“William” is a heterosexual Swiss man who was diagnosed HIV-positive in 2000, and given a maximum of six years to live – even with AIDS drugs. But he never took those drugs and eventually found his way out of the AIDS Zone.
William describes how he started out his journey after his diagnosis with a philosophical sense of fatalism, and this deep grounding stayed with him as he navigated the difficult waters of discovery, finding rethinking viewpoints after two years, and diverse test results after four. But he describes how life is still not easy when friends and family find it difficult to accept his years of good health as proof that he is not “in denial” of his pending doom.
Mentioned in connection with the origin of the word “pharmacy” in the Greek “pharmakos” — a class of persons in ancient Athens who were kept at public expense only to be sacrificed later as “containers” of social, and especially sexual, anxieties — is Casper Schmidt’s 1984 article “The Group-Fantasy Origins of AIDS.” Interested listeners can find the article here.
William also talked about a recent HIV criminalization case in Switzerland in which an HIV-negative man who supposedly injected several people with HIV-infected blood was sent to jail for over a decade.