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Skinner, thank you for adding this group. Before I retired, I lost several friends to AIDS, and each death broke my heart. They were not statistics, they were friends, and watching this horrible disease overtake them was almost unbearable. I'm going to tell about what our office did for one of them, in the hope that other work groups, or church groups, can do the same.
The man I'm talking about wasn't popular when he first came to the office. We didn't know then that he was gay, only that he had a rather abrasive personality, and some people found him too irritating. As the months, and a few years went by, we noticed that he took a lot of time out on disability. Then, he told us what his illness was.
Apparently, the fact that he was gay had made him estranged from all of his family except his mother. Our office was in Houston, Tx, and his family lived in another state. His mother became ill, and was not given long to live. He wanted badly to visit her, but didn't have the money, and the holidays were coming up, and vacation time had already been allocated in advance, according to seniority.
This is what our office did. We held a meeting, without his knowledge, and agreed for the people with the highest seniority to relinquish their vacation weeks, in order to make the week available to him. This required the cooperation of about 40 people. We were unionized, but this we decided without the union's knowledge. Next, we held bake sales, and took up collections. One woman whose husband worked for an airline was able to obtain round trip tickets for him.
So, before his own health declined, he was able to get the time off to visit his mother, and be at her death bed. He had the money to take the trip, and then a whole office who embraced him when he returned. We felt that what we did, while each little thing, be it changing a vacation week, baking a cake or making sandwiches, or giving money, was a small thing, it could make a difference to him. We did it because we knew that he had received a death sentence, and that none of us, until we knew that he was dying, had taken the small amount of time it would have taken for us to get to know him before we knew we were losing him.
When he went out on his final disability, the one where he entered hospice care, the whole office grieved for him. He was a human being, a co-worker, a loving uncle to his nephews, and a loving son to his mother. His father never reconciled with him. The thought that a man can father a child, then turn his back because of his child's sexual preference, was abhorrent to us all. When he died, his was the third funeral of a friend who died of AIDS. When I retired, there were two others who were HIV positive, but did not yet have AIDS.
What more does anybody need to know, except that this disease does not respect sex, age, race, or anything else? It kills our fellow humans, and we are now at the mercy of a fundamentalist president who would rather preach some rather lunatic form of abstinence, rather than stress how people can be protected from contracting, and spreading this killer. Being heterosexual does not protect anyone. There are other ways to spread this disease, and it is a disease, like others, which claims lives, and which should never be politicized, or ignored because some are more willing to point out what they perceive to be moral failings, than to help their fellow man.
We are seeing some of the same cruel rhetoric now regarding the vaccine to protect girls against HPV. We really don't have the luxury of allowing right-wing fundies dictate what health choices are available to the rest of us. Sorry, I'm afraid I went on a rant, and maybe it was wrong. It's just that when even a heterosexual woman like me, who was born when FDR was president can see how short-sighted and cruel our government's AIDS policy, and treatment of GLBTs is, I get on a soapbox and have to be dragged off.
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