McColly on World AIDS Day
Michael McColly, over at Beatrice, has an essay on World AIDS Day. A snippet:
My first World AIDS Day was in 1981, when I was sitting in a thatch hut in a small Senegalese village listening to the BBC and heard the news from America about a "mysterious virus that had been discovered in homosexual and bisexual men." I had thought I had run far enough away from my conflicted sexual life by joining the Peace Corps, but when that announcer in London let loose upon the world the word AIDS, it was as if the world had shrunk and the great African sun had turned pale.My second World AIDS Day came on a chilly April morning in Chicago. I'd snuck out of my North Side neighborhood to a public health clinic on the near South Side to get results from a test nobody wants to take. I remember the young African American men sitting in silence with their baseball caps pulled like mine down over their eyes. I remember the voice of the Latina social worker, "you weren't expecting this, were you?"
For the next few years I didn't celebrate any World AIDS Days...
Michael's the author of The After-Death Room, which published today.