Breaking the Surface (24 page)

I felt good about quitting. I knew it was the right thing to do in terms of my health and in terms of being an Olympic athlete whom kids looked up to. I had a responsibility not to smoke.

In an odd way, quitting both drinking and smoking at the same time made me feel even more dependent on Tom. I needed him to be there for me on my bad days because I’d used both the drinking and smoking as a way of coping with my bad feelings about myself. Now all I had was Tom. On his good days he was a strong support. He would tell me how proud he was of me, that I was doing the right thing.

Another thing Tom did that I was grateful for was that he got me to pay more attention to what was going on in the world. He encouraged me to read the paper and watch CNN. He also got me to read books. The first Christmas after we met, he loaded me down with a bunch of books to take with me when I went home for the holiday. They were mostly self-help books, like
The Art of Loving
and
The Intimate Enemy
. I wonder if Tom read them first.

But it wouldn’t have mattered what books Tom read, because the problems we had facing us couldn’t be solved by reading books.

Y
OU WOULD THINK THAT
because Tom and I were a gay couple, the subject of AIDS would have been something we talked about early on in the epidemic. But we didn’t. In fact, AIDS didn’t really register with me in a big way until 1986, when I heard about Ryan White, a hemophiliac teenager in Kokomo, Indiana, who wasn’t allowed to go to school because he had AIDS. Ryan got AIDS through tainted batches of the clotting factor he had to inject himself with every day.

Before Ryan, I had been vaguely aware of what was called gay cancer. In 1985 I heard, along with the rest of the world, that Rock Hudson had died from AIDS. But it didn’t seem like AIDS was something I needed to worry about. The way I understood it, you got it from having sex in bathhouses or public restrooms, and you had to have a thousand sex partners. I was in a monogamous relationship, and while I’d had relationships before Tom and dated several men along the way, I never had that many partners.

It’s quite possible that Tom knew a lot more about AIDS from the beginning. Unlike me, he had contact with the gay community. He had gay friends, and when I was away, he spent time in Los Angeles. But Tom never said anything to me during those early years of the epidemic, and I was so focused on my diving that unless Tom told me what was going on in the world or it was major national news, I didn’t pay attention. I depended on him to be my eyes and ears to the world.

The Ryan White story was impossible to miss, and it really caught my interest. I first saw Ryan on CNN. I was very impressed by this kid who had gone to court to go to school, especially because I had always hated school and would have been happy if someone had said I couldn’t go. Ryan was sick, but instead of people having compassion for him, they were terrified that he’d spread AIDS by going to school. I thought if I showed I wasn’t afraid of Ryan, then maybe others would follow my example.

As oblivious as I was in those days, I knew of course that most of the people who suffered from HIV and AIDS discrimination were gay men. There was no other way I felt I could get involved in the issue of AIDS without risking some reporter asking questions about my life. Helping Ryan was a way of lending my name and stature to the AIDS cause without having anyone get suspicious. And then I met Ryan, and my life changed.

I invited Ryan to come to our national championships in Indianapolis in April 1986. It wasn’t a big public event, and all I wanted was to earn Ryan’s trust. I also wanted to get to know his mother, Jeanne White, and make sure that Ryan wasn’t just being pushed by her. I’d known plenty of stage moms in my day.

After the competition was over, I gave Ryan my gold medal, and I took him and his friend from school on a tour of the diving facility. I brought them up to the top of the ten-meter platform, to show them what it was like from my point of view. Ryan thought I was crazy. He said he’d never jump off anything that high, even if someone paid him.

Ryan was a kid, but it was clear from talking with him and Jeanne that he was the one calling the shots. I remember one time when I was over at his house visiting, Jeanne and I were talking about the different magazines that were trying to buy his story. She didn’t know which one to go with, and Ryan yelled out from the living room, where he was playing video games, “Hold out for the money, Mom. You’re going to need it when I’m gone.”

Despite his maturity, Ryan was still a teenager. Later, when we did press interviews together, he’d keep me in stitches by making faces at me from behind the reporter’s back. But he never failed to impress me with his intelligence and his perseverance. Ryan was determined to go to school, and once he’d accomplished that, his goal was to live a normal life for as long as he could and take every opportunity to educate people about AIDS. I was amazed at how he handled himself, whether it was one-onone or on national television. He was—and is—an inspiration.

Because of Ryan I got involved with AmFAR, the American Foundation for AIDS Research. I was asked to be an honorary board member and I agreed to be part of a calendar they put together. Over the years, whenever I’ve been asked to donate autographed bathing suits and photographs to be auctioned off for AIDS hospices all over the country, I’ve gladly helped. I would like to have taken a more active, high-profile role in AIDS education and fund-raising, but I was afraid that people would start asking questions. I was especially afraid after I found out about my own HIV status. I intend to do everything I can now for the rest of my life, but I wish I could thank Ryan for the inspiration he gave me. Jeanne always reminds me that he knows.

Getting to know Ryan and being involved with raising AIDS awareness, there was no way I could ignore the fact that Tom and I were at risk. It wasn’t just gay men with a thousand sexual partners who were getting sick. Tom and I could easily have been infected before we met each other, before anyone knew how to prevent AIDS. It didn’t matter that we were in a relationship. We were still at risk.

I started getting more scared when some of Tom’s friends got sick and died and then when Kevin wrote to tell me that he was HIV-positive. He urged me to get tested, but somehow I managed to stay in denial. When Tom came down with shingles in the summer of 1987, I convinced myself that it had nothing to do with AIDS, despite the fact that shingles is often the first sign that someone is HIV-positive.

We had just come back from a European tour when Tom got shingles. He met me in Italy for part of the trip and then headed back to California. I returned to Florida to continue with my training. When we parted, Tom was fine, but shortly after he got home, he started complaining about itching and burning. He was in excruciating pain before he went to the doctor who diagnosed it. Plenty of people who get shingles don’t have AIDS, and I took comfort from the fact that a straight guy about Tom’s age who worked in my attorney’s office had shingles. I figured that if he could get it from stress, so could Tom.

It was too frightening in 1987 for me to think that Tom could have AIDS. First of all, despite all my problems with him, I still loved him very much, and the thought of losing him was terrifying. If Tom was sick, then I might be sick—we’d been having unsafe sex for years. He could have infected me or I could have infected him, even though I apparently wasn’t showing any symptoms and didn’t yet know I was positive. It was the twin terror of facing the death of the person you love most and the possibility of your own death at the same time. The whole thing was so overwhelming that I couldn’t let myself think about it. Tom’s shingles was stress. That
had
to be it.

Tom got over the shingles and we went back to life as usual, or at least usual for us. We talked about getting tested for HIV, but we didn’t do it. I don’t think either of us wanted to deal with the real possibility that one or both of us was positive, so we pretended nothing was wrong. All around us gay men were getting sick, getting tested, getting educated, but we remained in denial. We were also in denial about safer sex; when we did have sex, we continued not to take any precautions. Despite the fact that one or both of us could have been infected from before we met each other, I convinced myself that everything was okay because we’d been in what I thought was a monogamous relationship. That dumb assumption was more denial, because it was clear to everyone but me that Tom hadn’t been monogamous. Too many gay men— too many people—blinded by love make the same dangerous assumption. If you really love each other, be safe—every time.

In early 1988 we went on another trip, and while we were away, Tom started to have trouble breathing. He seemed always to be out of breath lately whenever we walked anywhere. Again, I chalked it up to overwork. Tom went back to California and I went back to Florida. By now this was late February, and I was in training for the national championships, just a few weeks away. The Olympics were only five months away, so this was the beginning of a very intense period of training. Little did I know how intense.

After Tom got home, he got worse and worse. He was having high fevers and night sweats and he could barely get up and down the stairs. During our phone calls, Tom didn’t let on how sick he was, but on March 8, he called me to tell me he had to go to the hospital. I don’t know how he got there, but he did. I waited in my apartment for him to call me back. A few hours later he called from his hospital room. He was very out of breath. He told me he had pneumonia, that they were asking a lot of questions about his sexual history, and that they were running blood tests, including an HIV test.

Tom told me he was scared and that he thought he had AIDS. My stomach sank and I could feel my eyes filling with tears. There were times during the conversation when he talked about wanting to end it. I knew he was in a lot of pain, and I knew he couldn’t bear the thought of dying the way some of his friends had.

There was no denying it now. Tom probably had AIDS, and it would only be a matter of time before we got the results. After I put the phone down, I sat in my room with my head in my hands and cried.

Oddly, I’d had blood drawn for an HIV test that very day. I’d gone to my doctor, John Christakis, to have my ear checked for an infection. While I was there, I talked to him about how he would handle doing an HIV test. Just in case I decided to have the test at some point, I wanted to know how it would be done. I guess my denial was weakening.

John is my cousin by marriage, so I felt comfortable asking him. I didn’t know him well, but I knew I could trust him. He explained to me that he would draw my blood and put it under an assumed name. I looked at him, not saying anything. I couldn’t actually say that I wanted the test, because saying it meant acknowledging that I had more than a casual interest in being tested. John picked up on my anxiety and said, “Let me see some other patients. You think about it, and if you want to get tested, we can draw blood today and have it sent out. The results will be back in a few days.”

As I sat in the examining room, I thought about the reasons why I should get tested. I should do it for my peace of mind, and I should do it because this was an Olympic year. I thought through the worst-case scenario and decided that if the test came back positive, I would pack up and go home. First of all, I needed to be with Tom. Then, what if I made the team and couldn’t compete? I would be depriving someone else of the chance to go to the Olympics. Since I expected to qualify in both three-meter springboard and ten-meter platform, that would mean depriving
two
other divers of the opportunity to compete.

Olympians are not made overnight. I had worked out with the other divers for years and years. I knew what we’d all been through, how hard we’d worked to be good enough to compete in the Olympics. So for me, the thought that I might make the team and prevent two other divers from going to the Olympics and then not be able to compete myself was terrifying.

Then there was Ron. He would be wasting his time training somebody who might not be well enough to go to the Olympics when he could have been working with someone who could win a medal.