The Last Bus of the Night

I stepped out into the fog that night not quite sure of what was next. The thick soup of San Francisco dampness that descends upon the city on most summer nights was particularly heavy, and I tripped over something on the sidewalk, but this night it didn’t really matter what it was. My mind was racing, yet my thoughts had not budged since I heard the words: “HIV positive.” At least, that’s what the teary-eyed nurse just told me. Like a good southern boy, I thanked her as if she had just handed me my hat, turned on my heels, and walked down the sickeningly fluorescent-lit hallway praying I would reach darkness before my river of tears burst its dam. I reached the bus stop, God knows how long I had wandered the streets, but only in time to see the taillights of the last bus of the night slipping into the misty darkness.

Life changed for me that night some twenty-five years ago; but at the time, I would have no idea just where it would take me. I assumed, as did most everyone else in the late 1980’s, that my life was no longer infinite as young men of 26 years, bewitched by the narcissism of youth, foolishly believe. Yes, I would die and probably sooner rather than later. This, in the days and weeks after that night in the San Francisco fog, I would come to accept as fact.

And why wouldn’t I? As a young therapist with a newly-crafted PHD, I had already seen so much devastation from the HIV epidemic. Young men were going blind, tapping with canes their way down streets lined with gay bars. Others were slipping into eternal idiocy with dementia. Still others went to work one day, fell ill the next, and were laid to rest within the same week. “Where is John?” is a question even I knew never to ask. It didn’t matter who it was–if they suddenly disappeared from the scene–you just assumed they had succumbed to the plague.

That was more than two decades ago, and since you are now reading my words, you know that I am still alive. Fortunately for me, a combination of good genes, perhaps a weak strain of the virus and the invention of the “cocktail” in 1996 turned my near-death experience into a manageable chronic illness. I was one of the very lucky ones who narrowly escaped with my life.

Only now have I come to understand the profound impact that virus has had on who I was and what I have become. It gave me my life to live in hurry. I had places to go, people to meet, jobs to treasure and quit, and many miles to travel before the darkness descended. For the better part of 10 years, I lived under a cloud of a temporary future. Before the HIV “cocktail” of medications, no one knew how long it would take for the virus to ultimately destroy my immune system. For some, it was almost immediate; others showed very few effects for almost ten years before becoming ill. After the cocktail, we all wondered when the clever virus would outsmart the antiviral medication and once again invade our immune systems as it had for the unlucky ones.

As it turned out, those dire futures never materialized for me, but I wouldn’t come to trust this until the century rolled over. In that time, I lived in fast-forward, always trying to get the very best—or at least the most—out of life before the final fog descended. I craved, no I demanded that life deliver everything I wanted. The clicking of my viral clock was loud and undeniable. I had nothing, not time nor love, to waste.

Ironically, HIV became one of the greatest gifts of my life. This truth runs very deep in me, my loves and my career. HIV radically changed my hunger and thirst for what is authentic and wonderful in life. I needed desperately to penetrate to the very core of things before precious time ran out. I wanted to taste it all. I wanted to know for myself–know like I know my own name–what the meaning of my life is. So much of what I had known and lived as a gay man in America had taken for a wild ride and left me wanting something more; something, as the dear Sylvester sang, mighty real.

With these hounds of time and mortality nipping at my heels, I dove into my own life and my work. I needed to know what was truly meaningful and not just the accepted counterfeits, proclamations of educated men who observe and rarely live life fully. I had learned so much in school and knew so very little of what mattered.

Like me, many gay men struggle more than do most other people in this world with finding our true, authentic voice. While HIV turned up the volume on my struggle with shame and authenticity, it is the same struggle experienced by gay men who have never been touched by the disease. As a group of men, we are undeniably present and visible in the world, yet our true inner worlds remained buried deep within the tight grip of a rejected child who wants acceptance and love. Modern heterosexual culture is, for the most part, undeniably hyper-masculine and invalidating of men who love other men. And as painful as this is, there is even a deeper wound of invalidation that prevents many gay men from discovering their true authenticity and inner passion. It is best summed up as we will never be like mom and dad. All children, straight and gay, are biologically predisposed to seek the approval and acceptance of their parents by mirroring the parents’ behavior. When it comes to the deeply fundamental behaviors of romance, tenderness and intimacy, we cannot mirror our parents in these. Instead, we are different. In the child’s world, being different is akin to risking abandonment, separation, and ultimately death. To avoid such intolerable feelings, we unknowingly but steadily abandoned our true selves and attempted to become something that was more desirable in straight world. In essence, we gave away our power for a seat at the table.

The experience of invalidation and the resulting wounds of shame we sustained are documented in-depth in my book, The Velvet Rage. For too long, many of us have lived lives that are beautiful facsimiles of the expectations of others rather than creations of our own authenticity and joy. We have excelled at beauty and succeeded at success, and still, there remains a nagging emptiness and a knowing that something is missing. It is something that seems vaguely familiar and childlike but is just beyond the reaches of our minds.

It is here that our journey to regain the missing pieces of our selves begins. Some pieces we deliberately traded off, others we abandoned and allowed to wither away, and still others were taken from us by the well-meaning but misguided guardians of our childhood. In The Velvet Rage, I chronicle our crusade into the challenges of adulthood without having been given the armor or the sword that our straight brothers were gifted by their fathers and a world that understood and accepted them. How we learn to fight our battles, love our men, and ultimately find lasting passion and fulfillment is where the story of The Velvet Rage ends. Far from the closet of shame, we ultimately find our true self and the authentic life we were always meant to have.

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Alan Downs, Ph.D.	Recent Articles Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and Substance Abuse Treatment
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