Stories of Fear

My name is Vasilios Papapitsios.  I became HIV-positive when I was 19, in North Carolina, through barebacking.  The first five years I lived with HIV, it’s like I was stuck in a vacuum. I couldn’t breathe.

In 2011, three months after my diagnosis, I was expelled from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill under homophobic claims that I was the center of the local HIV outbreak. This was simply not true.

The school told me I was a threat to campus and banned me from stepping foot on the grounds.  This caused me serious mental health issues which forced me into a dark place for many years.  I even went to the ACLU for assistance, but decided not to put up a fight, because that meant disclosing to the public and to my family.

I didn’t get on antiretroviral treatment  because I had little accessibility to care and stigma made me fear taking my next steps.  I got really sick.  At one point, I was reduced to 104 pounds and 6 CD4 or immune cells.  I should have had thousands of those little warriors.  My doctors told me I had one to three months left to live, if left untreated.

There I was. staring death in the face.  But I made a new start, through spirituality, medicine, and art.

I did an exercise in transmutation with my mentor, Sharon Jeffers.  She’s the grandmother I never had growing up and a true mystic. On pieces of paper, she laid down the words “fear” and “love” in front of me.  She had me stand on fear and feel with every particle of my being what that felt like.  I saw HIV — the virus, as well as the stigma associated with it — as lead in my body: dense, dark, and heavy.

She then asked me to step forward onto love, and to begin visualizing what loving my HIV would look like.  Love was only two feet in front of me, but getting there felt like pushing through a wall of cement.

I thought to myself, “I can love HIV.”

As I moved from fear into love, I visualized darkness turning into something full of light, sparkly and golden, pumping life through my once ‘polluted’ tunnels, now made into a magical network of veins transmitting healing forgiveness inside of me.  I made the intention to let go, to breathe, and to finally begin to heal and feel pleasure, to experience joy, and be more fully me, by embracing HIV.

Finally I was ready to start my journey towards a more holistic health. It felt like I was taking a deep breath for the first time in a while.

You might wonder why I avoided treatment for five years, especially when doctors tell us how important it is to start treatment as soon as we test positive. I don’t have an easy answer for you, except to say that lots of bad things happened to me during those five years, and I couldn’t cope.

For starters, I was so poorly educated that I didn’t think things would get as bad as they did.  Then there was my struggle to get good medical care in North Carolina after they had defunded the AIDS Drug Assistance Program in 2012, not to mention the ugly layers of stigma and self-stigma.

The important thing is that, shortly after I accepted the virus and stepped out of fear, I was ready to take my meds.  Within three months, I had gained 30 pounds and my CD4 cells returned to near normal. My body felt better than it had in years. And I was breathing again.

Which brings me around to the role of art in transforming my life.  I am an artist.  I make digital art and soft sculptures. Disclosure is one of the most important aspects of fighting HIV stigma, preventing the spread of the virus, and gaining a healthy sense of self.

One day I had this idea.  I thought, what if I could use art to disclose my status and help others to disclose theirs?  And what if it was light-hearted and cute, not heavy and scary?

I began to embroider weathered jocks and underwear I’d lived in since I contracted HIV. I call this series of artworks “Intimacy Issues.”  They are like my magical protective garments and have titles like Love AIDS, I’m Poz, and my personal fave, Poz4pleasure.

I began embroidering my underwear as art therapy, and with each stitch, I felt empowered.  Through this work, my fear started to dissipate and I could see myself having an intimate relationship again.

I believe there are blessings and hidden blessings in everything, including HIV.  As the great Sufi poet Rumi said, “The wound is where the light enters you.”  HIV is but one of many wounds I have, but for me it is where the most light pours through.

My name is Richard Rivera, and I remember how devastating AIDS was in the New York State prison system.  It was much worse than the public realizes or would imagine.

All around me during the early 1980s, prisoners began to experience sudden weight loss, sores in their mouth, a persistent cough, and other inexplicable medical problems. Popping up on the news were rumors of “that gay disease.”  Its official name was Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, or GRID.  But no one really knew what was going on or how it was transmitted.  All we knew was that this new thing was a death sentence.

Ironically, despite our fears and superstitions, prisoners continued to do what prisoners did.  Intravenous drug use, tattooing, and high-risk sexual behavior remained the norm.

In 1985, concerned over a friend named David who had disappeared from general population, I convinced one of the nicer officers to sneak me into the infirmary for a visit. When the doors opened, I saw a dorm-like area with beds neatly made with hospital corners lining the wall like a military barrack. But the room and the beds were empty.

The officer pointed to the back of the room, which was much darker. I made my way to an area sealed off with Plexiglas. It had an additional eight beds, on which eight prisoners lay: some on their backs, others in tight little balls. Their eyes were sunken into their skull, their hair thinning; their arms looked like twigs and their fingers were impossibly long. Some of them were covered in sores. One had swollen, purple legs, the skin so tight it looked like ripe fruit. He was softly moaning. It was my friend David.

I met David in 1983 at Great Meadow Correctional Facility, aka “Comstock.”  Prisoners called it “Gladiator School,” because of its propensity for violence.  I was 17 when I arrived.  I couldn’t read or write, and I had no friends and reputation.  I got into so many fights that I lost count after the fifth month there.

It was after a particularly violent encounter that I met David. He took me under his wing, showing me who to avoid and what not to do, while encouraging me to wear my glasses and stop eating my fingernails. I had no more trouble at Comstock. But David had a history of intravenous drug use and, I suspected, continued using and sharing needles.

In 1984, I was transferred to Green Haven Correctional Facility, and David followed soon after. He arrived smaller, thinner, and not at all the strong, robust, confident man I remembered.  Then a few months later, David was transferred.  That’s when I heard rumors of the secret ward and went looking for him.

The conditions in that ward were deplorable. Porters almost never went in to clean, medical staff rarely visited, and officers refused to have any contact with them at all. There were no medications, with the exception of the over-the-counter stuff like cough syrup and Motrin. AZT was still years away.

But every week from 1985 to 1987, I went there to care for David and the other men. David’s condition worsened, and ultimately, he was transferred to St. Agnes Hospital in White Plains, where he died.

The reason I am here today is because of brothers like David — and Jamel and Mongo and Joe and Pierre and Larry — who cared for me, corrected me, encouraged me, nudged me along the way. I went looking for David in that ward, because men like him had saved me, too, from being broken.

Brad Davis shot to instant stardom one night in 1979 in the south of France at the Palais theater.  It was the night the movie Midnight Express premiered at Cannes International Film Festival.  Before that, Brad had worked as an actor in some prestigious TV shows like Sybill with Sally Field and the mini-series Roots.  But, that night before the premiere, no one knew who Brad Davis was.

I’m Susan Bluestein; I was Brad’s wife.  I realized then that the experience of a five-minute standing ovation and the commotion that followed would be forever etched in my memory.  It was shocking and thrilling to see this short, skinny kid from Tallahassee, Florida and this middle-class Jewish girl from New York frozen in time amongst the movie elite.  It was like a dream, not real or tangible, but wonderful.  Brad won a Golden Globe award for that performance.

However, around the same time, Brad’s life changed in a very different way, and it wasn’t like a wonderful dream.  Brad had just finished a movie, A Small Circle of Friends.  His IV drug use and alcohol addiction were at their height.  After that movie, he went to visit a friend on the set of the film Heaven’s Gate.  He came down with the worst case of shingles and swollen lymph nodes the doctor had ever seen.

Today, they probably would have tested him for HIV immediately, but no one knew this in 1979-1980.  Through a miracle and much hard work, Brad got sober in 1981 and tried very hard to repair his reputation in the industry.  We were overjoyed to have our baby, Alex, in 1983.

In 1985, Brad went to Cedars Sinai hospital to donate blood, as he always did after Alex was born.  He had gotten an acting job in Italy for a few months.  Cedars Sinai sent a letter to the house informing him that he was HIV positive.  Brad had just finished starring in Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart at the Public Theater in New York.  This, of course, turned out to be very prophetic.

At first we didn’t really believe it or know what to think. We had so many questions. Was I infected? Was Alex? What should we do and how should we live going forward?

Fortunately, Alex and I tested negative.  We decided to keep Brad’s diagnosis secret so Brad could work as long as possible.  It had been hard enough for him to resurrect his career.  We didn’t think much about it at the time.  Brad looked and felt good, but a light had gone out of him, carrying this burden of his past.  By then, he had been infected at least five years, maybe more.

He refused to get any medical care for fear of discovery.  But in 1989, he wasn’t feeling well and knew he needed help from a doctor. Luckily, he was able to reach out to his friends Larry Kramer and Rodger McFarlane.  By then they were major AIDS activists in New York.  They sent him to a wonderful doctor, who agreed to see him in secret along with many other actors we found out later.

After his last job, A Habitation of Dragons, he picked up a parasite and couldn’t recover.  It was 1991.  He didn’t want Alex, who was 8 years old, to see him die a horrible death.  He took his own life while he was still able, on September 8, 1991.

Brad’s death shocked Hollywood.  Brad had wanted to tell the truth of how he died and what he had been through hiding the truth that he had AIDS.  There were many differing opinions as to whether he would have been hired if producers and directors had known.

The truth is he did some of his best work during that time, a mini-series, Robert Kennedy and His Times, being his favorite.  He loved that show and felt it was his first really adult role.  Brad wrote a proposal exposing the fear and discrimination at the time in the Hollywood Industry about anything related to AIDS.  It later became a book.

We made the most of the years we had together with Brad.  There was always music, lots of laughter and wonderful friends.

Brad’s motto was always “Don’t postpone joy.”  He never did!

Hi, this is Matt Bomer, and I’m honored to celebrate the life of Rock Hudson.

On July 25, 1985, movie star Rock Hudson, one of the biggest celebrities in the world from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, was the most famous person ever to publicly announce he had AIDS.  Just over a week before, he had appeared with frequent co-star Doris Day at a news conference promoting her new cable TV show.  He looked gaunt and frail.  He couldn’t eat a meal that Day had prepared for him.  Ten weeks later, on October 2, 1985, Rock Hudson was dead at 59 years old.

An Oscar nominee and a four-time Golden Globe award winner, Rock Hudson never came out publicly as gay.  The perceived risks to his career were apparently too great for him to do so.  Rumors of Rock’s homosexuality led to a planned exposé in Confidential magazine in 1955, the same year Life magazine named him “Hollywood’s Most Handsome Bachelor.”  But his agent Henry Willson (the one portrayed by Jim Parsons in Ryan Murphy’s Netflix series Hollywood) managed to convince them to bury the story in exchange for giving information on two other clients, Rory Calhoun and Tab Hunter.

Soon thereafter, Hudson married Willson’s secretary.  The marriage lasted three years.  It has been reported that Elizabeth Taylor, Mia Farrow, Susan Saint James, Carol Burnett, Angie Dickinson, Robert Stack, Julie Andrews, and others knew of his homosexuality, but he was such a friendly guy that even John Wayne is said to have remarked, “Who cares if he’s queer?  He plays great chess.”

Rock’s first major hit, alongside co-star James Dean, was the 1956 George Stevens western Giant, which also starred Elizabeth Taylor, who would become a lifelong friend.  Other hits include romantic comedy Pillow Talk with Doris Day; Come September with Gina Lollobrigida, Sandra Dee and Bobby Darin; and the long-running TV series McMillan and Wife with Susan Saint James.

Rock’s last significant role was a five-month recurring role on the television series Dynasty from December 1984 to April 1985.  Hudson was diagnosed with HIV on June 5, 1984, after a dermatologist did a biopsy of a mole on his neck at the suggestion of friend Nancy Reagan, who thought Rock looked too thin.  But Rock kept the results a secret for over a year.

Despite their friendship, the Reagans refused to provide him with preferential treatment at a U.S. military hospital, ignoring the pleas of Rock’s publicist.  Two days after his press conference with Doris Day, Rock traveled to Paris for treatments that were not approved in the United States, and collapsed at his hotel room at The Ritz.  His American publicist announced that Hudson had inoperable liver cancer, but four days later his French publicist admitted that Hudson had AIDS.

Rock flew back to the United States, spent a month in the hospital at UCLA, but was then released to go into hospice care at home.

His AIDS diagnosis was front-page news for almost every major U.S. newspaper in the summer of 1985.  Rock sent a telegram to an AIDS Project Los Angeles fundraising event in September 1985, saying, “I am not happy that I am sick. I am not happy that I have AIDS. But if that is helping others, I can at least know that my own misfortune has had some positive worth.”

People magazine reported that more than twice the amount of money was donated in support of AIDS research in the few months following Hudson’s death than had been donated in the entire year of 1984.  Rock left $250,000 in his will in support of an AIDS research foundation created by friend Elizabeth Taylor and his physician, Dr. Michael Gottlieb.  That foundation later merged with another AIDS organization to become the American Foundation for AIDS Research, known as amfAR.

President Reagan had never spoken publicly about AIDS until September 1985 following a month of widespread publicity about Hudson’s illness. A few days after Hudson’s death, Congress allocated $221 million toward finding a cure to AIDS.