I am acutely aware of the fact that no one in a million years would dare to publish this. That does not mean I do not need to write it. I needed to write it. Yet I can see where it fits tightly into JUST BEFORE THE CURE which is where it’s going.

Those two words in the same sentence. Love and Boys. It doesn’t come anymore explosive than that. Unless you were there for the Big Bang. I have learned to always put it up front in no uncertain terms: I do not have sex with boys. Never have. Never will. Love and sex are not the same thing. Far from it.

I am always asked: “Why do you teach boys at-risk.”

Let us translate that: “Why do you put yourself at such high risk as to be anywhere near such boys. You will be publicly executed.”

“A long time ago, I was one of them.”

People nod and slink away. I get those furtive glances. I don’t get invited to the Winter Haven Cocktail and Barbecue Golf Club to drink vodka tonics and eat pigs in a blanket. I don’t eat meat. I don’t suck cock (pity). And I don’t play golf.

Boys at-risk are anything but easy. But at-risk for what. That is definitely easy to answer.

HIV.

The disease comes first.

Not love. Not sex. Not sustenance. Not peer pressure. Not education. Not relationships. Not family. The disease comes before any of these things.

That means the issue becomes accessibility to the medications.

The typical, average cost of the medications per kid among our small group is $60,000 a year. Down from 100K a year. Mainly because some of these drugs are old enough to go generic. Big Pharma holds on to them very tightly. They make tens of billions of dollars. We are a captive audience for their show, and there are no free rides through HIVLand Adventures. Insurance companies cannot reject preexisting conditions, but they can fight paying for HIV drugs tooth and nail. I’m not sure how this arrangement helps anyone.

Health insurance companies are required to take you but they fight paying for antiretrovirals. One way or the other, they win. They have to take you, but they will charge you fees that could pay for the interior decoration of the Taj Mahal.

Then, there are other issues like prison, school failure, violence, loss of home and family, banishment, suicide, a roof over their heads, malnutrition, various addictions, self-hate, and any economic security whatsoever.

The polite academic descriptions never mention sex work. Etiquette forbids any mention of it. This is beneath contempt and patently absurd.

Sex work is one thing every last one of the boys I work with shares. By seventeen, they’ve usually spent several years managing their own business. They get branding, social media marketing, and the tricks they have sex for cash with, exclusively married men. They have a lot to say about all of this.

I cannot save them. That is as important to articulate as making it clear that I do not have sex with them. They are forever being called the Hard To Reach of all the many Boys At-Risk. We love to make them, and then throw them away.

I have no idea how you can be at-risk for something you already have. The labels can be as incorrect as they are polite. Many of their tricks will pay them more to lose the condom. Poverty creates a certain kind of desperation and despondence that has to do with an ability or lack of ability to endure.

They all have HIV. AIDS is not over. HIV is usually now described as something that can be managed. It doesn’t come anymore politically correct than that. There’s rhetoric, and then there’s reality. What I have seen is a completely different take. HIV manages you. I have never seen any of the boys manage it.

I am part of an entire team of people who are in essence the “village” it takes to head off suicide. Part of their drug cocktails are antidepressants. Often, they just don’t work. Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors are largely theoretical constructs. Neurologically, they’re placebos.

If a kid really wants to kill himself (most suicides are boys) he’ll find a way. So what works. If anything.

At the risk of sounding like Pollyanna, please allow me to tell you what does work. Love works.

This is why I love them. They bond so hard, they have one another’s back. It is not an affectation.

Often, one of the things they share as survivors is the violence that has been directed at them.

When Tay and Joel figured out they had both survived the same trick who had raped them separately, but with the same knife, they were able to actualize the notion that no one else could really understand what it felt like. Boys who have been raped in a culture war of sexuality and commodity come as a great surprise to a society that still can’t incorporate the idea that young boys can be sexually exploited, and when that young man is charging money for it, feelings of rage come to the surface that get focused on the kid who is trying to survive. Sex work can be like that.

Joel and Tay will tell you that they fell in love. They have a lot in common even if one is black and the other one, white. I have no illusions. You learn to discard such baggage. They will return to sex work.

I do not know if they can or will stay together. I know this: they don’t have sex. They are extremely sex negative. “It’s what got us into this mess.”

They mean HIV.

AIDS orgs and the CDC call them the Hard To Reach, but not much effort goes into reaching them. It’s tough stuff tolerating kids who make no effort to reach back. So no one is reaching anyone. The status quo.

They live their lives at the margins, and there is no evidence to suggest that their fate will be all that different from the boys at the margins who have no one. They sell what they have to sell. Prostitution is illegal and they are criminals. They pay cops not to bust them, and they are very bitter about it. We talk. They vent. I listen. Listening is what I do. It’s really all I have.

Joel and Tay love the same music. This is a big deal in the world of any adolescent. They recently gave the other boys, their cohorts and colleagues, dance lessons. Most find time to do fun things is quite limited. Most did not know how to dance. They have an Instagram account. Photography is now a passion. Their social media accounts are changing. The image of the whore (their term) selling his body is receding toward just the kid who is selling — not happiness — but the illusion of happiness which is one thing that goes a long way toward what is normal for teenagers to construct within a context of desirability versus quid pro quo. 

Some of the boys are bonded by addictions. They are not going to make it. There are no solid structures for them to cling to. Some of the boys are bonded by homelessness. They can tell you where the best shelters are, and which ones are safer than the others. Some of the boys are bonded by sexuality. It is a mistake for anyone to think all of them are gay. Straight boys can be good at playing what they see as nothing more than a part in a play they did not invent. A few are bonded by shared hospitalizations related to both HIV and suicide attempts.

Only they can know what brings them together. I can only describe what I see and what I am told. I never had such relationships when I was their age. It was not allowed. All I had was a motorcycle, and all it did was spirit me away to places just like the ones I had left.

It is easy for me to reject seduction. Love and sex are not the same animal. I can love them for who they are and not for what they do to survive. There is a vast difference.

I am perhaps Pollyanna, after all.

I was recently late because I had to tangle with traffic after spending an entire night sleeping upright (sleeping is not what I would really call it) in a hospital chair in a patient room with a kid who had no one in his life — to be at-risk for a life of loneliness is a murderous proposition — this kid had tried to hang himself, and was now strapped down and filled with drugs.

I could easily have been him. I used a gun. Not a rope. It is harder to kill yourself than people think.

When I returned to the other boys, they were dancing slowly all around the room.

Smash Street Art Program for At-Risk Boys is an initiative of Real Stories Gallery Foundation.