What My Black Star Tattoo Means

A confession.

My name is Alexander Cheves, but lovers call me Beastly. I write about sex for magazines. 

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I haven't come out and said it directly on this blog: I'm HIV-positive.

I want to talk about the tattoo on the back of my neck. I've never explained my ink before, and this one is particularly important to me.

I got the tattoo three years ago, two months after I learned I had HIV. I went to the tattoo parlor after class with friends. None of them knew my reason for getting it. Today, it's a sign that I was once very sad — suicidal, in fact — and survived. The tattoo is not easy to see, but every now and then I see it in a photograph someone takes from behind, and it makes me feel proud. It reminds me that I'm a survivor. I survived my own dark depression.

I knew I would survive HIV. That wasn't the fear. Thanks to modern meds, HIV is now a liveable long-term illness. When I got the test results, the doctor immediately told me that I could have a long life if I wanted it. But in those early months, still reeling from the diagnosis, I didn't want it. A life with HIV stigma did not seem worth living.

For most of the three years since my HIV diagnosis, my status has been a secret. My family didn't know. Most of my friends didn't know. My mother frowned at the tattoo on Thanksgiving after I got it. She surely saw it as a childish but otherwise harmless addition to my self-expression. She did not know what it meant — what was in my body. My parents could not have known that the tattoo marked a crisis in my life — the closest I've ever come to giving up.

My parents had plenty of experience with HIV and AIDS. As medical missionaries in Africa, they saw countless AIDS patients in the years we spent overseas. In 2014, 70% of all HIV-positive people in the world — about 25.8 million — lived in sub-Saharan Africa.

Last December, I called my parents from Los Angeles and told them the truth: I had published an op-ed in The Advocate about my HIV status and my reasons for keeping it a secret. The article was harsh on my parents. I called them the morning it was published, and it's a good thing I did. Friends and family members saw it and called them about it. They were given no time to process my news before fielding questions from others. Publishing it without giving them more warning was a cruel move, and I regret it. But the article was the truth.

After that

After that, everyone in my life knew. The little thing I had carried around as a secret was no longer a secret. I was publicly HIV-positive.

I've often asked myself: Is the black star enough? The strain on my family, the pill bottles, the medical stresses — does a little tattoo do it justice? Have I learned from HIV? Have I grown?

Why do we mark ourselves for suffering? Self-marking from successful hunts and kills is an old tribal practice, as old as our species. But HIV is not something I'll ever beat. HIV is not a battle to be won. It's a passenger, an identity, a community, a history — a painful one. Radiation and biohazard tattoos are common HIV tattoos, and aesthetically they make more sense. They are 90s-era relics from the time when HIV-positive people were seen as dangerous — when symbols of waste and toxicity were reappropriated as power signs by HIV-positive men to strip the stigma of its power. I've wondered: Am I ready for a biohazard tattoo?

I have had to claim my HIV and celebrate the identity it gives me. What is my other option? You can only fear something that will never change for so long. I could cower and apologize and hope people will accept me or I can stand up and demand more life, and I believe that's what I have done. That is what I try to do every day.

I have met other HIV-positive men who marked themselves differently — with a bear paw, a plus sign, and other things. Some knew the modern realities of HIV before they tested positive. Others, like me, didn't know much and had to learn what life with HIV is like. Those who pull from HIV all the joy and pleasure one deserves are my blood-brothers in a history of a disease that should have never happened — one that we are still punished and persecuted for.

The day I got the star tattoo, I had survived two months. I did not feel confident that I would survive two more — but I would try. That's all it meant, nothing more. It was a mark to measure life. Maybe that's what every tattoo is, in its way. When I got it, the tattoo was barely remarked upon by my peers. No one thought anything of it.

And I just kept living. Day after day. I made it.

Love, Beastly