For four years, the Association for the Fight against AIDS would fight against discrimination and promote condom use. Instead of supporting us, the government and its Ministry of Health harassed us. While only homosexuals were dying, they thought, why stop the epidemic? The fight against the virus, despite not wanting it, became a full-time job. No one wanted to show their face, especially with such a feared disease; individuals came to me to fight for them, and these small battles put my face in the press, on the radio, and on television. And when I realized it, I became the personification of prevention. Soon, the government and civil society sought me out to help me or to destroy me.
The director of the AIDS Control Department of the Ministry of Health informed me, over the phone, for example, that three sick people had claimed to have had relations with me. It was clear that the woman was pleased: she now had a card to use against me and rationalize that my criticism of her management was only for personal interest. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but it’s important for the Ministry that you get tested, so you don’t infect more young people,” she requested.
I entered my doctor’s office at the American Clinic.
The man who didn’t know the fear he had started playing with the result. “Do you really want to know if 181
you have it or not?” he said to me with an ironic smile.
“Yes, tell me once and for all. I’ve been living with this uncertainty since 1983,” I replied with a trembling voice.
“It’s negative!” he said, laughing.
The doctor got scared when he saw me crying and hugging him. The next day, my partner and I went to Cartago on a pilgrimage to the Virgin of the Angels.
He had made the promise, and I couldn’t let him go alone, knowing that he didn’t like walking.
Not everything was negative. Two years later, I received money from Holland and the United States to create a prevention manual for gays. The amount would allow me to hire some members of our group.
The results were so good that in 1990, we received funds from The Netherlands for a regional prevention program.
Having these resources, I made a mistake: I hired as health professionals those who had been our volun-teers until then. The Institute was born with a group of people who were not prepared to carry out prevention campaigns and who believed they were hired solely because they were homosexuals.
However, the fruits and the hardships kept accumulating. One of them, to my surprise, had to do with Judaism. Some of the donors from the Dutch Socialist Party were pro-Palestinian, and this was nothing more than disguised anti-Semitism. When I tried to celebrate the Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 182
and to announce that Jews, homosexuals, and gypsies were chosen for extermination, the diplomats objected to including a section about the Jews and told me that we did not deserve a separate celebration.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing: I saw their rationalizations that many others suffered during the war as an excuse to avoid facing their collaborationist past. It was a fact that Holland easily and eagerly handed over the Jews to the Nazis and that three-quarters of them died in the camps. They did the same later with the Muslims in former Yugoslavia.
Homosexuality no longer represented for me a home, a nationality, and a refuge. Now when the new Dutch Minister of Foreign Development decided to end the programs in Latin America, I took the opportunity for them to find another face to represent them.