If you missed Boulevard Theatre’s recent production of Terrence McNally’s Mothers and Sons, you did yourself a great disservice. It recalled memories and emotions of times past, but also reminded us of the power of hope. It also provided a prelude to the 30th World AIDS Day, which takes place on Dec. 1.
The play reminded me of living through those days of unrelenting obituaries and funerals. At the time, I worked in Germany for Lufthansa. Our crew center had a memorial wall for photos of recently deceased employees, usually long-retired flight captains. But when AIDS hit Germany and struck down young male flight attendants in its wake, it was rare to see their images on the wall. Like the mother in McNally’s play, there was a pervading denial. Parents, loath to admit their sons were gay let alone dead of AIDS, wouldn’t permit their fallen child’s photo to be displayed. They simply disappeared, their fate only revealed when you happened to ask a mutual friend, “have you seen Hans (or Rolf or Stephan or Markus)?” Silence was the typical reply.
But we had hope. Abandoned by family and government, we fended for ourselves. We created our own health care infrastructure. Locally, it was the AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin (ARCW), now a national health service model. We raised the funds required to protect ourselves, and we held the hands of the dying. If anything united us, it was hope in the face of catastrophe. Engagement was unavoidable. In fact, the HIV/AIDS pandemic is credited with creating the LGBTQ community, mixing that amalgam of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender individuals and queers, motivated by that common cause, a political will and common hope.
Returning to Milwaukee in the early 1990s, I became an inadvertent activist when I went to ARCW to donate an item for its Make-A-Promise Dinner’s fundraising auction. I left the building as the auction’s volunteer chairman, and I served in that capacity for five years. The ARCW staff member I worked with that first year later died of AIDS, as did several auction donors who, knowing their inevitable fate, consigned their prized possessions to help others.
Then, antiretroviral therapies were introduced. San Francisco’s newspaper, the Bay Area Reporter, celebrated Aug. 13, 1998, when, for the first time in 17 years, it ran no AIDS-related obituaries. Since then, the once death sentence diagnosis has become one of a manageable chronic infection.
Still, new infections persist. Worldwide, 9.4 million people live with HIV and don’t know it. Many only get tested after they become ill. Earlier this year, Milwaukee’s HIV cluster was evidence of the struggle to convince risk groups of the need to know one’s status. Stigma and fear, however, dissuade them from getting tested.
So, this year’s World AIDS Day theme is “Know your status.” A recent local media campaign to encourage testing recently featured familiar personalities who are HIV-positive. The community’s task remains to convince others, especially our youth, to take it to heart. Meanwhile, human trials of an AIDS vaccine begin in 2019.
A World AIDS Day Commemoration on Dec. 1, at South Division High School, includes free HIV testing and a community interfaith service.
