On AIDS, stigma and drugs

I was educated to think that AIDS was God’s punishment for those who dared living against his rules. No matter how much I tried to convince my teachers or even my fellow students that no kind of God could conceive such a cruel mechanism of revenge for innocent people I continuously failed in my mission. The extremely conservative dogma of the Opus Dei was creating a difference between those holy people who would never be infected for being worshipers and those who were perceived as condemned by their strict sense of hypocritical morality.
Drug users and homosexuals were their favourite targets. They were not only the people to avoid but they were also the destroyers of traditional society. A society based on family values and the sanctification of everyday life. Drugs were a sin because they were the manifestation of a hedonistic culture that killed the spiritual life, taking its users through a journey of self-destruction and depravation based on sexual temptation, and idolatry. Homosexuality, on the contrary was not perceived as a vice, but as an innate condition, a form of sickness whose only cure was abstinence, penitence and pray.
A common sense of deviance and transgression was perceived in both cases and today almost 20 years after my experiences at high school things have not changed at all.
My first real experience with AIDS cost me a good friend a severe depression and a feeling of self-hate that I am still struggling to get rid off when sometimes it comes back to me like a real torment. My friend was a sex worker, something that I never cared about too much because I went a couple of times with him to pick up men. He had all his life planned ahead, he knew what he was doing and he wanted to become a fashion designer, in my imagination I used to see him as a modern Karl Lagerfeld and I could not stop thinking that eventually he would achieve whatever he wanted to achieve.
Richard, not his real name, was like a mentor to me in many things, he was so gay to my eyes, he knew all the clubs, all the people and he was always happy and ready for a party. We shared lots of confidences, dreams, projects and many, many, more things. When he told me he was positive I felt the whole world was collapsing in front of me. Voices of my horrible past began to resound in my head and for a while all I could hear the guilty verdict coming from nowhere. Suddenly, I realised that I had to be there to support him putting religious superstitions a part.
But one night after a party we had a conversation in which I could not hide my anger for what had happened to him and without any consideration I blamed his life-style for his illness. My intention was not to condemn him, I was only trying to make see him that there was an alternative for living with AIDS and he should not be thinking about death. My words however did not seem to follow my intentions and instead I said that his promiscuity, his drug taking habits and his obsession with money and fashion had destroyed him. After that he told me that he would never want to talk to me again and that he did not expect that reaction from me.  
Being like I am, I was unable to say sorry and to my greatest regret I never saw him again. But when I think about all the things he told me about his sugar daddy, his clients, his Champaign breakfasts, his drugs, his sex marathons and how he described to me the secret code of barebacking I could only feel sorry and happy for a person who fought his way up in his own personal way.
I do not think that Richard’s problem was caused by being gay, taking drugs or even a sex worker, after our final conversation I learned not to judge him or anybody else. However I shall never forget one evening when he introduced me to another HIV+ friend of his as some who did not care about their status. That made me feel proud of our friendship and also capable to help him with my support. After losing contact with Richard I met another guy, also a sex-worker who a couple of years later was also diagnosed with AIDS.
This guy did not want to be fashion designer, to be quite frank he did not have any other ambitions in life than making money and partying all the time. I remember once when I knocked on his door and he opened very excited and out of control telling me that I should not do that again because someone was following him. At that moment I was not aware of Tina’s side effects but I am now totally convinced that he was high on crystal meth. His story was quite common and quite sad at the same time, young boy from small town moves to the big city where every single predator uses and abuses him and by the time he realises that he is infected with no place to stay and no other option to return to the place he left behind. Once again I am not criticising him but I most certainly condemning the people who turn their back on him and also the emptiness of the world in which he lived.
  By this I mean that promiscuity, parties and drugs per se can be a dangerous mixture if people do not know how to control them and that sometime the thick line between having a good time and making an irreparable mistake is very difficult to see due to a lack of responsibility.  That may sound like a cliché but desinhibition does not always equally work for the parts involved, for instance in some sexual encounters the more privileged partners might use drugs to surrender the resistance of the more inexperience lovers. In another cases such as the amateur porno industry people without scruples force actors high on drugs to perform unprotected sex scenes that will have an impact in the attitude of the audiences.
And at the end all these people infected seem to disappear from the scene just like ghosts forced to live in constrain for their previous lives. It is just like being forced into exile inside a community who has been marginalised for such a long time. HIV+ homosexuals suffer from a double stigmatisation, one for their sexual condition and another for their status. As recent as this past Gay Pride in London celebrating the 40 years of the Gay Liberation Front one of its members from the stage spoke for the silenced voices of those living with AIDS. And as all the people there gave him an instant ovation one cannot forget that in the internet chats people still look for bareback sex with disease-free partners. An attitude, that without any doubt reflects the hypocrisy of those ones who after being discriminated at some point in their lives are discriminating now on grounds of physical health, paradoxically enough those who stigmatise seem like they have not learned the lesson after being treated as deviants and perverts.
Maybe drug users and those working with them need to consider stigma carefully.