Breaking the Surface (41 page)

My health, thank goodness, has been stable. Over the past six years, I’ve taken the whole range of available HIV antiviral drugs, and now I’m back on AZT, but at a lower dosage. I’m still on daily medication to keep my fungal infection in check, and I take the usual prophylactic drugs HIV patients take to stay healthy.

As I look back over 1994, 1 can see that one of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that while diving may be my true gift, that doesn’t mean it’s the only way I’m able to communicate. My experience in St. Louis taught me that. And now that I don’t have to hide the fact that I’m both gay and HIV-positive, I have a lot more that I want to say. I just hope I have enough time to make a difference.

Wish me luck. I’ll need it.

I
COULD NEVER HAVE IMAGINED
what my life would be like after I finished working on this book. And because so many people have written to me to asking how
Breaking the Surface
changed my life, I thought I would tell you a little about the after-math.

When I finished work on the final chapter of
Breaking the
Surface,
I still had five months to go before publication, five months before I could leave my self-made prison. You’d think that after keeping silent about so much for so long that five months would be nothing, but it felt like forever. Honestly, though, after so many years in hiding, I had a lot of work to do before I was ready to talk publicly about things I never even talked about in private. I needed every one of those months to prepare psychologically and emotionally for what I knew was going to be one of the biggest challenges of my life.

In some ways, getting ready to tell the truth about my life was like preparing for the Olympics. I had to train. I had a coach. And I had specific events to get ready for. My coach was Dr. Stan Ziegler, a wonderful psychologist, and we worked together three hours a week for the better part of a year. The goal was for me to be ready by the time of my first major event, which turned out to be an interview with Barbara Walters, for ABC’s
20/20
in late January. The interview was scheduled to air less than a month later, on the Friday before the book was set to arrive in stores.

Part of me wondered if I’d ever be ready, if I’d ever be fully prepared to go public. And, of course, I couldn’t be. Just like diving off the ten-meter platform, you can prepare as much as you want beforehand, but once your feet leave the platform, it’s still a free fall. In diving, you hope you land on your head, with virtually no splash. In this case I knew that no matter what, I’d make some waves, but I at least needed to land on my feet, and I wasn’t sure I could do that.

Stan and I talked about everything from my bad self-esteem and past relationships to growing up and my thoughts about the future. There was never any expectation that we could possibly deal with everything in the short time we had, but we covered as much ground as we could. One of the major subjects we put off discussing was how I felt about my change in status from being HIV-positive to having AIDS. Although I had no symptoms, my T-cell count had fallen below two hundred, which, according to the Centers for Disease Control definition, meant that I was classified as having AIDS.

At the end of our second-to-last session before the Barbara Walters interview, Stan said, “Well, we didn’t get to the question of what happens if Barbara asks you if you have AIDS. I know that we’ve neglected this, but we’ll discuss it on Friday.”

At that point, my thinking was that I’d talk about being HIVpositive but not say anything about my T-cell count and AIDS. I felt fine. I didn’t feel sick or look sick, so I was having a hard time accepting my official diagnosis. It was overwhelming to think about it, because in my mind AIDS meant that the end was near. And I knew that would be the public perception as well. I could imagine the headlines—“Greg Louganis Has AIDS”—and everybody would be thinking I was on my deathbed. I couldn’t deal with it, but at least there was still time to talk it out with Stan.

On Friday, when I went to Stan’s office, there was a note on his door saying that his associate was taking his appointments. I assumed that Stan’s friend, Paul Monette, the writer, had passed away. Paul had been gravely ill with AIDS, and I knew that Stan had been helping take care of him. I figured I’d talk to Stan later in the day, and that we’d do my session by phone. This was an important session, so I knew Stan would find the time for us to talk.

Shortly after I got home, Mitchell Ivers, my editor, called and asked me if I’d heard the news. I told him that I’d gone to Stan’s office and there was a note on the door, so I figured Paul had passed away and that Stan was helping Paul’s partner with the arrangements. Mitchell said, “No, Stan died.”

Stan was forty-four years old. He didn’t have AIDS. He hadn’t been sick. This was completely out of the blue. I couldn’t speak. All I could say to Mitchell was, “I’ve got to go,” and I hung up the phone. I thought to myself, “Isn’t life supposed to be easier than this?” I learned some days later that Stan had died from unusual complications of Crohn’s disease, which he had battled for many years.

The day after Stan died, I was still in shock, but I had to drive down to the diving pool at Belmont Plaza in Long Beach to meet Barbara Walters and the
20/20
crew. The actual interview wasn’t scheduled until Monday, but they wanted me to do some dives, which they planned to videotape for the story. I cried the whole way down the coast, but by the time I got to the pool I’d managed to pull myself together. I was okay when I met Barbara.

Once we started taping, there was so much down time between dives that my mind started wandering. I thought about how this was what Stan and I had worked so hard to prepare for, and Stan wasn’t there. I was standing up on the diving board, feeling very alone, and tears started streaming down my face. Someone must have noticed, because Barbara came over and asked me what was up. I came down off the board and told her that my therapist had just passed away, and I started crying. She was wonderful and held me as I cried. I was very grateful to Barbara for her compassion and genuine concern. I got through the rest of the taping, and I drove home.

Two days later, I met with Barbara for the formal interview. After it aired four weeks later, many people asked me if I was upset with Barbara, because they thought she was harsh in questioning me. I never thought that. Off camera, Barbara was warm and loving. Of course, when the cameras rolled, sometimes the questions sounded as though they had a hard edge to them, but she was just doing her job. I didn’t feel in any way that she was trying to judge me or catch me off guard.

I was pretty nervous during the interview itself. This was the first time I was talking so publicly about a lot of difficult things. It helped that everybody was so nice to me. I’d already spent time with the crew, so I felt comfortable. And during the actual interview there were a lot of tears from them. They’d had no way of knowing what they were going to be hearing.

None of Barbara’s questions surprised me, including the one about whether I had AIDS. What came as a surprise to me was my own response. I hadn’t really thought through what I was going to say, but saying I had AIDS never crossed my mind. As I started explaining that according to the CDC definition I had AIDS, it was almost as if I was in a dreamlike state. I couldn’t believe what was coming out of my mouth. It was information that I had in my head, and it just came out.

After the interview was over, I told Barbara that I wasn’t sure I was comfortable with the response I’d given about having AIDS versus being HIV-positive. She explained that I had until the morning of the air date to let her know if I wanted it cut from the interview. She told me, “If you’re not comfortable with what you said, we don’t want to go with it.” But I didn’t really want to take back what I had said. It was something that I had to start dealing with, and I figured I might as well come clean from the start. It was a relief now that I had nothing left to hide.

I had two primary goals for the weeks following the taping of the
20/20
interview, a period that I knew would be the quiet before the media storm. First, I had to find someone to take care of my dogs during the several weeks I was going to be away promoting the book. The other thing I needed to do was talk to several of my friends about my HIV status. I had waited this long to tell anyone because the last thing I wanted to have happen was for the news to accidentally leak before the book was out there to explain the whole story and before I was ready to talk about everything.

The plan was to have the
20/20
interview air on Friday, and the following Monday, the day the book arrived in stores,
People
magazine was scheduled to publish an excerpt of the book. That same day, with everything already out there in print and having told at least the big news to Barbara Walters, I was going to speak at a student-sponsored event at Columbia University, to which the press had been invited. It was all meant to be very orderly and dignified.

Well, it didn’t exactly work out the way we had planned. Six days before the
20/20
interview was set to air, one of the national tabloids ran an article about me being HIV-positive and that I was going to announce this news, among other things, in an interview with Barbara Walters. My editor had heard a rumor that this was going to be a cover story, so we were relieved when we found it was buried way in the back. We hoped no one noticed, and I just went about my business as if nothing had happened. Of course, it was noticed, and on Wednesday a gossip columnist in Chicago ran with the story. By that afternoon it was out on all the news wire services that I was HIV-positive and had been when I hit my head on the diving board in Korea and “bled in the pool.” I never bled in the pool, but that was what just about every reporter seemed to accept as fact for the next few days as my story played out in the news media around the world.

By three in the afternoon, a half dozen reporters and television news crews were camped out in front of my house, and the phone was ringing off the hook. Some of the messages were from friends, people close to me, including Jeanne White, Ryan’s mom, whom I hadn’t yet had a chance to talk to. I’d planned to call all of them that night and the next day. One of the calls was from Dawnn Lewis. She’d heard the news on the radio and was really upset. She just assumed that I was coming forward because I’d gotten very sick, and she thought I was on my deathbed. I quickly reassured her that I was okay.

As I was trying to talk to people on the phone, the news people were calling to me through the front door, telling me that they wanted to hear my side of the story. Some of them slipped notes under the door. There was no way I was going to talk to them. My agreement with
20/20
and
People
was that I not talk to the media until after the Barbara Walters interview aired and
People
magazine hit the stands. I had every intention of honoring those agreements even though my initial instinct was to open the door and say, “You’ve got the story wrong, and you obviously don’t know how people contract the AIDS virus.”