On Being Here: An Election in 2012

On a chilly Monday morning, I got up by 5:30am to cast my vote and be done with it. It was the last week of early voting. I was committed to avoiding the last-minute masses. There were no more than 15 folks ahead of me so I was quite pleased with myself. I began plotting out the balance of my morning. As folks traded accounts of round-the-block lines throughout Atlanta, I heard someone say, “Man, I’m just glad I made it here today.”

The year my friend Bruce told me that my swollen glands were the first sign of "it," Ronald Reagan was in office. Three savage winter years had passed without those Presidential lips publically uttering "its" name. Eddie Murphy had performed a skit about a husband getting "it" from his wife due to her habit of kissing her gay male friends. There was no empirical evidence that I had a chance of surviving "it". But I had Sandra, Derek, Karen, Michelle, Simone and Clara who would not let me walk alone. There were Assoto Saint, Donald Woods, Joseph Beam, Marlon Riggs and Essex Hemphill whose raised voices summoned me to find my own. And if I went down, I knew my brothers Colin Robinson and George Bellinger, Jr., who had remained HIV-negative, would pick up my fallen spear.

By the time I had moved to Atlanta in 1992, AIDS had already left its indelible stain. I had heard hilarious and heart-wrenching stories. Those stories marked loss beyond measure, rendered in memorial-quilt snapshots of real lives lived, evoked in the vigil chants of survivors who touched the untouchable, fed their beloved, wiped up the puke and shit, and were given neither a passing mention nor a proper place at the mourning site. I was one of the fortunate. I had a partner, Lenny, whose love was focused on keeping me alive. I had a doctor who challenged me to take responsibility for my health on the same day that he told me I was not just HIV-positive, I had AIDS.

I will never know why the voter behind me was grateful for “being here today”. I am grateful to him. His expression pulled me from the surface rippling of my mind, the to-do lists, the what-she-got-on bemusements. I began to ponder the depth and the weight of that morning and all the mysteries that carried me to it. I had lived to bear three decades of this plague, to witness and shake hands with the nation's first Black president. Nearly 50 years after the March on Washington, I stood awaiting my ballot card, expectant and convinced that we could re-elect that President to a second term.

As Aretha once sang, “good work is never done until the morning comes.” Hard work and tough battles lay before us across the nation and within our states. I will still be working with my sisters and brothers living with HIV and AIDS to ensure that we speak to survive and survive to speak. Black gay men will still face the highest HIV infection rates and viral loads. The election results did not peel away the stigma and shame we face every day. Black and Latina women, white, Latino and Asian queer men, transgender people, and those who use injection drugs still bear the plague’s heaviest burdens. Undocumented immigrants, people who are poor, unemployed, and/or incarcerated, face the same dawn.

Now that President Obama has been re-elected, we must be more prepared to strategically challenge him than we were in 2008. Let us regard him not as our Great Black Hope manifest, but as a public servant we have charged to lead with greater integrity, courage and effectiveness. If Mitt Romney had ascended to the Presidency we would have needed to move swiftly to preserve as much progress as we can, and mobilize while under siege. Either way, I am reminded why I am here and I am thankful that I made it this far.

Craig Washington is Prevention Programs Manager at AID Atlanta, Inc.