By Colby Brin

Sitting across from him, talking to him, I observe that Gary could pass for five, even 10 years older. He doesn’t look aged or anything, just more mature. His impeccably trimmed beard and his distinctly light brown eyes make him seem wise beyond his years. The way he speaks—deliberately, sensitively—probably plays a part as well. So it’s easy to forget that Gary’s only 19. And with his calm demeanor, it’s also easy to forget something about Gary that he wants you and everyone else to forget. A little over two months ago, Gary, who is black, was diagnosed with HIV.    

How could a 19-year-old in this city have HIV? You would think teenagers today would know better than to expose themselves to the well-known risk of HIV from unprotected gay sex.

Gary now realizes how it happened. One night, several months ago, he went to a party in the Bronx with some gay friends. It was wild. Music. Dancing. Alcohol. Weed. Cocaine. Gary met George (not his real name), 32, and suddenly there was an intoxicating connection with another man to add to the other intoxicants. “I was so excited to find someone who was like me,” Gary remembers now. “One thing led to another and the next thing you know, me and this guy got into a relationship. We’re doing it raw every day.”

Being with older men was nothing new for Gary. He started talking to them on phone sex chat lines about the time he realized he was gay, at 13. When he was 16, he had sex with a 38-year-old. Gary estimates he has slept with at least 30 men in his life. He’s met them everywhere: parties, on the phone, on the computer, on the street.

That first night, at the party, Gary asked George if he was disease-free, despite Gary’s own admission that he had genital herpes. George said he was clean. By the time the truth came to light, Gary had already moved in with him. “I was living with my mother when I met George,” Gary says. “Getting out of the house and living on my own with somebody I loved was a great feeling. And he took advantage of me.”

Gary had been with George for a month and a half when he learned the truth. By that time, they already weren’t getting along. Gary describes that time, and whatever contact he has with George now, as “war.” First, George told Gary he was, in fact, HIV positive. Then, after Gary stayed with him to help, George returned his kindness in the cruelest way possible.

“When we’d fight,” Gary says, “he’d say, ‘So what’s your t-cell count? You feeling sicker nowadays?’ I was like, ‘Why are you doing this? For me to be so young, and you’re older, I thought you would think much more than that.’”

Still, in a manner that seems typical, Gary is reticent to admit any anger, even towards George, even though his diagnosis is so fresh. “Me being who I am, knowing what I know, I should have been way smarter than that,” he says. “I don’t know why I had unprotected sex. It was something about trusting someone, actually thinking someone is as real as you are. In that case, I don’t want any barriers between us.”

It may seem surprising that Gary would trust someone that much, but it can’t be surprising that he would want to so badly. “I’m tight with my mom,” he explains, but it’s clear that over the years Gary and his mother have passed in and out of each other’s lives. He was born in the East Tremont section of the Bronx, but he says that he’s lived “all over,” including stretches in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Maryland, Jacksonville, Fla., and Little Rock, Ark. He is vague about whom he lived with at each stop, saying he was usually put up by friends or relatives. Gary started at Theodore Roosevelt High School in the Bronx, but left before the end of his freshman year. He and his mom were together in Miami when he was 16 and he came out to her. She was upset at first, but eventually accepted the truth. Gary has never come out to his father, whom he says he rarely sees, and whom he doesn’t trust.

Gary wants very much to be a father himself. That was one of the first things he thought of when he got his diagnosis two months ago, from the New York City Department of Health. “When I found out, it was crazy,” he says. “It came to me that there were a lot of things I couldn’t do now, like having kids. I really want kids, and I was thinking, ‘What woman really wants to go through the whole process of getting the sperm cleaned? It was just madness. Crying, temper tantrums.”

That was the darkest period—right after getting the diagnosis. “When I found out, I went into crying, and getting high and depressed mode, for four or five days, with no sleep, no nothing,” he says. “Coked up, liquored up. It was a mess. I kept crying every time I thought of it.”

Fortunately, Gary’s HIV is at a practically undetectable level in his body, so he’s not on any medication right now. This helped him to keep the disease from dominating his thoughts, after the initial shock wore off. Talking to counselors at the Adolescent AIDS Clinic Program at the Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, where I interviewed him, has also helped. Gary has yet to go a full day without thinking about his HIV positive status—he estimates that he now thinks about it five times a day—but he can imagine a time in the future when he’ll go through 24 hours without it invading his mind. Still, he’s not sure when he’ll be able to tell his mother, whom he feels he has let down. Gary hasn’t told most of his friends, either, for fear they’ll look at him differently.

Gary says he has had a few one-night stands since his diagnosis, and he hasn’t told his sexual partners either, out of the same fear. “If we’re using protection, I don’t think he needs to know,” he says. “Because I feel like people talk so much. If I tell someone, he’ll tell people.”

While this attitude is unrealistically—and perhaps even hypocritically—cavalier on Gary’s part, there’s no doubt that unprotected sex is the major culprit behind HIV transmission. Ultimately, every individual is responsible to himself for having unprotected sex. Gary has his own theories on why a man might do this. “I think drugs and alcohol have a big effect on transmission,” he says. “Out of a hundred people who get it, 98 percent were on drugs. It heightens your confidence, makes you feel like I could do things you shouldn’t do.”

There is also a certain power dynamic that takes hold when a younger man hooks up with an older one. “The younger one comes in acting all big and bad like he knows the world,” Gary says. “And the older one’s really cocky. He’s like, ‘You think you know everything? Let me show you something, and just have sex with you raw. And now you just left my house, I’ll never see you again, and you have the virus.’ That’s it. They’re so unhappy, they want someone else to be unhappy.”

Asked why blacks and Hispanics have higher rates of transmission, Gary gets yet more specific. “I’m really sorry to say this, but with the majority of blacks and Puerto Ricans, it’s all about a pretty face,” he says. “They just want to have sex, because I look good. They couldn’t care less what I got. They don’t ask any questions. As soon as I come back in the room, they’re naked. It’s all about being in the moment.”

Gary knows all about being in the moment. He has lived virtually his whole life day to day; he has had little choice. Now, at 19 and living with HIV, he still has no one he can truly fall back on for any sort of security. When I ask him where he’ll stay the night, Gary is typically vague. “Lord knows where I’ll sleep tonight,” he says. “I’ll have to just see what happens.”