How's Everyone Feeling Right Meow?

[Regina]

It's definitely great that he has that supportive environment from you and that he seems to have a good relationship down. That immediately creates a more open environment for him to learn and grow, better than stifling up the "dark secret" of his sexuality and having to find everything out the hard way.

But yeah, you can't force him to join anything, but encouragement is great

[Joods]

Thanks. He came out to us last year when he was 13. I suspected it a few years before that. But I've always been encouraging. I'm just step-mom, but he has a wonderful bond with me and I love him so much. I was so excited for him and his boyfriend for their homecoming that I nearly cried when I saw him in a tux for the first time. He is full of adorableness, ya know.

[GUBU]

My friend had a scare last year, he was convinced he was showing symptoms but thankfully came back negative

Actually I'm due a trip down the clap clinic myself, been too long. I don't suspect I have anything, but best get checked.

I was like that before finding 12 Steppers.

Turns out the pills and drink were screwing me up all on their own, and my imagination did the rest.


There was just an article in the paper recently about some of the earliest hiv cases, and what's known now about that time.  Some preserved tissue samples from the 70s turned up.  HIV was present and spreading long before "Pateint Zero". Not mentioned in the article though was how the case tracking thru Patient Zero helped establish how it was happening.

I'm aware of a sudden and unexpected death in the Midwest of something eerily similar to PCP in '78.  Too late now to ever find out if it was or wasn't hiv, but it's something that has rattled my cage for decades.  A friend of mine in the 80s who died 'rattled some cages' at the hospital he was at.  They had hiv cases before him, but he was different, he had never traveled out of Iowa.  All the other cases they had seen up to that time had all been diagnosed in NYC or Frisco and then they traveled back to be with family.  My friend was the first at that hospital to have contracted it in the state.

I haven't lost anyone I know to it in years.  2007 if I had to hazard a guess, and that was from medication side effects and underlying heart disease.  For my group, the worst of it was over in 95, and just a few 'stragglers' since.  And it wasn't so much treatment had improved by then, it was more that all the hiv+ people I knew had died by then.  Not counting hiv+ people I have subsequently met at 12 Steppers, damn few of my friends from the 70s onward who were positive survived.

The artwork at the office had the faces of upwards of 40 people in it, close enough,  . . . close enough

too close.

I've read that the whole Patient Zero thing was a misread of his actual designation of Patient O (O for from outside California, where they were tracking from). And that at no point within the scientific community was the man considered the locus within the US. It's just the media got word of Patient Zero and ran with it.

I've also read that there were cases in the UK which are considered to be AIDS from at least the sixties. It's a lot older than we probably know.

[Edwardo Piet]

Feeling burntout. Not feeling like reaching out. But I am feeling alone. I feel... different. Not feeling myself. Feeling introverted. Aloof.

If anyone wants to talk to me just hit me up with a PM or a Skype message. I'd very much want to talk to you. I love all my friends. Especially my besties.

I don't know why but I just feel unable to take the initiative.

[vorlon13]

I'm almost 60, my experiences in this regard are anachronistic.

30 years ago when I had the test the first time, I did make a phone call, but the verbiage wasn't much more than "OK, I went and had 'The Test' and I'm fine, go worry about something else." Click.

I'm profoundly lucky various and sundry relatives didn't figure me out as a kid, and I left the area I grew up in at age 17, and I couldn't get away fast enough.

I have some friends that have attended PFLAG meetings with their parents/family members. I'd give that a ++good, but keep in mind, from me it's anecdotal evidence.

There was one other gay male (at least) in my class at school, but he died in an accident our freshman year. It was a total fluke I found out about him, absolutely no one left around here suspects a thing about him, and I'll never tell.His folks never, ever suspected. Hell, I wouldn't have believed it except the one who told me mentioned him first, and as someone he'd had relations with. It was jaw dropping.

I've had friends get sick from HIV, get hospitalized and die, and their parents never acknowledged the elephant in the room. But that was 30 years ago, it's gotta be better now. And 30 years ago, everyone I knew that became sick from HIV died, and that went on for 10 years. It's a manageable condition these days, nothing like it was back then. As I noted elsewhere, it wasn't so much that the treatments improved enough I noted when members of my peer group stopped dying, it's that my peer group was wiped out before the treatments improved enough to save them. My group of friends that remain from the 70s, the few that are left, are almost all HIV-, the rest didn't make it.

You're fortunate now, almost unimaginably so.

[vorlon13]

LOL !!

VERY occasionally, one of the rough gay sites I enjoy on Tumblr will solicit questions. Tonite was such an opportunity, and I asked about involuntarily being connected to an Electro-stim and shocked with erotic intent.

I might post the answer later . . . . .

[Thumpalumpacus]

Feeling good. Happy with the way things are unfolding for me, comfortable where I'm at in recovery, and pretty much the only major problem is that the state of Texas keeps screwing up the winning lotto numbers, so I'm at work.

[vorlon13]

LOL !!

VERY occasionally, one of the rough gay sites I enjoy on Tumblr will solicit questions.  Tonite was such an opportunity, and I asked about involuntarily being connected to an Electro-stim and shocked with erotic intent.

I might post the answer later . . . . .

Never has but open to the idea, desires someone who knows how to adjust the Electro-stim erotically

[Joods]

Woo hoo ....

Kinky!

[Athene]

I'm feeling very nairvous for my huhspundt, right-a now-a. Ees like um, how you say?....there's a buttars in my stah-mach.