The dating scene has always been a rollercoaster ride, but it’s an especially bumpy one for the thousands of Americans like Wojcoski who carry the AIDS virus. When the epidemic began a decade ago, people got sick so fast that romance was low on their list of priorities. Now, with earlier diagnosis and better drugs to prevent and treat symptoms, men and women who are HIV-positive may live for many years with the virus, often looking good and feeling fine. Whether they are homosexual or heterosexual, they frequently go through a period of celibacy while adjusting to their diagnosis, but eventually recognize the need for companionship and intimacy. Faced with an uncertain future, they are unwilling to accept a present bereft of relationships.
Linda Luschei found out she was HIV-positive just a few days after her husband died seven years ago. They had been married only five months, and although he had suffered from chronic fatigue and other symptoms, he was not tested for AIDS until the day before he died. “We used to say to each other, ‘Thank God we found each other just in time because this AIDS business is so scary’,” says Luschei. A widow at 27, she moved back to Los Angeles from New York-and gave up on love. But she was terribly lonely, and finally decided to try dating again.
Like many HIV-positive men and women, Luschei insisted on telling the engineer she began dating about her status before they became physically intimate. To her surprise, instead of running away, he went out and bought a book about AIDS. She had no objections to his using a condom, but he also insisted on wearing rubber gloves during intercourse-and immediately afterward, he would jump out of bed and into the shower. “It would leave me in tears,” says Luschei, “but I didn’t feel I had any rights. I knew all along that it was not an emotionally correct relationship for me, but I thought it was all I could have.”
Wondering if she might feel more comfortable with someone who was also infected, Luschei joined Friends for Life, a Los Angeles social and support group for HIV-positive men and women. “But I was scared to death,” she says. “I’d already lost a husband. Do I want to care deeply for someone who may die also?” She thought about other ways to reveal her HIV status if a man she liked were negative. “What I pictured was, I’d meet somebody, go out with him a lot, a lot, a lot of times until he was hopelessly in love with me, and then tell him-and hope he was so enamored of me that he wouldn’t run the other way,” she says.
When that scenario failed to materialize, Luschei took out an ad in the L.A. Weekly, mentioning her HIV status. To her amazement, she received 72 replies. She went out with 10 of the men, and slept with two. Negotiating intimacy, she says, was far easier than it had been before. Now she feels confident enough to tell any man she likes of her status early in the game-and she’s eager to get on with her search. “I don’t think I’ll feel complete or fulfilled unless I have another shot at a really good relationship,” she says. “Doesn’t it make sense that somebody confronted with the possibility of an earlier death would want to grasp life all the more?”
In all HIV-positive relationships, the issue of what to tell when inevitably arises. Wojcoski, who is gay and finds he usually gets involved with men who are HIV-negative, believes in full and prompt disclosure. “Sometimes I talk about AIDS too much,” he says, “as though I want to test people to see if they’re going to run. If they are, I want them to run soon, not hurt me more when it matters later on.”
For others who are HIV-positive, the fear of rejection can be so intense that it obliterates honesty. Pat Griffin, a trustee for the National Community AIDS Partnership, was infected with the AIDS virus in the mid-1980s. But she has only recently decided to tell the dozen or so men she has slept with that she is HIV-positive. Acknowledging that it was wrong not to tell them sooner, she rationalizes the omission. “Being involved with men who are married helps,” she says. “They aren’t being honest; why should I be honest with them?”
Candor and caution are especially difficult to instill in young people, who may resist linking sex with death. “If you’re smart, you assume everyone’s infected,” says Scott Walker, codeveloper of Bay Area Youth Positives, a San Francisco support group for HIV-positive people in their late teens and 20s. “That’s a big jump to ask a young person [to make].” Bill Hunt, who has been HIV-positive since 1985 and oversees the counseling service of the AIDS Resource Center in Dallas, worries about teenagers. “I think about how scary it is for them to start dating in the middle of all this,” he says. “I’ve had a happy life. I’m 37; I had my fun. For a 20-year-old to get AIDS, it’s a tragedy.”
Some HIV-positive men and women find great relief in socializing with others who carry the virus. In New York, Blood Brothers night at the Comeback Club in the West Village draws 200 HIV-positive men every Thursday. “For a person with AIDS, it feels like returning to the mainstream,” says founder Will Leonard, 27, who learned last year that he carries the virus. “It’s wonderful,” says Wojcoski. “You don’t have to go through the whole goddam issue of discussing what you are. I can’t tell you how refreshing it was just not to have to bother for once.”
Kevin Dimmick, a 35-year-old California computer programmer who says he acquired the AIDS virus 12 years ago, believes that most of the major AIDS organizations have neglected the needs of heterosexuals who are affected by the disease. So last March he organized an Infected and Affected Straight Folks Party-followed by five more. People feel safe at these gatherings, says Dimmick. “Everybody understands without a word spoken. Nobody is going to cast judgment on you for having the virus.” He is currently dating an HIV-positive woman, Cyndi Angenette, 40.
If there is a small silver lining to the tragedy of AIDS, it is that the looming threat posed by the virus has made many people think hard about what’s important in a relationship-about finding joy and expressing tenderness before time runs out. “Someone who dates me has to be a little transcendent,” says Wojcoski. “They have to rise to the occasion. They can’t be weak. They can’t be fearful. They have to take a lot. I don’t mean to sound silly, but I feel I’m capable of a rich relationship. AIDS can pull people apart. It complicates people being together. I made love to someone a couple of weeks ago for the first time in a while, and I had forgotten what it felt like to be loved physically. I was very quiet the next day because I was not used to being loved or being made love to or being touched in a fond way. I want that so badly, and I don’t get it very often right now.
