Read Missing the Big Picture Online
Authors: Luke Donovan
The feeling of testing negative and knowing my HIV status was a natural high. I was so excited leaving the clinic that I almost got into a severe car accident and had to slam on the brakes as I left the parking lot. But, at least I was still disease free.
A couple of days later, I had a phone interview to work for a county department of health as a public health representative. I had started applying to different jobs because I found it insulting that I was making twenty-three thousand dollars a year at a job that required a bachelor’s degree. It was specifically in the partner notification program. Since I was tested only a few days earlier, I aced the interview and knew what the department was looking for: somebody who was nonjudgmental and wasn’t shocked by individuals who slept with fifty or one hundred sexual partners or who slept with men and women. About two weeks later, my potential supervisor called and said I didn’t get the position, but he said he was very impressed with me and that I could do the work. Ironically, I wasn’t offered the position because I didn’t have any experience working with people with STDs. So, I asked him where I could get this type of experience, and he said that most cities had organizations dedicated to providing services to people with STDs, HIV, and AIDS. He suggested I check and see if any of those local nonprofits were hiring.
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
—George Bernard Shaw
I
n early 2007, a local news station approached some people walking in downtown Albany and asked what their New Year’s resolutions were. Most people said to lose weight, keep better contact with friends and family, and so on. When I was watching the interviews, I imagined that my own response would be to finally get a good job. I was depressed because I was still living at home at twenty-three, and I wanted to get a higher-paying job so I could move out of my mom’s home and become independent. I aggressively started searching for a new job. The previous March, I had taken a civil service test to be a caseworker for either the Department of Social Services or Child Protective Services. It wasn’t work that I really wanted to do, but the jobs came with great benefits. By early 2007, I had my first interview.
When I was driving home from my caseworker interview, the phone rang and it was the director of prevention from the AIDS Council, a local nonprofit in northeastern New York that provided services to individuals fighting HIV/AIDS. I scheduled an interview with the woman a week later. The position involved working with adolescents who were in residential treatment and providing them with education on HIV and STDs. I had never been so excited about a job before. The first interview went well, and only a day later, I received a call to schedule a second interview. The director of prevention informed me that it wasn’t going to be a standard question-and-answer interview. Instead, she asked me to prepare a simple ten-minute presentation on HIV/AIDS. I would need to give this presentation to three to ten prevention specialists who were going to pretend to be adolescents.
To prepare for the presentation, I decided to play a game that I had learned from the improv show
Whose Line Is It Anyway?
I was going to start with the letter A and give a risk factor about HIV/AIDS. I was a little nervous as the director called me out of the waiting room for the presentation. There were six people in the room, and they had to pretend to be adolescents. Out of the six people, only one was male and he was also African American. At six-foot-four and over two hundred pounds, he had a classic football player physique. There was also a young Caucasian woman, three Caucasian women in their forties, and a young African American woman. I explained the rules of the game and started with the letter A. “One risk factor for HIV/AIDS is anal sex.” The man looked at me with a disgusted expression and yelled, “That’s gay!” I replied that anal sex was also common among heterosexual couples, and I moved on to the rest of the alphabet, asking the group to provide me with words for each letter.
The answer they gave me for B was “butt fucking,” C was “cunt,” D was “dick,” E was “ecstasy,” F was “fucking,” and G was “gangbanging.” Finally, they cut me off. It was the most enjoyable interview I’ve ever had. I left convinced that I would be offered the position. A week later, I called back and was informed that I wasn’t offered the job. The director told me that the prevention staff liked me, but she couldn’t go into specifics about why I wasn’t given the position.
A couple of days after that, I was offered a job at Albany County Child Protective Services as a caseworker. I knew that preventing child abuse was important. With me working two jobs and still living with my mom, money was my main motivating factor. It was twelve thousand dollars a year more than my full-time job, so I said yes and started a few weeks later.
I was sad about leaving the workshop. I had been there nine months and was just starting to feel comfortable. I did have mixed feelings about taking the new job, but it was a county government job and most people would love the opportunity to work in government—especially in the capital of New York. There are always rumors that government workers don’t do anything, but government jobs offer job security, great benefits, and fair pay.
I began at Child Protective Services on a Friday in February 2007. The first thing they had me do was read case files for clients with whom I’d be working. I was supposed to get a caseload of seventeen families. The first family I read about was separated after twenty-five pounds of feces were removed from the home.
Just like any new staffer, I was introduced to the other employees in my unit. Another caseworker in my unit was engaged to a woman I worked closely with during my internship at the Sanchez group home—the one from which I’d gotten fired. I knew that he probably knew that I was terminated, and I was paranoid that he would tell somebody.
Later in the day, I actually shadowed another caseworker named Trevor. He had a case in which a single mother was letting her boyfriend, who abused her daughter, into her home—after there was already an order of protection forbidding the boyfriend from coming anywhere near the house. “You basically have to be like a politician,” Trevor warned me as we drove to her house. The woman greeted us both and was initially pleasant. Then Trevor directed the eight-year-old to go to her bedroom. It was heart wrenching to see a woman choosing a boyfriend—whom she’d only recently met—over the safety of her daughter. Finally, the woman yelled at us, “You took my son away from me! You’re not going to take my daughter from me!” and slammed the door.
At the end of my second day of work, I had enough. I decided to call back my program director at the workshop and ask for my job back. I just couldn’t work in that field again. I ended up going back to my job at the workshop.
I also worked very hard at trying to accept my sexuality and to meet somebody I could be in a relationship with. I spent a lot of time online trying to meet people, but none of them went anywhere. Most of the men were just looking for hookups. I found out about a gay men’s support group that met weekly at the Capital District Gay and Lesbian Community Center (now Pride Center).
I was very nervous walking into the gay and lesbian center. After years of trying to deny my identity, I finally realized that I was a gay man who absolutely hated being gay. As I looked around the room, I noticed that most of the people in the room were older and were quite friendly with one another. The group started with each member going around and giving a brief report of his last week and recounting anything significant that happened. One man had been married for over thirty years and was struggling with how his adult children couldn’t accept him dating men after the death of his wife. His daughter-in-law had forbidden him from seeing his granddaughter. In fact, the same man met another man in the therapy group whose ex-wife was the granddaughter’s schoolteacher. The little girl was able to get a Christmas gift from her grandfather thanks to the connection that was formed in the group.
As I listened to the other men, I noticed that the man beside me looked very familiar. He said his name was Shawn, and I thought he looked like a former Christian brother who taught Spanish and religion when I was at Saint John’s. I thought that was funny, since most of my life I didn’t act on my gay thoughts because I didn’t want to be seen as a deviant in the Catholic Church. Now the person who gave the masses at my Catholic school was sitting next to me at a gay men’s support meeting.
After the meeting, I went up to him. He told me that, after two decades, he had left the Christian brothers only one year earlier. “I was thinking, where do I know this kid from?” Shawn said. He’d recognized me too, and since his coming out, said that he’d run into more former students at the local gay bar than at football and other athletic games. I joked with him about how in tenth grade he gave me a strange look after we had to write down our cultures during a campus retreat; when he looked over my shoulder, he saw that I’d written “white trash.”
A few months after I went back to my job at the workshop, I began applying for other jobs. While I was upset that I didn’t get the job in prevention at the AIDS Council, I decided to apply for a case manager job there. I interviewed for the position and was offered it, but I ended up turning it down. It wasn’t that much more money than my other job, but the main reason I turned it down was that I didn’t want people to think that since I worked at the AIDS Council, I was gay. Sure, I was gay, but I didn’t want anybody to know that. I didn’t see myself as a flamboyant gay man. Plus, I had a disoriented view of people with AIDS. I thought of them as needy and as criminals, and I thought the work would be frustrating. Still, I struggled with turning it down, since there was a part of me that realized that people with AIDS struggled with the same alienation that I had gone through.
Shortly after I decided to turn down the AIDS Council job, I actually thought about my life in perspective. I realized that I was just like Senator Larry Craig; somebody who people think is gay but denies it. I decided to attend the support group more often in the hopes of overcoming my feelings of self-hatred and internalized homophobia.
That summer, I realized no matter how much you try or what you do for others, you can never make somebody like you. You can never make somebody change, no matter how hard you try. The only person you’re guaranteed to wake up with every day is yourself. At the end of the day, you just have to believe that what you do is right and the decisions you make are ones that you can live with. I realized that I didn’t want to keep on going through life trying to make everybody like me and paying too much attention to what people thought of me.
Since I felt bad turning down the AIDS Council job, I decided to start volunteering. I wondered,
What would happen if I died tomorrow?
My obituary would say, “Well, he did his best to try to please others.” I thought that I could turn all my years of self-hatred into something positive, so I started volunteering with Steve Kozlowski and his wife, Mary. For the past fourteen years, the couple organized book sales and even had a thrift shop dedicated to helping people with HIV/ AIDS. By 2007, Steve and his wife had raised over $500,000 for the cause. As of 2012, the couple has raised over $750,000 for people living with HIV/AIDS.
As part of my volunteer work, I stocked the thrift store’s shelves and worked the register at book sales. It didn’t help me come out of the closet, though, and I still had difficulty meeting people who were interested in developing a relationship. I continued to post profiles on gay websites. By now I was not only fooling around with guys I met online, I was having sex with them as well. I always used condoms, but I decided to get tested again. In fact, I routinely got tested every six months. I didn’t want my family to see my name on a quilt some day on World AIDS Day. Each time I would go to a different place, and never my own physician’s office. I felt like too much of male whore. Luckily, everything always came back negative.
I once got tested at an AIDS Council location off-site at a bathhouse in Troy, New York. I immediately recognized the HIV counselor, as he was in the interview I had a few months earlier. He was the one who, when I mentioned anal sex, began to scream, “That’s gay!” During our session, he told me he was gay and didn’t care what others thought, since he was definitely not a stereotypical gay guy. He even told me to make sure I looked at other guys’ balls for any rashes, lesions, or lumps before I did anything with them.
Another time, I went to Planned Parenthood for testing. I used my insurance card to process payment. I later found out that men can’t just go to Planned Parenthood. My insurance kept rejecting my claim and threatened me before I finally paid the bill. Now I can laugh that Planned Parenthood almost ruined my credit.
At one of the early meetings that I attended at the support group, I observed a good-looking, middle-aged man named Mike who went to almost all the meetings. I couldn’t figure out why exactly he was there since he had a partner and seemed very happy and was always smiling. Nothing ever discouraged him, and he rarely said anything bad about anything or anyone. Mike would always try to give me advice. After a few meetings, he disclosed to the group that he was HIV positive and had been for close to twenty years. When I heard him say that, my eyes jumped in the back of my head, since I had never known anybody with HIV or AIDS.
Even though I stopped attending church after high school, I continued to pray every night before I went to bed and believed that I had a personal relationship with God. I have always felt that God communicates to us through other people. Before I started attending the men’s support group and met Mike, I had many misconceptions about HIV and AIDS. Just weeks earlier, if I had heard that an older man with AIDS was living next to me, I probably would have been judgmental and not empathetic at all. But I knew that Mike was a very nice person, and it helped me realize that people with AIDS can be beautiful, too.