"My Boyfriend Has AIDS".(narrative)

At 23, Gwenn Barringer fell head over heels for a guy who is HIV-positive. Here, she talks about how she's overcome her fear of the deadly disease to be with him.

* AIDS was something I never thought too much about until 1993, when I was a freshman in college and an HIV-positive woman came to speak to my sorority. She was an attractive 22-year-old who had contracted the virus from having sex with her boyfriend. I looked around at my friends and thought She could be any one of us. That woman had a profound impact on my life. Because of her, I got my first HIV test and decided to become involved in promoting awareness of the disease.

A Chance Encounter

By the fall of 1998, I was working toward my master's in psychology. Looking for an HIV-positive man to interview for my thesis, I was put in touch with Shawn Decker. Like me, Shawn was 23. He lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, about an hour from my school in Harrisonburg. So I called him, and we spoke briefly. I was looking for someone who'd contracted the virus sexually, and Shawn was a hemophiliac who'd been infected by a plasma injection when he was a kid, so I ruled him out.

I didn't think of him again until we ran into each other at a conference a month later. I introduced myself, and we wound up talking for a while. I thought he was nice and had a good sense of humor, so when he asked if he could call me sometime, I said, "Sure." A couple of weeks later, the AIDS quilt--a huge patchwork of squares representing people who have died from AIDS--was at my school, and Shawn called to ask if I wanted to see it with him. That night, we really hit it off, talking about our families and our past relationships. I found out that even though Shawn had been diagnosed HIV-positive when he was 11, he'd still had girlfriends. I had a long-term boyfriend at the time who lived in a different city. Our long-distance relationship was unraveling, and I found myself confiding in Shawn the way I would with a close friend. Although I didn't know it at the time, Shawn's feelings for me were already more than friendly. And even though I wasn't prepared to admit it yet, so were mine.

After that night, Shawn and I started hanging out all the time. Shawn had never gotten seriously sick from HIV and lived a pretty normal life. We liked going out to dinner and listening to live music. We spent so much time together that when I didn't see him for a week over Thanks-giving break, I really missed him.

One night two months after we met, Shawn and I were having dinner when he laid his cards on the table. "I know you're with somebody else, and I don't want to complicate your life," he said gently. "Eventually, I want to be with you as more than a friend, hut if that can't happen, I still want to be your friend." He was very straightforward, but he never pressured me. Knowing that Shawn would be there for me no matter what gave me the courage I needed to break up with my boyfriend.