On Saturday night at Belles, before the drag show, they'd play a slow song. One song. A chance for couples to touch, to be intimate. So many of my friends hated it. "Why would they bring everyone down for a stupid slow dance? No one wants to touch when they dance," they’d complain.
But to me, the moment was an aching reminder of what many of us as young gay men had never experienced—life without the shame of intimacy - and life without a looming expiration date. My mind goes back to the Sylvester hit "One Night Only." In that moment, the lyrics, originally meant as an anthem of a fleeting free-love culture, actually articulated a more disturbing unspoken truth for us:
“In the morning this feeling will be gone / It has no chance going on / Something so right has got no chance to live / So let's forget about chances / It's one night I can give.”
As gay men in the 1980s, we believed our days were numbered. Sex was a game of chance, a spin of the Russian Roulette cylinder. Friends were dying around us, and no one truly understood the cause, only the brutal, inevitable consequence.
Our fear was sometimes brutally reinforced by the mainstream, straight world. On October 17th, 1989, just before I met my 2nd partner, I was watching coverage of the San Francisco earthquake aftermath. As the footage showed the destruction, a young child looked up at his mother with teary eyes and asked, "Momma—why does God let this happen?" Without hesitation, she replied: “It’s God’s wrath on the queers for infecting the World with AIDS.”
She froze, realizing the daggers I was staring into her. She had consciously given voice to the societal verdict: gay men were dirty, unnatural, and our sexuality was a biological contamination. The public health mandate to use condoms was not just a medical recommendation; it was, for us, a life sentence of penance. Straight couples could risk intimacy for love; we were mandated to risk only our lives if we sought connection outside of a latex sheath. And we felt we had no choice but to buy into the narrative. We were indoctrinated to believe that sex without barriers was shameful, an admission of our own inherently "dirty" nature.
I Was Given a Choice
That same month, I met Charlie in New Orleans. We found ourselves on the floor of a walk-in closet in my shared hotel room—a private space carved out of necessity. Before we were intimate, he disclosed: “I need you to know I’m positive.”
It was a profound, terrifying act of honesty. Though I acted cool, my mind was screaming. After eight years spent in mortal fear of this specter, I had been given the choice. I nodded yes. And we did what the authorities told us—a sterile, cautious, protected intimacy. The greatest act of human connection had been reduced to a series of administrative tasks conducted in a crawl space.
Charlie became my 2nd partner, and my first sero-discordant relationship. His honesty gave me choice, but it did not grant me ease. I was never madly in love; I’m not sure I knew how to be, how to overcome the trauma and indoctrination of the 80s and truly let someone in. We loved each other, but the truth beneath the surface was far more pragmatic. I remember I would say to him, “I love you. Today.” The unstated half of that truth was always: Don’t book a vacation we might not live to see.
The Suffocation of Love
By 1992, I was an HIV activist and educator, and I had met my 3rd partner, Tom, who was also positive. Perhaps I embraced these relationships to wear them like a badge of honor - showing everyone that I could practice what I preached. But with Tom, I also began learning how to truly love and be loved. And, in a way, we did. We fell in love. But there was always something between us - a hesitance. And my meticulous diligence was also always there. I was exacting when it came to our protection practices, sometimes even wearing latex gloves, and always, always, immediately jumping into a scolding hot shower—a ritual of purification that symbolized the need to wash away the risk and the shame immediately after the act of love.
I could tell Tom craved intimacy. He wanted a touch that was passionate and carefree, not painstakingly planned or transactional. But I, ever the Boy Scout, didn’t—couldn't—give him what he most wanted. Consequently, I felt more and more inadequate.
And we never talked about any of it. Not once. So, the emotional cost of our adherence to the rules began to precipitate our downfall.
Over time, our relationship was suffocated by what was not said. We traveled across Europe, from Switzerland to Prague, hoping a holiday would heal us. Instead, we spent days in silence, then argued, and then returned to silence. On the flight home, we didn’t even want our arms to touch on the armrest between our seats. The fear and the constant vigilance had successfully frozen our emotional connection. I left less than a week after we arrived home. Another relationship fallen to the weight of the burden and our adherence to the cruel rules we’d been given.
A Reckoning and a Reclaimed Future
By the time I met my No. 4, we had both reached a breaking point. We had grown to resent a life lived without true intimacy, without the easy abandon straight couples took for granted. The need for true connection, paired with an understandable ego—a rebellion against our second-tier sentence—led us to embark on a shared, Albee-esque experiment. We would reclaim the emotional and physical intimacy that fifteen years of epidemic had forced us to deny.
It was freeing: to touch someone and be resolute in the decision not to fear. We tested twice, six months apart, sharing our negative results each time. No more relegation. We committed, and we were intimate. That’s the way it should be, right?
Then, in June 2000, he called. “I’m positive.”
I immediately shifted into caretaker mode. It took weeks for me to finally submit to a test for myself. When my doctor, a long-time friend, turned to me with tears in his eyes and said, “John, I’m sorry to say you’re positive,” I held my breath for a moment. The only words I could muster were: "Well, fuck..."
This wasn't resignation; it was the final, devastating exhale after fifteen years of holding my breath against a specter. I had fallen, not through carelessness, but through the desperate, conscious act of rebellion against the societal sentence—the psychic toll of years without true, unburdened intimacy. The tragic irony was complete. I had finally achieved the "normal" life I craved, but it came with the virus I had spent half my life dodging.
The pain of that fall did not define the end of my story. Today, two decades later, the narrative is entirely different. I am living well, and happy with my 6th partner of 10 years, Sean. A sustained, true connection that felt impossible in the early days. We have been granted the unexpected gift of longevity, the very thing that felt cruel to even discuss when Charlie and I spoke of love, "Today."
The scientific establishment’s early messages, though necessary for survival, broke a generation’s heart. But the revolution has finally arrived. The advent of Undetectable means Untransmittable (U=U) has done what decades of sermons and shame could not: it has restored parity and equity. The next generation of gay men need not be sentenced to a life of emotional freezing or transactional intimacy. The moral judgment has been stripped away by science. The fear that suffocated us—that mandated a second-tier existence—is finally obsolete.
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