Taylor as I read this it I notice a mix of feelings. First, you are the first person and only person I have witnessed speak about their HIV status. I am learning through you. I am remembering the many many people who died without knowing their status, died before science created life-saving medication. My anger and sadness has no place or power here but I am angry at the person who knowingly infected you. I am angry at this cold-hearted medical system. I am angry for any moment you have had to face this diagnosis alone. I am angry at all who profit from continued illness. In my imagination and manifestation--- your writing--- your testimony is saving millions of lives. You contnue to touch my heart and make me grateful for all the gay and queer men who have been in my life.Thank you.
Tasha, I felt every part of what you wrote. Not only the anger, but the love sitting beneath it. You named the history that shadows this diagnosis, the generations who never lived long enough to see what science can do now, the lives that ended before the world learned how to keep us here. I carry them too.
I want you to know this. I have never expected anyone to hold rage on my behalf, but I understand why you feel it. The silence that led to my diagnosis was its own kind of violence, and the system that followed has a coldness that can make anyone feel solitary inside it. But I have never walked this entirely alone. Even in the hardest seasons, there were people who stood close, even if they did not know the full truth.
What moved me most in your words was not the anger. It was the gratitude. The way you honored queer men you have known, the way you held space for the ones who are no longer here, the way you let this essay widen your understanding instead of shrinking from it. That is not small. That is its own kind of medicine.
Thank you for seeing the testimony and not treating it as spectacle. Thank you for imagining a life beyond my own where these words might reach someone who needs them. Thank you for meeting the piece with such depth and care.
The specimen/glass metaphor makes “undetectable” feel like a lived condition, not a label—care and surveillance braided together. The way you hold intimacy, profit, and criminalization in the same frame is razor-sharp. I won’t forget this.
Thank you, Dr. Mirkin. I really appreciate the way you read this. Calling it a lived condition rather than a label gets right to the heart of what I was trying to name. Undetectable isn’t something I check off. It’s something I, and a lot of others, live inside every day, with care and surveillance happening at the same time.
I didn’t want any one piece to stand apart. Intimacy, profit, criminalization, they’re always in the room together whether we admit it or not. Hearing you see that tells me the frame held.
Thank you for writing this and for deciding to share it with us. So many things struck me. Particularly the description “the warmth that blooms in glass” and then the chill of the calculation of cost, profit, surveillance, “specimen”. It’s unflinching and real.
This essay takes me back to a time when I lost my best friend to AIDS in 1994. We were 30 and I think of him all the time. I think of how antiretrovirals came too late for him, and how great it is that we have them now. But I never stopped to consider the reality of living with an undetectable viral load and what it means. I learned a lot from you today. I had believed that these days HIV is so manageable that it’s like having well-controlled diabetes or another chronic illness. It’s not the same, and your writing cut through my layers of privileged ignorance. It also confirms for me just how disconnected we become from other people’s and groups’ realities when we lack a personal connection to them. How much our societies need diversity and inclusion to stay connected and supportive and empathetic.
You didn’t just respond to the essay. You brought a whole life with you. Your friend, your memories, the years you’ve carried him, the way grief keeps a quiet place in the body long after the world has moved on. I felt all of that in what you wrote.
I’m sorry he didn’t get the chance to see the medicines we have now. I’m sorry the timing failed him the way it failed so many. The love you still hold for him was clear in every line, and I’m grateful you let him step into this space through you. It means something when someone is remembered without apology.
And thank you for the honesty about what you didn’t know. Most people stay silent rather than face the gap between the story they believed and the truth sitting right in front of them. You didn’t retreat. You stayed. You listened. That matters.
What you named about disconnection is real. Most people don’t understand this world because they’ve never had to. They think “manageable” means simple. They think absence means safety. Your willingness to see beyond that, to let your understanding shift, is a kind of empathy that feels rare and deeply human.
I’m holding you and the memory of your friend in this moment.
And only if it feels right, I would be honored to know his name, so I can hold him more fully as part of this conversation and the fight he didn’t get to finish. 🤎
You are a very generous soul, Taylor. Typing this through tears - my beautiful, smart, loving, never-forgotten friend’s name is Gerry Magill. I think he would have loved your writing.
Kathleen, what you offered in sharing his full name moved me more than I expected. You could have given only his first name. Most people do. It is safer, easier, less exposing. But you didn’t. You trusted me with the whole of him, and that landed in a very particular place in me.
There is a kind of security in that gesture, a sense that this memory deserves to stand upright, not half hidden. And I want you to know I felt it. I felt the safety you extended, the way witness becomes a kind of protection when someone is remembered fully, not in fragments.
Gerry Magill.
I said it out loud just now.
Said whole. Said without retreat. Said like someone whose life still echoes.
It felt, to me, like a legacy being honored in full measure. Like a spiritual pact passing quietly from your hands to mine, asking me to hold him with care, to hold the era he lived through, to hold the fight he did not get to finish.
Thank you for trusting me with all of his name, not just part of it.
I will carry Gerry Magill the way you meant him to be carried. Whole. Loved. And still shining in the room.
I needed to take some time with this one and read it over before responding. There was a depth that I didn't want to risk missing due to the nature of the conversation, and the vulnerability you displayed by sharing it. I want you to know before reading another word that I am grateful for your strength, and the risk you took. It was not in vain, and you deserve to be seen for all of who you are. Thank you for being here and creating this space.
"The bottle felt heavier than it should. Not the weight of the pills themselves but the weight of forever... This was the beginning of a permanent relationship with pharmaceutical intervention."
This was one of the parts that stuck out for me. It speaks to a burden that isn't simply a burden. In this case, you are burdened by more than just the virus that lives within you. The pills themselves are a burden, and they aren't a burden merely due to the time it takes or the need to remember them, they are a burden because they can't be missed, can't be ignored. People speak about the "weight of the world" being on their shoulders, but what happens when it's not the weight of a physical world (nor the exaggeration of such), it's the weight of an unseen future, an unseen, but tangible eternity? Does the soul not also live with this weight? There is so much in this one piece, that I feel it could carry an entire set or articles all on its own. This is a weight none should be forced to carry alone, and yet so many have no other choice. It's a weight that is actively being made heavier by the purposeful collapse of an infrastructure that you speak on later in the article. Things fail, and I am cognizant of that. Things fail, and sometimes there is nothing that can be done, it is frustrating, but it must be accepted. This isn't that situation. The most angering part of the impending, likely collapse, is that it is a consciously made decision. Some are out there actively choosing to sacrifice people who are already struggling with the consequences of what isn't always even a choice. It strikes me to consider how many people with HIV were affected because a partner didn't disclose, and had the same indifference as the man who transmitted it to you. How many made what they thought was the same decision they had made possibly just the weekend prior, but this time, that decision carried with it consequences they couldn't have predicted which now will define the rest of their, potentially much shorter than necessary, lives.
There's a strangeness here to the criminalization of HIV transmission... Presumably (though, with the way this country works, this may be a poor presumption), the true intent of the laws were to help limit the number of people forced into this twisted relationship that you find yourself in. By assigning a felony charge to not disclosing, one would think that fewer people would take the risk of not disclosing, and still fewer would be having sex without knowing for certain that they are undetectable in the first place. Except, that isn't how criminalization works. If it was, murder wouldn't happen, rape wouldn't happen, theft wouldn't happen, etc etc etc. Criminalizing things tends to create a more dangerous space for those who would otherwise have acted in a "responsible manner" (I use heavy quotes here because sometimes people become criminals out of a need to satisfy a responsibility, such as putting food on the table, or to protect themselves and others). It leads to wide swaths of a population being extra criminalized, it leads to gross abuses of power under the justification of the person being abused is a criminal, or might be. Instead we end up with people still going around, actively staying silent about their status until someone like you is infected, and has to be afraid of his potential criminal status despite doing everything right. We have people looked at as dangerous, when they're misunderstood. We don't find more acceptance, and love, we find more aversion and indifference. It sits heavily on my heart knowing that someone I've come to love through this screen, must deal with that fear, hatred, and burden, not because of anything he has done, but because of something that was done to him.
"People ask what it’s like to “live with HIV.” I tell them: imagine the most intimate relationship you’ve ever had. Now imagine you can never leave. Now imagine it lives inside you. Now imagine you didn’t choose it. Now imagine it might kill you if you stop paying attention to it daily."
This one floored me. It alters my entire perspective around HIV, but also intimacy, and the importance of choice. Very few people need to be this aware of anything in their lives, whether it lives within their own bodies, or exists outside of them, as deeply as you are forced to be of your "status". Regardless of what the outside world is, does, or says, in the comfort of most people's own home, they can live without a thought to what else is happening. One is likely to still know that they may only be in that particular home due to extenuating circumstances from outside whether it be policy, prejudice, finances, etc, but they can still find moments where those things don't have a direct impact. You don't have this luxury, nor do the many like you, and there isn't a policy, or social realigning that will allow you to magically find peace and security. For that, my heart is with you.
Thank you for taking the time you took with this. I could feel that you did not rush your reading or your response, and that matters more to me than I can easily say. You did not skim the surface. You stayed with it.
What you named about the pills, the weight not being time or routine but inevitability, is exactly it. The burden is not just maintenance. It is permanence. It is knowing there is no version of the future where attention is optional. When you asked whether the soul carries that weight too, I felt seen in a very precise way. Yes, it does. The body takes the pill, but the soul carries the knowledge of forever.
Your clarity about infrastructure is also important to me. You are right to distinguish between failure and choice. What is happening now is not accident or tragic inevitability. It is a series of decisions made by people far removed from the consequences, deciding who gets to remain manageable and who becomes expendable. That distinction matters, especially for those of us who have done everything we were told was right.
I also appreciate how carefully you thought through criminalization. You did not stop at the intention of the law. You followed it to its actual impact. The fear, the silence, the way it punishes the very people trying hardest to be responsible. Living with the knowledge that you can do everything right and still be made dangerous in the eyes of the law is a particular kind of psychological pressure. Naming that without flattening it means a lot.
And that last section you quoted, the intimacy without exit, I am glad it shifted something for you. That framing came from a place I had never seen articulated until I had to live it. Choice becomes a completely different concept when vigilance is the condition of survival. You are right that most people get moments of mental refuge, even inside systems that constrain them. That luxury is not evenly distributed.
Thank you for holding all of this with such care, and for holding me with it too. Knowing that someone is thinking this deeply, not out of obligation but out of connection, makes the act of writing it feel less solitary. 🤎
I felt the honesty in what you wrote. Not the praise, but the way you let the piece move through you. It means something when someone notices how the tenderness and the harm live in the same room, and does not step back from it.
You saw what I was trying to hold together. You named it without softening it. That kind of recognition is rare, and I am grateful you were here to meet the work that closely. 🤎
Taylor as I read this it I notice a mix of feelings. First, you are the first person and only person I have witnessed speak about their HIV status. I am learning through you. I am remembering the many many people who died without knowing their status, died before science created life-saving medication. My anger and sadness has no place or power here but I am angry at the person who knowingly infected you. I am angry at this cold-hearted medical system. I am angry for any moment you have had to face this diagnosis alone. I am angry at all who profit from continued illness. In my imagination and manifestation--- your writing--- your testimony is saving millions of lives. You contnue to touch my heart and make me grateful for all the gay and queer men who have been in my life.Thank you.
Tasha, I felt every part of what you wrote. Not only the anger, but the love sitting beneath it. You named the history that shadows this diagnosis, the generations who never lived long enough to see what science can do now, the lives that ended before the world learned how to keep us here. I carry them too.
I want you to know this. I have never expected anyone to hold rage on my behalf, but I understand why you feel it. The silence that led to my diagnosis was its own kind of violence, and the system that followed has a coldness that can make anyone feel solitary inside it. But I have never walked this entirely alone. Even in the hardest seasons, there were people who stood close, even if they did not know the full truth.
What moved me most in your words was not the anger. It was the gratitude. The way you honored queer men you have known, the way you held space for the ones who are no longer here, the way you let this essay widen your understanding instead of shrinking from it. That is not small. That is its own kind of medicine.
Thank you for seeing the testimony and not treating it as spectacle. Thank you for imagining a life beyond my own where these words might reach someone who needs them. Thank you for meeting the piece with such depth and care.
The specimen/glass metaphor makes “undetectable” feel like a lived condition, not a label—care and surveillance braided together. The way you hold intimacy, profit, and criminalization in the same frame is razor-sharp. I won’t forget this.
Thank you, Dr. Mirkin. I really appreciate the way you read this. Calling it a lived condition rather than a label gets right to the heart of what I was trying to name. Undetectable isn’t something I check off. It’s something I, and a lot of others, live inside every day, with care and surveillance happening at the same time.
I didn’t want any one piece to stand apart. Intimacy, profit, criminalization, they’re always in the room together whether we admit it or not. Hearing you see that tells me the frame held.
Thank you for writing this and for deciding to share it with us. So many things struck me. Particularly the description “the warmth that blooms in glass” and then the chill of the calculation of cost, profit, surveillance, “specimen”. It’s unflinching and real.
This essay takes me back to a time when I lost my best friend to AIDS in 1994. We were 30 and I think of him all the time. I think of how antiretrovirals came too late for him, and how great it is that we have them now. But I never stopped to consider the reality of living with an undetectable viral load and what it means. I learned a lot from you today. I had believed that these days HIV is so manageable that it’s like having well-controlled diabetes or another chronic illness. It’s not the same, and your writing cut through my layers of privileged ignorance. It also confirms for me just how disconnected we become from other people’s and groups’ realities when we lack a personal connection to them. How much our societies need diversity and inclusion to stay connected and supportive and empathetic.
Kathleen, this meant a lot to read.
You didn’t just respond to the essay. You brought a whole life with you. Your friend, your memories, the years you’ve carried him, the way grief keeps a quiet place in the body long after the world has moved on. I felt all of that in what you wrote.
I’m sorry he didn’t get the chance to see the medicines we have now. I’m sorry the timing failed him the way it failed so many. The love you still hold for him was clear in every line, and I’m grateful you let him step into this space through you. It means something when someone is remembered without apology.
And thank you for the honesty about what you didn’t know. Most people stay silent rather than face the gap between the story they believed and the truth sitting right in front of them. You didn’t retreat. You stayed. You listened. That matters.
What you named about disconnection is real. Most people don’t understand this world because they’ve never had to. They think “manageable” means simple. They think absence means safety. Your willingness to see beyond that, to let your understanding shift, is a kind of empathy that feels rare and deeply human.
I’m holding you and the memory of your friend in this moment.
And only if it feels right, I would be honored to know his name, so I can hold him more fully as part of this conversation and the fight he didn’t get to finish. 🤎
You are a very generous soul, Taylor. Typing this through tears - my beautiful, smart, loving, never-forgotten friend’s name is Gerry Magill. I think he would have loved your writing.
Kathleen, what you offered in sharing his full name moved me more than I expected. You could have given only his first name. Most people do. It is safer, easier, less exposing. But you didn’t. You trusted me with the whole of him, and that landed in a very particular place in me.
There is a kind of security in that gesture, a sense that this memory deserves to stand upright, not half hidden. And I want you to know I felt it. I felt the safety you extended, the way witness becomes a kind of protection when someone is remembered fully, not in fragments.
Gerry Magill.
I said it out loud just now.
Said whole. Said without retreat. Said like someone whose life still echoes.
It felt, to me, like a legacy being honored in full measure. Like a spiritual pact passing quietly from your hands to mine, asking me to hold him with care, to hold the era he lived through, to hold the fight he did not get to finish.
Thank you for trusting me with all of his name, not just part of it.
I will carry Gerry Magill the way you meant him to be carried. Whole. Loved. And still shining in the room.
I needed to take some time with this one and read it over before responding. There was a depth that I didn't want to risk missing due to the nature of the conversation, and the vulnerability you displayed by sharing it. I want you to know before reading another word that I am grateful for your strength, and the risk you took. It was not in vain, and you deserve to be seen for all of who you are. Thank you for being here and creating this space.
"The bottle felt heavier than it should. Not the weight of the pills themselves but the weight of forever... This was the beginning of a permanent relationship with pharmaceutical intervention."
This was one of the parts that stuck out for me. It speaks to a burden that isn't simply a burden. In this case, you are burdened by more than just the virus that lives within you. The pills themselves are a burden, and they aren't a burden merely due to the time it takes or the need to remember them, they are a burden because they can't be missed, can't be ignored. People speak about the "weight of the world" being on their shoulders, but what happens when it's not the weight of a physical world (nor the exaggeration of such), it's the weight of an unseen future, an unseen, but tangible eternity? Does the soul not also live with this weight? There is so much in this one piece, that I feel it could carry an entire set or articles all on its own. This is a weight none should be forced to carry alone, and yet so many have no other choice. It's a weight that is actively being made heavier by the purposeful collapse of an infrastructure that you speak on later in the article. Things fail, and I am cognizant of that. Things fail, and sometimes there is nothing that can be done, it is frustrating, but it must be accepted. This isn't that situation. The most angering part of the impending, likely collapse, is that it is a consciously made decision. Some are out there actively choosing to sacrifice people who are already struggling with the consequences of what isn't always even a choice. It strikes me to consider how many people with HIV were affected because a partner didn't disclose, and had the same indifference as the man who transmitted it to you. How many made what they thought was the same decision they had made possibly just the weekend prior, but this time, that decision carried with it consequences they couldn't have predicted which now will define the rest of their, potentially much shorter than necessary, lives.
There's a strangeness here to the criminalization of HIV transmission... Presumably (though, with the way this country works, this may be a poor presumption), the true intent of the laws were to help limit the number of people forced into this twisted relationship that you find yourself in. By assigning a felony charge to not disclosing, one would think that fewer people would take the risk of not disclosing, and still fewer would be having sex without knowing for certain that they are undetectable in the first place. Except, that isn't how criminalization works. If it was, murder wouldn't happen, rape wouldn't happen, theft wouldn't happen, etc etc etc. Criminalizing things tends to create a more dangerous space for those who would otherwise have acted in a "responsible manner" (I use heavy quotes here because sometimes people become criminals out of a need to satisfy a responsibility, such as putting food on the table, or to protect themselves and others). It leads to wide swaths of a population being extra criminalized, it leads to gross abuses of power under the justification of the person being abused is a criminal, or might be. Instead we end up with people still going around, actively staying silent about their status until someone like you is infected, and has to be afraid of his potential criminal status despite doing everything right. We have people looked at as dangerous, when they're misunderstood. We don't find more acceptance, and love, we find more aversion and indifference. It sits heavily on my heart knowing that someone I've come to love through this screen, must deal with that fear, hatred, and burden, not because of anything he has done, but because of something that was done to him.
"People ask what it’s like to “live with HIV.” I tell them: imagine the most intimate relationship you’ve ever had. Now imagine you can never leave. Now imagine it lives inside you. Now imagine you didn’t choose it. Now imagine it might kill you if you stop paying attention to it daily."
This one floored me. It alters my entire perspective around HIV, but also intimacy, and the importance of choice. Very few people need to be this aware of anything in their lives, whether it lives within their own bodies, or exists outside of them, as deeply as you are forced to be of your "status". Regardless of what the outside world is, does, or says, in the comfort of most people's own home, they can live without a thought to what else is happening. One is likely to still know that they may only be in that particular home due to extenuating circumstances from outside whether it be policy, prejudice, finances, etc, but they can still find moments where those things don't have a direct impact. You don't have this luxury, nor do the many like you, and there isn't a policy, or social realigning that will allow you to magically find peace and security. For that, my heart is with you.
Thank you for taking the time you took with this. I could feel that you did not rush your reading or your response, and that matters more to me than I can easily say. You did not skim the surface. You stayed with it.
What you named about the pills, the weight not being time or routine but inevitability, is exactly it. The burden is not just maintenance. It is permanence. It is knowing there is no version of the future where attention is optional. When you asked whether the soul carries that weight too, I felt seen in a very precise way. Yes, it does. The body takes the pill, but the soul carries the knowledge of forever.
Your clarity about infrastructure is also important to me. You are right to distinguish between failure and choice. What is happening now is not accident or tragic inevitability. It is a series of decisions made by people far removed from the consequences, deciding who gets to remain manageable and who becomes expendable. That distinction matters, especially for those of us who have done everything we were told was right.
I also appreciate how carefully you thought through criminalization. You did not stop at the intention of the law. You followed it to its actual impact. The fear, the silence, the way it punishes the very people trying hardest to be responsible. Living with the knowledge that you can do everything right and still be made dangerous in the eyes of the law is a particular kind of psychological pressure. Naming that without flattening it means a lot.
And that last section you quoted, the intimacy without exit, I am glad it shifted something for you. That framing came from a place I had never seen articulated until I had to live it. Choice becomes a completely different concept when vigilance is the condition of survival. You are right that most people get moments of mental refuge, even inside systems that constrain them. That luxury is not evenly distributed.
Thank you for holding all of this with such care, and for holding me with it too. Knowing that someone is thinking this deeply, not out of obligation but out of connection, makes the act of writing it feel less solitary. 🤎
T
This stopped my breath more than once.
To be honest… it’s still echoing in me, Taylor.
The way you hold intimacy, violence, surveillance,
and systemic betrayal in the same frame …
it’s one of the clearest articulations of embodied truth I’ve read.
I felt the honesty in what you wrote. Not the praise, but the way you let the piece move through you. It means something when someone notices how the tenderness and the harm live in the same room, and does not step back from it.
You saw what I was trying to hold together. You named it without softening it. That kind of recognition is rare, and I am grateful you were here to meet the work that closely. 🤎