Still, I’ve been dropped like a hot sack of potatoes because of my status. I once dated a guy for a month without having sex because I liked him so much and I wanted him to really get to know me. When I told him, he never spoke to me again.
Then again, I might have done the same thing. I’ll never forget the first time a big muscle daddy came to my house to hook up when I was twenty years old and he told me he was positive. I told him I couldn’t do it.
I look back at all the people who have lived with, dated with, struggled with, and come to terms with HIV and my heart bleeds with gratitude and empathy. So many of them didn’t live to see the privilege of getting to survive as an HIV+ person. It’s one reason why, as a thirty-two-year-old living with HIV, with the privilege and microphone I now have, I rail against the way this country’s government responded—and continues to respond—to the HIV/AIDS crisis. It is one of the biggest losses of life in American history. So many people let it happen right in front of their faces and didn’t lift a finger to help. So often queer people are the butt of a joke or seen as disposable. Our lives aren’t valued.
I’ve had access to medication that’s allowed me to live a long life where I can fulfill all my hopes and dreams. If I didn’t know that I was HIV+, I would never know that I was HIV+. What I mean by that is: I take a pill every day now, and I see a doctor every three months, but other than that, I’ve done nothing but get cuter, realize my dreams, look better topless than I’ve ever looked before, and my new figure-skating curves? Don’t even get me started. Postdiagnosis, I’ve accomplished more than many HIV-negative people will ever have the chance to do.
We’ve made huge strides because of Ryan White, Princess Diana, Elizabeth Taylor, and countless other activists, like Ruth Coker Burks, who have given so much to make up for all the people who sat around and watched it happen. And for all the hardships that I put my family through, they never let me go. Even after I got HIV, they never cast me out on the street. So many others didn’t have the same love and acceptance for their own loved ones with HIV.
There’s so much more work that has to be done around this conversation, and that’s part of why I’m telling you this now, as hard as it is.
In a lot of this country, you can be treated as a felon for living with HIV. Someone can have their whole world turned upside down because of archaic laws that are written to criminalize and demonize people with HIV—whether it’s people being harassed or incarcerated, or being denied refugee status based on their HIV. There are too many outdated laws and regulations that negatively impact and further stigmatize people living with HIV. We need to see policy that reflects the modern medical understanding of what living with HIV/AIDS is. HIV is a health issue—not a criminal one, and not a moral one. Anyone can get it.
Homosexuality and HIV stigmatization is a big problem in the United States and all over the world. In places like Chechnya, the Middle East, parts of Africa, Asia, and even in the US—where homosexuality and HIV/AIDS are so rampantly stigmatized that it can be nearly impossible to get medication, and as misinformation is pervasive—the spread of disease is on the rise. The CDC and the New York Times have done incredible work on the silent stigma ravaging the American South. HIV doesn’t care; it affects everyone. But with what we know, we can stop the suffering HIV is causing.
My HIV infection would end up helping me learn to love myself so much more than I ever had before. When I got HIV, I felt that I wasn’t allowed to be seen as sexy or desirable. I had to work so much harder to fall in love with and accept where I’d come to in my life, and forgive myself for all the decisions I’d made to get there. That wasn’t an overnight process. It was a daily one. To a lesser degree, even today, it still is. Life is so much a daily exercise in learning to love yourself and forgive yourself, over and over.
Of course, it meant that my St. Louis experiment had failed and would turn out to be just a blip—and a pretty ugly mistake at that. But, hey, Nancy Kerrigan didn’t give up in ’94 when she was attacked with a metal police baton.
Much like Nancy, I had a lot of work to do for the life Olympics that I never could have known was waiting for me back in Los Angeles.
I’d hit bottom. Now it was time to rebuild.
Chapter 10
The Khaleesi Within*
*Except That Whole Unfortunate Ending
BEFORE I MOVED BACK TO LA, I PULLED OFF PERHAPS THE GREATEST heist (of my own money) the world has ever seen. Ocean’s 8 had nothing on me. My grandfather had gifted me some money. (Enough to buy a sensible vehicle. Not, like, a house. But holy mother of gratitude, did this gesture ever save my ass.) The catch was: I didn’t have autonomy over that money until I was thirty-five. But I could get some—with permission—starting at twenty-five. That could amount to a few thousand dollars per year, depending on how good a year it was for advertising.
I knew come hell or high water, Los Angeles was the key-holder to my future. But my family thought that the key to my future was having COBRA health insurance, working in the basement of the newspaper in my hometown, and being close enough to family that they could peel me off the floor if I died of full-blown AIDS. Not me, not now! I thought to myself.
So with the poise and strength of Michelle Kwan in the 2001 World Championships, I collected myself and sauntered into my uncle’s office. He happened to be my grandpa’s money manager.
“Hi, Uncle Dominik!” I said breezily. “Papa left a message with your secretary—I came in to get a check for five thousand five hundred dollars from my account. That was my Christmas present this year.”
He looked at me, unsure. But I assured him that we had all discussed it and the lack of message from my grandfather was just a holiday oversight.
I tapped my toe with a growing angst as his secretary brought me my check. I took it, went straight to Bank of America, deposited the check, packed up my Kia Rio, called my mom, told her that I was done in St. Louis—oops, sorry, love you, mean it, bye!—and I was back to California.
Sergei, understanding my plight, helped me to get together a bachelor apartment in West LA. I wanted to be out of the fray of West Hollywood with wider streets and less parking meter pressure. I lived in a ten-foot-by-ten-foot studio with a kitchenette that had a minifridge, a stovetop burner, a shower that I had to wash half my body in at a time, and I paid $800 for the privilege of it. That was what I could afford.
I knew that I didn’t have a ton of money to last me for very long and I needed to make like McKayla Maroney at the 2012 Summer Olympics and vault myself into a successful hair clientele as soon as possible. So I started emailing and calling any clients I still had and found a cute little salon in Venice to rebuild from.
One of the first people I called was Erin Gibson. Erin is a successful writer and comedian who, years earlier, I had poached as a color client while I was working at Tonia Skoekenkaya Tutberidze. When we first met, she was doing her own color out of a box—which had worked for her until she gave herself fluorescent orange roots.
“Erin, why do you have this gorgeous haircut with such angry roots?” I asked her that day.
“I’m not paying those outrageous color prices!” she said.
I told her I would do her roots for fifty bucks out of my house at night after I got home from the salon. So she started coming over to my place one Thursday a month so I could touch up her color. She was a headshot photographer on the side, and I always asked for her advice on things—how she had become successful, and how she’d navigated her life so far.
Not long before I’d left LA for St. Louis, I’d told Erin that I wanted to make a website, and that I’d do her hair for free if she took cute headshots of me for it. I promised her three root touchups in exchange for her services. But after the first one, I bounced for St. Louis without finishing the job, even though she’d already taken the pictures of me. It nagged at me, that I’d done her dirty like that.
At my new salon on Abbot Kinney in Venice, I was stressed to show them that I could
deliver clients. Erin was my last client of the day that first day. Since I’d left for St. Louis like a ghost in the night without saying goodbye, I wasn’t sure if that had left a bad taste in her mouth. But as soon as I saw her, she hugged me and it was like no moments had passed since we’d seen each other last. Our friendship picked up right where it left off.
We made small talk. She asked me what had happened in St. Louis, and I told her the cold hard truth: that I’d been introduced to a total bitch named methamphetamine. We’d hung out a handful of times, had our fifteen minutes in the sun (and by sun I mean scorched earth hellfire), but those few times were enough for me to be introduced to her other friend, HIV. (One has a way of leading to the other.) I wasn’t sure what Erin’s reaction would be to me, since I hadn’t told many people about this yet, but it was only one of calm compassion. Not one thing I had said had moved one hair on her head. Her ability to not see me any differently, even after that news, left me completely wigless.
As I started doing Erin’s hair, my station partner, Molavanda, and her client started talking about Game of Thrones. I overheard and instantly jumped into the conversation: “Oh yeah, honey—I’ve been watching her. This little blond baby, she wears a sash and she’s got such bad attitude, honey—she wants to kill everybody. And Christina Aguilera, honey, somebody done stole her dragons and she’s mad as hell because she can’t find her eggs anywhere. And then Mr. Potato Head Dr. Evil Guy, honey, he’s over there doing some other stuff.”
“Wait, what is this all about?” Erin said, laughing.
I shook myself out of my recapping fugue state. “What?” I said.
When Erin collected herself, she had a look on her face like she had an idea. “We need to do this for Funny or Die,” she said.
“Do what?” I said.
“Recap Game of Thrones!”
I thought she meant doing a quick little video on our phones. I didn’t realize she was talking about a full set, a full series, with lights and a crew.
* * *
Four months later, I found myself at a little salon on Melrose to tape the first two episodes of a little baby idea called Gay of Thrones. We didn’t know exactly how it would look—if it would be a show that showed me watching Game of Thrones, or if it would strictly be me in a salon with a client and we would recap the show. In the first episode, it was basically a shocked client—played by our producer, because we didn’t have a guest to play the part—getting his hair cut while I went on a tirade of incorrect pronunciations of everything on the show. It felt like it was a stream of consciousness of saying the funniest things I could think of as I recalled the first two hours of the show that I’d seen. But I hadn’t really watched the show that carefully, so we were all just doing our best.
Erin tried to go through each episode before shooting and remind me of funny things I’d said, but nothing stressed me out harder than trying to learn lines. All I wanted to do was get out in front of that camera and have her yell out a scene to me, and I would riff on what had happened until we found something she liked. Then I’d do it again—shorter, tighter, faster—until the recap was perfect.
Erin took something that started off as this random thing—an off-the-cuff monologue moment from me—and turned it into something with a much more polished voice. She made it her own and got it to where it is. I definitely had a hand in building it, but there was a group of people who crafted that show—nobody more so than Erin. I wouldn’t be writing the words of this book right now if it wasn’t for her. She and I may not talk every day, but outside of my mom, there’s nobody in the world who has changed my life more than Erin Gibson has. It’s crazy when I think about how much her friendship has impacted the course of my life. Even when we’ve had creative growing pains, we were always able to grow together, and I will always look up to her so much and strive to use my voice authentically because of the opportunity that she created for me. (And if you haven’t read her book, Feminasty: The Complicated Woman’s Guide to Surviving the Patriarchy Without Drinking Herself to Death, you should read it, because it’s smart and stunning. Just like Erin.)
Anyway, about halfway through the season, I went out on a Saturday night with my girlfriends. All the girls told me they were doing molly that night, and it was no big deal—it was just two hours, all you had to do was take a teeny-tiny little pill, and you’d feel totally great and normal.
“Perfect!” I said. Remember that whole two-steps-forward-one-back thing?
At nine thirty that night, I took the molly. Great idea, I know. Three hours later, I was gone. My eyes were seven-eighths of my face. I looked like a late ’90s alien. I was in the corner of my apartment watching what looked like brick walls opening and closing, hearing weird voices in my head in the accents of local newscasters I remembered from my childhood, flashing back to everyone I’d ever had sex with but wished I hadn’t.
I looked over at the clock. Suddenly it was eleven thirty in the morning. I had to be on set at five thirty that evening. “Girl,” I whispered to myself. “Go to sleep.” I had been up the whole night. The minutes inched by.
Finally, I called my friend Helenskaya from rehab. Helenskaya had been horrifically addicted to meth—like hard-core, gnarly Iowa meth—and when I first met her, I’d helped her take out these really gross beaded braids she’d had put in when she was trying to get sober two years earlier. They were such a tangled mess, it was a miracle we didn’t just have to cut them out. But Helenskaya had stayed sober ever since and turned into a gorgeous thriving lawyer. I knew she’d know what to do.
“Helenskaya, girl,” I said. “I accidentally did this weird molly and my jaw feels like it’s locked and my pupils are all crazy and I can’t come down. What do I do?”
“Girl,” she said, “the first thing you’re gonna do is you’re gonna go get you a cheeseburger with a lot of cheese and a lot of bacon on it.”
“Okay,” I said, exhaling.
“Then, you’re gonna go get you a nice cup of 2 percent milk and you’re gonna drink all of that.”
“Okay.”
“You’re gonna go get in the shower, girl, and after that you’re gonna feel like a whole new woman. And when you go out into the world, you just gotta distract from your face so nobody notices that you’re all fucked up and shit.”
“Got it!” I said. “Gotta go!”
I ran to Hardee’s and got a double bacon cheeseburger and a 2 percent milk. I chugged the milk. I devoured the burger. I smoked a blunt. I started to come down. But still not enough.
Finally, I realized that the most genius thing I could ever do was tie my hair into a topknot, then back-comb the topknot into the biggest possible top bun, then take the longest scarf that I could find and tie it into an asymmetrical side-bow. Then, I thought, nobody would notice that my pupils were the size of my face and my eyes were completely black.
When I arrived to Funny or Die for our shoot, Erin met me outside. I was forty minutes late, with a big-ass scarf in my hair.
When I got out of the car, she looked at me like I was insane. “Oh my God,” she said. “What happened to you?”
I stammered for a minute, then confessed.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Let’s just get you a cup of coffee, huh?”
But the craziest thing was that somehow I still nailed it. I gave a stunning performance for that episode of Gay of Thrones. But it was a moment for me where I learned that I was under a new sense of pressure. If I wanted to be in front of the camera, I had to start prioritizing my health and well-being above my need to fit in or have fun.
A lot of the self-inflicted wounds that I experienced in my twenties were because of situations that I found myself in socially where I would get stuck in this idea that I needed to be “normal.” That could mean, in this case, doing a little pill of molly to be normal, because these girls I was out with could do it and seemed to suffer no consequences. Why couldn’t I?
But for me, because of my trauma, if I did those things, there
was a chance I could be having sex with weirdos, or making decisions that could really negatively impact my relationship with myself and further traumatize me. That was something that I resented and resisted for a long time. Letting go of that idea that I needed to be normal or that I somehow wasn’t normal just because I needed to prioritize self-care to be healthy is the biggest gift I’ve ever given myself. Being normal is being completely unique, because nobody’s the same.
Normal, honey? Who is she, anyway?
Erin and I started to pick up more momentum out of that first season. We had developed an idea for a Gay of Thrones spinoff show, but it was a hard sell. We sat in meetings where the executives seemingly were unable to put me in a box that they thought would work in the way my catchphrase “Where are my dragons?” worked. They didn’t seem that interested in anything else we had to say.
At one of those pitch meetings, as we were pinballing off each other, doing our Tina Fey–Amy Poehler dual-creator realness act, an executive asked us about something having to do with the first season of Game of Thrones.
“Oh, right,” I said. “Like when that crazy guy was in hard shoulder pads and that other poor lady was pregnant, honey, and she did a full coup de grâce on her boss and took her baby and did a reverse swan dive over the cliff!”
The room fell quiet. “That was Spartacus,” somebody said. “Not Game of Thrones.”
“Oh,” I said. It turned out the reason Erin and I never really knew what was going on in the third season of Game of Thrones was because neither of us had seen the first two seasons. I never even really understood anything that was happening because I’d watched Spartacus in rehab all those years earlier—never Game of Thrones. But I ended up becoming a hard-core GoT superfan who devoured the first two seasons . . . I was just a little late to the party.
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