On Being Positive on World AIDS Day

By Christopher Edwards on 12/01/2010 @ 11:19 AM

The appointment was supposed to be just a check-in. I already thought I'd cleared the hurdle.

Instead on October 18, 1999, at the SF City Clinic I was told that I was HIV-positive. I was 25. The date kinda sticks you know? I have a tattoo on my left of arm of chai, Hebrew for both "living" and the number 18, which I saw and still see as especially prophetic.

As I delved into my art school studies and tried to find a way to answer the anger and confusion, I spent several months becoming deeply intimate with David Wojnarowicz, whose cross-disciplinary work in the 1980s, dealt with themes about sex and love and HIV and the male body. His work was and is challenging, and right now he continues to be misunderstood as a piece of his is in the middle of a censorship controversy at the National Portrait Gallery.

Now, 11 years later — nine of those years in a binational relationship — I can let the distance between my emotions take in the meaning of HIV to me and the epidemic to our community and to Immigration Equality.

Of all the important emotions that I attach to my relationship is the understanding that the stability of that relationship, as unstable as our unjust immigration system has made it, has helped me stay healthy, helped my immune system respond in a healthy way.

Because of the important work of HIV-positive activists, living with the disease in the U.S. right now, especially in a cities like New York and San Francisco, offers a plethora of support for healthy living. I'm also indebted to the work of activists in the 1980s, 1990s, and even today that have fought so hard for that social safety net. Included in those are the activists that founded Immigration Equality, in response to ban on travel and immigration for HIV-positive people.

Being apart of Immigration Equality, then as a volunteer and now as an employee, as that ban was overturned and the very first HIV positive immigrants are allowed to seek asylum here has been an incredible journey. The overturning of the HIV ban is a very powerful statement to our perseverance as well as the perseverance of activists in creating the change we want and need.

Several years ago, thinking about the important performance work David Wojnarowicz, I kissed statistics from the worldwide AIDS epidemic as a form of blessing. Today, on World AIDS Day, I share that piece with you:

Counting to December 1: World AIDS Day from Christopher Edwards on Vimeo.