Missing the Big Picture by Donovan, Luke (great book club books txt) 📕

people’s houses and once I even went to a man’s hotel room who was from out of town. The lights weren’t even on in his room. We had exchanged numbers after I replied to his post on Craigslist. He told me to wear boxer briefs and a baseball cap, since it was a big turnon for him, and I did.

I wasn’t having intercourse, but I was having oral sex. At first I liked it, but then I began to get scared. I was having sexual encounters with random people I didn’t know. What if I got an STD or HIV? After three or so of these encounters, I went down to the city’s health department and got tested. I was embarrassed to be sitting in the waiting room and shocked at the personal questions they asked me: did I have sex with men, women, or both; did I have oral or anal sex; was I giving or receiving. But I was the fool for playing Russian roulette with my health and not knowing the facts about STDs. I did the initial blood work for HIV, and then I had to have a cotton-swab insertion to test for chlamydia or gonorrhea. It was awful, and if anybody wonders why there are higher instances of chlamydia among women than men, I think it would have to be the way that it’s tested.

After that, I had to meet with another nurse for HIV counseling. I had never talked to anybody about gay sex before. When I told the nurse that I’d only had oral sex, she said, “Well, I’m not going to say you can never get HIV from oral sex.” Then she told me about a man who was performing oral sex on his partner and had dental work done earlier that day. His partner climaxed in his mouth, and then he became infected with the virus. One monumental point that she made was, “You’re young, and you’ve got a lot of living to do.” Then she told me that alcohol impairs judgment. “Sometimes you might meet a guy in a bar, and after a few drinks he looks like Brad Pitt,” she said. I am still thankful for that nurse for changing an anxiety-filled situation to something that really helped change my behavior. I came back three weeks later to find out my results. It was the same nurse. She smiled and said, “You’re fine.” Then she added, “And you better stay that way.” She then gave me a hug as I left.

The feeling of testing negative and knowing my HIV status was a natural high. I was so excited leaving the clinic that I almost got into a severe car accident and had to slam on the brakes as I left the parking lot. But, at least I was still disease free.

A couple of days later, I had a phone interview to work for a county department of health as a public health representative. I had started applying to different jobs because I found it insulting that I was making twenty-three thousand dollars a year at a job that required a bachelor’s degree. It was specifically in the partner notification program. Since I was tested only a few days earlier, I aced the interview and knew what the department was looking for: somebody who was nonjudgmental and wasn’t shocked by individuals who slept with fifty or one hundred sexual partners or who slept with men and women. About two weeks later, my potential supervisor called and said I didn’t get the position, but he said he was very impressed with me and that I could do the work. Ironically, I wasn’t offered the position because I didn’t have any experience working with people with STDs. So, I asked him where I could get this type of experience, and he said that most cities had organizations dedicated to providing services to people with STDs, HIV, and AIDS. He suggested I check and see if any of those local nonprofits were hiring.

CHAPTER 9

ALL GROWN UP

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

—George Bernard Shaw

In early 2007, a local news station approached some people walking in downtown Albany and asked what their New Year’s resolutions were. Most people said to lose weight, keep better contact with friends and family, and so on. When I was watching the interviews, I imagined that my own response would be to finally get a good job. I was depressed because I was still living at home at twenty-three, and I wanted to get a higher-paying job so I could move out of my mom’s home and become independent. I aggressively started searching for a new job. The previous March, I had taken a civil service test to be a caseworker for either the Department of Social Services or Child Protective Services. It wasn’t work that I really wanted to do, but the jobs came with great benefits. By early 2007, I had my first interview.

When I was driving home from my caseworker interview, the phone rang and it was the director of prevention from the AIDS Council, a local nonprofit in northeastern New York that provided services to individuals fighting HIV/AIDS. I scheduled an interview with the woman a week later. The position involved working with adolescents who were in residential treatment and providing them with education on HIV and STDs. I had never been so excited about a job before. The first interview went well, and only a day later, I received a call to schedule a second interview. The director of prevention informed me that it wasn’t going to be a standard question-and-answer interview. Instead, she asked me to prepare a simple ten-minute presentation on HIV/AIDS. I would need to give this presentation to three to ten prevention specialists who were going to pretend to