms, and he vilified from the floor of the Senate gay people AIDS and that quite frankly, that AIDS was God's retribution to us, that was God's answer or punishment.

In the nineteen nineties there was a group called Act Up and they engaged in social protests to develop awareness among people.

And what they did is they snuck out it and from Senator Helm's home and they had made a giant condom and covered his entire house with this condom, which got a lot of national recognition.

A lot of humor, and after a while, the DC police came by and told the protesters to take the condom down from the senator's home, and all they got was a parking ticket.

It gets even better, It wasn't their car.

Can you imagine, Mick and Robert, how have you navigated telling people about your status?

What have been the most surprising responses?

Well?

I didn't run around saying hey, I'm HIV positive, But whenever the subject came up and I was directly asked about my status, I was always honest.

And again because of where I lived, first San Francisco and then Palm Springs, I never experienced a negative reaction to someone else learning that.

All right in a mission.

You know, I was in a relationship at the time, and when I told my partner that was the end of our marriage, he wanted to throw me out.

You know.

We wrote a book and one of the things that I talked about is how much I owed Joel for so many things in my professional life and on my personal life that I learned from him and appreciated and I will always thank him for that.

But the other side of the story is that he couldn't accept it, which comes down to this.

I forgive myself for having gotten infected.

I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But you know what I can do.

I forgive the person who gave it to me, because either he didn't know his status or he went ahead and did it anyway, And I forgive him for that, and I forgive myself.

You have to understand that I am not a victim right in the story.

How does HIV influence your daily life now?

Well, certainly one of the major impacts is the daily routine of taking medications.

And beginning in the mid nineties, when the proteas inhibitors came out, that's when I started taking medications, and ever since then, I have had to make a point of taking my HIV meds twice a day every day, ye knowing that if I didn't it could lead to complications and potentially eventually death.

I'm a little lucky.

I take one pill in the morning, and that is certainly a whole lot better than the five or six pills I had to take when I first was diagnosed.

But Bob is right.

He stresses a point that was very early on impressed upon me by my doctor.

He said, every time you take one of these pills.

It reminds you of what has happened, and you must confront your own self loathing because you are homosexual, and the pressure that's put upon you is that you are a bad person.

Okay, that kind of pressure can stop a person taking their meds.

It is very important that I take my pill every morning, but it reminds me of my being in the wrong place and making the wrong choice.

But you know, there are good things about this as well.

You know, our community organized, at least in Los Angeles, but also in the gay men's health crisis in New York and in San Francisco and all across the country.

In Los Angeles it was AGED Project Los Angeles, the APLA first commitment to Life dinner, which honored Betty Ford, was such an enormous outpowering of just support.

It was also coinciding with the time that Rock Hudson had just died, and that was a real shock to Hollywood because he finally came out and he said he had age and then he subsequent we died from it, and that really rocked the city, rocked the world, and people started, you know, looking around and saying, well, people are dying all around us.

I think the biggest thing to know about this disease is that it is no longer a death notice.

I totally concur that's exactly how I feel about it too.

Yeah, they are medications available now that if you take them.

They will save you.

I mean, not only does it save them, but it can also become undetectable, which I think is an absolutely amazing achievement.

Yes, yeah, I'm a last test I had I was undetectable.

Yeah.

You know, I'm not defined by HIV.

However, it is a part of my life.

It does affect how I date, and you know, I have it really in for tops who say that they will only have intercourse with somebody who is HIV negative.

You know, I'd rather have raw sex with a person who I knew their viral count.

But if you are going to practice unprotected sex, not only is it important that you get tested, but you see a physician because there is a prevention method called PREP that your insurance may be able to provide for you.

And I would encourage you strongly to take up PREP.

You know, there was this there's a case before the Supreme Court right now by certain Christian companies who say they don't want to, they don't want their insurance to pay for PREP.

And that case is now before the Supreme Court and I don't know what's going to happen there, but if companies are allowed to cherry pick and decide what kind of treatments they're going to fund, we're just moving right back down that slope and people are going to pay for that.

And got to remember too, it's not just gay people that HIV positives.

So it's a world thing that people need to take care of themselves and educate themselves and make sure that they stay healthy.

Yeah, this is not just confined to the gay community.

And that's why my message to you is get tested, be honest about yourself, be honest with your partners, and use PREP.

So, folks, were the end of our episode, and it's time to ask the golden question, or should I say silver what's the silver lining for you about your experience with HIV?

Looking back that there are many silver linings.

The first is after learning of my diagnosis and after I had process at a time that it was medically untreatable, and I attended a workshop that was on meditation and visualization, and during that workshop, I learned conclusively of the power of the mind over the body, and if you can learn to harness the energy of your mind, you can deal with your body in physical ways that are astonishing.

And the second biggie was that in my process, I made a decision to move from San Francisco to the Palm Springs area, and.

That had to do with.

One of the recommendations that was being given to the community was get the stress out of your life, and so for me, that was moving from the big city to a I guess what I'd say a gentler community.

And I have to say that my life.

I've been in the desert now thirty five years, and I think that move has done a lot to keep me alive for the past thirty eight years.

They're healing powers here.

Yeah, there's something about the desert that I don't know calls.

You back silver Linings.

The desert it is a savior, it really is.

I sat outside almost every evening and just look up at that sky because it scared me when I first got here.

You're living in a city and all of a sudden there's nothing.

But I have learned to breathe.

I have learned to sit and cry from sadness and from gratitude.

Yeah, Bill, my biggest silver lining was meeting my partner at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, who would be my partner for sixteen years.

And I had just gone through the seventies in San Francisco, which was the wildest time I've ever experienced, and all of a sudden it changed and I had a partner and we were monogamous together, and that is the only reason that I'm here right now.

I know I would have been one of the victims of the AIDS crisis had I not met my partner.

For me, behind every silver lining is another silver lining.

It was the most tragic irony that not only should I have HIV, but I should also be diagnosed with a rare autoimmune condition.

You know, I've had four near death experiences in the last five years, So every day is a blessing.

And I realized that my life is really not my own anymore.

I'm part of something much larger, and I learned who my friends are.

Thank you for joining us for such a vulnerable and heartfelt conversation.

That's a rapport today.

Silwer Linings is a production of Iheart's Ruby's Studio and The Outspoken Network.

We're your hosts Bill Lyons, Robert Brieves, M Peterson, and Jesse Martin.

Our executive producer is cier Kaiser.

The episode was written by Ryan Amador with post production by Eric Zeiler.

Our theme music was composed by MaTx Hirchinau, with audio direction and designed by Matt Stillo.

And if you're having fun with us, please subscribe the follow along and don't forget to rate and review the show wherever you get your podcast.

Thanks for listening.

That disco music gets into your blood.

Pauper's manacle.

What I said, guys, we're closing in fifteen minutes, Wash your mouths out and get out of here.