I’ve been a fan of the San Francisco Gay Men’s chorus for a really long time. I first heard of them when I went to the Castro Street Fair in 1997. I was in San Francisco for the Lotus Developers Conference. That was my first trip to San Francisco and my first exposure to a gay men’s chorus. They had a booth, and I bought ExtrABBAganza, which had just come out. A few years later, I bought Naked Man. When I heard “I Come From Good People”, that was the moment I knew I wanted to be part of a gay men’s chorus.
I’ve been digging through some of my gay music and movies lately, getting in touch with my inner homo, and at some point today, I came to a realization: I’m incredibly fortunate.
Had I been born just a few years earlier, I would have been part of a generation of gay men who were losing friends at an alarming rate to the AIDS crisis. A big chunk of a generation was lost due to an epidemic that just ravaged the gay community. Ask anybody a few years older than me, and they can name the friends they lost to AIDS. So much of the gay movies and music deal with the loss of friends and lovers to AIDS. I came out in a time and place where I wasn’t exposed to that loss.
Don’t get me wrong. I lost a few friends. In fact, I lost a friend from high school to AIDS. The worst part is that I didn’t know until college that he had died. I had met a guy, and he had a picture over his fireplace, and I commented that I had gone to high school with Michael. That’s when he explained that he had died of AIDS. I hadn’t seen him in years, and knowing that I’d never see him again didn’t make it any easier.
Medical science has come so far in the past 25 years. Testing HIV+ is no longer a death sentence. Today, we celebrate the friends who are surviving and still with us. And we practice sex in ways that hopefully prevent the spread of this disease. HIV and AIDS is still a serious threat to not just our community but the world as a whole. I hope that my generation and the generations to come don’t lose sight of just how awful this disease was.
That said, I think I’m in touch with my inner homo.