Live Fast, Die Young, and Leave a Beautiful Corpse

walking on sun sun shine, originally uploaded by JKönig.

by: anon

I am a member of the real Uptown community in Chicago, not the gentrified Andersonville that people like to call Uptown. I am talking Lawrence and Broadway, baby, and I have been here most of my life. I am an African American and 47 now, so needless to say I have seen a lot of change here over the years. I went to high school at Rizen Orr on the West Side, but Uptown is where I call home. I did a little college and I am looking to go back, but I am not in a hurry. I am satisfied with my job, and my home. It’s a nice one-bedroom apartment, just enough for me. I am a single man, and I am way past the roommate stage, and as far as relationships go, I am sure God will put that man in my life when the time is right.

Single don’t mean abstinent—I have a high sex drive, and I try to get off at least three times a day. I hunt, no shame in my game, shit, grocery stores, bathhouses, even walking down the street. No strings attached, I just need to cum, then—bye! I come from a time when it was fabulous to be gay, it was chic. Even if you were not gay, you wanted to be. Fashionable, good-looking—we brought that to the map. As far as sex went, I remember when the only thing you had to worry about was the clap, or gonorrhea. Life was just free, you could meet someone out discothequeing, and the next thing you know you were ten toes up and ten toes down in the alley.

I remember the first time I got burnt, me and my guys were cruising, looking for a caper at the Bijou Theater, next thing you know we were fucking this white boy, all in the aisle. About a day or two later my dick was spitting out all kinds of junk, so I ran to the clinic. That was the first time I got gonorrhea, but it sure wasn’t the last. Back then I was working at a porno book store, and for some reason I picked up this magazine called The Advocate—it had to have been in the late seventies or early eighties, because I was going to school to study medicine. It was talking about AIDS, and they labeled it the gay disease, profiling us and shit. I had a lot of friends that died in the years following, but a lot of us still didn’t use condoms. We had a saying—“Live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse.”

I didn’t see any disadvantage in using condoms—it was something about that flesh—but to me there is no disadvantage, just excuses. To think about it, I don’t know why I didn't catch HIV, I was doing all I could to get it. I am a top, and a few of my friends who were tops got infected with HIV, and I watched them transition. Before that, I just saw bottoms catching it and dying from it. That made me think a little bit, and my family was in my ear about strapping up, too. Now, I am not going to claim a saint, I use them now, but not all the time.

I’ll say two out of three encounters I use condoms, and I still play Russian roulette and bet on my own intuition with the other one. It feels good to have made it to this age, and I know that condom usage had a lot to do with it.