DECEMBER 5, 1997 GAY PEOPLe's ChronICLE 9

SPEAK OUT

Hey, doc: Just 'cause I'm gay doesn't mean I have AIDS

by Mubarak S. Dahir

Since the advent of AIDS, it seems like every time a gay man is sick, everyone thinks the same thing: He must have AIDS!

This is not true, of course; living in a community ravaged by one virus has not made us immune to all the rest. But judging from the reaction of most people—including my (ex) doctor-to a gay man who is ill, you would think it was part of the Hippocratic oath.

I found out just how quickly such a conclusion is reached when I recently fell ill myself. With a 103-degree temperature, and dehydrated enough to lose ten pounds, I found myself sitting in a doctor's office recounting my medical history and describing the strange ailment that seemed to have seized my body overnight.

After a slew of questions about such things as relatives with cancer and diabetes, the doctor asked my "sexual preference." Conquering the urge to answer that, yes, I prefer sex to abstinence, I told him I was gay.

I could see the bells going off in his head: "Ding-aling-aling! Gay equals AIDS! Gay equals AIDS!"

When he asked, as I knew he would, I told him it had been about eight months since my last HIV test, and yes, it had come back negative. And no, I did not consider myself at high risk for catching the virus.

Foolishly, I thought my answers would pretty much steer him away from the kneejerk conclusion that gay equals AIDS. The doctor, however, looked somewhat puzzled that a gay man would not consider himself at high risk for HIV.

The doctor's fixation with AIDS kept creeping through in our discussions, even as the lab tests started turning up the real causes

of my discomfort. I later found out he marked on my medical chart: "Gay male, denies HIV."

I'm positive if I were heterosexual, he wouldn't have made a similar note.

It reminded me of what I thought were bygone days, when we talked about highrisk groups rather than high-risk behavior.

In some ways, it's hard to blame the doctor. As a gay man, I know first-hand the terrible toll this virus has taken on our community, and I know when I hear that a friend has been in the hospital, I silently hope we haven't lost another one.

But one of the worst backlashes of the AIDS epidemic has been the constant portrayal in the media of gays as dirty, infected disease carriers. We don't stigmatize patients with other illnesses, such as cancer, for their disease. But with gay men who have AIDS, society early on linked a moral component to the sickness.

It's a link that somehow has never been broken. There is still a judgmental undertow to gay men with AIDS, the sense that we, least of all, are society's "innocent victims."

AIDS is not the first time medicine has linked gays with disease. In fact, that clumsy word homosexual was originally a diagnostic term.

There has been a history of mistrust of doctors by the gay community. It started with the profession's long record of misclassifying us as mentally ill. Though the medical profession no longer accepts that gays and lesbians suffer a pathology, more than a few gay men and lesbians have memories of mental wards and electric shock therapy.

No one likes to get sick. There's nothing more frightening than when your own body turns on you. When we're sick, all the things

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that seemed to be so important to us when we were well-careers, money, deadlinesseem surprisingly inconsequential. The only thing that matters is getting well.

Perhaps that's why doctors in American society are almost the modern-day equivalents of pharaohs in ancient Egypt. In matters of health, they hold the Rosetta stone to wellness.

Maybe we as a society put too much faith, too much trust in doctors and medicine.

Skepticism around the doctor as holy man is increasing-due in no small part to the revolutionary way people with AIDS

have fought to be partners in their health care. But for better or worse, it is still a widespread custom.

And so there I sat, and despite this doctor's politically offensive and medically unsound prejudices, I remained dependent on him, if just temporarily, for medical relief. I swallowed a little of my pride so he would give me the medicine I needed to recuperate. But even after I recovered, 'I still felt a little ill.

Mubarak S. Dahir is a freelance writer living in Philadelphia.

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