This is something I usually don't talk about!

Tweet

(I came across this earlier today--I wrote this in 2009!) In 1983 I lost 2 friends to AIDS, both named Michael and both the first two deaths from AIDS in Fort Lauderdale. At that time it was called GRID. One Michael was an ice skater with the Ice Capades and traveled all over the country. He left a 10 year old son whose mother didn't want him. The other Michael was a school teacher who cared so much for his students that aside from all the time he spent in school teaching he spent at least three quarters of his time away from school working for his students to make lessons interesting and to bring them up to their potential. Two years later a very unorganized group of adults started a new organization called "Buddies" which basically was a group who helped people who were HIV+ or had AIDS. (Sadly many adults today, 28 years after the epidemic started, don't know you can be HIV+ and not have AIDS!) get medical help, housing, food, check that they took their medicines, financial aid where possible, etc. In the late 1980s a new statistic started to enter the medical field--teenagers who were HIV+ or had AIDS and were out on the street. As a group we didn't start the idea but 'borrowed it from New York and San Francisco--we would concentrate on getting gay kids off the street, putting a roof over their head, food in their stomachs, care for them, let them know they were important and needed while at the same time making sure they continued their education. There were a lot of legal problems and rules set up because you were dealing with adults and teens and we were living in a world, still are, where adults didn't know that being gay did not equate with pedophilia--just read a recent blog. For approximately 20 years I have personally dealt with close to 175 kids. More than 20 of them have died, 15 in my arms, and each felt as if my own child had died. I remember calling Ken's mother to tell her that her son would be dead within 24 hours and her response was, "Good!" Sara's father said she had been dead to him since the day Just for the record I am not using the kid's real names but their street names and why they didn't use even their first names on the street is a blog in itself. It was and is hard to get any information from these kids and the first step is to get them to trust you which is not easy. Some of these kids were kicked out of their homes because they were gay and the parents didn't want their friends and church to know that, or even worse, in the parents eyes, if they could think anything worse than being a homosexual, was if their community found out the kids had HIV or AIDS. Can you imagine how the 'good christian' would act when they were told or found out that their kid had AIDS and was a homosexual?!?!? Trust me the kids didn't tell them as in most cases it was an adult that the kid trusted which makes it, and made it, almost impossible to get them to trust another adult not to mention what they went through from the time they were thrown out oftheir house until either we found them or they came to us. Most of these kids felt worthless and they acted like they were. They sold their body for a ham sandwich or a shower or a place to lay down out of the rain. For a few cents they would do things that would make you sick and disgusted. We wanted to, tried to get these adults, male and female, gay and nongay, who preyed on these kids but in most cases the kids were too scared or didn't want to go to court and this scum of the earth went on to prey, and still do, on 13, 14 and 15 year olds. Yes the men outnumbered the women and in the former case were much older than the latter but both sexes took/take advantage of these kids. I remember Jackie so sweet, so young, with cigarette burns all over her body, and her 'protecter' Jack, a street smart wise ass boy who saw himself as a man and yet cried like a baby in my arms the night Jackie died. There was Frank, at 17, who took care of the younger kids on the street making sure the old men didn't take advantage of them and jumped in front of a car to stop a predator from taking a kid to his home and sodomizing him. I remember Leslie who wanted to be a woman so badly she prostituted herself to men by giving them oral sex so they wouldn't suspect that she was a male and saving the money to get breasts only to die in the street killed by a man who discovered who she was and still has not been prosecuted. I had/have a 175 kids and with them 175 stories and all the good, bad, ugly, successes, failures that go along with them. I am now partially responsible for two kids, one HIV+ and the other has AIDS, but both will make it and have a good long life. The kid with AIDS 'inherited' it from his mother who doesn't want anything to do with him but he is smart, hopeful, funny and one of the most positive people I have every met--and that is NOT a pun. It is very difficult for me to read a blog about not educating kids about sex, to hear that the church will guide them, that parents don't want homosexuals talking to their kids in assembly, that gays are pedophiles, not real men or women, don't deserve to adopt kids, get married or are 'less than'. I don't want to hear that a gay person chose to be gay when that makes no sense at all, I don't want negative blogs about gays so a gay kid can read it and feel less about himself/herself, I don't want to read a blog about gay stereotypes that gives an idiot, he thinks, the right to bash/kill/ a gay person. I don't want to read 'gay friendly' people blogs talking about how DADT should be kept in place because a gay man will 'look' at them as if every gay man/woman finds every nongay man/woman irresistible. I get tired, I get angry, I get depressed, I get burned out but more than anything I want to yell at every self righteous right wing christain (yes, small c) republican to stop it--stop killing our kids with your stupid posts! Words hurt--words kill--think before you type--think before you post your blog--stop the name calling--the bullying--remember the Golden Rule or are you too good for th