World AIDS Day: David Loftus

Since its heyday as the “epidemic” of the late 1980s and early 1990s, it’s amazing how far AIDS has receded from awareness -- mine as much as anyone’s. I was a reporter on the medical beat of a small Western newspaper when the great white hetero powers-that-be finally began to admit that it wasn’t just a “gay problem.” I got myself tested for HIV (and photographed having my blood drawn) so I could explain the procedure to readers. There wasn’t much point in doing so for myself, since I had had few partners by then, and had mostly practiced safer sex, even in my teens. Some years later I was tested again when there was more cause for concern, and tested negative again.

I’ve lost a few acquaintances to AIDS over the years -- a fellow I acted with on stage, other friends of friends -- but no one really dear to me. I heard that a high school classmate contracted HIV from her philandering husband, who subsequently died of AIDS; I never knew her well, and there wasn’t anything to say to her, really, when we happened to cross trails at a reunion, but I hope she’s still going strong. Colleagues and I do staged readings of “A Christmas Carol” every December at the local AIDS Hospice, but it’s just another stop among half a dozen nursing homes and retirement centers. And I can hardly remember reading a substantive story on HIV in a decade. Probably thousands are dying every day of AIDS in Africa and Asia, but I never hear about them. I’m sure somebody’s doing an awareness event here in Portland for World AIDS day, but I don’t know what it is, and am more concerned about an audition I have this afternoon.

Sometimes I think we should be obligated to listen to a summation of world news every day: emphasis on “world” (not just the U.S.) as well as “news” (not the latest crap about the some LA pseudo-celeb, or a movie or TV series the station is trying to plug with a bogus “inside look”). Sort of like homework for grownups. Not a lot … five minutes a day would do. Just to remind us there is a much bigger world of pain, hunger, disease, violence, and neglect outside our exoskeleton homes and gated homeland.