Learning To Live With AIDS

September 1983. The date may not have much significance to many people but to Bruce Hall, a 29-year-old black gay man, it had profoundly changed his life, perhaps forever. That was when he went to his doctor with a temperature of 103 and throat thrush and was diagnosed as being among the 3,210 people with AIDS, a disease, says Leonard Brown, MD, of New York's Community Health Project, with a 40 percent mortality rate.

To Hall, a native of New York City, now living in Chicago, the diagnosis was unfair. Especially after years of abstinence from drugs, alcohol, and multiple sex partners. He had even quit smoking cigarettes. (Although during the interview in a Greenwich Village restaurant, Hall bought a pack of cigarettes and chain-smoked four of them. he attributed his smoking to nervousness caused by the interview. He later left the pack of unsmoked cigarettes on the table.) But none of that seemed to matter. He had to learn to live with a disease that not only debilitated its victim but also intensified homophobia and mass hysteria. These last two cost Hall his job.

He had known about AIDS for a long time. He just didn't think that he would get it. His black gay friends deluded themselves by thinking of AIDS as a white man's disease. They don't anymore.

However, Bruce Hall is a fighter. He says he doesn't want to live his life in a bubble, being afraid of everybody and everything. To counteract that feeling, he has put himself through a self-imposed physical fitness program involving bicycling 18 to 30 miles a day, lifting two 40-pound dumbbells up to one and a quarter hours a day, and much walking. He is also undergoing hypnosis, although he is not sure of its effectiveness against AIDS. In the past few months, Hall has seen a vast improvement in his weight and he has not caught any colds, he says, since the diagnosis.

Hall graduated from Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1977 with a B.A. in sociology. He is presently attending Loop College in Chicago where he is studying for a certificate that will enable him to counsel alcohol abusers.

Recently Hall delivered a presentation, with three other panelists, among them Dr. Brown, at an AIDS forum for the black gay community in the West Auditorium of Hunter College [in New York].

This excerpt is from an article about the late Bruce Hall. It was originally published in the New York Native in 1984.