Subtitle: Living with Asymptomatic HIV
Author: Richard Mac Intyre
Foreword by: Stephen Lacey
Subject: Gay Studies/HIV Studies/Nursing
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-2596-9
Pages: 256 pp.
Description: A series of poignant and compelling conversations with asymptomatic HIV+ gay men.

People who have lived for many years with HIV but without symptoms are asked to fight a virus they cannot see and a disease they cannot feel. This not only colors decisions about medical treatment, it also affects personal identity, sexuality, community, and lifestyle.

Initially concerned with several men who knew they were HIV positive but who elected not to monitor their T-cells, MacIntyre focuses on the ways in which HIV+ gay men in his own community interpreted their diagnoses and made treatment decisions. The result is a partly autobiographical (MacIntyre tested positive for HIV in 1985 and is as yet asymptomatic) and beautifully written collection of conversations between the author and several articulate, well-educated HIV+ gay men. Mortal Men uncovers contrasting beliefs on health, illness, and medicine as well as psychological and sociocultural issues that influence medical and lifestyle decisions.

The stories in Mortal Men show how several asymptomatic HIV+ gay men in the early 1990s experienced the ministrations of their doctors and the pronouncements of the press; how they either took up or resisted the ways in which their friends and community understood the disease and its treatments; how relationships to the health care system that ranged from complete trust to fragile trust to overt distrust or fear affected treatment decisions. That MacIntyre has chronicled their struggles both preserves their humanity and endows the future with the insights that they developed in response to death. In the process, Mortal Men offers new discernment and possibilities for people coping with serious illnesses and for people who must construct new meanings for life in the midst of death and the technologies engineered to prevent it.

MacIntyre notes that standard interpretations of viral loads have nearly made the concept of a healthy HIV+ person an oxymoron, despite the fact that many HIV+ people have been living healthy lives for more than a decade without pharmaceutical intervention. But this book is not so much about the pros and cons of various treatments as it is about how a group of gay men confronted and lived with HIV and the options available to them in the early 1990s.

Richard MacIntyre is a registered nurse and an associate professor at Samuel Merritt College in Oakland, California.

"The metaphor is far more powerful than the condom. Even when I'm taking precautions, the idea that I could be infecting someone has colored my own sense of my body. . . . At other times, to be honest, it's very hard to believe that the virus is in you, because it's invisible, you know."-Gabe

"It wasn't just that we got infected with the virus. All this self-loathing and the destruction of gay culture made it impossible to live life in a normal, satisfactory, and sustaining way. . . . You feel cut off from any long-term involvement with other people. Life seems pretty bleak because you think you're going to die and to top it off, they start giving you poison to counteract the virus that's inside of you."

"Is that why you don't have your t-cells monitored?"

"Definitely."-Eric

"Right now, I'm sitting here thinking I have to make some effort in the next two weeks to get my T-cells up. I have to start getting my rest. I have to not be stressed. . . . Maybe I'll quit my job. . . . So everything is based around my T-cells. . . . My doctor says 'T-cells, T-schmells. You're not a T-cell.' He says not to worry about my T-cells, but I'm getting a lot of outside pressure here. . . . from you, and from all of my other friends who love me."-Jason

"The thirties is a time when people start coming to terms with getting older and mortality. Not that you're necessarily about to dig your grave or find your tombstone, but nevertheless, as you approach forty, you start dealing with mortality. But since this whole decade of my thirties has also coincided with AIDS, it's made the somewhat normal process of coming to terms with mortality that much more intense. Inescapably intense."-Gabe