Lesson Learned
Op-Ed: Fred Rodriguez
As a gay man that came of age during the AIDS Pandemic in the US, I think our community has a unique perspective on this new pandemic. We were faced with community isolation, uncertainty, as to how one got the disease, and how exactly we were going to get through it. For many of us, we did not see a light at the end of the tunnel and our fear turned to frustration.
As a kid in college, I was trying to find myself AND who I was going to be. In between marching in rallies and staging protests on campus along with my fellow students, fighting to be heard, and demanding to keep the life our community had been accustomed to, I naively believed it was what I needed to do. I took every opportunity to go up against the society that I felt was attacking us. I could not see that what we should have been fighting for was to stay alive, and not for our privilege, or our penchant for the LGBTQ+ community.
We as an LGBTQ+ community protested the closing of the bathhouses, the bars, and the parks. We felt it was an attack on our freedom, our identity, and most importantly on our sexuality. We were wrong. Plain and simple. We. Were. Wrong. And unfortunately, we paid a heavy price. We saw our friends, our family, or loved ones, die around us. We were helpless, devastated, and desperate for answers—for help. We lashed out at the media, at the politicians in mainstream society for not understanding us. For not seeing us. For making us invisible and second-class citizens. For making us dispensable.
Turns out we were our own worst enemies. But we learned, we understood, and we took charge of our futures. We made sure to learn from our mistakes and lessons of the past, so as not to repeat. Once we realized that the virus was about more than us individually, we realized we had to fight it as a community. We banned together for the greater good, for what the community needed to survive. We made sacrifices, willingly, to not repeat the sacrifice of an entire generation.
I urge you to please check your privilege, your ego, your selfishness, and, learn from the LGBTQ+ community. We voluntarily canceled Pride events, and no one screamed and bitched. Don’t sacrifice a generation for things that do not matter today and will still not matter tomorrow.
Nothing in this life is worth a life.
