Twenty Five Years and Counting…

By John Paul Womble

June 5, 2006 marked the 25th anniversary of the first reported cases of AIDS.

My father, John Sidney Womble was a Baptist minister, a loving and good father as well as a gay man. After he and my mother divorced he moved to San Diego, California. I stayed in North Carolina and continued to be raised a Southern boy. When I was 18 years old, I learned that my father was HIV positive. This man who was my hero, close friend and mentor was very, very sick. This man who believed his limits – and mine – were only confined by our ability to persevere, encountered the first thing in his life that he could not master or overcome – AIDS. He developed PML, a rare and horrific opportunistic infection that subsequently caused him to go partially blind and lose his ability to “appear” well.  His worst fears were being realized – all of them: he was alone, sick, “weak” and dying. And the world around him thought by being gay he was perverted and “deserved” what he got. So, rather than live in pain with judgment abounding, he checked in to a hotel in Southern California, drank a bottle of Jack Daniels, took an overdose of sleeping pills and left a note that said, “Son – Let the official story be heart attack, sweet peace and goodnight!” He was 43 and I was 22.

Now you might think the story ends there, but that would be just to dad blamed easy….

I came out of the closet to my dad and my family years before his death, when I was sixteen years old. And my plight, as it were, was made exponentially easier by the path my father had blazed. I was not petrified of being gay nor hindered by a fear of touching or loving someone with AIDS. I was in fact probably overconfident – in some ways – and not afraid enough in others.

Now, don’t get me wrong...losing my father and mentor also meant losing someone who might instill reasonable confidence and a steady hand in my development as a young man. Unfortunately somewhere between the ripe old age of 23 and 25, I managed to follow a little too closely in my dad’s footsteps and I myself became infected with HIV. Like father like son, huh.

I had some great teachers and learned from the best, but my dad was in a class by himself! What did I learn?

Speak the facts;
Speak the truth;
And stand up in the arena – we are in the battle for our lives!

So, today in this arena let me say: I am 38 years old and have been HIV positive thirteen years. I have worked in the field of HIV/AIDS for many years and am now the Director of Development and Public Affairs for the largest AIDS service organization in North Carolina. And I am still in the fight of my life, for your life and the world as a whole…

Twenty five years later, I find myself asking two questions: how can we endure in the face of this much loss, this much disease, this much pure grief? And what kind of future am I really trying to create?

In some ways the question of endurance is the easy part. I don’t have a choice; we don’t have a choice. We know that AIDS won’t go away if we ignore it—we’ve already tried that, and the resulting death and destruction is the likes of which we never could have imagined. We cannot, we must not, be silent about AIDS. 25 years ago a small and frankly disliked group of young men in the US began to sicken and then to die, very quickly. But silence and lack of concern didn’t make AIDS go away; silence has cost us the lives of 30 million unique souls. We must not stay silent. I will look to a future where AIDS does not exist. Until that day – until the cure – may we remember those lost, those living and those we must protect – and may God bless you AND be with us always.

By John Paul Womble