On this World Aids Day in 2020, I Cherish Memories, Celebrate Survival, & Commit To Doing My Part
Although we’re all consumed by the COVID-19 Pandemic, HIV and AIDS continues to ravage many communities. Check out my reflections below and learn what you can do to protect yourself. Note: Some pieces of this post were originally posted on the now defunct Dance Fitness Health blog around November 2014.
Today is World Aids Day.
Like every December 1, it comes and goes, but it feels different this year. My anxieties around HIV and AIDS have only heightened since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Why? because I worry that many us are more consumed with evading one disease and taking risks that could lead us to be diagnosed with another. And while sexual activity is a natural piece of our human existence, rates of common STD and STI infections reveal that many of us fail to take precautions during sex… So, I worry.
I’ve been able to manage and control my anxieties around this issue by celebrating the existence and relative safety of my HIV positive friends and family. For many of us who have the privilege of being in the U.S. with good healthcare access, HIV is a manageable condition and one that we are one step closer to ending thanks to new biomedical prevention tools. I know this because I’ve been loved through my ignorance by friends who are positive. It is their vocal commitment, along with friends working in healthcare, to ending HIV stigma that led me to be one of the only heterosexual Black women I know openly, and personally, advocating for using biomedical HIV prevention tools. And not as a doctor, or counselor, but as a private user because I know that their availability wasn’t always the case.
I lost my favorite uncle to AIDS and I still remember the last time I saw him. I was only four years old and it’s one of my eldest memories.
More important than anything, though, has been my ability to watch them thrive despite the challenges of HIV, COVID-19, Anti-Blackness, and a myriad of other issues that disproportionately impact them — That impact US. I celebrate my positive friends, today, as they continue to live and thrive, to buy their first homes, to get married, to have babies, and to just simply be. I celebrate them despite the cavalier attitude with which their own government once took towards AIDS and is now taking towards COVID.
It is estimated that some 36 million people worldwide died of AIDS between 1981 and 2012 and that another 35 million are living with HIV. Some say, and I agree, that we lost an entire generation to HIV/AIDS. For these reasons, HIV prevention advocacy has always held a special place in my heart. But it is not solely because of my understanding of the prevalence of HIV among African Americans, nor because I have a number of friends who are positive… It is because my favorite uncle was was one of those 36 million to die of complications of living with AIDS. Specifically, he died after his lungs collapsed, a complication brought on by AIDS, and a fact that many of my family members seem to never acknowledge. But maybe the pain is lessened when they choose not to admit this?
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Sometimes, I wonder if others remember him how I remember him. I was very young, maybe it was the summer of ’94, but I distinctly remember his knock at the front door of my parents’ apartment saying, “Guess who?” I jumped up and down, my long beaded hair flopping across my head, screaming “Uncle Ants! Uncle Ants! Uncle Ants!” My uncle, Anthony L. Hickson, “Ant” for short, was my favorite. He was young, fun, and always brought me treats my parents wouldn’t allow me to have right to the front door. We played what felt like endless games of hide and seek when he came to visit. It wasn’t until he died that I came to understand why he worked to become so close to me.
My uncle died a month after his 31st birthday on March 15, 1995. I was four years old. Even now, I still remember the memories we share, quite vividly. On the day of his funeral I remember bouncing from lap to lap in my cute poofy dress. At first, I sat with my mom, but I could not stop screaming, shaking; I was angry that my favorite uncle was in this “box” and was never going to come to the door again. After my late grandmother took me and failed to console me, I bounced over to my aunt’s lap. I think I tired myself so much that I fell asleep because my last memory is of us pulling out of the funeral home.
***
Although it hurts to have lost my uncle to an illness that few understand, or for this matter, acknowledge, it feels good knowing that there are people working all across this globe to bring us closer to an AIDS-free generation. Since the early 1990s, research, advocacy, treatment, and prevention of HIV/AIDS have been at the forefront of many local, state, national and world health organizations. I’m old enough to have Get Tested Get Answers seared into my brain. But as the 90s and early 2k’s came and went, so too it seems like public care towards the HIV/AIDS crisis.
Where has our collective commitment gone? Now is not the time to take our foot off the gas!
My personal connection to this disease led me to spend much of my early adult life as the friend to go with my peers to a clinic for testing, the one to open paper results (when they used to deliver them this way) for a friend or colleague who were too afraid, and as the one to help comfort friends who were waiting for their results and got called back to see the doctor. Now, with my Ph.D. in hand, I’m also the person determined to ask Black college women what we can do better about the ongoing resurgence in HIV cases among Black women especially in my hometown, Atlanta. Black women know best how to help, support, and improve treatment efficacy for Black women. As a Black woman scholar, highlighting their beliefs, perceptions, and current approaches is the least that I can do.
Although HIV is no longer the death sentence it was in the late 80s and early 1990s, stigma and its symptoms still ostracizes many from testing and screening for HIV. As we celebrate this World Aids Day, I implore all of you to look for the closest clinic or healthcare practice offering free or discounted testing. And try not to let this fear and shame get in your way.
You deserve sex.
You deserve healthy sex.
And you deserve to live and be healthy as you have sex.
AND, I want you (if you’re still reading this) to include testing as part of your sexual engagement.
Every year, on World Aids Day, I think of my positive friends I am thankful to still have here with me. But I also lament the loss of the relationship my uncle and I could have cultivated over the past 25 years. Of the artists, creatives, and loves loss when the infection rate was at its peak. Although my relationship with my uncle was cut short, yours does not have to be. Being tested for HIV does not make you a less trusting partner, and neither does asking that someone you choose to engage in sexual activity get tested. These actions make you an informed and responsible sexually active individual. And, if all else fails, use me as an excuse or reason to get tested. You owe it to yourself to be proactive about your wellness.
