Growing up in an Epidemic
Listen to COLAGE Executive Director Beth Teper interview Stefan Lynch Strassfeld about his family and their experience with HIV/AIDS for StoryCorps on NPR Morning Edition this Friday at 5:20am and 7:20am PDT and 6:20am and 8:20am EDT and online here.
In my generation – I’m 38 now – growing up with a gay dad meant growing up with AIDS. I was 10 when the first person I knew got sick, 15 when my step-dad died, and 19 when my dad died. But even for my peers who didn’t lose their fathers, the specter of AIDS was always looming. Did they have it? Were they practicing safer sex? If I tell my friends my dad is gay will they be afraid they’ll catch AIDS from him? Or me? Am I going to get it? I lost most of my family, young gay men, over the course of 10 years, and I miss them every day.
But those same men also taught me so much: how to live when you’re
dying (and we’re all dying), how to organize and fight for what you believe in, and how to make family when your family of origin had pushed you away, or in my case, was leaving one by one. It’s no coincidence that COLAGE was founded by daughters of gay men who grew up in the epidemic, or that I was the first Director – getting involved just months after my dad died. I had learned how to make family andcommunity from the best. My aunties, the men who along with mywonderful lesbian mom helped raise me, pioneered the existence of “queer family” because they needed it, and I continued their work because I needed it. On World AIDS Day I am blessed by the ones I
have, remembering the ones I have lost, and grateful to my aunties for
leading the way.
Please take a moment to remember those who we have lost, and take action everyday to create awareness and stop the spread of HIV/AIDS.
In solidarity,
Stefan Lynch Strassfeld