Michael McColly Remembers World AIDS Day

In The After-Death Room: Journey into Spiritual Activism, Michael McColly writes about his encounters around the world with people who are confronting the AIDS crisis head-on and helping those who are HIV-positive to live, and die, with dignity. In this essay, he looks back at his personal history of World AIDS Day, which has been formally commemorated on December 1 since 1988 but, as you’ll see here, can’t be pinned down quite so easily.

My first World AIDS Day was in 1981, when I was sitting in a thatch hut in a small Senegalese village listening to the BBC and heard the news from America about a “mysterious virus that had been discovered in homosexual and bisexual men.” I had thought I had run far enough away from my conflicted sexual life by joining the Peace Corps, but when that announcer in London let loose upon the world the word AIDS, it was as if the world had shrunk and the great African sun had turned pale.

My second World AIDS Day came on a chilly April morning in Chicago. I’d snuck out of my North Side neighborhood to a public health clinic on the near South Side to get results from a test nobody wants to take. I remember the young African American men sitting in silence with their baseball caps pulled like mine down over their eyes. I remember the voice of the Latina social worker, “you weren’t expecting this, were you?”

For the next few years I didn’t celebrate any World AIDS Days. I went on no walks. I went to no fundraisers. I wore no red ribbons. When I heard that word—that word that lived inside my body on television, I turned it off. Every day was for me World AIDS Day. I’d joined a worldwide tribe growing larger by some 3,000 every day. I didn’t need to be reminded.

But in 2000, I traveled to South Africa to attend the International AIDS Conference to teach yoga to people living with HIV. Yoga had given me back my body, and in South Africa activists from around the world had given me back my spirit. And for the next two years, with my credit cards and notebooks, I traveled to the far corners of Asia and Africa and into the forgotten neighborhoods of Chicago to listen to the stories of those who live every day inside this virus; I wrote down the stories of activists and doctors, social workers and sex workers, Buddhist monks and Baptist ministers, orphaned children and incarcerated men.

Last year, on World AIDS Day, I found myself on the snowy campus of Indiana University. My alma mater had asked me to come to speak on the AIDS pandemic. I told them the stories of the activists I met in South Africa; I told them about the AIDS doctor in India who started the first organization for people living with HIV as he does; and I told them about the Senegalese sex workers who cried out to Allah to protect me from death when I told them my status. But the story that those students from Kokomo and Terra Haute probably remember most, is the one that came from their classmate at the end of my talk. She raised her shaking hand, and in a voice choking back tears, she told her classmates something she’d never admitted publicly before: “For ten years my parents forbade me or my sister from speaking with my brother because he had AIDS.”

This day is a day of tragedy and triumph, but most importantly it’s a day to listen to the stories that must be retold and retold for this disease to finally come to an end.

1 December 2006 | guest authors |