{"id":24070,"date":"2012-07-01T20:36:34","date_gmt":"2012-07-01T20:36:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=24070"},"modified":"2012-07-01T22:53:53","modified_gmt":"2012-07-01T22:53:53","slug":"what-ive-learned-from-living-with-hiv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=24070","title":{"rendered":"What I’ve learned from living with HIV"},"content":{"rendered":"

What I’ve learned from living with HIV<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Melissa Harris-Perry Blog<\/a>
\n2012-07-01<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nMacalester College<\/small><\/p>\n

Ed. note: This is a guest column by our guest today, Christopher MacDonald-Dennis<\/a>, the Dean of Multicultural Life at Macalester College. Chris normally tweets this essay out every December 1 to commemorate World AIDS Day, but was kind enough to allow us to share it in this space.<\/em><\/p>\n

My name is Chris, and I live with HIV.<\/p>\n

I know some were here last year [on my Twitter timeline], so I\u2019ll try not to bore you. I just want to remind us that we are here among you, living, thriving, sometimes barely surviving w HIV\/AIDS. I\u2019d like to tell my story: why I made choices I did and what I\u2019ve learned-because I have learned a great deal about myself from this disease.<\/p>\n

To start: I have been positive for 15 years. March 10, 2010 was\u00a0 my anniversary. I am 41 years old. In fact, I was born exactly 1 week before Stonewall rebellion in NYC. I was born and raised in a working-class Boston neighborhood. I grew up in uber-dysfunctional family: brother diagnosed as sociopath in teens, dad an alcoholic, mom mentally ill. It was hell in that family, I was a little \u201csissy\u201d who knew at early age he was gay. I was OK with it but knew others wouldn\u2019t be. I was terrorized as kid-ass kicked a lot. My city didn\u2019t like “femme” boys. Also, I am mixed: dad was white, mom Latina…long before mixed folks were cool.<\/strong> We just were odd. So I grew up alone, and lonely…<\/p>\n

<\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n

Read the entire essay here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What I’ve learned from living with HIV The Melissa Harris-Perry Blog 2012-07-01 Macalester College Ed. note: This is a guest column by our guest today, Christopher MacDonald-Dennis, the Dean of Multicultural Life at Macalester College. Chris normally tweets this essay out every December 1 to commemorate World AIDS Day, but was kind enough to allow […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,395,666,2039,6,26,20],"tags":[11146,11145,11144],"class_list":["post-24070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-gaylesbian","category-health-medicine","category-new-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-christopher-macdonald-dennis","tag-melissa-harris-perry-blog","tag-the-melissa-harris-perry-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24070\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}