The Burden of Surviving

(The name Jerry B is an alias. The interviewee will remain anonymous in this blog post due to the sensitivity of the subject)   

In the early ’80s, Jerry B was a young, openly gay man living out his life in Los Angeles, California as a waiter to support his dancing career. He grew up in a very traditional Jewish family with his parents and sibling.  The influence of his family’s traditional views and ideals made it difficult for him to come out to them. When he eventually did, his family became distant and pretended that his life choices and homosexuality just didn’t exist. Unfortunately, with the AIDS/HIV epidemic rapidly spreading through the gay community, Jerry’s life was difficult and challenging. As if being gay wasn’t hard enough during the ’80s, the amount of illness and death, which seemed to only be impacting homosexuals, made an everyday living even more problematic.

I got the pleasure of meeting Jerry B through my aunt and uncle a few years ago, and at the time, I was not aware of his life journey and I knew nothing about his past. Through an interview I did with Jerry a few years ago, he opened up to me and I discovered more about his background, and what it was like living in the ’80s with a deathly shadow lingering over him and others like him.           

When I asked Jerry about the changes he witnessed in people when the AIDS/HIV epidemic became public knowledge he said with a chuckle, “Attitudes were pretty f***ed up. You became a leopard; you were treated like someone with leprosy. No one wanted to talk about it; people didn’t believe that you could only catch it from the transmission of fluids. They thought you could catch it from sharing a glass, shaking hands, or eating something that they ate. So everyone was naïve and stupid and very closed minded.” According to Avert.org, in September of 1983, CDC debunked the idea that AIDS could be passed on by casual contact, water, food, air or surfaces. But as Jerry said, some people are still just stupid and naïve.    

        Dancing took Jerry to some amazing places where he got the opportunity to appear as a zombie dancer in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” music video and a werewolf in the movie “Teen Wolf” with Michael J. Fox, nothing could help prepare Jerry to deal the AIDS/HIV experience.   After losing thirty close friends and the love of his life to the disease, he could no longer live in Los Angeles, the town where it all happened. While working as the Director of Financial Aid and Compliance at Antioch University in Los Angeles, he saw an opportunity to transfer and forge a new life, in a new state, in a new city. He found his fresh start in Dayton, Ohio when he transferred to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

Though Jerry believes that he made the right decision to leave LA and start new, he is still haunted by the memories of a different place in time and the tragic loss of friends, co-workers and his loving partner.