Interviews with Mr. AIDS

It's all over but the analysis, the first job interview I've had as a positive person -- at least, this type of positive. \nI had the night-before jitters, not because of my qualities or qualifications, but because of revealing my HIV status during the interview. It was a baffling fear. My resume is covered with "HIV Live," HIV test counselor, HIV speaker, AIDS this and AIDS that. \n With an hour to convince someone I have qualities that can't be found in Times New Roman 12-point type, I can't avoid talking about the single most important event in my life, or at least the one that drives my ambition and determination. \nAs much as I didn't want to turn my interview into an opportunity to educate, it's the work I've chosen to do. So I read employment advice for positive job seekers, from sources as varied as "The Body online", Poz Magazine, the government. Each one of them screams -- "Don't Reveal." A part of me knows they are right; a part of me thinks they're screwed in the head. \nDisassociation is impossible for me, which might give you an idea of the trench I have engineered for myself. As Blanche DuBois sadly learned in "A Streetcar Named Desire," a life of relying on the kindness of strangers inevitably manufactures its own hurdles. \nWhy wouldn't I have it differently? Why wasn't I content, as so many are, to keep my status to myself?\nI confidently told my interviewer I was tired of the lack of reality in the media about HIV. I told her that of all good things I've managed in my life, nothing comes close to this HIV life I've been having. \nThe worst of what has happened to me the past three years is how it has affected my approach to the affairs of life. They fascinate me, I want to grab them by the metaphorical lapels and pull them closer. I want the people in my life to know and be known by me in better ways than "how's it going" or "nice to see you" might suggest. \nYet I walk in a constrained world, and understand it well. I speak of loving things the way others speak of liking them. I feel love not because I'm such a saint but because I understand how difficult and how wonderful things can be, often at the same time. And I understand the tentativeness of the negotiation between those two extremes we casually call life. \nI never expect people to accommodate me, I expect I will accommodate them; to consider myself handicapped in any way runs counter to what the past three years have meant to me. I might be a checkbox on an application, a token to be slipped into the spot marked "Americans With Disabilities Act," but that isn't the reality I live. \nI recently had an e-mail interview from a student working on a paper. One of the questions dealt with the empowerment or disempowerment I have experienced since diagnosis. \nWhile the question honestly confused me -- I answered that I thought being born white and male in the '60s made disempowerment a moot point -- I thought of all the "fears" I have carried forward the last three years. \nI was afraid of ending life, I was afraid of mainstreaming, I was afraid of graduate school, I was afraid I wasn't smart enough, and now I am afraid of interviewing. \nBut I left that job interview with the idea that the company that didn't hire me would miss out on a good deal. \nIn fact, I learned today that my difficulty in thinking of disempowerment wasn't based on where, how and when I was born, but because I hadn't thought of empowerment, I hadn't defined it or identified it with myself. \nThis interview comes early in the process for me -- I won't finish my Master's program until next summer -- but it couldn't have come at a better time: A month before my 40th birthday, my fourth anniversary with Chuck, a time of assessment. \nAnd I've learned a new piece of metadata about myself -- empowered: Fit and alive at a fascinating moment in time, with as many years as I want to enjoy it. I enjoy my little paranoias, they are anchors in the stream of events. I told my e-mail interviewer I thought my fears were refreshingly common, a perspective I learned as I reviewed my answers. \nThere will always be someone who can reject my experience, or not be compelled by it. My interviewer might have been one of them. I only reward myself by going at every situation with the steamroller of honesty and this intensity I live, but damn, that's a good reward. \nIt is the story of change that keeps being told here, an interactive story in which the end changes when choices are made in the story line. What surprises me when I write it is how small the changes are that eventually repaint the big picture. Life never changes at the moment something is done, but about a hundred ripples out in the metaphorical ocean it occupies. What waves will come out of this?\nThis week I'm living the story as I'm writing it. It's my favorite way to write this column. In fact, it's Friday and I'm going to the Homecoming Parade, which I find enormously entertaining. What will be playing in my mind won't be an interview, a debate of whether I've made the right choices, if my story will end the right way. I know full well I've done the right things; my parents think so, Chuck thinks so. I'll be jonesing for candy, watching for Miss Gay IU. \nThere's nothing like a guy in a dress propped up in a convertible to remind one how tenuous reality is …