When I tested positive in the spring of 2005, it felt like the end of the world. HIV was this boogieman that I had been taught to hate and fear since before I really understood how sex worked, and suddenly this monster was inside me.

I am 60. I have lived half my life with HIV/AIDS. This is my normal. When I tested positive as part of a study in 1983, no one would have expected me to be here, let alone be thriving. Not many of the first wave are here.

AIDS, in spite of nearly taking my life just a few days before, was giving me a new one. AIDS would be the precise reason I would go to law school, for there is nothing like fighting for your life with an insurance company to make you wish you had a J.D.

For my fellow Americans who are ill with whatever they're ill with, and whose time, like mine, is limited, we have to shut out the noise of people on the right who aren't able right now to open their hearts wide enough to hear the call of mercy.