back to home page

My first encounter with AIDS came at a very young age. There was a death in the family of a young male cousin. His name was Dwayne. He was always a little different from anyone else that I had always known; with his hair always a little too styled and his clothes a little tight. It is strange but my memories of him in life pale in comparison to the one I have of him in death. His funeral was a spectacle; drawing a colorful outpouring of people that I had never seen before. It was a shock for the over protected little girl who attended Christian elementary school.

            At this point I didn’t know what AIDS was and my family wasn’t using that word either. It was simply put that he was gay, got sick, and died. I didn’t question this because it wasn’t a child’s place, but I really didn’t know what being gay was. I did understand that it is something that you don’t want around you. “Those kind of people” were present at the funeral and forced to sit away from the family. Nothing more was said about him.

            Fast forward a couple years to my cousin Alfonso. He had two distinctive physical features; eyes like honey and a wooly unkempt beard. My young cousins and I called him the wolf man until my mother told me that he wore his facial hair like that to disguise a skin problem that he was having. He was too thin the last time that we saw him. His went into the hospital some months later and in a few days he was dead. Cause of contraction is unknown.

            There is one more part of this story that is a recent development. While explaining this assignment to my mother and talking about Dwayne and Alfonso, she asked my why I didn’t include another cousin named Edward. I knew that he was a heroine addict and always had been told by his sister that he had overdosed. The truth is that he died of AIDS, because of his drug use.

            Thus, my perception coming into this class is a little tainted, or rather clearer because of the loss that my family has felt. I was young and not extremely close with any of the three; but I did feel the loss vicariously through family members. They are all still missed; one has been memorialized in the form of a tattoo