by
Robert Locke, Pseud. Clayton Bess
This is a true life story that I believe will have resonance with high school
and university students, and I would like to find a way to integrate this story
with my proposed presentations for mature students.
During the 1980s I gave many very successful author's presentations in schools
around the country. In 1989, however, it became clear to me that my career as
author was going to be severely crimped because I needed to go back to work full
time in my previous career as librarian so that I could get onto a Group Health
Insurance Plan.
I had been diagnosed with HIV in January, 1983, and by 1989 my CD4 count was so
low—indicating that my immune system was precarious—that health
insurance companies declined to sell me health insurance.
Actually to say that I had been diagnosed with HIV in 1983 is inaccurate since my onset
of symptoms was so early the disease didn't even have a name yet. I went to a
doctor in January, 1983, because I had noticed a worrisome swelling in the back of my neck
the previous September that I feared was cancer. After a brief examination, the
doctor told me, "No, you do
not have cancer. You have a disease that is showing up in gay men in New York,
San Francisco and Los Angeles. They present with swollen lymph nodes like yours
and within six months they are dead."
Needless to say I never went back to that doctor. I stumbled out of that office wondering what
to do with this information that he had imparted so carelessly, so cruelly. I had
just had my first children's book published with Houghton Mifflin Company to
overwhelming acclaim, and I had a contract in my pocket for my first play to be
produced at the prestigious American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, and
here I was with a brand new killing disease that no one even knew anything about yet.
To my surprise, in the Fall of that year, 1983, I was still alive. I remember one day
particularly. I was back home in Sacramento and planting flower bulbs—daffodils,
tulips, narcissus, crocus—and wondering if I would be alive in the spring to
see the blooms. I had a sudden revelation: I decided then and there that this must be the way I would
live the rest of my life—
however long or short it might be—as though each day were the first day of my
life and as though my life was going to be just like anyone else's, full of
promise.
So I kept writing and I went out as often as I could to schools where I could be
with the kids that I adored so much, always looking forward.
When I was denied health insurance in 1989, I did go back to work full time in
the library at California State University, Sacramento, where I could walk to
work every day and get Group Health Insurance as part of my job benefits.
This paid for not only my doctors visits but for the medications I have
been on ever since, moving along to each new medication as my virus grew
tolerant to the older medication that I had been on previously. I never imagined
that I would actually live to see the retirement benefits, but in fact I did retire
in 2002 with
health insurance benefits ensured for life.
Now more than 25 years after my original diagnosis, it is hard for me to believe
that I am still alive, never
having been sick a day from AIDS—knock on wood!—and I am working to bring
Clayton Bess out of his long retirement. I was delayed in this goal because
I spent the years from 2000 to 2007 taking care of my mother in her failing
health. Before that I had helped her to take care of my brother who died of AIDS
in 1996 and then my father until he died in 2000.
Death has loomed large before me for a long time. But now I am ready to turn
back to young people with a new and revived message of hope, and with a whole
lot of living experience to draw upon. I have not yet written much about my
own journey with my own disease because I always strove to keep my HIV status
a secret from my mom and dad. They were almost killed by my brother's early
death, and I didn't want them to have to go through the distress about whether
they might outlive
me as well. Now I am free to write about it, and to talk
about it.
However, HIV-AIDS is certainly not going to be my only topic, or even my foremost
topic, in my author's presentations. Authorship, writing, publishing, playwriting,
dramatic productions are the topics I will offer most
prominently in my presentations which I hope will vary school by school with the
ideas of the librarians, teachers and administrators of each school. Adaptability
is the key word for Peace Corps Volunteers, and I am first and foremost a Peace
Corps Volunteer. So I do hope that you will contact me with
requests based upon the suggestions I offer in these webpages and whatever
else you see
to be for the good of your students.
Contact: Clayton Bess
Copyright © 2009 Robert Locke
All Rights Reserved