As a 27-year survivor of HIV/AIDS, I remain particularly tuned-in to advancements in the treatment of the disease. Obviously, in all those years, a cure has remained elusive. But huge, almost miraculous, strides have been made rendering it a chronic, manageable disease.
I remember the early days of the three-drug regimen which consisted of a combination of two nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors and one non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor, a protease inhibitor, and an integrase inhibitor. In a bit of black humor, because so much of gay life at the time centered around the one place we felt safe – the gay bar – this used to be called “the cocktail.” It was the mid-90s, and up until then, an HIV diagnosis meant certain death, sooner rather than later.
The three-drug regimen changed HIV from a rapidly fatal disease to a “survivable with pharmacological intervention” disease. The men who were sick at the time the cocktail was rolled out experienced remarkable dying-to-living transformations, so much so that they were called “Lazarus men” alluding to the biblical story of Jesus at Bethany raising a man named Lazarus from the dead. Many of them fled the metropolis and moved to a quaint little resort town called Palm Springs in the California low desert about 120 miles north of the US border with Mexico.
People have commented to me, “oh, you live in Palm Springs… that’s like a gay mecca,” and it is, because of the great desert migration begun by HIV positive men in the mid-90s who had been given a second chance at life because we now had medicine to treat the disease. There was nothing left in the cities they came from for those early pioneers; HIV meant jobs had been lost, meaning mortgages and rent couldn’t be paid – HIV is an expensive disease to have and an expensive disease to treat. Added to the economic devastation that accompanied an HIV positive diagnosis was the stigma and social shunning – we learned what it must have felt like to have been a leper in the Middle Ages. And because of systemic homophobia, we were blamed and chastised for our own declining health, even by Republican presidential candidates. Society writ large saw us as victims of our own crime. And that crime was being gay.
Palm Springs offered an oasis that was as much metaphorical as it was physical. I read a report several years ago that tourist spots tend to attract LGBTQ+ residents because their populations are largely transitory and inherently diverse – people are in town for a few days or weeks, and while they may bring luggage on their trip they tend to leave their “baggage” at home. Locals adopt a pronounced tolerance for diversity, because that diversity provides the tax base, through restaurants, hotels, and attractions, that keeps their town a going concern. Tolerance becomes the town’s stock-in-trade.
So Palm Springs was an attractive destination to the Lazarus men, and those, like myself, who followed them years later, not just for its reputation as LA’s playground with its endless sunshine and spring-like winters, but because it held out the opportunity for LGBTQ+ people to avoid living in a place that left them feeling constantly under siege. Palm Springs became a gayborhood where we could feel safe.
For the large contingent of HIV positive men who found their way to the desert, Palm Springs offered them a chance to rebuild the lives they thought they’d never be able to live because of the finality of the diagnosis, and a place to have a life while we waited for greater and greater medical breakthroughs. I’ve gone from a cocktail of three drugs which had to be taken at specific, and very precise, times of day to just one pill a day! That kind of progress, in just under three decades, is why I remain optimistic we will see a cure in my lifetime. And it’s why I even have a “lifetime” today – I’m at an age now where you realize you’re just slightly too old to die tragically young, as so many HIV positive men did.
And while we await a cure, we have our town, with its sunshine, its snow-capped mountains that remind me of a Bundt cake dusted with powdered sugar on top, its palm trees, its fields of sand, its progressive politics, and its promise of life well lived.
Written and directed by Daniel F. Cardone, Desert Migration is a 2015 documentary about the long-term HIV/AIDS survivors who have migrated to form a unique community in the beautiful but harsh landscape of Palm Springs. More than the story of a town, it is a paean to the daring, the courage, the resilience, and the hope of that town’s people. Watch its trailer below: