Kudos to the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network for their Think B4 You Speak campaign that helps people understand that the popular saying “that's so gay” is the kind of language that hurts people's feelings (and sometimes causes those people to wanna blow your head off).Now can GLSEN or somebody work on a campaign to snuff out popular phrases like “clean” and “disease-free.” Those are the words often used by people who are looking for love and sex and want to avoid getting HIV/AIDS.
As in, my attributes are “I'm good looking, in good shape, and clean and disease-free, so UB2 (because I don't want to get HIV/AIDS and become dirty and disease-ridden).
Of course, I don't mind people wanting to avoid acquiring HIV/AIDS or any other medical complication in life. What I do mind is people avoiding people with disease as a way of avoiding the disease. That's ignorance, fear and all the other negative shit that makes people hate and separate.
People who are HIV-negative can have all kinds of safer sex with HIV-positive people and still walk away without getting HIV or AIDS. So not only are the HIV-negative people in question discriminating against me and my kind, they're doing it with some of the most hideous, heartless and hateful phrases humans ever dreamt up.
Just like that's so gay, words like clean, bug-free and disease-free represent the kind of language that is harmful, insensitive and divisive. Personally, I know of at least one person who thinks, just for a moment, of blowing off the heads of every thoughtless, clean and disease-free, inhumane human who chooses to use those words. And if one person is pissed, others are pissed, too.How many ways can you tell the world you're better than someone else?
How many ways can you say it to their face?
Would you say it to their face?
Come say it to my face.
But let me put away my weapons first. Now go ahead. Say it. Call yourself clean and disease-free to my face. I wanna watch your eyes tremble as you try to decipher how an angry, dirty, disease-ridden black man that's so gay is gonna react to your words.
On a more personal note: Good thing I got my writing to work out my "issues."
Randy Boyd is a five-time Lambda Literary Award finalist and the author of four novels featuring main characters who are not "clean" and "disease-free." Randy himself has been the opposite of "clean" and "disease-free" since 1985, when at age 23, he found out he was HIV-positive, not HIV-negative (the correct medical terms).Also, check out, Would You Say That to Ryan White?
