The Thing About Homophobia

When I was younger, the homophobia I experienced was indistinguishable from daily life—but in Texas, in the nineties, that was hardly a notable thing. One time in fifth grade, standing before a crowd of smiling parents, a sports coach calmly informed us that we’d played our opening football match like a bunch of faggots. Another time, in junior high, I was sitting in the cafeteria eating lunch with another kid deemed sufficiently faggy when our meal was interrupted by an open water bottle of piss that someone had lobbed at our table. In high school, by which time the subject of my queerness was somewhat common gossip, I received a week of e-mails a little too well written for a kid regarding my inevitable descent to Hell. Most days, the stigma surrounding being queer felt nothing short of claustrophobic. Until I reached university—where I finally found community—the anxiety underlying my queerness, in virtually every conceivable situation, was unsettling and annoying. But, as with any other grievance that overstays its welcome, life went on around it. I still had crushes. I still, luckily, had friends. I had a job, stressed over grades, and rode my bike to the store to buy cat food.

Whenever I’m cornered into telling straight friends these stories, they respond with a look of shock, coupled with an apology or a window of silence lasting however long they deem appropriate. When the subject comes up among queer white friends, they offer a nod of acknowledgment, and recognition, before we move on. But when I tell queer friends of color, and Black queer friends specifically, they just snort lightly, or shrug, or give a flick of the wrist, before recounting a similar experience that they themselves endured. Then, always, we’ll laugh at the ghoulishness of it, and also at its startling predictability. Because few things are more boring than homophobia. In its destructiveness, its fearful maliciousness, its nascent violence, it mirrors other stigmas in its profound lack of imagination.

A couple of weeks back, the rapper Jonathan Kirk, a.k.a. DaBaby, spoke onstage to a crowd at Miami’s Rolling Loud festival. Between statements full of misogyny and misogynoir, he beckoned his fans to raise their lighters if they “didn’t show up today with H.I.V., AIDS, any of them deadly sexually transmitted diseases that’ll make you die in two, three weeks,” and for “not sucking dick in the parking lot.” A comrade onstage backed him up with the observation that a lot of audience members were “suspect as a motherfucker.” The rapper T.I. later defended the rhetoric by saying, bafflingly, that if the queer rapper Lil Nas X “can kick his shit in peace . . . so should DaBaby.” The following week, the actor Matt Damon applauded himself, after half a century of life on earth, for removing “faggot” from his lexicon on the advice of his daughter. When these comments were called out for their ignorance and irresponsibility, the speakers either doubled down, immediately recanted, or, in DaBaby’s case, asked for education in lieu of “harassment” and then recanted his recanting.

None of it felt particularly surprising. The words were gross. Dumb. Dangerous. They were also boring and predictable.

Today, there are more than 1.2 million people living with H.I.V. in the United States. In 2018, M.S.M. (men who have sex with men) made up sixty-nine per cent of the 37,968 recorded cases of H.I.V. diagnoses in the United States. Half of the nation’s recorded H.I.V. diagnoses were from Southern states, which had more infections than any other region. White M.S.M. accounted for twenty-three per cent of these diagnoses, Latinx M.S.M. accounted for twenty-six per cent, and Black M.S.M. accounted for a staggering forty-eight per cent. Black folks in the U.S. have been disproportionately affected by H.I.V./AIDS since the epidemic’s Stateside outset, but, in the South, Black M.S.M. are still very much in the midst of an epidemic. If the current rates persist, then half of all Black M.S.M. in the U.S. will be diagnosed with H.I.V. in their lifetime.

Last month, the federal government mandated that PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis), a drug for H.I.V. prevention approved by the FDA in 2012, be made available for free under most insurance plans in the U.S. Prior to this legislation—and without support from programs like the Patience Advocacy Foundation or Gilead Co-pay—the cost of PreP could run as high as twelve hundred dollars a month. For H.I.V.-positive folks, antiretroviral medication can reduce a user’s viral load (the amount of H.I.V. virus in their blood) until it’s undetectable, making their viral load untransmittable (U=U). Whether you’re H.I.V.-negative or poz, the presence of such a medication is life-changing, and the benefits of access to it are frankly incalculable.

It’s worth noting that the statistics above only account for the diagnoses recorded: many M.S.M. are entirely unaware of their H.I.V. status. This could be due to the lack of testing or resource centers in many communities. It could be due to a deep underestimation of what, exactly, the risks of the disease are. It could be due to recent infection, the costliness of taking time off from work to get tested, the cost of medication for those who are not currently insured, or any number of difficulties that the marginalized face in a country whose medical system actively and systematically hangs them out to dry. But in a country where, in 2020, at least forty-four trans or gender-nonconforming people were violently killed, and where legislation across the nation continually shuts down abortion clinics performing preventative care and S.T.I./S.T.D. outreach—and where, in 2021 alone, thirty-three states have introduced upward of a hundred bills to curb the rights of trans people, including children—the blinding, boring, deadly stigma surrounding queer folks has a role to play, too.

Around the time I turned twenty, a friend asked me if I’d ever taken the time to get tested for H.I.V. I hadn’t. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that this was something I should do. Around the same time, I’d made myself a regular on Houston’s queer circuit, and my friend told me that this was fine, but that without regular testing I’d be putting myself in danger. This friend told me, gently, that they’d even take me to a testing site, which I politely declined. Other friends continued to ask me, gently, whether I’d been tested yet, until about a month later, after further risks and recklessness, and yet another slipup, when I took them up on their offer. We went to a testing site the very next day.

That afternoon, at Houston’s Legacy Community Health clinic in Montrose, I sat down with a Black H.I.V. coördinator who couldn’t have been much older than me. He was patient with my excuses. I got my first rapid test, which was negative. He told me that I had to take care of myself. He was one person who would be checking on me, he said, and I had to do it for the both of us. He gave me a prescription for Truvada. He asked if I’d be picking the meds up at the building’s pharmacy, and I asked him to send it to my local one instead—the clinic was situated outside of my daily revolutions, and I was terrified that I would simply put off going there.

This turned out to be a mistake. At my local drug store, a pharmacist told me—incorrectly—that I didn’t need the medication if I wasn’t H.I.V.-positive. At another pharmacy, I was told that the prescription was likely given to me by “mistake.” Eventually, I returned to Legacy, where a woman promptly filled my prescription. When I told her what had happened, she shook her head. She told me to just keep coming back here, and there wouldn’t be any more issues. And then she smiled.

Lately, a good chunk of my time is centered on telling queer love stories. It’s a pretty cush privilege, and one that’s only possible because of those who wrote their own stories before me. Narratives of queerness, in which queerness is treated with care and attention and mundanity, without needing to be a mountain of struggle or something to be overcome or a pool of trauma to be waded in ad infinitum, are the exact sort of thing that I had very little of growing up. The stories I write aren’t ones in which the randomness of violence or misinformation or stigma don’t exist, because that couldn’t be further from the truth. They just aren’t the primary focus.

Representation is certainly one way of combatting stigma—an essential one, even—but it alone is not transformative, because it doesn’t amount to protective legislation or equitable compensation or access to medical care. It does not amount to the rule of law unfucking itself to provide access to life-saving services for marginalized populations. And it does not amount to undoing the sort of blatant homophobia that DaBaby and Damon recently put on display. But it’s possible to fight for all of these things at once, because it has to be.

A story is one thing, and life as it’s lived can be another. It’s rare that more than a few days go by without a friend of mine being accosted or called a slur. One week, several buddies on Instagram, in different parts of the globe, posted about being harassed on the street on the same day. Another week, when my boyfriend and I were picking up barbecue outside of Houston, a man saw the two of us and our running shorts and he spit. Another week, a Lyft driver, apropos of nothing, said wasn’t it a shame that so many “fag flags” were popping up around the neighborhood. I told him that I was responsible for at least one of those flags (after checking to make sure that the route we were taking matched where I’d intended to go), and he fell silent, until we arrived at my destination, when he told me to take care and not catch AIDS.

The other weekend, some queer friends and I caught a drink at a bar. We’d all been vaccinated for months, and, although the risk of the Delta variant loomed large, we figured we’d try and make the most of an outdoor beer while we could. The patio was crowded, but parties kept to themselves, and while the body language of queer spaces—hands on shoulders, fingers on waists, lips on ears—was largely absent, the laughter wasn’t, and each table existed in its own little universe, connected to the larger orbit. Chatter bounced from table to table, because how could it not in a country that actively tries to kill its most marginalized, and comes just too close every time. That was enough to catch a buzz for. So we cheered, and we laughed, because those things feel, at any given point in time, like they couldn’t be further from predictable.