May 19 is National Asian & Pacific Islander HIV/AIDS Awareness Day and World Hepatitis Day. This blog post is one of a series on the impact of HIV and Hepatitis B in Asian & Pacific Islander communities. As A&PIs, you may not believe that you are at risk for these diseases, but you are. Follow our posts throughout the week for different perspectives and stories from our community.

“What is not possible, however, is to even think about transforming the world without a dream, without utopia, or without a vision…World transformation requires dreaming, but the indispensable authenticity of that dream depends on the faithfulness of those who dream to their historic and material circumstances…” 

--Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Indignation  

I felt like I was his hope.

      In our time spent together, he also reinforced that feeling–telling me many times that I was the only person that understood him and his reasons for his addiction. We had lived together for about six months already. He was not only a roommate to me, but a very close friend. We had reached that point in our friendship where we could finish each other’s sentences. Yet, as I was consumed in my work and my academic life, I failed to see what was happening behind his closed door. He was addicted to crystal meth, or what he would refer to as “T”. I always found it confusing to awake from my sleep consistently in the early hours of the morning to sounds of intense cleaning, vacuuming, scrubbing, and at other times, disturbing sounds of breaking glass, confrontation, crashing objects. I found solace with my innocence as I classified these behaviors and sounds as a normal collegiate experience. But as he and I began to spend more time together–engaging in seemingly endless talks, cigarettes, and tapioca–it was as if our minds, bodies, and souls opened in circular confidence. He proclaimed that he did not want to lie to me anymore. “I’m using and dealing meth, Ben” he confessed to me, as if this addiction was his true identity as a being. And at that moment, it was as if I felt this need to be his “savior,” some beacon of hope for this man, this roommate who I slowly began to love. For months, I would spend time with him to flesh out his feelings, try to collectively build a mutual understanding of why he found himself submissive to this drug. Despite our daily sessions on our balcony, he continued to use, he continued to sell. I later decided to move out of that apartment, leaving that destructive environment and that part of my heart within those walls.

      I devoted the following period of my life to working in the campus community–educating Filipino college students about the risks of drug use and unsafe sex. I used that experience as a sense of justification to save others from witnessing what I witnessed, from hearing what I heard, from feeling what I felt. But this new found purpose in life was challenged a year later. He came back into my life, self-identified as sober. He insisted that he be a guest speaker in my programs, his own way of giving back to my support many months before. He was good at it. He was a face and an age that reflected the community I tried to change. After his first experience as a campus speaker, he insisted that we catch ourselves up over dinner. After the six pack and endless glasses of wine, we found ourselves in that private and intimate space–my bedroom. The moment was so vivid, even taking myself back to that time in thought brings the same butterflies that consumed my stomach. It was as if every desire I had for him returned in every fast-paced heart beat. The sound of my beating heart muffled my words as I asked for a condom. However his response is as vivid and clear to this day as sunshine after a rainy afternoon; “You know I trust you, and I know you trust me. We have nothing to worry about.” And what followed after was one of the most beautiful nights of my life–the fulfillment of my desires, lusts, and pleasures I have long craved with such innocence, vulnerability, and trust.

      And it was short lived, like many of those beautifully erotic one night stands. It would be almost three months until I would hear from him again. It was about one week before he contacted me, that I started receiving daily calls from an unknown number. A women, undisclosed, urging me to return her calls, “I have important information for Ben” she would say in her voicemail messages. At that time, I was experiencing credit issues, so I brushed it aside, assuming she was the beginning of a sea of creditors who would bug me for the rest of my life. A few days passed, and he returned to my life harboring news that would change my prospective on life forever. I could already sense something was wrong when he said his hellos. And his response to my inquiry of his well being confirmed my suspicions and brought to a realization my deepest fear. “Have you been getting calls from the Whittier Clinic?” And as I processed those words, it was as if every puzzle piece in my mind connected together and made sense. “I tested positive for HIV” he said.

It was the most indescribable feeling to have overcome my body in the shortest of seconds. It was every emotion at once, anger, confusion, fear, hypocrisy, loneliness, tarnished, polluted, impure. I was angry that this happened to me and I placed every sense of blame on him. I blamed him for forming that sense of trust. I felt betrayed, used, broken.

      Hands trembling, chest tightening, I felt as if my breathing could not keep up with the pace at which my heart was beating. I began to facilitate a process inside of my head coming to terms with accepting myself as someone with HIV. Who would I tell first? Who would I trust? What would my parents say? I decided to tell my roommate first. I broke down and cried in her arms, telling her everything. “You don’t know if you have it yet,” she exclaimed, “Let’s go get tested.” I next told my best friend, and in minutes we were in a car driving to downtown Los Angeles. I called every clinic I could find. “Are you providing rapid testing right now?” I would plead.

      The first clinic that my best friend and I thought of was the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center in West Hollywood, CA. We arrived there, rushing to the clinic floor. I walked in with butterflies eating away at the lining of my stomach. “Hi. I’m here for an HIV test?” I had no idea why I felt to say those words in a question. The staff member looked at me and said, “I’m sorry, we’re not testing anyone this week. We’re saving all of our kits for pride.”

      It was the Friday of Los Angeles Pride. Apparently, all the clinics in the area we’re saving their HIV testing kits for use at the weekend’s festivals. I was angry. I wanted to know now. The staff member told us to try Minority AIDS Project, about 20 minutes south of where we were. We were on the road again—this time, in rush hour traffic. If you’ve ever been in LA rush hour, it usually takes you an hour and a half to get from one side of LA to the other. I was uneasy. I wanted to throw up. I smoked cigarette after cigarette. Despite comforting affirmations from my best friend, inside my head all I wanted to do was drive the car off the freeway into a tree. I kept reliving that night of pleasure in my head, flashbacks of moaning in lust and pleasure, flashbacks of me grabbing on to his back while he was on top of me, flashbacks of him and me sharing a beautiful nightmare.

      When we arrived, the waiting room was crowded. Many people were there for food stamps, mental health services, and medical care. I felt nervous that they would find out I was there for an HIV test.  My hands were sweaty. My pulse was racing. I was in the testing room. After explaining my sexual history, the counselor began to prick my finger to draw a sample of my blood. I was horrified. She wasn’t using any gloves. I thought to myself, shouldn’t she be protecting herself? What if she has a cut? What if she gets exposed to my blood? She put the sample stick inside the rapid test solution. I saw a single red line appear. I didn’t know what that meant. I began to breathe hard. “Okay, you can go back to the waiting room now.” 

What? Back to the waiting room? But, what was that line? What did it mean? I had these questions running in my head over and over. I returned to the crowded waiting room. My eyes scanned left, and then scanned right, wondering if people were judging me. Minutes felt like hours. I sat crossed legged with my foot shaking vigorously, anything to keep my mind up with the beating of my heart. I focused on the activities of others in the waiting room; a young child crying, her mother trying to comfort her, a woman laughing at a joke, spoken by the man next to her, my best friend on his phone, explaining with excuses to his other friend as to why he has to cancel dinner plans for this evening.

      And then I hear this loud voice behind me, “HERE YOU GO. YOUR’RE NEGATIVE.” I was embarrassed. Everyone in the crowded waiting room seemingly stopped everything that they each were doing to stare at me, and a slip of paper that was given to me. My counselor had just revealed my test result in front of the entire waiting room. Despite the problems of this situation, I felt dizzy. I felt nauseous. I felt weak. I felt tired. My friend and I walked outside, and immediately after closing the door behind me, I fell into his arms and finally let out tears. Ever tear, for every sense of fear for the longest hours of my life.

      Looking back at this experience, I’ve come to a realization of how problematic my feelings and my behaviors were during those days. I don’t know why I am only able to share this experience through writing, and it has only been recently that I have shared this experience through spoken word. Retrospectively, it shows me how I can once embody the stigma, shame, and cowardice that I attempt to combat on a daily basis. Returning back to work after that weekend after Los Angeles Pride, I immediately went to our HIV testing referral guide and deleted the Minority AIDS Project.

      As I allow myself to fall into Freire’s last pedagogical letters--collected and published as his Pedagogy of Indignation, I have come to be inspired to guide a testimony to my community with an epistemological revealing; one that I believe will place my own positionality within a humanizing vulnerability. I do this to display myself as not just as a writer, a researcher, or an HIV-negative health educator who had an HIV scare; but as a human being; affected by this very often stigmatized experience of trauma. I want my testimony to fuel a dream, a vision, a utopia I have for a community less apathetic and indignant about this era of AIDS.