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by Adam
As I shake Christopher “Cree” Gordon’s
hand in the lobby of the HIV Alliance building in Eugene, Oregon,
I know almost nothing about him. All I know is that he’s HIV
positive, he’s African-American (he told me this on the phone),
and he has a soft voice with a Bayou accent, one that rushes through
sentences and lingers on last syllables, one that I’m hearing
now as he says it’s nice to meet me.
Cree is small, young, handsome, and dark-skinned or
light-skinned, depending on which lens you’re looking through.
A green sweatshirt, scissored at the neck where the hood begins,
hangs on his thin shoulders. It says BARDO, 2002 PRODUCTION WORKSHOP,
and it has the two masks, one happy, one sad, that symbolize dramatic
arts. He’s also wearing blue jeans and tan leather sneakers.
Cree is twenty years old, but he still owns a boyish, almost delicate
appearance.
We move into one of the Alliance’s offices and
sit in the type of wool-upholstered chairs that await patients’
in a dentist’s lobby. Above me is a poster that displays a
picture of a thirty-something male with blond hair and earrings
in both lobes. Across the top of the poster, white letters say,
“I believe in protecting my partner.” Orange letters
across the bottom spell, “HIV stops with me.org.”
I ask Cree how long he’s been in Eugene. Since April, he says.
I ask him where he was before that.
He smiles – Cree is always smiling – and says, “About
a year ago, my step-dad, he kicked me out of the house, and I was
in rural Louisiana, so naturally I was like, ‘Oh, I should
go to the big city.’ I went to New Orleans and when I got
there I was like, ‘Oh, fuck.’” He laughs.
“I didn’t know how I was going to eat, where I was going
to sleep, where I was going to shower. I was on the streets, I had
nowhere to go. In Louisiana you can go out when you’re eighteen,
so I started going out. Like, I’d go to the French quarter
every night and sleep during the day under a tree by the river.
But then I got tired of that so I started going home with guys at
night. Then I was like, ‘Well, I’m cute, all these guys
think I’m attractive, why don’t I get paid for this?’
So I started using survival sex. And then sometimes I wouldn’t
even worry about getting paid. I just wanted a bed to sleep in or
a shower.”
Wait. Survival sex?
“It’s kind of like hustling or, I don’t know if
I’d call it prostitution – I didn’t do it every
day. It was just like a means to get my basic needs met.”
He’s still smiling, almost laughing, and I can’t believe
we’re talking about this. I’m pretty sure these should
be deeply buried secrets, but he seems fine sharing them with a
stranger. In some ways, I now know more about Cree than I know about
my best friends. But Cree and I, we just met five minutes ago.
---
Crawling from Cree’s left wrist up his forearm, almost to
his elbow, is a colorful coil of awareness bracelets. The bracelets
represent HIV/AIDS (red), tsunami relief (green), prostate cancer
(blue), breast cancer (pink), gay rights (rainbow-colored), and
NIKE (black and silver). The NIKE bands are just there for decoration
– one of his friends at the University of Oregon Black Student
Union gave them to him because there was “too much color”
on his arm.
Too much color has always been an issue in Cree’s life. “I’m
biracial,” he says. “My mom is white and my dad is black.
I think living in rural Louisiana, I had more issues and more drama
with being biracial than I did being gay. It was kind of odd. The
little town I’m from, blacks and whites still go to separate
churches and I would get, like, evil looks when I would go to the
white church.”
His school had 600 kids because it drew from other parts of the
county, but he estimates the town, Cecilia, only has 500 residents
(officially it has 1505). Cecilia is one hundred miles west of New
Orleans, but it managed to slip between the devastating hurricanes
that recently hit the Gulf Coast. It’s a town where nothing
is close together. Cree didn’t have a car, so if he wanted
to go to the store, he would have to walk five miles. It’s
also a town where race relations still have the power to inflame.
“My mom’s side disowned her when she married my dad,”
Cree says, “so I didn’t even know I was half-white until
I was ten when my mom’s dad killed himself and then I met
her family. So yeah, I basically grew up black.”
In a gap between family history and commentary on his racial self-image,
Cree has dropped a bomb – in this case, his grandfather’s
suicide. Cree is always doing this, dropping weighty bombs in the
middle of conversation, and I have to rewind through his words to
make sure I’ve heard him correctly. He’s just so blasé
about it; the kid still hasn’t stopped smiling.
But we have issues to sort out here. Cree has just informed me that
his mother was disowned, her grandfather killed himself, and he
didn’t know that he was half-white. I have questions about
everything, but I start with the half-white thing. How could he
not realize that his mom was something other than black?
Cree explains: “I lived with my dad’s parents while
my mom and dad were off doing their thing. I was kind of dumped
on my dad’s parents, but yeah, I didn’t know my mom
had a family, too. In Louisiana, black people come in all different
shades, from whiter than you are to blacker than black, so I just
thought my mom was light-skinned. I thought she was black, too.”
When Cree’s parents were divorced, Cree and his mom moved
back to Cecilia. Cree was eight. He remembers being in the Dollar
Store and having his mother say, “Christopher, come see your
grandmother.” Cree says, “I’m thinking, ‘Oh,
Ma’s here.’ My black grandmother. [But my mother] showed
me this old white lady, and I was like, ‘That’s not
my grandmother,’ and she was like, ‘Yeah, that’s
my mom,’ and I was like, ‘You have a mom?’”
That was one of his few encounters with the white half of his family
until his grandfather committed suicide a year later.
Cree’s not sure why his grandfather killed himself because
he never met him. He never met him because his grandfather, a lifelong
racist, had disowned Cree’s mother when she married Cree’s
father.
Suddenly, after his grandfather died, there were a lot more Caucasians
around. “I had all these white people, my aunts and uncles
and cousins, and I was really confused because I hadn’t grown
up with them, I was so used to being black. Even to this day I have
trouble saying I’m biracial. Usually when somebody asks me
what ethnicity I am, I say, ‘Oh, I’m black.’ A
lot of my mom’s side has had issues with that. Especially
my white grandmother. She says she’s not racist, but she was
married to a racist for forty years.”
Cree is still smiling, still sitting in the same chair, aimlessly
spinning and twisting his awareness bracelets. To watch us talk
without sound, you’d think Cree was telling me about his new
favorite movie. But that’s not the case. Now we’re talking
about the rest of his family, and how it’s never been stable,
not even in his early years. “I was born right after my mom
and dad got married so I don’t know if they were ready for
a kid or not, but I lived at my father’s parents’ house
until I was like five when my little brother was born. I’ve
kind of been tossed around. My parents are good to my little brother,
but they never wanted to deal with me, so I never really had a home.
I was always with whoever wanted to deal with me.”
I ask him about growing up queer, and whether or not that was an
issue with his family. “My black family is the family that
had trouble with me being queer,” he says. “Everybody
wants to keep it on the hush, they don’t want me to be out,
they don’t want me to tell anybody, because we were in a small
community, everyone’s going to find out, but I didn’t
care.
“I grew up knowing I was different. I preferred to play jump
rope and play with my cousins’ dolls instead of my Tonka trucks
or whatever. But it was in junior high when I had my first crush
on a guy, and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s what different.’”
He starts a lot of his sentences with “Oh” or “Yeah,”
and this is one of the most alluring things about Cree – how
he can downplay even the most shocking revelations. I could ask
him about the worst moments of his time in New Orleans and he would
run a hand over his short hair, smile, roll his eyes, and exhale,
“Yeaaah,” as if survival sex were a slightly embarrassing
experience, but hey, we’ve all done stupid stuff, so what
the hell, here’s the story.
After Cree graduated high school, he went to Xavier University,
a predominantly black Catholic college in New Orleans. I ask him
if he was active in the gay community there, and he says, not really,
but he did turn every project or paper that gave him relative leeway
into a study or defense of queer rights. Cree only stayed at Xavier
for a year – it was a private school, and he couldn’t
afford tuition and living expenses.
So he found himself back at home, bouncing between the white and
black halves of his family. “Everyone had these bright ideas,”
Cree says. “You know, ‘Go back to school, do this that
and the other,’ but no one’s helping me. So I just took
the little money I had, caught the bus, and went to New Orleans.
I didn’t know what I was going to do when I got there. I just
went.”
And that’s when he began using survival sex as a way to live,
exist, eat, shower, sleep. Basically, survive. “It was kind
of degrading,” Cree says. “I felt like I was letting
myself down. But I had to do what I had to do to get by.”
After several months in New Orleans, Cree found a reason to move
west. “In April of this year I met a guy who was from Eugene
and he was working in New Orleans. He was making the promises, he
was like, ‘Oh yeah, come to Eugene, I’ll help you, you
can go back to school, this that and the other.’ When I got
here I realized it was a bunch of crap.
“I found out he was a closet case. Like nobody knew [he was
gay], he was living with roommates, he kind of snuck me in [to the
house] because he didn’t want his roommates to find out he
was gay. When his friends would come over and I was there, he would
introduce me as his friend, Cree. He was like thirty-seven or thirty-eight
and I was nineteen and everybody was like, ‘What are you doing
hanging out with a nineteen-year-old kid?’”
Cree needed somewhere to sleep. “I actually moved into a recovery
house for like addicts and stuff, even though I wasn’t recovering
from anything. It was just a place to stay. It wasn’t good.”
Living in a recovery house must introduce you to some interesting
characters, I say. “Especially when they’re coming down,”
Cree acknowledges. “They’re messed up.”
Actually, it’s thanks to some stroke of luck or will power
that he’s not an addict himself. In New Orleans he tried crystal
methamphetamine and did coke relatively regularly. If he left a
bar drunk, he would be more likely to try whatever drug his new
friend laid before him.
A few days after arriving in Eugene, he found a drop-in center for
homeless youth. They would help him find a job, housing, and whatever
else he needed to get his life back on track. He had begun working
for OSPIRG, the Oregon State Public Interest Research Group, going
door-to-door trying to gain support for environmental issues and
human rights campaigns.
The HIV Alliance soon came to the drop-in center to test the homeless
youths, a band of the population that has been targeted as “high-risk.”
The HIV Alliance also keeps a close watch on “men who have
sex with men,” the term they use instead of gay or homosexual.
Some men, Cree explains to me, might have occasional sexual encounters
with other men, yet resist labeling that would align them with the
queer community. To encourage men who have sex with men (MSMs) to
get tested, the HIV Alliance makes it standard practice to offer
ten dollars, a big bottle of lube, or a dildo with every test result.
As both a homeless youth and an MSM, Cree was exactly the type of
case that the HIV Alliance looked out for. Cree took the test, but
only because he wanted the ten dollars.
A few days later, Cree got his positive result back. “I think
I went into a state of shock,” he says. “My body went
numb. I wasn’t thinking about anything. When I got home, I
broke down. I didn’t want anyone to touch me. I just sat in
the corner and cried.” That was on Thursday.
Cree used Friday to deal with the news, cried some more, and skipped
work. But
when the weekend arrived, he adopted a new outlook: “For some
reason, that Saturday, I was like, ‘Okay, look. Christopher,
you’re HIV positive, you’re gonna be HIV positive for
the rest of your life. You can find something good out of it. I
read the letter Kelly [his case worker] had given me, I read all
the little pamphlets and everything. For the next week, I came in
every day. I had a list of questions. I wanted to know about this,
this, and this. That’s how I started volunteering.”
Cree now works with the Men Who Have Sex with Men Outreach Program,
putting together condom packets and literature, transcribing interviews,
and venturing into public sex environments like the beach to try
to get the word out to men who have sex with men that they should
get tested. MSMs represent 62% of all new HIV infections in Oregon.
He’s also working with youth and minority groups – being
a young biracial kid helps reach those audiences. In September,
he went through public speaking school, and now he tells his story
to student assemblies. He says he breaks down sometimes, which surprises
me because at no point during our discussion have I sensed that
he is close to tears.
The Alliance focuses on testing high risk people like
MSMs and intravenous drug users. According the National Center for
HIV, STD and TB Prevention, 63% of males diagnosed with HIV in 2003
were MSMs. 14% used IV drugs. 5% engaged in both activities. (For
more statistics and information regarding the disease and its prevention,
visit http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/dhap.htm.)
I ask Cree if he was cautious when he used survival sex to get by
in New Orleans. “Most of the time I was,” he says, “but
there were times when I really wasn’t worried. I was more
worried about getting a place to sleep or shower, or trying to get
a free meal out of it, and sometimes, I didn’t even do it
for those things, I did it for the attention. So if I could get
the attention and feel like someone cared for me, for a day or for
a weekend or for however long he wanted to deal with me, I wasn’t
really worried about protection. If he pulled out a condom, that
was fine. If not, we did whatever without it.”
Since joining the volunteer staff at the HIV Alliance, he has learned
to be careful. “Now I make it a big deal to protect my sexual
partners and to do everything I can to protect them, and I do use
safer sex products to protect them as well as I can.” He smiles.
“But I am twenty, so I’m still sexually active.”
As far as he knows, since being diagnosed, all of his sexual partners
have been HIV negative.
Cree’s life has changed in many ways since he came to Eugene.
There are some cons (he has to live with a potentially fatal disease
and it rains too much) but his life is mostly full of pros. Next
semester he’ll be a student at the University of Oregon. He’s
got his own two-room apartment. As part of the county’s welfare
program, his rent is paid for and he gets 152 dollars worth of food
stamps each week because he doesn’t have a regular paycheck
(he gets 25 dollars for every public speaking event). “I don’t
have much furniture or anything,” Cree says, “but it’s
all good. I’ve got a roof over my head.”
His hair used to be long and curly, but he cut it all away. He shows
me his driver’s license, and I don’t believe it’s
him at first. In the corner of the plastic ID, I see what looks
like a young Latino with the mane of a romance novel cover boy.
But it’s Cree.
He is, by the way, planning to change his name. To what, I don’t
know. He won’t tell me.
For now, Cree describes himself as a healthy kid. Eventually, when
his T-count decreases, he’ll go on the $2,000 a month drug
cocktail that is prolonging the lives of so many Americans, but
his doctor advises that he wait until the meds are absolutely necessary.
As a sign of how far AIDS research has come, Cree’s doctor
compares HIV to diabetes. The combinations of medicines are getting
better, and he’ll probably live a full and healthy life. HIV
and AIDS, once a death sentence, are now, in the doctor’s
words, just a “nuisance.”
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Later in the day, Cree and I are sitting in a coffee shop and it’s
dark outside and rain is falling. Cree picks up a free weekly paper
and flips to the back. “The personals are usually hilarious,
especially in these little papers,” he says.
I look across the table and scan the personals upside-down. Under
MEN SEEKING MEN, there’s only one listing, and it’s
quite possibly a joke. I point this out to Cree.
“That’s how big the gay community in Eugene is.”
Is that depressing? “Yeah, the only gay bar is a couple buildings
behind this one and it used to be like a Burger King or McDonald’s.
They converted it into a bar. It’s so sad. There’s no
community here.”
We discuss gay rights and I bring up homophobia, wonder if it’s
a problem. “I don’t think it’s as bad as it used
to be,” Cree says. “I think people are a little more
open-minded.” He sees being black and being queer as similar
struggles: “They’re both strikes against you. As a black
person, you still feel like you’re trying to be equal. People
here are more open-minded, but where I come from, sex and sexual
orientation isn’t dealt with. But I think it has gotten better.
At least [being gay] is not a disease anymore.”
I ask him how he became gay, whether he believes it’s genetic,
and he admits that he’s not sure. He was always around women
growing up, so men were what intrigued him. Environmental factors,
Cree says, might contribute to a person becoming homosexual, but,
“I never felt like I chose to be gay. I don’t know why
anyone would choose to take on an aspect that would make their life
harder.”
Life is hard for Cree, and understandably so, but he’s got
a sense of humor and a smile that makes me continually forget what
he’s gone through. We talk about a lot of things that aren’t
heavy and sad. “I’m addicted to sugar,” he says
at one point. “I eat sugar all the time. Like, I’ll
eat raw sugar. It’s crazy.” Later I ask if we should
care that Brad left Jennifer for Angelina. “No,” he
says. “He really loves me.”
As far as guys other than Brad go, he tends to like them older.
“How about pro athletes?” I ask. “Are you into
them?” He is. He likes Andy Roddick best. Cree does not like
George W. Bush, but he does like to work at the front desk. He tells
me this as we’re in the lobby and he’s pointing to the
black swivel char. “I like to sit in that chair, even though
I don’t get paid. I like sitting in that chair because I have,
like, power. I’m in charge of letting people know when other
people are here. I just feel like I’m the most important person
when I’m sitting in that chair.”
He’s got a wealth of interesting facts about STDs, too. For
instance, I learn from Cree that you shouldn’t brush your
teeth before you go on a date because the brush tears little cuts
in your gums. Viruses can creep through the cuts.
The conversation returns to Cree’s taste in men and he says
he likes white guys. I laugh, surprised, and ask him why. He says
he was raped by a forty year-old black man when he was sixteen.
---
Cree wants to study Eastern European history at the University of
Oregon, learn Russian or something, and go over there to work as
an HIV awareness social worker. They’ve got a real problem
in that region, he says. But he also wants to study French to get
back to his roots in Louisiana, Cajun country. His grandparents
spoke French, his parents understand it, but the language is lost
on his generation. He might even live in Quebec for a while. Later
he tells me he might go to Seattle. He’s starting to like
the West Coast.
Neither I nor Cree knows where he’ll be five, ten, or twenty
years from now. But he’ll be somewhere. He has a disease that
isn’t a death sentence, he has a new life, he has a future.
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