The Jigtastic Journal of J. Na Na

“50% of all new HIV infections occur between people aged 18 – 25.”

Source: Centers for Disease Control

That certainly lifted a weight off my shoulders when I hit 26. 

But in all seriousness, that ghastly, sad statistic has remained with me, hovering like a freak patch of heavy fog in my everyday, conscious mind.

The last time I went to Kaiser to have my ears checked out, I just remember seeing so many gay guys all in one contained edifice.  It was like the photo negative of a big, gay club scene, where deafening music had been replaced by deafening silence, and cruising eyes with pallid glances.  They were there in the lobby, walking up the stairs, getting in the elevator with me, exiting it, mostly guys around my age or a bit older, it seemed.  I was thankful my doctor’s floor served primarily non-native Asian families so I could escape from it all.  I didn’t want to think about it anymore, I knew what I’d seen.

Why does it happen to that particular age group? you have to ask.  And what do we do about it?

A few years ago, there were some pretty effective HIV-prevention ad campaigns that unabashedly used scare tactics to convey the message of a scary disease.  “HIV is no picnic” read the tagline of one campaign’s billboard, featuring a man with facial wasting in part of a series focusing on the debilitating symptoms of HIV.

Another campaign used the above statistic from the CDC as its bannerhead, and twisted requisite images of young adulthood to incorporate the letters “HIV”.  A torso-only shot of a guy wearing a letterman’s jacket reveals the letters “HIV” stenciled in gold where his name and sport should be.  Another headless shot of a girl wearing a sleeveless lavender top with a gold necklace meant to draw attention to her breasts suddenly breaks at the necklace’s cursive three-letter emblem.  I’ve certainly never gotten these images out of my head, not helped by the fact that I passed them twofold each work day when taking the Muni, then some more on the weekends.  Really drove the message home.

But I have to wonder if it was ever introduced beyond the boundaries of San Francisco, to the rest of America’s youth.  I doubt it.  But I also wonder just how effective it was within those boundaries, right at ground zero, where the fabric of time was first ripped, and sent hundreds of thousands of men to an early grave.

Some blame it on crystal meth, but that’s just a catalyst, isn’t it?  You still have all your senses about you on meth; in fact, they’re heightened.  But you can get completely stinking-ass drunk and have no idea what you did the night before after blacking out.  God knows it’s not helping anything, but meth and other controlled substances do not instantly whiplash you into a brand new person with a completely different personality courtesy of a brand new brain.  You may not be thinking clearly, but your mind’s still working.  Just with a different spin on its usual routine.   

–Okay, and here’s the part where the future father in me lays on the loud, neon disclaimer: This does not mean you should rush out and partake of illegal drugs.  For one, they are illegal, which, respective of moral or ethical grounds, bespeaks a measure of Trouble with a capital T that you needn’t engender unless you hate being a free, fun-loving citizen.  In tandem with that, such illegality comes borne of a concern for the common good, or as I like to refer to them, the common dumb.  Ill-possessed of physiological awareness, mental acuity, and emotional wherewithal, the common dumb are simply not equipped to go taking these demi-poisons and continue sub-functioning at permissible levels.  If you’re none too fit as a person normally, why on earth would we want to legally allow you to enhance such lameness to rabid degrees?

But for many people, drugs and alcohol can lift inhibitions and poke up into different spheres of thinking and feeling that translate into their sober reality later.  So it’s not all bad, but it’s not all good.  I just wonder where you get to the point where you say to yourself, I’d rather feel good for these couple of minutes having unprotected sex rather than live the rest of my life.   How do you decide your life’s not worth it in that instant, all at once?  All the years rolling out ahead of you snapped up short like a rug pulled out from underneath your feet at your own doing. 

And hasn’t anybody heard of fucking masturbation for God’s sake?  If you’re that horny and don’t have a trusted other homo handy, take matters into your own hands.  Save your life while you’re at it.

I guess the big question is for that 18 – 25 year-old target group: Do you love yourself? 

You can use haunting images to scare people into a permanent state of trepidation over HIV, like old wive’s tales used to keep children from going out into the forest at night.  I don’t see anything wrong with slapping reality across the face of my fellow haughty young hotties.  But that’s just drawing the lines in the battlefield.  How do you win? 

Maybe if we had more of a sense of community?  Maybe if you, say, volunteered a little time to your local Gay & Les Center, or some queer-oriented charity.  Is that too Mr. Rogers-sounding?  It’s just something I’ve been thinking about.  If we stopped seeing each other as the competition and the prize, and leveled out to a broader mindset, all the different facets of ourselves would trickle out and blend like so many streams rushing out into a river at different angles.  Propelled forward with the flow all at once, realize how strong you are, and not get caught up in the game of hunter and prey, trailblaze your way towards greater things.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 6th, 2005 at 7:42 pm and is filed under Idyllic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.