To call this the latest is a bit of a misnomer.  I guess I named this page before I considered how 'latest' is used all across the web to attract surfers to the most recent content.  The emphasis which I intended was on the root of 'latest'—late.  I am late.  I have always been late.  If you examine this site to any significant extent, you will know that this page rarely has anything recent on it, and other pages are updated about as often.  Looking back, there appears to be an entry about once a month. 

My intention—since I don't know when—has been to escape, to leave, to become the 'late' Joe.  You see, once long ago being present to the moment cost me contact with all subsequent moments.  I was an innocent child, giggling, charming, kinda cute.  Irrestible to some unknown predator whom I am—to this day—unable to identify.  That was before I knew there was such a thing as a predator.  Or such a thing as escape.  My proximity to the terrifying events was overwhelming enough that I did not care that the direction of my flight would lead to death.  In fact, I assumed then that whatever my flight was leading to, that it was a better place to be, since it was away from the extant danger. 

I am now near that final destination.  I am close to that place which I once viewed as a kind of Oz, a gleaming City of Light far off in the distance, offering a hope of escape from my infantile terrors.  Maybe it actually is.  The problem is that I do not know for sure.  I don't know how this movie ends.  I haven't seen it yet. 

At some point, I began to persue death; not because I wanted it, but because I had lost so much on my way toward it.  It was a fatalistic hopelessness at first, then it became an erotic fetish.  I didn't start my deliberate persuit of unsafe sex until after the discovery of AIDS.  But for decades I had already been in full flight from real life, from being open to every moment, from the full experience of the now.  It was the fact that I had fully experienced real life, and had failed to protect myself from the intensities of presence in the moment that I had been so savagely hurt, broken into two isolated parts, each desperately longing for reunion with the other. 

I began, in 1983, to solicit bareback donations from a few guys I knew—and from a lot of guys I knew nothing about.  Safe sex was available to me even then, when I was getting screwed while parked on some dark back-road in Northborough, or years later seeking out a decent looking top to bareback me in my own bedroom, and, failing that, in the bushes or the alleyways or the sidestreets of Worcester or Boston; despite all this I am an intelligent person, and I have always been well informed.  But twenty-one years ago it seemed to me that to acknowledge my error, to mourn the decades lost to fear, and to correct the path I was on... well, it simply seemed too far to go.  Besides, there was a satisfying symmetry to my dance with death, a dark spirituality that kept me in touch with the only hope I had ever known, the promise of escape. 

They really don't know what causes AIDS, and it is not an epidemic, as the fear mongers would have everyone think.  But, in the absence of a body of fundamentally objective scientific study there are no readily available alternatives beyond accepting the toxic drugs, or refusing treatment.  Today, after four years off them, I started taking the drugs again. 

There are two minor differences between what I used to do when cruising for anonymous sex, and what I am doing now, taking the drugs prescribed by my kind doctor:  Now my dance with death is sanctioned.  And today, the dance of putting these chemicals inside me is a lot less fun than the dance of twenty-one years ago when I was putting young cocks inside me, and keeping what they gave.  The dance has changed, but it really hasn't.  My dance with death continues, now with a little less grace and flourish, but still true to the course I began as a traumatized infant, toward the hope of Oz, toward a sparkling City of Light, and—as always—toward escape.