I don't go to Mardi Gras Fair Day because there are too many ghosts there for me. Ghosts from people passed over. Work related ghosts from being a staffer for Mardi Gras. And the living ghosts walking around who pretend to not know me because they have a new boyfriend, or are cruising, or are partying or whatever. Ghosts are everywhere.
An old flat mate was in town for Mardi Gras, and he dropped into my place for a visit after he had been to Fair Day. My old flatmate chatted to me about Fair Day and about his ghosts. We caught up on the previous few years. All the stuff that's too long to type into a Gaydar message.
“You are the first generation of poz people to not have to worry about dying” he said to me as he drank a glass of cold water.
This made me recall a newspaper story about a drag queen who ran one of the Sydney bars. He stated in the story that young pozzies were good at rorting the welfare system, and that young people were reckless with drugs and sex. According to the drag queen in the story - welfare was only okay for him and his mates, and, young people were demonised.
“It's those young people not disclosing, who are driving up new seroconversions” said my old flatmate as he drank the last of his water.
“No, time is the cause” I interjected. “The longer time goes on, the more sex happens, and the more sex happens, the more likelihood there are seroconversions. It's the time variable along the x axis of the graph that generates new numbers, not an increase in risk taking behaviour by young people.”
I wasn't into youth bashing. Mainstream media does it constantly and I wasn't about to jump on the bandwagon. My old flatmate is in his 50s. It worried me that he didn't include himself in the group of people who don't have to worry about dying anymore. His opinions were like the drag queen’s in the newspaper. They both thought that young positive guys had it so much easier than they did.
I understand why positive heterosexuals feel invisible in our community because, as a young positive guy, I had always been made to feel that HIV belonged to older gay men. The x axis on the graph had turned my hair grey. I am now an older gay man close to age 40, yet I became poz at 21. I went through all the experiences older positive guys went through and a bunch of different ones because I was young when I seroconverted.
Access to resources and support networks determine how well you cope with your HIV. The average age of seroconversion is around the mid 30s. By mid 30s people have a decade of adult friend/family networks and a decade of career/finances to fall back on. But it's very different for young people.
Young people aren't long out of the family home and they move around a lot for uni, work and to find where they fit in. All their long established friend networks dissolve when high school ends and they have to create new ones. It can be hard to get family support if they have been pushing family away for the past few years to define themselves. And young people don't have well paying careers or a history of savings. For young people the lack of resources and support makes coping with HIV very difficult. Not having these networks in place is difficult and having to create these networks while young and poz is even more difficult.
My pantry was bare except for the tin of peaches that lives on the second shelf so I didn't offer to cook my old flatmate dinner. After a long chat about the inner city becoming all apartments, and how wealthy older gay men were the only ones who can afford to live in the apartments, and how MAG was the biggest stall at Fair Day, he finally finished his visit and went back to his hotel.
“You are the first generation of poz people to not have to worry about dying” stung in my ears as I fell asleep on my sofa in front of the telly. For one pozzie to say other pozzies are less worthy is the greatest injustice we can do to our community. Both the drag queen and my old flatmate were guilty of doing this. While asleep on the sofa I dreamed about shopping at Aldi so I didn't have to eat tinned peaches.
