I have been living in San Francisco for 36 years. The military brought me here in the 70's where I supervised loading ammunition for all the bombs that they would shoot off over in Vietnam. I grew up in the suburbs of Seattle, but that was a land far away and a time long, long ago. At that time Seattle was a city of 500,000 and now it has close to a million people. When I grew up there were fruit orchards and ranches, now it's all suburbia; all homes and freeways. I wouldn't say my family was religious but I remember going to church every Sunday until I was about 15 or 16. I decided to make San Francisco my new home. The military was quite exciting; I retired out of the reserves after 22 years.

I wasn't exactly out in the military but I was definitely having sex. I was living with two guys, a couple, and we had an excellent arrangement! I never had to worry about dates! In the 70's we had sex clubs and baths everywhere, I used to frequent the bathhouses quite often until they got shut down because of the AIDS epidemic...everyone kind of went underground for a while. Being here since the 70s, I've seen this city morph quite a bit. You can have just as much fun now as you did back then, though. In the early 70's everybody kind of knew everybody and the city felt like a small town. Once people discovered the West Coast, the city's dynamics changed. There were fewer small bars and then, in the mid to late 80s, things started picking up again, and they glitzed up the bars, bars got bigger, and people started going out again. With the 90s came the big mega dance parties. Who knows where it will go...it just keeps changing.

I didn't come out to my parents until the 80s. I thought about it and thought about it for a long time because I had HIV. I thought, it wouldn't be really too cool for them to get a phone call one day from someone that just said your son's dead. So, I took a big breath of courage and my lover and I drove up there on a vacation and I came out to my parents. Actually I came out to the whole family because everybody was there, and then I told them I had HIV.

Telling them was a relief for me, I'm sure they had a little bit of anxiety for a while but thanks to modern medicine and protease inhibitors...I'm still here. Every body was cool about it, my mother was probably the most affected by it, because, you know, I am her first born, and her son has a disease.... and he might die. So, it was probably hardest on her.

I now live south of Market in a small studio and I live on disability. I haven't worked for the last 13 years and I just got a housing subsidy which is so wonderful for me, because I've been on the waiting list for eight years now. Everyone thinks there are all kinds of benefits for people who are positive, but the reality is that they are slim and few...that would be the best description. People say, "There's housing" and there's really not housing. You're on your own. There are a few board and care places, but those are for people who are very ill. I can get food from Project Open Hand's food bank and evening meals from them (thank goodness for that) and there's a very small fund called the AIDS emergency fund that you can tap into once a year for up to ten years. Other than that though, there is really not much there, not as much as people think.

I've heard people say, "If I turn HIV positive, I'll get more benefits..." and really they have no idea what the story is all about. I think that myth started because in the 80s people were dying left and right, everywhere. So the city set up a lot of programs to make it a little bit easier when you became ill and were not able to take care of yourself and then you died.

Now, with the protease inhibitors, those "model programs," as they called them, are no longer available. With the current political administration (things may change after this last election) but for the last 4 to 6 years it has been really tough. The money given for HIV/AIDS services on a yearly basis keeps getting slimmer and slimmer and so it's tighter.

In the mid 80s speed came into the picture. My lover and I were living in the Haight, and he came home one day and said, "Well, look at this. Let's try this for an enhancer." I have to say, it really enhanced everything! He had been at the bars and somebody said, "Here, try this." So he brought some speed home and it really made our togetherness even tighter, we had really good experiences partying together. We didn't do it every day; I wouldn't recommend doing it every day or even a few times a week. I would recommend using it as a treat... maybe once a week at the most. The reason I say that is because too much of a good thing can eventually wear on you. Most people probably know about dopamine and how speed affects your brain chemistry-the rollercoaster and all that- so if you want to party with speed and have a good time then you have to be able to take care of yourself and your body so that you can come down and function again.

My lover and I learned from other people who partied that you have to drink a lot of fluids, and that you do not do speed in one big mass dose- you try a little bit at a time to see where your peak level would be, which is different for everybody. That's why I don't recommend you do this stuff by yourself, because it isn't that much fun alone and there's also a slight danger if you do it by yourself because you might go past that peak and then you've got no one there to support you. What happens with some people if they do too much, is that they start hallucinating, hearing voices and start doing odd things like taking things apart and putting them back together, scrubbing their house down, for me that really isn't what partying is about. You're supposed to enjoy yourself, you know?

For me, crystal is mainly connected to sex. Other times I'd stay out dancing all night, drinking lots of liquids and having a good time. It's also important to have good hygiene, dental hygiene specifically because what happens is your saliva picks up all those chemical properties that eat away at the enamel of your teeth. So when people tell you that their teeth turned rotten because of using speed, that can be true but they may have not done some things to help prevent that from happening: drinking lots of water and taking care of their teeth. We also learned that if we wanted to party into the next day, then we had to eat light foods and rest. If you're going to be pumping away all night having sex or out dancing and partying -- resting becomes essential you know? For me watermelon is a good food source: it's full of liquids and it's a good brain food!

I would say my lover and I were pretty responsible, we had to be. I was still working in the reserves and he was waiting tables and had to keep it together so he could make his money, remember people's orders at different tables. We would always coordinate our time together and we'd play with crystal sparingly, once a week...maybe twice if we pushed it. It is challenging to just keep it at once a week because the high is a very nice high and you can stretch it out and get your money's worth. I had friends that got used to that high instead of getting used to the whole experience, they got used to the high and got trapped in that, which is what you don't want, you know? That's why I recommend always doing it with somebody else, set some good base ground rules around it and use it as a fun experience that you can look forward to.

Things are much slower for me in my life now that I'm in my mid 50's. Occasionally I'll play with crystal maybe a couple times a month. When I felt my body take longer to recover and the coming down got a little harder than when I was younger, I began to taper down on my use. I take my time and use crystal for special occasions and I've learned what good experiences I want to save my partying for. The temptation is always there to play with crystal more but as I've gotten older I have realized that it takes me longer to get myself back together and recover, so I want to keep my partying experiences positive.