Missing the Big Picture

by Donovan, Luke

  The answer they gave me for B was “butt fucking,” C was “cunt,” D was “dick,” E was “ecstasy,” F was “fucking,” and G was “gangbanging.” Finally, they cut me off. It was the most enjoyable interview I’ve ever had. I left convinced that I would be offered the position. A week later, I called back and was informed that I wasn’t offered the job. The director told me that the prevention staff liked me, but she couldn’t go into specifics about why I wasn’t given the position.

  A couple of days after that, I was offered a job at Albany County Child Protective Services as a caseworker. I knew that preventing child abuse was important. With me working two jobs and still living with my mom, money was my main motivating factor. It was twelve thousand dollars a year more than my full-time job, so I said yes and started a few weeks later.

  I was sad about leaving the workshop. I had been there nine months and was just starting to feel comfortable. I did have mixed feelings about taking the new job, but it was a county government job and most people would love the opportunity to work in government—especially in the capital of New York. There are always rumors that government workers don’t do anything, but government jobs offer job security, great benefits, and fair pay.

  I began at Child Protective Services on a Friday in February 2007. The first thing they had me do was read case files for clients with whom I’d be working. I was supposed to get a caseload of seventeen families. The first family I read about was separated after twenty-five pounds of feces were removed from the home.

  Just like any new staffer, I was introduced to the other employees in my unit. Another caseworker in my unit was engaged to a woman I worked closely with during my internship at the Sanchez group home—the one from which I’d gotten fired. I knew that he probably knew that I was terminated, and I was paranoid that he would tell somebody.

  Later in the day, I actually shadowed another caseworker named Trevor. He had a case in which a single mother was letting her boyfriend, who abused her daughter, into her home—after there was already an order of protection forbidding the boyfriend from coming anywhere near the house. “You basically have to be like a politician,” Trevor warned me as we drove to her house. The woman greeted us both and was initially pleasant. Then Trevor directed the eight-year-old to go to her bedroom. It was heart wrenching to see a woman choosing a boyfriend—whom she’d only recently met—over the safety of her daughter. Finally, the woman yelled at us, “You took my son away from me! You’re not going to take my daughter from me!” and slammed the door.

  At the end of my second day of work, I had enough. I decided to call back my program director at the workshop and ask for my job back. I just couldn’t work in that field again. I ended up going back to my job at the workshop.

  I also worked very hard at trying to accept my sexuality and to meet somebody I could be in a relationship with. I spent a lot of time online trying to meet people, but none of them went anywhere. Most of the men were just looking for hookups. I found out about a gay men’s support group that met weekly at the Capital District Gay and Lesbian Community Center (now Pride Center).

  I was very nervous walking into the gay and lesbian center. After years of trying to deny my identity, I finally realized that I was a gay man who absolutely hated being gay. As I looked around the room, I noticed that most of the people in the room were older and were quite friendly with one another. The group started with each member going around and giving a brief report of his last week and recounting anything significant that happened. One man had been married for over thirty years and was struggling with how his adult children couldn’t accept him dating men after the death of his wife. His daughter-in-law had forbidden him from seeing his granddaughter. In fact, the same man met another man in the therapy group whose ex-wife was the granddaughter’s schoolteacher. The little girl was able to get a Christmas gift from her grandfather thanks to the connection that was formed in the group.

  As I listened to the other men, I noticed that the man beside me looked very familiar. He said his name was Shawn, and I thought he looked like a former Christian brother who taught Spanish and religion when I was at Saint John’s. I thought that was funny, since most of my life I didn’t act on my gay thoughts because I didn’t want to be seen as a deviant in the Catholic Church. Now the person who gave the masses at my Catholic school was sitting next to me at a gay men’s support meeting.

  After the meeting, I went up to him. He told me that, after two decades, he had left the Christian brothers only one year earlier. “I was thinking, where do I know this kid from?” Shawn said. He’d recognized me too, and since his coming out, said that he’d run into more former students at the local gay bar than at football and other athletic games. I joked with him about how in tenth grade he gave me a strange look after we had to write down our cultures during a campus retreat; when he looked over my shoulder, he saw that I’d written “white trash.”

  A few months after I went back to my job at the workshop, I began applying for other jobs. While I was upset that I didn’t get the job in prevention at the AIDS Council, I decided to apply for a case manager job there. I interviewed for the position and was offered it, but I ended up turning it down. It wasn’t that much more money than my other job, but the main reason I turned it down was that I didn’t want people to think that since I worked at the AIDS Council, I was gay. Sure, I was gay, but I didn’t want anybody to know that. I didn’t see myself as a flamboyant gay man. Plus, I had a disoriented view of people with AIDS. I thought of them as needy and as criminals, and I thought the work would be frustrating. Still, I struggled with turning it down, since there was a part of me that realized that people with AIDS struggled with the same alienation that I had gone through.

  Shortly after I decided to turn down the AIDS Council job, I actually thought about my life in perspective. I realized that I was just like Senator Larry Craig; somebody who people think is gay but denies it. I decided to attend the support group more often in the hopes of overcoming my feelings of self-hatred and internalized homophobia.

  That summer, I realized no matter how much you try or what you do for others, you can never make somebody like you. You can never make somebody change, no matter how hard you try. The only person you’re guaranteed to wake up with every day is yourself. At the end of the day, you just have to believe that what you do is right and the decisions you make are ones that you can live with. I realized that I didn’t want to keep on going through life trying to make everybody like me and paying too much attention to what people thought of me.

  Since I felt bad turning down the AIDS Council job, I decided to start volunteering. I wondered, What would happen if I died tomorrow? My obituary would say, “Well, he did his best to try to please others.” I thought that I could turn all my years of self-hatred into something positive, so I started volunteering with Steve Kozlowski and his wife, Mary. For the past fourteen years, the couple organized book sales and even had a thrift shop dedicated to helping people with HIV/ AIDS. By 2007, Steve and his wife had raised over $500,000 for the cause. As of 2012, the couple has raised over $750,000 for people living with HIV/AIDS.

  As part of my volunteer work, I stocked the thrift store’s shelves and worked the register at book sales. It didn’t help me come out of the closet, though, and I still had difficulty meeting people who were interested in developing a relationship. I continued to post profiles on gay websites. By now I was not only fooling around with guys I met online, I was having sex with them as well. I always used condoms, but I decided to get tested again. In fact, I routinely got tested every six months. I didn’t want my family to see my name on a quilt some day on World AIDS Day. Each time I would go to a different place, and never my own physician’s office. I felt like too much of male whore. Luckily, everything always came back negative.

  I once got tested at an AIDS Council location off-site at a bathhouse in Troy, New York. I immediately recognized the HIV counselor, as he was in the interview I had a few mont
hs earlier. He was the one who, when I mentioned anal sex, began to scream, “That’s gay!” During our session, he told me he was gay and didn’t care what others thought, since he was definitely not a stereotypical gay guy. He even told me to make sure I looked at other guys’ balls for any rashes, lesions, or lumps before I did anything with them.

  Another time, I went to Planned Parenthood for testing. I used my insurance card to process payment. I later found out that men can’t just go to Planned Parenthood. My insurance kept rejecting my claim and threatened me before I finally paid the bill. Now I can laugh that Planned Parenthood almost ruined my credit.

  At one of the early meetings that I attended at the support group, I observed a good-looking, middle-aged man named Mike who went to almost all the meetings. I couldn’t figure out why exactly he was there since he had a partner and seemed very happy and was always smiling. Nothing ever discouraged him, and he rarely said anything bad about anything or anyone. Mike would always try to give me advice. After a few meetings, he disclosed to the group that he was HIV positive and had been for close to twenty years. When I heard him say that, my eyes jumped in the back of my head, since I had never known anybody with HIV or AIDS.

  Even though I stopped attending church after high school, I continued to pray every night before I went to bed and believed that I had a personal relationship with God. I have always felt that God communicates to us through other people. Before I started attending the men’s support group and met Mike, I had many misconceptions about HIV and AIDS. Just weeks earlier, if I had heard that an older man with AIDS was living next to me, I probably would have been judgmental and not empathetic at all. But I knew that Mike was a very nice person, and it helped me realize that people with AIDS can be beautiful, too.

  Two weeks later, after I told my program director that I had a job offer at the AIDS Council, my supervisor at the workshop suddenly left and her position became vacant. I applied for that position and got it. I was now a program coordinator and a supervisor of three individuals. I got a raise but was only making $27,000 a year. I had a bachelor’s degree and almost three years’ experience working with the disabled. The job always kept me on my feet; the disabled people I worked with were always one step ahead of me.

  I had one client who would call off work all the time. Each time, he would always give way too much information. One time he called in stating that he had to go to a biopsy and have an enema. Another time he called in and said he had a back virus. Another time he had diarrhea and gave the consistency of his bowel movements. Once he called in stating that the power went off in his house and he was going to stay home from work to make sure that it stayed on.

  There were the times when I had to literally chase clients who went running from the workshop or would interrupt meetings. We also had one client with Asperger’s syndrome who would stay in the bathroom for up to five hours at a time. He, too, enjoyed telling everyone about his bowel movements. I liked my job at the workshop, but I realized that human services work could never pay the bills. I decided to go back to school, and I entered the most demanding, underappreciated, yet most rewarding field in existence: nursing.

  I think what I learned most about the workshop was that people with mental retardation are very sexual beings. There were incidents when I would have to investigate two people with Downs syndrome touching genitals and would remind them sternly that their behavior was inappropriate for work. Once I had to call a residential manager and tell her about an inappropriate-touching incident that occurred with one of her residents when the phone cut out. I called her back and asked, “Where was I?” She then said, “You said something about penis.” It was a great job and a terrific program. It was a great opportunity to see people who were labeled as mentally retarded have jobs, earn a paycheck, or scream in pure ecstasy when they were nominated “worker of the month.”

  I was now in nursing school. I couldn’t work two jobs and go to nursing school, so in July 2007 I resigned from the adult group home. I definitely enjoyed my time there. It was the only job I ever had that when I walked into work, the clients would tell me that they missed me and that they were excited when they found out I was coming in. I was able to go to amusement parks, concerts, movies, and Lake George as part of my job. I got free food and hugs from the clients, and overall, I became a better person. I almost felt like a parent sometimes, when I would see one of the clients walk out of the house in the fall without his coat and had to fight with him to wear it.

  I think the resident who was disappointed with me leaving the most was Anthony. My last day, I picked him up from a visit at his mother’s house. His mother and brother were there, and they were telling Anthony, “Don’t worry—he said he would come back and visit.” Just as I overheard them, I noticed that they were standing near where Carmine’s senior picture hung in his grandmother’s house. I was glad that I was given the opportunity to work with Anthony. Carmine’s family is made up of very nice people, and it’s too bad that all that high school drama made us enemies. I was glad that I was able to rectify something.

  When I was in nursing school, I still worked full time as the program coordinator at the workshop. In my free time, as much I tried to stop, I would go online to various gay websites, trying to meet men. There were some situations that I wish I hadn’t gotten myself into, but I was too stupid to avoid them. In 2008, I walked into this man’s house and, upon entering the kitchen, he turned off all the lights. I couldn’t see anything, but I could feel his body rub up against me. I asked him to turn the lights on, but he said he didn’t want to, so I left.

  I also turned down a lot of offers, and I often wonder what could have been. There were many guys looking for threesomes with their friends, and there was an older gentleman who wanted to role-play with him being a coach and me being the “bad jock.” I didn’t like sleeping around, but I was lonely and wanted to be with someone. It was really embarrassing that I was worse at dating men than I was at dating women. I did make some platonic friends online, and I would go to the gay bars occasionally. I never told my co-workers, my other straight friends, or my family. I just couldn’t accept myself. Luckily, I did find another hobby that occupied some time.

  Even though I didn’t like talking in front of others or being the center of attention, in my early twenties I wanted to start doing standup comedy. Nobody could believe that I went up on stage in front of a crowded audience. The first time I did so was in November 2005 for a contest that the Albany Comedy Works was having for amateurs. I went up first and only did two minutes. Saint John’s, my former high school, had made the news after an English teacher was busted having sex with four of her students. Since it was a Catholic school, the first joke I made was that the only Catholic value that any of the students were practicing was that nobody was using contraceptives.

  Then in 2006 and 2007, I took some comedy classes with an area comedian named Mike Irwin. I was still nervous on stage, but I liked doing it and received some laughs. I always looked innocent and very nice, but when I got on stage, I made some risqué jokes. I asked Mike once for advice because I felt awkward talking about sex with an older audience. Mike told me, “Don’t worry. Old people have fucked.” Mike passed away in 2008. I wrote on the funeral’s guestbook page that I went from somebody who nobody could imagine doing comedy to making people laugh in a stand-up comedy show.

  Then, in December 2008, Albany-based comedian Greg Aidala started an open-mic comedy series every Sunday at the Lark Tavern. I would open every set I did by saying, “Yeah, so has anybody ever tried to pick somebody up and you know you’re not getting anywhere? Like, they say, ‘Luke stop; Luke, leave me alone,’ or ‘Luke, if you talk about feeling my boobs again I’m going to have to tell Mom.’” It usually went over well. I loved doing comedy because I was an outsider all of my life, and I loved to see people in the audience smiling and laughing. Stand-up comedy shows were a great way for people to forget all their problems and just laugh. I was only heckled a f
ew times. I got called Charlie Brown by a woman who thought I looked like the Peanuts character, and when I did a set about the slang term tea bagging, one gay man was offended and said, “No balls in my face.”

  I graduated from nursing school in May 2010. While most college graduates who graduated in 2010 struggled to find a job, in March 2010, two months before I finished my degree, I already had a job offer. In May 2010, I began working as a registered nurse at a hospital on a floor that handled all sorts of medical issues, including some HIV patients.

  In October, I noticed that one HIV-positive patient had visitors I recognized from the gay dating/hookup sites. I had seen these people online, but I’d never talked to any of them. When I saw the patient getting discharged, I recognized the guy picking him up—he was somebody I’d had sex with twice.

  I was nervous. But since I’d never come out to anybody, I just kept it to myself. Somebody I had a random hookup with was very close to somebody who had full-blown AIDS. I always used protection but was still afraid. Luckily, I got tested for HIV soon after, and it came back negative.

  There still wasn’t much that could keep me from looking for hookups. I was a virgin until I was twenty-four, and now there was so much opportunity to get with other men, thanks mainly to the Internet. Only a month after my scare, I was again on the gay site Adam4Adam.com. I started chatting with somebody who was muscular and tall. Pat said he was looking to hook up and wanted me to come over. He said his roommate was going to be there, but that he would be sleeping on the couch.

  When I got out of my car, I noticed that Pat was very good-looking—even better than his pictures promised. Most people I met online weren’t as good-looking as their pictures. I was excited as I walked into his house, and he had me wait in the kitchen for a few minutes. Then I heard a voice from the other room. “Hey Luke, what’s going on?” I couldn’t see who it was at first, but then I saw that it was Jake, an HIV-positive man I’d met through another friend a few years earlier. Jake was nice, but he was careless and had HIV and past histories of syphilis and IV drug abuse. I went over and talked to him for a few minutes.