Wounded AIDS Warrior } We Are Loosing Them Did U KNow?

           
I saw this article at Poz Magazine and I had to post it here. I know the issue well. I wondered how come guys that have survived the AIDS slaughter of young guys in the 70-90’s Now in their 30-60 are dropping and no one will talk of why. Either they just died because people die. or may be he died of consequences of AIDS that still happens. right?? What a silly game! We went through every major disease we don’t understand. All Cancers, AIDS, Suicide. We always try to hide them like that doesn’t have consequences.

In the 80-90’s I don’t remember of hearing that somebody died of AIDS.  They died of pneumonia, skin disease, stroke, heart attack. Never AIDS and never the real disease. If somebody died of Lymphoma it was called  "undetermined causes", what lie? Why? to protect the dead? They are dead, they don’t care.But some do it to protect the living who feels or felt embarrass to have one close to them with AIDS  and then dying from it. The enigma still persist.

 Their partners tended and tend to be more forthcoming, but sometimes they felt the same way as their dead person’s family. How can I admit that I lived with somebody with AIDS? Who is gong to get close to me now. Im still young, Im single now, would like to be a couple again, like I was for 18 yrs.
Many times I,  and many like me learnt the hard way to look for a vase in the living room in the house or apartment where we are having a date of someone we met at the bar or internet.
That’s usually where they were kept.

I had a partner or lover through most of the epidemic, but there was a period when we brooked off of a few years in which I was dating. I remember meeting someone at a bar in Pembroke Pines, FL.  He brought me to his house, a big beautiful house. I saw this beautiful large vase on top of the fireplace. I asked and with some honesty, was not told it was the grandmother like before I’ve heard. He said it was his lover. He was a mechanic and a car felt on top him.  He died. I thought that at least he told me it was his lover. I thought of him as open and honest, after all when we where headed to our cars after exchanging numbers. I invited him to my place. He said "I live very close to here, I’ll take you home, but only if you promise me something". I couldn't think of what he would want from me that it was already settled without saying it in any particular words. He said, "If you just going to …* me, I will rather not take you home”

I thought this situation was getting out of my hands faster than a kitty cat after a bird.  I started getting pissed at my self trying to remember what did I say that is making this guy have second thoughts about me?  Now Im really confused.
 He says "If I take you home you will have to date me and promise me now that you will. Do you keep your promises?”  "Yes I do"  I said  "I’ll date you” I was confused but yeah, he looked like someone I would like to date.

In the morning there was breakfast for me and I felt so impressed. By him, his education, loved his, swimming pool and movie room.  Do they still have those?  The vase bothered me. Next date and it had taken weeks because he said he was up north visiting, but kept in  touch.
On that date I felt uncomfortable that is was so much apart from the first one, for a guy that wanted to date me so badly. Besides there was breakfast for me the next day so I figured [performance]that was not the case.  At his house he tells me Adam I have to tell you something, Long face and wet eyes. I asked him for a drink before he said anything. Scoth.
 I knew before he told me, what he was going to say. He said that was his ex in the vase that he died of AIDS and he had it too.

 Why am I Saying this? I’m bringing this out because we hopefully know that by covering up AIDS by some, the epidemic grew faster and became stronger. Now we are covering the carnage that AIDS is done to our minds.

Now we hide other diseases associated with AIDS but actually is not even AIDS, is more like having kidneys, hearts, lungs, brain, strokes, diabetes,diseases etc. All these diseases as a matter of fact are causes of the meds not directly to AIDS. I am sure someone could argue the opposite but this is what the medical community says.

But we are leaving one straight-out cause of AIDS that has little to do with meds. It’s a blood relative of AIDS but no AIDS. It’s as deadly as Kaposi Sarcoma but unlike it tends to be invisible but just as scary. That is mental disease or 'wounded warrior disease'.  It’s the same disease that soldiers out of Viet-nam get but more likely from Gulf War 1, 2 and Afghanistan. These soldiers impacted by “WD” come back so fucked up that they either killed themselves or someone else, but usually themselves. If not they aare never whom they were before.

This is been happening in the gay community since there is AIDS. I had a friend Ian, who got up in the middle of the night, left his partner Joe sleeping, left his wallet, watch, shoes and his clothes. He went and jumped naked into the Hudson River in the middle of February. Found a month later under the GW bridge. Got other stories but I will spare you.

As I saw the other day someone whom I consider an internet friend on FaceBook, lost it and started talking about an AIDS meeting he attended and he says you had all this young guys with HIV doing good on meds, thanking Jesus thanks to this and that,  other wise they would be dead.  Guys who have never gotten sick and certainly have not seen what some of us have seen. He did not loose it at the meeting, he is not like that, I am, but he came out with his feelings so hurt, as he addressed his followers at  Facebook. When he says," It rained today” you have 60 people commenting on it, they like what says. There were just a few comments to him,  I think two and I was one and the other did not understand what he was saying.. No body would touch that or understand it.

He called them “twinks” and other not nice words and he was referring to younger HIV’rs because he felt offended that these guys that don't know what AIDS is and do nothing to stop it.

I know in those dark days AIDS was here and you knew it every minute. There was no test and no meds., You were dead if you got it!"You never knew if the next day was the day that showed up. As a gay man I assumed every one had it. Even with a partner.  After all we knew we both had been exposed in the past. The first things you did before you brush your teeth was check for spots on your arms necks, stomach. Then get ready to find out how many had died over night or over that week’  I will tell you that to go through that every day for years and be one of the ones that is spared, now doing well….might not be doing well. Not doing well when you are fucked up inside your head. When you have a depression that no Meds can take away, that you can be hide it very well, but it comes out when you are alone, for a minute for overnight.

No one has addressed that and even though so many of us, still young are committing suicide, we hide the cause.  Funny now we read he was HIV or died of HIV causes.  All lies, he died because he could not take it any more of the guilt by being left behind, of the anxiety of having ALL your friends die and find yourself alone in the world. So he took an overdose.

All I hear in the medical and mental health communities is about studies but I know that health care providers have not been taught about this or they never learnt it which have being going on for years and that the problem needs to be addressed but it never is.
 The outside world needs to know that before the soldiers in the Gulf war 1 and 2, the gay community mainly in the USA was suffering Wounded Warrior disease, or mental disease due to have come through a tunnel of stench and death! It impacts the sufferers and people close to them. But many times no one knows why or what to do except there are, group therapy and this pill and the new one that came out but causes strokes but does nothing for that depression.

If we keep going this way and no changes are done, we would have lost 1 and may be 2 more generations of people that survived the disease, either became totally free of it or totally in control of it, yet we lost them because we would not address what was killing them. It’s not only suicide, but the loosing of the mind of smart people that have become useless compare to what they still capable of doing if we compare them to people non AIDS age related. Wasted lives and even when one put it’s mind into something important and productive trying to get on their own two feet…many times sadly it ends like Spencer Cox. That darkness follows the survivors, not of HIV but of AIDS.
Adam Gonzalez for adamfoxie*blog

Wounded AIDS Warriors Suffering, Dying on Their Own by John Voelcker The death of Spencer Cox prompts a cofounder of the Medius Institute for Gay Men's Health to speak out. John Voelcker The death of notable AIDS activist Spencer Cox last month, at age 44, was a wake-up call -- a blaring alarm -- that highlighted once again the critical need for mental health programs and studies of the powerful trauma experienced by gay men in their 40s through 70s who've lived through the loss and destruction of entire communities due to AIDS. A drama student in college, Cox was a brilliant and searingly smart activist, and he accomplished by age 35 what many of us never achieve over a lifetime. In 1995 he designed a drug trial for Ritonavir -- an early protease inhibitor -- that allowed for fast data collection and a quick approval process if warranted. After just six months the drug was approved. Cox was then only 26. He was one of several activists featured in the current documentary How to Survive a Plague, most of whom had lived with AIDS at least since 1990. Its most recent footage of him was filmed less than two years ago. Witty, incisive and often warm, Cox was also prescient. Seven years ago he proposed to start an enterprise called the Medius Institute for Gay Men's Health. It was dedicated to improving the health, well-being and longevity of gay men in mid-life (generously defined as 35 to 65). The goal was to look in a cross-disciplinary way at all the factors affecting the physical, mental and emotional health of a set of men who had lived through the AIDS epidemic, come out the other side and were too often doing startling, illogical and very dangerous things. We hear a lot about "wounded warriors" with regard to American military battles overseas, and and justifiably so. It's devastating for young men and women to watch as trusted comrades are grievously hurt or killed at their side. It's equally devastating to return to a society that honors veterans for a day, then expects them to act "normal" and resume life as the same people they were before the war. While the life-long disabilities they suffer may be politely overlooked, it's clear that they're expected to shield the memories, losses and fears brought back from the battlefield. But for military veterans, there's a $140-billion Veteran's Administration to thank them, care for them and minister to their needs. The veterans of our own war here at home aren't so lucky. There are the hundreds of thousands of men and women who survived the worst of the AIDS epidemic during the 1980s and 1990s. They are the wounded warriors of our fight. And they have no such support -- especially those who've lived with HIV for 15 years or more. Whether HIV-positive or negative, many of them suffer what would likely be defined as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Their rates of dysthymia and depression are higher, they may engage in unsafe sex, and a few of those with HIV inexplicably stop taking the lifesaving anti-retroviral medications that saved their lives 15 years ago. Men who know the rules of safe sex may test positive after staying negative for three decades. With the enthusiastic support of a small group of tenured activists, Spencer Cox laid out proposals for studies of this kind of post-traumatic stress, reached out to his network of contacts within HIV research and medicine and read copiously. But what we learned in the 12 short months of Medius was that no one really cared. Medius had little luck finding institutional funding. It wasn't a service organization but essentially a think tank and research group, trying to bring together researchers across disciplines to gather data that could support design of programs that would meet the needs of gay men in midlife. "Too wonky," we heard. "Such an obscure niche," we heard. "Find a wealthy patron," we heard. But we learned that wealthy, middle-aged gay men, even those with friends quietly succumbing to all manner of ills, didn't want to hear it. Depression, drug addiction and destructive behaviors weren't to be discussed, though all had a friend or two who'd vanished from polite life. And the professional AIDS establishment, with a few notable exceptions, was worse. The basic attitude was that if the personnel of ACT UP had problems, well, we were probably college-educated gay white men, and we undoubtedly had the money and resources to solve our own damn problems. Meanwhile, Cox himself was grappling personally with the very problems Medius sought to study. The institute never got off the ground, and he began to drift further away from longtime friends and colleagues. In his later years he grappled with what was likely depression, suffered several hospitalizations, used meth and degenerated mentally and physically. In the months before his death, he had apparently stopped taking the antiviral medications he helped to get approved 15 years before. Medius today lives on solely in a pair of incisive white papers written by Cox in 2006 and 2007: The Legacy of the Past: Gay Men in Mid-Life and the Impact of HIV/AIDS (2006) and Living on the Edge: Gay Men, Depression and Risk-Taking Behaviors (2007). In retrospect, we can read those papers "and break the private code written between the lines," writer Mark S. King suggested last week. "It spells out 'HELP ME'." And the need for that research remains as urgent as the mental anguish suffered by Cox and the other veterans of the AIDS wars. I've been told that LGBTQ activists in their 20s find the term "war" too confrontational and militaristic. "Look how far we've come," I hear. "We'll have marriage equality in the next decade, and we'll be just like everyone else!" That may be. But realistically, our society doesn't expect the veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Vietnam to be "just like everyone else." It grapples, however imperfectly, to understand their wounds and provide for their needs. In that light, perhaps now is the time to resuscitate the research that Medius advocated for. If we really want to honor the life and work of Spencer Cox, we will do the scientific work to understand why people like him die too early. We'll fund the studies, set up the programs and hold out our hands to bring suffering AIDS veterans into the light. Otherwise, the Jan. 20 memorial service for Cox will offer one day of feel-good sympathy and remembrance, and then more wounded warriors from our battle will continue to suffer and die before their time. John Voelcker was a member of ACT UP New York and a cofounder of the Medius Institute for Gay Men's Health. He is now editor of Green Car Reports and lives in New York City. This article was originally published onHuffington Post.