WHEN SOMEONE says the words HIV/AIDS, in most people's minds it usually sparks images of a global epidemic and poor people dying in Africa. The problem seems both gargantuan and remote -- so large that we can hardly comprehend it much less do anything about it and so removed that we feel little connection to it. Last Wednesday's presentation "A Boy, a Girl, A Virus and the Relationship that Happened Anyway" did an excellent job of reminding those in attendance that not only is HIV/AIDS a problem here at home, but that the individuals stricken with it remain people with identities separate from their disease. It also affirmed the importance of being well informed if we are going to attempt to comprehend this multi-faceted pandemic.
The program first featured Shawn Decker, a hemophiliac who became infected with HIV at age 11 in 1987 after receiving a tainted blood transfusion. Upon learning of his condition, his rural Virginia school expelled him out of fear that he would infect the other students. His parents had to fight to get him readmitted, explaining repeatedly to school officials how the disease was actually transmitted. Even then, the school passed out leaflets to students warning that one of their schoolmates had HIV and that the disease was often linked to hemophilia, putting the spotlight on Decker.
This wasn't the last time Decker would endure the experience as being identified as his virus. While his first impulse was to hide and deny his virus, as he matured he came to understand that it could be part of him without defining him. He launched his Web site "My Pet Virus," which gave both informative and humorous takes on living with HIV, and he started spreading the message as an AIDS advocate.
It was through this work that he met his future wife, Gwenn Barringer, the presentation's other speaker. Barringer is HIV negative despite the fact that she and Shawn have been in a relationship for the past seven years. "And yes," Barringer made clear, "we do have sex." She said that because they always use a condom "the negative partner stays negative. We don't have the option to not use the condom that one time."
Surprised? With all the talk about the failure rates of condoms and how the only true safe sex is abstinence that is drummed into students, it's not hard to imagine that most probably never gave much thought to the idea that a person infected with HIV could have a healthy sexual relationship. Most students think that the risks associated with condom use stem from problems with the condom, when in fact according to Decker "the much greater danger is human errors," like using condoms that are too old or doubling up.
Barringer's mother certainly took some convincing before she got used to the idea of her daughter dating an HIV positive man. But when she finally met Decker, Barringer said her mother "saw he was a person, not a medical condition." The case is illustrative of what many of us in the audience went through that night. Rather than trying to envision HIV/AIDS as an abstract plague ravishing the third world, we could see it in the flesh of a relatively normal looking young man with a healthy and robust relationship who lives right here in Charlottesville. Rebecca Elliott, a third year College student who's also the executive director the of AIDS Service, Awareness and Prevention, which helped sponsor the event, commented, "Because it's such a salient topic, there is a sense that we're on a crusade and the people and their actual experiences get lost."
By telling their story and answering the audience's questions on topics ranging from what living with AIDS is like to how to prevent its transmission, Decker and Barringer demonstrated both how the disease affects people on a personal level and how difficult it would be to comprehend without having the necessary information unfiltered by prejudice. Decker explained that when he told some people he was having sex as an HIV positive person, "They started putting up walls. It was like they thought I should live in a monastery," and that his friends who contracted the disease through mistakes like having unprotected sex often faced moral stigma for their disease.
The only real antidote to this kind of attitude, be it the result of ignorance, ideology or both, is actively educating people about topics like sexuality rather than treating them as taboos or questions that you should ask your parents. Decker's parents didn't have the information necessary to prevent his disease, but he and Barringer see that his story has the power to both prevent others from contracting HIV/AIDS and help us understand those who already have. For their vision, they are to be commended.
A.J. Kornblith's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at akornblith@cavalierdaily.com.
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