World AIDS Day

Butler Community College offered the opportunity to gain some personal insight Monday during National AIDS Awareness Day.

HIV patient Dusty Gardiner came out to speak to Butler faculty staff, students and visitors about the troubles of living with the disease and his view on problems with society’s perception about it.

Gardiner told the crowd he hails from Douglass, where he came to terms with his gay sexual orientation at the age of 12. He said he felt the urge to experience more of the world from a young age, spurred in part due to a lack of acceptance for his orientation there at the time.

“I knew I needed to get out,” Gardiner said.

After he graduated in 1994, he moved to New York where he felt he would fit in better. Gardiner said he knew about HIV and how to prevent it, so he wasn’t concerned about the possibility of contracting it himself.

“I never really thought about it,” he said.

Gardiner then began a streak of visits to different countries beginning in London. There, he saw a number of ads concerning safe sex that prompted him to think over his views on the topic in general. He said there is a significant problem in the United States with public officials and the public being afraid to be open on the subject of HIV and safe sex.

“Very little has been done about this on the national level,” Gardiner said.

Visits to other foreign locations, from Amsterdam to India to Thailand, each brought fresh perspectives on the issue to Gardiner.

He told the group of his time spent in Africa, where the blinds were drawn whenever he would be on a tour bus as they passed by a village afflicted with poverty and AIDS to preserve a positive image for the tour group. This highlighted for Gardiner a recurring problem he’d seen in his travels with the people of those countries seemingly pretending to be oblivious where presence of the disease and need for education on prevention was concerned, a problem he said persists to this day.

“If we don’t want to see something, we just won’t talk about it,” Gardiner said.

He said he moved to Las Vegas next, where he admits to having “lived dangerously” where his personal life was concerned. After he began having health problems following a move to Cincinnati, he finally decided to get tested for HIV, which he was convinced he’d contracted at the time.

“I was pretty sure I was being cooked in a microwave a couple times and they couldn’t get the times right,” he said of the testing process.

The results came back negative from two different doctors, to his surprise. It turned out he had cancer, however, which, presented him with challenges of its own. Scared as he had been about the repercussions of his lifestyle, Gardiner took a vow of celibacy for three years to sort out his responsibilities. He moved back to Kansas, where he finally got back into dating over the Internet.

Though he had tried to be careful, he ended up contracting HIV from the first person he met in spite of being safe about his relations. He discovered the condition after getting tested when he sensed things settling down with the next person he met, whom he is still with today.

Initially horrified about his situation, Gardiner took the advice of his doctor and stayed active socially for his mental health. After coming to accept his situation, he set a personal life goal to get out and talk to people about HIV and promote awareness of how to prevent it and the challenges it causes.

Gardiner now attends Kansas State University and said through his efforts he has been able to make impact there with the community opening up more over time.

He told the group he is now a popularly requested speaker for a number of fraternities and sororities, whose members are generally active sexually, which he says shows more stake is being placed in that information as long as it is presented properly. This led to Gardiner being invited to a traditionally straight bar to do HIV testing, an invite he found surprising but delighted him and further affirmed his efforts have made headway in the area.

Gardiner said broader public acknowledgement and involvement in HIV awareness education is key to shifting public perspective in a better direction.

“Activism makes all the difference,” he said.

Gardiner said part of the unconcerned attitude many have regarding such sexually transmitted diseases is knowing of the increased longevity of patients through available health care and the subsequently lower fatality rate from the disease every year. However, he said, despite those improvements, that perspective ignores the troubles those living with the disease face every day and isn’t helping inform the public about prevention.

That problem carries to the medical field, where Gardiner has had trouble on multiple occasions with going to new local doctors who don’t have broad education on the subject. Such unpreparedness concerns him because of the serious life-affecting nature of the disease and he is worried about not being able to receive proper health care in one place, where he could in others.
Gardiner said awareness and the facts associated with the condition isn’t just something those without HIV need to know, but even those who already have it.

“If you don’t teach people that have the disease, they’re going to keep spreading it,” he said.

Gardiner, who is now a three-time cancer survivor, told the group of a number of conditions that affect him as a result of HIV, from shaking hands to days he literally can’t move, sometimes because his body is fighting off a common cold. Problems with kidney and liver functions have also been a persistent problem. He’s run into a variety of other challenges as well, from personal loneliness to fear about changes in the numbers on his blood tests when they reach serious levels. A more unique challenge has been explaining to children how to act around people to avoid the condition, where he said the main rule he gives is to not touch others’ blood.

Gardiner said there are some positive movements going where awareness is concerned, but the issue is one that will need to continue to grow to counter the negative stigma associated with those who have HIV.

“It’s those little messages that send a really big, bad message,” he said.

Gardiner said as the United States changes its global perspective, he is anticipating a greater focus on the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases and their prevention that will turn the outlook for the activists like him to a more positive one.

“Paying attention to the people that are making a difference in the world is important,” he said.