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Back to the Future: How Prison Taught How to Relearn my Relationship with Time
In 1981, the AIDS epidemic began, and I was living in ground zero, New York City. I had come out at a very young and precocious 16, and had enjoyed an extremely hedonistic life when I went to college at NYU — lots of drinking and sleeping around, all while still managing to do well in film school. At 21, the future was extremely bright for me until the first articles appeared about this strange syndrome afflicting gay men and killing us with startling and horrible swiftness. Within a year or so the death toll was already 10,000, and it wouldn’t really let up for 15 years, when the miracle drug cocktails finally came on the scene. The American death toll was north of 300,000 by then.
I didn’t take the test until 1988, but I knew I’d been positive for years already — the math wasn’t hard to do, given my promiscuity. Somehow I was spared the death of someone close until 1991, but that was the worst of them all. My brother, (who was also gay) died in February of that year. Then came one friend after another, every few months or so, for the next 5 years.
Each year, the certainty increased that this was going to be my last year as well. As a defense mechanism, I consciously tried to reduce the space in my mind devoted to anticipating and planning for the future, except to occasionally imagine…
