eoe-0705-028 michael mooney:

deep point man

(LOS ANGELES, POSTED JULY 17, 2005)

in the process of getting my previous post ready, i had to doublecheck the medibolics website url so i could post a link in reference to anabolic steroid therapy for hivers. it occurred to me i’d been out of contact with michael mooney and nelson vergel for a long time. like a lot of people.

so while i was at the site i dropped them a note. mooney and vergel are the authors of built to survive, the how-to manual for hiv-related anabolic steroid use.

---------message---------

from: richard kearns

to: michael mooney & nelson vergel @ medibolics

subject: engines of enlightenment: journal of an aids shaman

mike & nelson--

it's been a whole lot of years since i met you in los angeles with the power presentations. i tried to set up hiv-savvy training programs at different gyms in the la area, but though management was willing, guys were too afraid to be out at the gym.

after a lot of stuff, i'm on the upswing again. physical therapy so i can get to the point of getting to the gym by myself. i'm on a maintenance dose of 300mg injectable testosterone [weekly] and hoping to be able to go on my first cycle late this year or early next year.

[clipped]

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this morning, i woke to find michael’s reply:

---------message---------

hey richard,

glad you are vibrant. we both know the problems trying to get people to do what we thought was good for them.

i laugh, but it's true.

keep it up,

michael

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an interesting way to start the day.

mind you, this is me, who applauded washington blade editor chris crain on that last post for saying, “people act more responsibly when they’re told the truth.” “amen to that,” i said, “though sometimes they take a while. it is the dynamic principle empowering ghandi’s notion of satyagraha—the power of inspired, non-violent, personal political activism.”

so all the big, important decisions in the world hang in the balance between michael’s proposition and chris’s proposition. before breakfast.

it’s been a while since i’ve thought out loud about anabolic steroid therapy and trying to set up hiv-oriented exercise programs at different west hollywood gyms.

it’s not exactly a tale about trying to close down bathhouses, or trying to get folks to use condoms. but in whatever community this is in which i live, it’s a story about confronting the irrational beast: how we go about fearing death. mortality.

part of the reason this is a story is because i have never in my adult life been able to have a hobby. when i learn something new, i am driven to master it. to learn it well enough to be an expert. to teach it. or write about it.

this is not medical advice.

this is a personal journey as well as a journey of service.

why did i start steroid therapy?

protease inhibitors (pis) were in the compassionate access pipeline. my lover had pis and his ks lesions disappeared. i was in the waiting line and kept wasting. it looked good on me though—i was teaching aerobics as well as journalism at the time. thin worked. too thin was a problem.

my doctor, barry chadsey, whom i miss, suggested i go on anabolic steroids. when he told me, i remember drawing breath to say something inane about steroids being dangerous, and stopped. we looked at each other and said together, “what can it do? kill me?” and laughed ‘till we came to tears. so it was good medicine from the get-go.

every study on starvation i looked at—and i remember wading through one honker with black-and-white photos that were a visit to the holocaust museum—confirmed the fact that after people experience severe weight loss, the lean mass component of their weight forecasts their ability to survive. the workable components of lean mass are bone and muscle. weight gains in fat do not improve chances of survival. so for a person like me with aids-related cachexia, an anabolic steroid protocol was a good idea. bulking up kept me alive for twelve years, until too many episodes of undiagnosed recurring acute arv-generated pancreatitis kept me from putting weight back on between hospital visits.

you can’t depend on just the weekly shots, though. you have to do the work in the gym. briefly, my strategy has been to use mega-dosed steroid cycles and progressive weight resistance to build up my lean mass 20 pounds over my set point in a relatively short period of time. i also maintained it off-cycle. then, every time i got sick and lost the average 20 pounds, it only took me down to my normal weight, which wasn’t so difficult an injury to bounce back from.

there were several signicant emotional components to my anabolic steroid therapy. this is one: every time i do another rep, i am saving my life. here’s another: every time i add another plate to the stack, i am getting harder to kill. and another: the heady realization that, at 198 pounds and five percent bodyfat, i looked hot enough to make guys pause midstroke lifting the fork or spoon to their mouths when i walked by them as they sat in the elm-shaded sidewalk cafes along santa monica boulevard.

for me, steroid training became a huge, empowering metaphor for dealing with everything else my life. the myth: tangible results from struggle. it keeps me pushing.

i became a certified personal trainer, which involved attending weekend seminars for two years and passing a national certification exam. nor was i shy in speaking up about my exercise specialty—hivers. i was fortunate to be in a receptive environment.

here’s a story about personal political activism at an ace (american council on exercise) training seminar. it was lunch on saturday. twenty of us. i had been popping up with comments all morning about things like immoderate aerobic exercise being contraindicated for hivers. i started a brief discussion about how, for hiv-positive exercisers, the goal of lean weight gain is a more appropriate training strategy than the training motivators most exercisers work with, those of of fat loss and “looking good.” as we sat down to eat, i said, out of the blue, “want to see what an hiv drug cocktail is? here. i’ll show you,” and i dumped my mid-day bottle of pills out on the table. there must have been two dozen. “these eight are my cocktail—three separate medicines, and i take some of them four times a day,” i said, sorting the pills and capsules into piles and naming each component. “i take these so i don’t barf,” i continued, “and these are for the diarrhea, and this is the antidepressant, and these are from my acupuncturist,” and on and on. people still remember that lunch. from saturday on, there were four food groups: proteins, carbohydrates, fats and prescription drugs.

back to the hiver exercise programs.

gym managers were enthusiastic about offering their support for such an unusual program. there was a remote possibility it might lead to new memberships. here are some of the issues i tried to tackle.

big gyms are collections of exercise communities that are fairly well-defined (so to speak). the aerobics folk tend to hang out with the aerobics folk—spinners with spinners, steppers with steppers. the floorworkers stay on the floor with the other stretchers, pilatescists, core-strengtheners and power-abbers. the weight trainers hang out with the weight trainers, free-weighters being the hardcore end of that enclave. yoga classes are often melting pots, particularly the kind of class i like to call “naked sweaty yoga.” you can’t achieve enlightenment unless you fog the mirrors.

breaking into the weight training experience can be an incredibly intimidating prospect. for veterans as well as newcomers, the social environment is rough on embedded fears about body image, wellness, sexual identity and lovability. i wanted to provide support for hiv-positive exercisers attempting weight training for the first time. i wanted to set up buddy matching systems for hivers, and spend time teaching them good lifting habits and how to spot for one another. i wanted make sure hiv-exercisers were savvy about what we could call “universal gym precautions,” wise to the hazards of skin contact with leather padding on weight equipment, skillful at using clean towels as relatively-sterile barriers, and in tune with weightroom etiquettes such as wiping down equipment before and after using it. (and then not using the same towel after showering. duh.) i wanted to train personal trainers to be savvy to hiv/steroid-related issues. i worked out a system of exercise journaling where hiv-positive exercisers could keep track of medical data and exercise data and nutritional data together and have control of their own records.

another effort that was successful was the ahf-sponsored drop-in support group on hiv and exercise that i was able to facilitate. that’s also the place where i met several memorable hiv-infected women. another time.

for the most part, though, the programs fizzled. why?

here’s how the regional manager of one gym chain explained it to me: “there are all sorts of guys at the gym who have come into my office and told me privately they’re hiv-positive. but they’re not going to make that admission out there by going to a class or carrying a notebook that pegs their hiv status. it puts a dent in their abilities to chase and be chased, which is part of why they’re here, too.”

we must do better than this.

“we both know the problems trying to get people to do what we thought was good for them.” thank you michael. i wish i had your gift for fewness of words. if i did, i would have said something like “i didn’t think it was going to be easy.” but i’m a just-can’t-let-it-go-at-that kind of a guy.

we can do better than this.

“people act more responsibly when they’re told the truth.” thank you, chris. i didn’t think it was going to be easy. and i’m not done yet. there is more truth to tell.

we shall do better than this.

rather than just shrug my shoulders and cave to fearful behavior and convoluted struggles with mortality (for which i do have sympathy and respect), i feel compelled to tackle a couple other questions in this whole bad-decisions business.

how do we do better?

first: here is our challenge

every new hiv infection is a personal political act. every aids death is a personal political event.

by politics, i mean the notion that the bedrock of the wellbeing of our community is self-government, ultimately supported by self-knowledge. how do we make decisions inspired by justice that benefit both ourselves and the community in which we live? how must we struggle against injustice? how should our communities support and inspire and educate and protect us? and we them? what are our mutual obligations? what might they be? community interventions in matters of infection and death--as mourners as well as healers--are legitimate moments of that conversation.

we must improve the way we make decisions in order to be free.

“if we cannot make ourselves a knowledgeable and thoughtful people,” said my friend richard mitchell, the underground grammarian, in a book titled the graves of academe, “then we cannot be free.” i miss richard too. he died in 2002 from diabetes-related causes.

mitchell goes on to say:

“we are a people who imagine that we are weighing important issues when we exchange generalizations and well-known opinions. we decide how to vote or what to buy according to whim or fancied self-interest, either of which is easily engendered in us by the manipulation of language, which we have neither the will nor the ability to analyze. we believe that we can reach conclusions without having the faintest idea of the difference between inferences and statements of fact, often without any suspicions that there are such things and that they are different. we are easily persuaded and repersuaded by what seems authoritative, without any notion of those attributes and abilities that characterize authority. we do not notice elementary fallacies in logic; it doesn't even occur to us to look for them; few of us are even aware that such things exist. we make no regular distinctions between those kinds of things that can be known and objectively verified and those that can only be believed or not. nor are we likely to examine, when we believe or not, the induced predispositions that may make us do the one or the other. we are easy prey.”

this is not namecalling. this is political crisis. how should we go about making better decisions? if mitchell’s paragraph were a quiz evaluating your skills of rational decision-making, how would you score? what are our weaknesses? how must we respond to them? are you easy prey? is that acceptable to you? are you content with it? i’m not. but you knew that already.

second: here is our hope:

what is our strength?

at the other end of the spectrum is something i can only (at this point) articulate as gay courage. lgbt spirit. our substance. our grit. our balls, no matter how we are gendered. the power we drew on to come out. it is characteristic of who we are and how we came to be. it defines us, to ourselves, to the world, to everyone & everything inbetween.

this is from gay beat poet harold norse’s memoirs of a bastard angel (which term is a euphemism for homosexual). (i believe he might still be alive and living in san francisco)

“that night, unable to sleep, i gazed at the stars through the attic window. boundless space. infinity. my mind boggled. who am i? why am i here? where am i going? as i stood stargazing, i began to rise and soar like a comet, speeding out of this world toward the astral bodies, beyond space and time. a circle of light engulfed me as i floated in some fifth dimension, in a tide of faces, arms, legs, genitals—a sea of human bodies—thousands, maybe millions, swirling around in whirlpools. then, as i had once done under ether, i suffocated, losing consciousness. so this was death! but almost at once i lived again—a new life—feeling ecstatic. again i was standing in the attic looking at the stars. it was no dream. i’d had an out-of-the-body experience.

although it did not bring peace or faith in a divine being (i’d had no experience of this) it showed that mind and spirit were not restricted by physical laws. i saw that i contained forces i could not comprehend but that existed within me. i was part angel.

we must learn to draw on our spiritual strengths to make better decisions, as well as to follow through on them.

there can be no denying that every lgbt person is part angel. it is as rock-solid a foundation of our gay humanity as is our mortality. trust it.

what must we do? what must i do?

seek out opportunities to be out.

if you don’t tell ‘em now you love ‘em, when are you gonna tell ‘em? when it’s too late?

if you’re not going to be out now, when are you going to be out? when it’s too late?

be out. be out today. be out with yourself. be out as much as you can. be out more. know your story. don’t wait until it’s a question of being nailed. practice.

here is the first part of my personal plan to be out: i will tell you the truth. i will tell you my stories, in my pain, in my shame, in my triumph, in which you will recognize your own. in my joy.

for me, the creation of texts is a political meditation as well as an artistic and spiritual practice. a response of my heart. it is the work of a shaman, the mythologization of experience. an engine of enlightenment.

what shall i do?

aim to change the world.

i hope to hear your stories on my way to washington with the campaign to end aids. right now i have to go be out with some pills at breakfast.

namasté.

aids.org

beingALIVE la

the life group la

SHORT LIST

call for one hundred heroes

pcsl: emily

coming up: a series of poses on tattooed soiciety

responses to d-life's reader survey

response on jonathan's hiv blog: hiv/diabetes comparison thread

scrawls on the wall

TO RECENT POSTS

RESOURCES

text of eoe5-028 michael mooney, deep point man © 2005 by richard kearns. writers and speakers quoted own their own words. in particular,

http://www.sourcetext.com/grammarian/index.html

go to chapter titled: propositions three and seven

now out of print. copyright 1989 by harold norse. isbn 0-688-06704-2

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