This op-ed originally appeared in The Washington Blade on May 30, 2026.
If I admit I’m HIV positive, some men immediately reject me. If I lie and say I’m HIV negative, many of those same men will gladly have unprotected sex with me.
That contradiction has haunted me for years and made me wonder: What would the gay men who died of AIDS in the 1980s think if they could see us now?
The future would absolutely astonish them. Everybody carries around a handheld device that can instantly broadcast their thoughts, faces, bodies, and lives to the entire planet. We elected a Black president twice. Same-sex marriage is legal. Gay people can openly marry, raise children, grow old together, and even get divorced like everybody else. HIV itself is no longer “the deadly disease” it was when I learned I was infected in 1985 at age 23.
Back then, life expectancy was often measured in months. Surviving long enough to grow old felt like science fiction.
Now there are medications that can suppress the virus so effectively, a person living with HIV can become “undetectable,” meaning they cannot sexually transmit the virus. Countless people who once expected to die can now live long enough to worry about all the ordinary things people worry about as they age: heart disease, bad knees and what restaurant closes too early.
Back then, that wasn’t even a pipe dream. But the future also got weird.
What shocks me most is not the medical progress. It’s the emotional contradiction surrounding it. The general public no longer fears sharing space with people living with HIV. Most people understand you cannot get HIV from a hug, a handshake, sharing food, breathing the same air, or sitting next to someone on a plane.
But sex is different. Especially in the gay world, where stigma still lingers in strange and contradictory ways.
I’ve watched gay men reject HIV-positive men while simultaneously engaging in anonymous unprotected sex with people whose status they know only because somebody typed a word into an app. “Negative.” “Clean.” “DDF.”
As if viruses never lie.
At the same time, we now live in a sexual culture far more open and visible than anything most gay people from the 1980s could have imagined. The bathhouse has largely been replaced by hookup apps and social media. Sexual behavior is documented, broadcast and archived in real time.
But greater sexual freedom did not necessarily bring greater emotional clarity.
Some men still fear HIV intensely. Others eroticize it. Some even document their attempts to acquire it.
We solved the medical crisis of HIV far faster than we solved the psychological, emotional and sexual contradictions surrounding it.
As a long-term survivor, I sometimes feel like a time traveler trapped between two worlds: one that remembers the terror and one that barely remembers the war.
That feeling became the seed for my new novel, The Unfrozen Few. I imagined a group of AIDS patients from the late 1980s choosing cryogenic freezing rather than death, only to wake up in present-day America. They emerge into a world of smartphones, same-sex marriage, social media and medical breakthroughs, but also into a world that still doesn’t fully know what to do with people living with HIV.
In many ways, the frozen few are simply long-term survivors with the volume turned all the way up.
I think the dead would be amazed by how far we’ve come. And stunned by the ways we still haven’t.