General Idea: One Year of AZT, One Day of AZT, 1991
Back before I started blogging here at the CARE Program, I wrote mostly on contemporary art at my blog Leap Into the Void. Back in 2008 I bemoaned the fact that World AIDS Day and A Day Without Art had seemed to have fallen by the wayside. My attempt at the time was to remember a specific artist, someone who I had gone to school with, who died of AIDS. Other bloggers followed suit, and their posts can be seen here, here, and here. Part of my thinking was that the era of effective combination therapy came along at the same time as the internet, which means there's little or no record in cyberspace of those who died of AIDS for the most devastating years of the epidemic. Perhaps that's one of the reasons we see so much complacency around HIV prevention and treatment today.
With that in mind, there's someone I'd like to remember here today. In 2001 I attended the GNP+ conference in Port of Spain, Trinidad. GNP+ is the Global Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS, and they hold an international conference on the off years, in-between the International AIDS Conferences.
It was in Port of Spain that I met Kenroy Nicholson, a young man in his twenties from Trinidad who was living with the virus. After meeting at the conference we hung out for a few days before I flew back to the United States. At the time he was working at Royal Castle, a local fast food chain. He lived in a township outside the city, an area with dirt roads, and maybe a water pipe that came to each block. His place had no phone or electricity, and was made of tin sheeting and cement blocks. He lived there with his two siblings, their partners and children in a one bedroom home. Of the five adults in the house, he was the only one who was working, and he did it without shoes, and without HIV meds. He never asked me for anything except friendship and understanding. We stayed in touch by mail, and he invited me to return for Carnival the next year. I couldn't return until the following Summer, and by the time I got there he had died.
So I'm dedicating this World AIDS Day post to Kenroy, one of the five thousand people who die each day from AIDS, people who do their best despite the lack of the most basic medical attention.
If there's someone you'd like to remember, feel free to post in the comments section.
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