THE ART OF UN-DYING:

A 33-Year Middle Finger to HIV, AIDS and Haters—an Interlude

The thing about surviving is that only now—thirty-three years into HIV, fifteen years past active addiction, and on the far side of the most public of death spirals—can I comfortably sit with myself and understand, without excusing, the choices that brought me here.

Despite myself, and despite my own tenacious appetite for self-destruction, I am still here.

I’m still here after calling Alain from a payphone tucked beside the check-in desk at UCSF’s Parnassus campus, choking out the words “I have HIV” before collapsing into that raw, hysterical sobbing where your lungs simply refuse to pull air. I still hear his voice across the telephone line: “Come home. It’ll be okay. We’ll get through this.” Those words are the anchor that has held us together for more than three decades.

I am still here after staring down a drug dealer with the barrel of his pistol shoved hard into my gut, telling him, “Go ahead. I’m already dead. You’re the one who’ll pay the price.” To which he lowered the gun, muttered, “You’re one crazy honkey,” and stepped out of my car without taking a dime.

I’m still here after thrush became a systemic invasion. The infection bled seamlessly from my throat down into the depths of my intestines, an invisible, creeping tide that left no part of my internal anatomy untouched, ushering in an alphabet of infections: PCP, CMV, Crypto, Toxo, Coccidioidomycosis, and neuropathy—all with a nadir CD4 count of nine.

I’m still here after the Sustiva-fueled nightmares, the Ziagen zaps to my brain, and the peripheral neuropathy ddC left behind.

I’m still here despite the hundreds of times a needle pierced my skin. Sometimes it delivered the pharmaceuticals meant to keep my cells alive; sometimes it delivered the street poison meant to drown out the mental pain. It punctured my soul, dropping me to the absolute floor of my existence, only to force myself back up each time. There is a dark comedy in using a needle to stay alive after using one to try and die.

I’m still here long enough to know that only through true acceptance of myself, and of others and their choices, can I begin to heal and find everlasting peace. I’m still here, but I’m not all the way there yet. There is no room for hate in my heart, even for the people who hate me the most. I’ve lived long enough to appreciate the quiet relief of that grace.

And yet, if you rode with me on Gulf of Mexico Drive, not a single trace of that wreckage would be visible.

There I’d be: tailored jacket, polished shoes, Ray-Bans catching the fierce Gulf light, standing inside a seven-million-dollar coastal compound on Longboat Key talking terms with the CEO of a national healthcare chain. Through fifty feet of floor-to-ceiling impact glass, the Gulf of Mexico stretched out like turquoise glass against the blinding, cool-powder quartz sand. Outside, a negative-edge pool spilled silently toward the mangroves. Inside, a wealthy couple from Greenwich was having a mild existential crisis over the kitchen island.

“Jim,” the husband said, running a manicured hand across twelve feet of honed Calacatta marble, “do you think the grain in this stone clashes with the bleached oak cabinetry? In this light, it almost reads… aggressive.”

I smiled the practiced, serene smile of a REALTOR, “It’s a natural vein, Richard. It brings movement into the room. It breathes.”

He nodded thoughtfully, appeased by the theatre of it.

Meanwhile, behind my eyes, the tape was playing.

The first bathroom I remember was a wooden outhouse with a crescent moon carved into the pine door behind our home in Leatherwood, where we wiped with torn pages from the Sears & Roebuck catalog.

And here I was, standing in air conditioning so clean it smelled like money, listening to a man whose biggest problem on Earth was whether his imported Italian stone was too dramatic for his morning espresso.

People often ask how an addict who burned his entire life to the ground ends up selling second and third homes with seven-figure views to the top one percent. The secret is simple: People mistake my drive for tenacity, but when you have already died, nothing at a closing table can scare you.

In real estate, everyone is posturing. The buyers, the sellers, the attorneys, the brokers—they all walk into the room armed with egos, leverage, and fear. They think the stakes are life and death because an escrow deposit is on the line.

I’d stand in those waterfront homes, quiet, watchful, entirely unmovable. Why would I break a sweat? Nobody in those homes had ever had a snub-nosed revolver pressed into their ribs. Nor had they likely ever had to call their partner from a hospital payphone to deliver a death sentence. To them, negotiation was a blood sport. To me, it was just recess.

Surviving the fire didn’t just leave scars; it gave me an unshakeable kind of armor. You can’t intimidate a man who has already slept in the dirt and bargained with God just to see the sun come up.

I’d close the deal, hand over the heavy key fob, and watch the buyers pop a bottle of Dom Pérignon on their terrace. As the cork flew over the railing and the sun melted into the Gulf in brilliant shades of tangerine and violet, I’d take a quiet step back into the shadow of the foyer.

I didn't envy their millions. I didn't resent their ease. I just stood there on the travertine, took a deep, clean breath into lungs that were never supposed to make it past thirty, and whispered the only truth that ever mattered: I am still here.

Success in high-end Florida real estate doesn't just breed envy; it breeds a very specific, polite brand of country-club viciousness. On the surface, the Sarasota luxury market is all proper manners, chilled sauvignon blanc, and manicured tropical lawns. But underneath the stucco and the ocean breezes, it is a ruthless, territorial swamp.

When a gay outsider bred in the Appalachian hills—a guy who didn’t go to the right prep schools, didn’t inherit a seat on the hospital foundation board, and didn’t spend his twenties networking at the yacht club—starts vacuuming up multi-million-dollar clients on the barrier islands, the knives come out fast.

At first, it was just the standard whispering campaigns over dry martinis at the Field Club.

“Do you really know who your agent is?”

“I hear he has quite the… colorful past.”

“Darling, with his health, are you even sure he’ll be around to see your deal close?”

They tried weaponizing everything: the HIV, the addiction, the tattoos beneath the French cuffs, the old court dockets from decades ago. Competitors would slip anonymous printouts of decades-old police blotters into the mailboxes of my prospective sellers. They whispered to title attorneys, gossiped to loan officers, and tried to convince high-net-worth clients that hiring me was a reputational hazard.

In their minds, they were the gatekeepers of paradise, and I was the barbarian who had somehow climbed over the gate and stolen the silver. What these people never understood was the catastrophic miscalculation they were making.

They were used to fighting with people who played by country-club rules—people whose greatest fear was being snubbed at the valet stand or cut from the charity gala committee. They thought a whisper could destroy me because a whisper would have destroyed them. They had no concept of where I had come from.

When you’ve had a two-by-four used to beat you by a preacher with the strength of a bear, an anonymous letter from a rival realtor in a tennis skirt doesn’t even register. When you’ve survived the plague years watching your entire circle die while the government looked the other way, a replanted Dallas socialite clutching her pearls at your background is pure comedy.

I’d seen that brand of cruelty before. I had tasted it years earlier in Wilton Manors’ gay community—my own community, until the public flogging began. But back then, I was too stubborn, too tenacious, and far too irreverent to give a damn. I refused to fold. I refused to hide.

But when you refuse to run, they escalate.

It culminated in the ultimate, gutless act: someone pitched poison over my fence.

Looking down at the sterile linoleum floor of the clinic as Bailey lay there lifeless, my mind went straight back to my pawpaw marching toward the bluff with that trash bag full of puppies. It was the exact same darkness I had fled as a kid, just dressed up in rainbows and feather boas. They wanted to break me. They wanted me to unravel, to lash out, to publicly self-destruct so they could point their rhinestone-encrusted fingers and say, “See? We told you what he was.”

They wanted a fight. Instead, I gave them my absence.

I did what any animal does when the trap closes. I ran.

The Road to the Final Third

I fled to Palm Springs first. I thought the desert was still the place where ghosts went to reset, where the dry mountain air could cauterize a fresh wound. What I didn't understand was that in a digital world, you can’t outrun a shadow. The grapevine had outpaced my car. The whispering campaigns, the screenshots, and the curated venom of social media groups had poisoned the well before I even turned the ignition off. The verdict had been rendered in absentia. My fate was sealed in the desert before I unpacked a single bag.

So I pointed the car north and east, retreating all the way back to the Appalachian hills, back to the source of the river.

But you can't step into the same river twice. While I was there, searching for solid ground among the coal dust and old ghosts, my father died. The man who had given me life, who had called me on the morning the towers fell, was suddenly gone. The last remaining anchor to my childhood pulled loose from the riverbed, leaving me entirely adrift—though not before he told me he was proud of me, and that he loved me.

With the hills feeling smaller and colder than I remembered, I turned around and ran back to Florida. Not to the glittering, cutthroat barrier islands of the Gulf Coast, but to the quiet, unassuming scrub of Sebastian on the Atlantic side.

And that was where the running finally ran out of road.

For two straight years I lived inside a self-imposed purgatory. With nowhere left to flee, the exile turned inward. I dragged myself through the mud of my own history. I pulled up every piece of wreckage, every person I had ever wounded, and every catastrophic decision I had ever made. I put my ego on the chopping block and systematically hacked away at it. I beat out every lingering shred of arrogance, every toxic delusion of specialness, and every comforting lie that whispered I was somehow better or worse than anyone else.

My body broke first, and my mind followed, turning into an unyielding torture chamber on a continuous loop. Sleep became an unaffordable luxury; the nights were just wide-awake vigils staring into the ceiling while the ledger of my life demanded payment.

Eventually, you reach the absolute edge of that cliff. You sit on the floor of a dark room and realize there are only two choices left: you either make your grand exit from this life, or you get off the floor and choose to live.

I chose to live. To once again defy the expected and give life a big middle finger.

And the only way forward was the hardest thing a man with my past can ever do: I began to forgive myself.

I stopped measuring my worth solely against the scale of my sins. Slowly, quietly, I allowed myself to remember the good I had done—the people I had fed, the dying men I had comforted during the plague, the friends I had housed, the small lights I had kept burning in the dark, even if it felt minuscule compared to the wreckage.

Somewhere in the deep, late stages of that grueling inventory, a final revelation arrived: revenge is just another mask that hate wears. All the schemes of retribution, all the fantasies of exposing the hypocrites, the liars, and the saboteurs—they weren't justice. They were just poison I was drinking while expecting my enemies to die.

The moment I let go of the need to settle the score, the air in my lungs changed. I took the deepest breath of my life.

For thirty-three years, I had lived in a defensive crouch, bracing for the next infection, the next betrayal, the next funeral, waiting for a thirty-year-old death sentence to finally be carried out. In Sebastian, I stopped waiting to die. For the very first time in my life, I started planning how to live.

It took three years across three states to clear the wreckage, but I have finally found the ground beneath my feet. This is the final third of my life. I don't need an altar, a real estate closing table, a luxury resort, or an audience to validate my existence.

I just need my hands in the earth, the open sky, and the quiet space to guard this hard-won peace. The haters are still out there, buried in their own venom, but they no longer occupy a single inch of my mind.

I am still here, and I’m content with that—finally.