But did you have to get THAT over them??
That’s what I’d like to say to a friend of mine who recently died of something HIV related.
When I first knew him decades ago he wasn’t a virgin, wasn’t closeted, but was pretty much celibate–because he was terrified of AIDS, and also, I think, because of hang-ups relating to growing up in the Bible Belt.
He moved away from NY and I didn’t see him for a long time. When I saw him over the last ten years he was over his inhibitions. He’d become in fact rather reckless. I would laugh and say to him, “Is the same sweet little hung-up person I knew. . .”
He never told me he was sick and living across the country I hadn’t seen him in four years
I left a VM for him a few weeks before he died, and when he returned it he said he sounded the way he did because he was getting over bronchitis. Soon after that, his sister called me to tell me what was happening.
Was his secrecy a hangover of some kind of guilt? As another friend of mine used to say, “All extremes meet.”