原文：
http://0rz.tw/802Z7
http://www.fridae.com/newsfeatures/printer.php?articleid=1729
August 7, 2006
my boyfriend died of AIDS
By Dr Tan Chong Kee
It is especially hard for gay men to grapple with AIDS because people still
think that AIDS is a gay disease. But the more we try to dissociate from it,
the more it haunts us like an evil spirit. Tan Chong Kee writes.
My first boyfriend died of AIDS about two years after we broke up. I found
out about it more than a year after his death, of all times and places,
during the 1st Singapore AIDS conference in 1998, when a mutual friend, a
Taiwanese representative to the conference, asked me out to lunch, and
dropped the bomb shell.
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My first thoughts were: He must have already been HIV+ when we first met.
Thank God we were always safe. And I better get tested tomorrow.
Immediately after that, a wave of sadness came over me. Naturally I was sad
because someone I knew and was close to had died. But underneath that was an
even deeper sadness. It was hard to articulate why I was so sad, but it was
very clear what the sadness did. It made me totally incapable of being angry
with him. My boyfriend at that time was livid. He thought it was utterly
irresponsible for my ex to hide his HIV status from me. I could have been
infected.
He was right. But all I wanted to do, was to gather all the photographs I had
of him, put them into an album, and look at them anew, wondering what he was
thinking and feeling at those times, smiling into the camera with me by his
side, and knowing his days were numbered.
Why didn’t he tell me the truth about his HIV status? He was a medical
doctor. He kept telling all our mutual gay friends to get tested. He taught
me all about safe sex when I first came out. So why couldn’t he tell me he
was positive?
I will never know the answer. But I can guess. Would I have entered into a
relationship with him if I had known this when we first met? To be perfectly
honest, no. Hell no! AIDS to me then, in the early 90s was something that
happened in San Francisco. It was something remote. That did not mean I didn’
t take precautions, but it did mean I never thought it possible that someone
I knew could be HIV+. If he had told me, I would probably have freaked out.
And I guess he knew that too.
Perhaps you can now understand why I was so sad. The stigma of HIV was so
great that he could not even share it with someone he loved. What was it like
for him, to keep this secret in order to have some semblance of normality in
his life? And I, together with the Taiwanese society at that time,
contributed to his need for secrecy.
It was very difficult to come to grips with this: I was stunned to realise
years later that I was stigmatising my own boyfriend.
It is especially hard for gay men to grapple with AIDS because people still
think that AIDS is a gay disease. But the more we try to dissociate from it,
the more it haunts us like an evil spirit. Truth is, we cannot fight
homophobia without fighting stigma against HIV. One stigma feeds off the
other. AIDS has been used to discredit gay people just as homophobia has been
used to discriminate against people living with HIV/AIDS.
And stigmas, like taboos, are often hidden. Imagine a society who in reality
is homophobic but will not admit it, preferring to think of itself as morally
superior instead. They will say no, we talk about the gays openly, we are not
anti-gay, just don’t hold hands in front of the kids. But we, on the
receiving end, can all decipher the don’t-come-too-close-to-me grammar of “
the gays” and the convenience of hiding behind “the kids.”
We are just as guilty when it comes to folks who are HIV+. We know they
exist, we talk about HIV every so often, but we would rather not have them
come too close. How do you think our fellow gay HIV+ men feel when they
decipher our hidden stigmatisation towards them?
I remember a moment in a play that The Necessary Stage did with Paddy Chew,
the only person in Singapore who has ever come out as HIV+. During the
Question and Answer segment in the middle of the play, a member of the
audience asked: “help me understand you, what can I do to help?” That was a
magical moment. It was a moment when Paddy the actor on stage stopped being
the emasculated symbol of AIDS, a promiscuous gay man, an object for
observation, but became a person with feelings and needs, foibles and
strengths, deserving of respect, understanding and compassion – just like
everyone else.
Stigmatisation runs the full gamut from very subtle to rabidly hysterical.
For hysterical, try rabidly anti-gay televangelist Jerry Falwell: “AIDS is
not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the
society that tolerates homosexuals.” For subtle stigmatisation, what I did
was a good example. At its core, stigmatisation is selfish indifference to
human suffering: it’s your own fault, so stay away from me. Contrast that
to: help me understand, what can I do to help?
As sexual minorities, we are well acquainted with stigmatisation. Let’s not
do it to others. Few of us are hysterical, but many of us stigmatise PLWHA so
subtly that we are not even aware of it ourselves. We can do better.
John Manzon-Santos, Executive Director of the San Francisco-based Asian &
Pacific Islander Wellness Center, gave me this idea and I would like to share
it with you. If you already know someone who is HIV+, come out about him/her
to your friends and family. Tell them about your HIV+ friend and help them
see your friend as a person. From you, they will learn compassion and
understanding rather than recoil as a way to relate to people who are HIV+.
If you don’t know anyone who is positive, go and volunteer at your local
HIV/AIDS organisation and soon, you too will have a HIV+ friend. If you feel
coming out as gay or lesbian was hard, imagine how much harder it is to come
out as HIV+. There is no need to wait for another Paddy Chew, or for the
government to change its mind. How much longer do you want your friends to be
living under such a heavy stigma? Do something about it today.
Dr Tan Chong Kee holds a Ph.D. in Chinese Literature from Stanford University
in the United States and is one of Singapore’s best-known figures in civil
society activism.
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