By Matt Sullivan
Last month I did two things I’ve never done before. I got my first HIV test and I went to a candle light vigil for a boy who committed suicide.
My decision to get my first HIV test came out of fear. I had what a friend called a whore week. I had sex with four different people in five days. Two instances happened in my own apartment. I’m no stranger to one night stands, but this was the first time I had allowed a stranger into my living space. When the first guy came over, I made sure to hide all of my valuables in drawers and underneath the sink in the bathroom. I prepared my space for an invasion, which was stupid. If the person had any interest in stealing my stuff, he could simply knock me out, tie me up, or kill me and take his time searching. I’m not saying I wouldn’t ever invite a stranger over again, because the experiences I’ve had so far haven’t warranted a fear for that, but them coming over seemed hollow. When they came to my apartment, I remember feeling weird about my room. It didn’t feel like mine. In a way, I didn’t feel like myself. I was acting, like in a movie. I wasn’t without control, I could have snapped out of it at anytime, but when those people came over the shift to Nate Ralston was instantaneous.
Nate Ralston was the alias I used when I was nineteen and in college. That name was used in chat rooms, emails, and usernames for any and all sites I used to hook-up or show off to people. There are hundreds upon hundreds of naked pictures of myself floating around the internet and stashed in folders on home computers (videos, also, but I made less of those). As Nate Ralston, I connected with thousands of men. That number is no exaggeration. I didn’t have sex with all of them, or even most of them, though. My sexual partners count less than twenty (which may or may not be a lot). Through webcam, I was able to talk to people all over the world. When they asked me to do something ‘on cam’ for them, I did. They were my “fans” and I had to please them.
This career brought me to a man I coined as Navy Seal Man. He and I met multiple times. This man was a millionaire who lived in the Prospect area of Louisville. Initially, we met at his house, or mansion. His basement could have eaten my house at the time. One of his spare bathrooms was bigger than my bedroom. Later, we moved to meeting on his yacht. He would pick me up on the banks of the Ohio downtown and we’d ride off and explore each other. He did this, I found out, because he had previously been married and had children. He lived in his house alone and, I guess, rich people talk. If he was found with a nineteen year old boy, his forty-three year old reputation would just be ruined. I stopped meeting him eventually and that was when he started offering me money. I declined and never spoke to him again, to my wallet’s protest.
I also met another guy online. He was someone I knew, but he kept himself anonymous for a long time, until he trusted me enough to show me his face. His name, and other information, I have to keep private because I promised I would. Let’s just say that you never can be sure who wants to fuck a boy.
My porn ‘career’ didn’t start at nineteen, though. I snapped my first shot at fourteen. Those photos were then traded with people I believed, at the time, were also my age, via the seedy AOL chat rooms. The first time I did that I felt a rush of sexual energy. I had goose bumps on my arms and I felt invigorated. At night, when my dad was asleep, I would take picture after picture and trade them like Pokémon cards with other “boys,” building up my own pornographic deck.
My dad caught me once, when I was about sixteen. I wasn’t naked, but the camera was on and plugged into the USB drive, ready to go. I blamed the camera’s state on my brother, but he didn’t believe me. He also didn’t take the camera. After a few moments of anxiety, I was again consumed by lust and exhibitionism. Strangely, while I can’t remember how many pictures I’ve taken, or who I sent them to, I can still remember what the first ones looked like, when I was fourteen.
Pictures and videos are different, though, from skin on skin action. I’m intangible in a picture, only a voice in a video, but in person I’m all of myself. When the people I slept with invited me over or came over to my apartment, I no longer had that abstract protection. In my head, when I shifted to Nate Ralston, I think I was trying to create a substitute for the protection I had lost. If I wasn’t me, they couldn’t hurt me. Nate Ralston might die, but I would not. The people who came over didn’t just enter my home, but they entered me. The last place to go was my head.
An HIV test
When those people came over, we used condoms, but I never once considered what sort of physical or sexual consequences these meetings could have had. I only thought about my possessions and being murdered. I’ve never been afraid of getting HIV, though the things I’ve done have put me in plenty of positions to be infected.
I got tested after work, on my own. I wasn’t nervous when I walked into AVOL, a free testing clinic in Lexington. When I thought about the possibility of having HIV I only thought about how that would affect my writing. This virus wouldn’t kill me; it would only make my words stronger.
The guy who gave me the test brought me back into an office, remarking on how hot it was outside. I used what looked like a thermometer to swab my gums and placed the instrument into a tiny tube that sat on a desk facing the tester. After that, I sat on a couch for twenty minutes (that’s how long the test takes) and listened to the tester stumble over information about HIV and AIDS. You can only get infected with HIV through your “pink parts.”
He fidgeted with his pen while he asked me questions from a questionnaire required by the CDC. The virus must be directly injected into the blood stream. You could, for example, accidentally swallow the virus without contracting. He wiped sweat from his forehead and repeated how hot it was outside.
All the while, he would look down at the tube, moving just his eyes, and they would widen. Do you know the difference between the two? The virus is what causes AIDS. AIDS is not a tangible thing. It is a syndrome, a state, like being cold. You can’t pick up ‘cold.’ You can feel cold, but cold is simply the state of slow moving atoms. AIDS is the state when a body has a weak immune system.
Once, he picked up the tube and shook it a little, like an hour glass that wasn’t shifting the sand correctly. I sat on the couch the whole time, smiling and answering the questions. I was calm. This was nothing to me. I was picking up groceries, running errands, getting an HIV test. Nothing. After twenty minutes I learned I was negative. The testing stick would have shown two bars, he said, had I had a low t-cell count. With only one bar showing, I was told I didn’t show signs of having HIV. He said I should come back in three months for another test and was given condoms.
I was finished with the errand.
A suicide
Later that same week, a boy named Matthew Vanderpool committed suicide. He shot himself in his garage. I attended the candle light vigil they held for him downtown in front of the courthouses. When the vigil started, I was sitting on the outskirts of the circle on a wall. I didn’t know Matthew, and I didn’t want to enter the group because of that.
While I was sitting there, people who happened to be downtown would walk up to the group, seeing the news crews, and then turn around when they either found out what the group was for or because it wasn’t what they hoped.
There were two people who were pulling an ice chest, passing out bottles of water to people. When they went up to the group to offer water, the people holding their flickering candles and crying said nothing until the water peddlers packed up their caravan and walked down the street.
After the water peddlers were gone, a friend I had planned to meet at the vigil showed up. He knew people in the circle. With him next to me, I felt comfortable moving closer and listening to the group talk about Matthew. From what I heard, Matthew and his friends had made plans to go see a movie the day after he had committed suicide. They said that he was happy, or at least, he seemed happy. My friend gave many hugs that night, as his friends who knew Matthew tearfully embraced him.
The event unnerved me because while I was there with people who knew Matthew, and while Matthew was connected to me in one strong, singular way, being gay, I still felt like I was trespassing. I don’t know what I expected from going to the vigil, but I probably shouldn’t have gone. I went as a spectator, not a mourner, and I thought that because I shared something with this boy I didn’t know, that it would mean something.
My friends and I left shortly after joining the group. We went to Soundbar on Limestone and I sipped away the nerves. While I stood at the bar with my friend, I wondered if perhaps the week before I had come close to committing suicide. Not intentionally, but because of the potentially dangerous situations I put myself in. I’ve not had such a week since then.
Leave a Reply