This is a digitized version of an article that originally appeared in the print edition of the New York Times in 2025, before it was published online.
We’re working to continue developing this database.
Three times. I went to the hospital, had a disposable needle stuck in my arm, and each time I felt fear and nausea before the results came back, the thought of sitting in a public waiting room watching a video about “Living With This Will Kill You.” mal. These tests have been going on for five years, and the results have always come back negative—which is not surprising in retrospect, since I’m not one of those “high-risk” people who sleep with their heroin-addicted bassist and have no regrets. They hope to be thanked in the liner notes of their first big self-released album.
Still, testing is something that should always be done.
Even though I am middle-aged, go to a prestigious school, and don’t know a single woman or gay man with HIV, I am still afraid of the disease. At one university I went to, the dorm baskets were full of condoms and diaphragms, and we felt that the health counselor should be told directly that we should not have sex without a condom unless we wanted to die; it disappears overnight, destroys our future, and endangers others. (They have seen it happen, oh yes, they have.) They give us instructions, don’t explain how to use the mouthpiece, just tell us where to go for the test, and then give us three big pockets (even some glow-in-the-dark ones, just for variety). They tell us it would be fun if we had better etiquette. We follow this rule until we can’t anymore, because we can’t, because it’s not fair, and our ability to do it is no better than we thought. So once again we ignore precautions, then we get scared, go for the test, and when the results come back normal, we run out of the hospital with the paper in our hand, look at us and swear we won’t be stupid anymore. But of course, we embarrassed ourselves once again. And the test always gives the same results for the same reason, and will soon be a joke on the SAT. In ten years, it scored higher than lying about whether we had unprotected sex, a lie that is as much a crime against ourselves as talking about keeping a gun under our pillow every night. It may be a confession, but something tells me I’m not the only one who does it. I don’t actually believe that most of us—and by “we” I mean the general public, who are accused of thinking they’re immortal, of being stupid, lazy, and lacking in energy—have made any significant contribution to AIDS. Vaccines. My guess is that we all ignore it, and almost everyone who claims otherwise is lying. One of the key points of safe sex is when there is no mantra of “You don’t know where you are”; that means everyone is a threat and we are either bad or don’t know. “He didn’t tell me he was on medication,” the HIV-positive woman said in a social media post. Safe sex “documentaries” on MTV and call-in radio shows on pop radio show a woman whose boyfriend “says he loves me but he’s messing things up.” The message we get is that trusting anyone is irresponsible, that trusting a partner, especially a man, is wrong, and that we are not mature enough to have sex. We are told that if we are careful, we will probably be fine. We are told to prepare for the worst, not to invite disaster by hoping for the best. We are encouraged to keep our needs under tight control, otherwise we will lose control of the vehicle completely, and no one can say we were not warned. So for us AIDS remains a private hell, smoldering in the intimate conversations of friends, occasionally surfacing when we think about it, and darkening when we think about it.
When night falls, hysteria sets in, and the names of people we know…
questions of who will do it to, who will do it to, whether they will die, seem to line the ceiling like the long shadows we saw in our childhood. But we sleep and wake up again. Nothing has changed, we are simply content to forget, which has become the ultimate survival instinct. What remains for me and my friends is a deep anxiety, a low sense of fear and anger that is inherent in everything we do. The disease scares us and affects our behavior, but our behavior remains the same. One consequence is the development of a spirit of injustice and fear that can do us more harm than the disease itself. In this world, peace of mind is a utopian idea.