National Day of Silence is about more than being gay

[COMMENTARY] Friday is an important day for the lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender community and its allies. It is the National Day of Silence. The event is designed to bring attention to the silence of living in the closet, or of self suffocation. It is designed to bring attention to the silence that is literally driving people to their deaths — often as a result of suicide, a symptom of the painful power of the closet for LGBT people every day. Sometimes, it is easier to stop living than it is to continue with the pain inflicted daily with anti-gay slurs, taunts and bullying.

But I want to discuss another closet — one that has been shoved down the throats of the gay men’s community specifically and to a certain degree the community at large. Today I will be silent no more about the oppressive closet in which the deadly human immunodeficiency virus thrives. The silence of positive — shoved on them by the negative.

It is a closet designed to prevent people from being faced with a virus of which there is much myth and very little real discussion. A closet created to make an us-versus-them reality, to separate the healthy from the infected. A closet so strong, in fact, it is supported, buoyed and enforced by state felony laws.

I know all of this intimately because in July 2007, I was diagnosed with HIV infection. This is the first time I have chosen to speak out publicly about this issue. And I do so in part because of the smothering silence of the closet of HIV. A system in the gay men’s community has been created where lying about being HIV positive brings rewards, but being truthful brings shame, shunning and ridicule. This systematic closeting of HIV and those infected with it is slowly picking off the gay men’s community.

Continued -HIV positive men are being placed in a position to choose between honesty or intimacy. Whether to tell someone they are positive and be shunned, or be silent and have a date. How inhumane can we be? Have we learned nothing since the drag queens and street hustlers threw bricks and rioted that June day in 1969 and gave birth to a movement of honesty and integrity and living an out life? There is nothing more sacred to the gay rights movement, I have always been told, than the right to choose to love whom we love.

How can I as a HIV positive man live that honesty, that integrity and authenticity for which I have been fighting as a gay man for nearly 18 years when my own community it asking — no, demanding — that I live in a closet? I can’t, and more importantly, I won’t. It was this closet of silence that led to my infection in the first place, and I will be damned if I will allow it to control me any further.

The silence ends here. It ends today. It ends now.

I admit, I have participated in the silencing of this virus. I have been part of the game. I am angry I have been been part and parcel of creating a reality wherein this disease has been allowed to silently slither amongst us. I am furious that the media has focused more on HIV in Africa than HIV right here in our own country. I am appalled that we are prepared to spend $6 billion annually in dealing with HIV in Africa, but can barely muster the votes and support to spend $2 billion annually in our own country on our own people for HIV treatment and prevention. I am horrified that HIV education consists of a modified Nancy Reagan Just Say No attitude, when in fact people — young people, old people, Americans — need to know that this virus is here, and that it is continuing to infect us.

But it is easier to be silent when the impacted community is African Americans or Hispanics in our inner cities. It is easier to be silent when the people being decimated by HIV are gay men. Those communities won’t rock boats, and they have access to the antiretroviral medications. The so-called “cocktails,” like people with HIV need only to sip a Sunset-on-the Beach and they are cured. No one talks about how these drugs destroy your liver, your kidney, your pancreas and cause redistribution of body fat. You certainly don’t see pictures in advertisements for HIV medications that show a man on dialysis and with a hump back because of the medications. You see a man climbing a mountain. Yeah, that’s reality — NOT.

However, the silence is easier this way.

We are silent about the disease. Silent about how it is spread, silent about how we fight it and fund assistance for those in need of medications. We are silent about the side effects so people say, “Oh, it’s OK if I get HIV because I will just take a pill and be all better.” Well, guess what: It’s not that easy. We are also silent about who has it and who doesn’t, and the silence is killing us.

Yes. It is killing African Americans, Hispanics, gay men, Americans. The silence is killing us. And we have created a beautiful system of denial in which we feed ourselves the lies of silence in order to assure ourselves that we are safe. We live comfortably in our silence, in our myth. Why actually talk about HIV with our partners, when we can just make an assumption about their status? I mean if you talk about it, god forbid, you might actually have to come face to face with the virus and shatter the illusion.

So today, for me, I am breaking the silence on a new closet. The closet of HIV. My name is Todd A. Heywood, and I am a gay man, a community leader, a journalist, and HIV-positive, and I will no longer sit in silence, nor will I allow another person to force me into silence again. I did it as a young gay man. I have done it for the past several months as I have adjusted to my HIV status. But the silence is over. And let me be clear, if you want to reject me because I happen to have HIV in my blood, that is your problem, not mine. But I won’t let you walk away from me for that reason without confronting your silencing, oppressing behaviors.

The reality bus has arrived, and it has a seat for all of us on it. Welcome aboard.