2006-08-13 - 11:27 p.m.

If you were to go around and ask most people if they had ever known somebody with AIDS, few outside of the gay, sex, or injection drug community would be able to say yes. c-k met Jean-Luc Svoboda in 1990 because he had many gay friends and JL had reached the point in his illness where he needed to downsize, and so he called c-k and suggested that he stop by to lighten JL his 800 plus opera collection.

JCW, the grand donor of a Sony Radio, Grand Master of the Gay Line, and ex- of JL suggested c-k as the recipient of these 800 opera records. Good spirited c-k, not much on opera, took the records anyhow, although he hardly had the space for them. He later helped JL move into his dying apartment, where Svoboda defied everyone by surviving until 1997. c-k went to visit JL about once a month, and would witness him get sick, and recover, and listen to JL's theories on why he had recovered on this or that occasion in particular.

There was one point in 1995 when JL looked actually robust. But it wasn't to last. He got sick one last time and passed to the point where he could no longer stand up. It was hard to gauge the end, since he had gotten very sick from time to time, and then recovered again.

Initially squeamish, c-k got over this sense after a while. He wasn't a caregiver, but people need to feel each other, and c-k touched JL. Cher made him get a blood test when they started to see each other in 1998, but no, it wasn't that kind of touching. But had she known, she might have found herself suffering from her own brand of squeamishness. Like the time Ashley talked to some night trade workers and offered to photograph them with their disposable camera. He took a lovely pic of the girls as Cher was sliding away in disgust.

AIDS is a dangerous side effect of being a sex trade worker, so take care, girls (and boys). Xena loves all of you, but in an abstract way. Cher was sliding away as one of the girls was touching Ashley. It was hand-to-hand as she showed him what he knew well -- which button to press on the camera. Cher wouldn't touch him on the rest of the walk back to her home. Perhaps she was afraid of catching something.

What would she make of JL? He sweated AIDS out of his pores. Nothing would have made him practice safe sex. Not that anybody thought it was necessary when he contracted the illness. IV drug users? They share today. Sex trade workers? It's hard to say. Some are latex girls, I suppose, but the ones that pose for pornographic pictures almost never pose with men wearing condoms, and I suppose if there's a picture of you doing the porn thing with a man doing it with his thing up your posteriosis, skin to skin, you really have to have faith, or people that pray for you when they see your picture.

Whatever happened to love? Xena is filled with love and sorrow for the girls who do it so much that they don't care, much less feel anything when they do it. There are men that need them to be that way. It hurts the most when the girls are too beautiful for it.

Written as the 16th International AIDS Conference commences in Toronto.

Xena prays for the girls...