I was diagnosed as hiv positive 25 years ago. I had just turned 20. I had picked up a guy cruising at Plaza Pakistan and he took me to his apartment nearby. We had sex without a condom and he came inside of me without warning. As soon as he came he went to take a shower, without saying a word. I was stunned. It didn\u2019t feel like rape so much as a common heartbreak. It was my birthday week. My skin soon became covered in hives and I had a high fever for 3 days straight. \u201cI got lice,\u201d I thought. I went to get tested at the Mu\u00f1iz Hospital in Buenos Aires. I wanted to find out for myself. Voluntary individual testing was not very accepted at that time. Diagnostics from close-body contact was denied. Wanting to know one’s serological status was contradicting the cultural mandate of getting sick and dying.<\/p>\n
In the Retrovirus Laboratory, a doctor handed me the exams and explained the immediate result: viral load and CD4 analysis. The Mu\u00f1iz hospital is surrounded by a park. Under a scorching sun, my legs went weak, my eyes clouded over, my heart rate accelerated, and I fell down. I got my breath back while sitting on the curb of an alleyway. I read it again: \u201cPOSITIVE.\u201d Done! I\u2019m a fucking aids victim at 20. Cultural sentence served. \u201cYou are going to end up dead in a ditch!\u201d my mother cursed me for being a faggot.<\/p>\n
\u201cA \u2018positive\u2019 result only indicates contact with the virus. It does not necessarily imply illness or severity of the disease.\u201d I learned that this final clarification placed in the results was a phrase metabolized thanks to the activist struggle against the metaphors of war and plague propagated by medical science, metaphors that performed<\/em> the institutional and social abandonment and the cultural and physical death sentence of millions of infected people around the world.<\/p>\n After I left the hospital, I called my brother (also a faggot) from a public phone to let him know. \u201cYou\u2019re an idiot!\u201d is the first thing he said to me, a punishment faithful to the script of cultural abuse. I hung up. I called a gay friend of that time. \u201cCome over,\u201d he said. He was waiting for me with a phone number. \u201cCall this number. You\u2019re not going to deal with this alone, you need company.\u201d It was the number for Nexo [1]<\/sup><\/a>One of the first civil organizations working with hiv\/aids in Argentina, created in 1992 by a group of gays. They published the monthly magazine NX, aimed at the homosexual community, which included … Continue reading<\/span><\/span><\/span>