Heavy Duty
by James Lehman
Since the last article I wrote, "Your Under 21. You can't Be GAY!
Sorry, Kid" was of a rather strange tone, I've decided to write a sequel
to it.
I have a rather tainted view of recreational sex. When I was
younger, I kind of felt like I had to keep up. I was pretty regular at
trying to find someone I could fool around with. All the while, I knew
that HIV was out there, so I only did certain things that I was told were
of little or no risk. Well, let me tell you something. Hepatitis-B is out
there too, and it's about one-thousand times easier to catch. Just
before I turned twenty-five, I got very sick with what I thought was the
flu. I felt like crap and it just wouldn't go away. I mentioned to a friend
that my pee looked like ice tea and she said "Oh my God! You've got
Hepatitis!" I got tested, and sure enough I had it. It very nearly killed
me. I developed two perforations from my duodenal artery into my
duodenum. I was bleeding to death. I fell into a coma for about six
days. I came out of the coma to find myself on a 100% oxygen
respirator. My blood chemistry was shot to hell. I was delusional and
regularly hallucinating. I was given 0% chance to live. When they
thought they had a window of opportunity, they did an emergency
ulcer surgery. I was in intensive care at Akron City Hospital for twenty-
nine days. Obviously, I lived through the whole ordeal, but due to the
lack of blood and oxygen to my extremities, I suffered a lot of
permanent nerve damage and lost both of my femoral arteries, the
blood supply to my hips. After about a year and a half, my dead hips
finally wore down to the point where I had to have metal replacements
put in. For less than $200 I could have had a series of shots to
immunize myself against Hepatitis-B. I don't need to worry about that
now.
After my release from the hospital and during the time that my
hips were degenerating, I went through a very long recovery. I was
unable to work and became financially ruined. One day, a friend gave
me a phone number of a guy he thought I might like. This guy never
went out, so I would never have met him any other way. I called him
the next night and made plans to go to his home the following day.
When I got there, I never left. That was about four and a half years ago.
As you might guess this guy is Terry Zimmerman, co-publisher of this
magazine. He was with me through both of my hip replacement
surgeries.
Now that we are partners in life, neither of us has to spend any
time or thought on pursuing our own personal gay dating scenes. So
we have both decided to look outward and try to make a positive
difference in this area's gay community as a whole.
The way I see it, advancing the social position of gay people
should be played like a good game of chess. There are certain moves
that need to be made before other strategies can be put into action.
Passing ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, into law, I
think, is critical. Protecting one's source of income is probably the
biggest reason why gay people stay in the closet.
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