For World Aids Day, new Dean of Multicultural Life Christopher MacDonald-Dennis delivered a talk as part of the Lealtad-Suzuki Center's SPEAK! series in which he conversed openly about being diagnosed with HIV in 1996. This week he sat down with The Mac Weekly to chat about the talk, his history and the legacy he hopes to leave at Macalester.
TMW: Were you apprehensive about giving your World Aids Day talk?
CM: You know, I've actually been a speaker, kind of a "Motivational Speaker"—although I hate that term because it sounds so cheesy. But I've done speaking to classrooms, to groups, to AIDS Prevention Organizations … but there was something about a small community, especially in a place that I didn't quite understand. I had heard people say, "We don't do that in Minnesota." You know people say that a lot here. I'm from the East Coast, but I didn't know how this was gonna be received in the Midwest in a place where people are extremely friendly, but also very reticent in talking about their personal lives. So I wasn't quite sure what that was going to be. I remember waking up that day and being a little like, "Okay, so this could either go really well or…"—I knew it was going to go well, but I wasn't quite sure what the impact was going to be.
TMW: Why is it so important to you to give "Living With HIV" talks?
CM: Someone reminded me that we are entering the fourth decade of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, because it was 1981 when we found out. And I think that for a lot of people, HIV and AIDS are topics that people don't really talk about, that people don't think about; I think they think about it somewhere else. They think about Sub-Saharan Africa or they think about it happening to other people. And for me, I want people to always know that they know someone with this disease. So it puts a human face to this disease. And it really allows people to say, "This is something that we as a community need to tackle." It also allows people to come out about their own experience. I've met people who've come up to me that their fathers have had HIV. I met a woman once whose grandmother had HIV. Even after this talk here, there were people who came up and said, "Can I tell you about the person that I've lost?" And they've never talked about that before. So it's nice to be able to say, "I want to bring who I am to this place and I want to talk about my losses."
I also think that oftentimes we focus on intellectual intelligence, kind of like academic intelligence, but we don't talk about emotional intelligence. And I hope that I showed that [cultivating] that is just as important … to become more aware of yourself, to really understand who you are. That doesn't mean you're not to make mistakes, but it just means, "Okay I understand who I am and I am comfortable in my own skin." And people really commented after the talk that it was unlike anything they'd really ever seen at Macalester.
TMW: In your talk, what's the most important point for you to make?
CM: I want people to see themselves, so I talk about the decisions that I made when I was having unprotected sex with the person who infected me. I remember thinking (and I said this) that he didn't use a condom. And I remember thinking, "Maybe I should say something. But what if he leaves? What does that say about me?" I want people to hear that because I know I'm not the only person who has ever thought that. And I always say that I was just the unlucky one. I want people to locate themselves, because sometimes I think that in this society in order to protect ourselves because we say, "Oh this won't happen to me because I would never make that decision." And when I said that, and when I told people what I was thinking, you could see people's faces, like "I've been there, I've done that, I've made some of those poor decisions." So it's just really to help people to realize that that's why you need to really protect yourself because it's not like I did something so horrendous. I just met this really cute guy at a club. You know, that's all I did. And a lot of people do that and don't think about the consequences. I also wanted people to take from the talk that we ultimately can choose—while we can't always choose what happens to us—we choose how we accept it and deal with it. I always say that HIV was the greatest gift I've ever received, because I've had to learn about myself. People kept being really surprised, but I said, "We can do that with anything in our life. When we have disappointments, how do we ultimately choose to deal with that?" That doesn't mean we don't get upset or frustrated, but it does say that ultimately, how we choose to really deal with it is up to us.
TMW: Would you say your experience as a Queer Person of Color with HIV has been different than other people's?
CM: You know, it is different and it's not different and let me explain what I mean. I explained in my talk that when I was first diagnosed, I joined a support group and there were people from different walks of life there. I remember there was this rich, gay, white male lawyer. Very nice guy, but totally came from a different world than I did. I had HIV, he had HIV. There was an African American woman whose husband had been in jail, there was a Latino woman who had been an IV drug user and some folks who had had unprotected sex and I think they were from poorer communities. You know, Audrey Lord says, "There is no hierarchy in oppression." It's a phrase that we in Social Justice say all the time, and I didn't really get it until that moment. I realized that we all faced different issues, but we were the marginalized in society. Ronald Reagan didn't say the word ‘AIDS' until I believe it was 1987 or 1988, even though he had gay friends, even though he knew gay people. A lot of us who lived through the early years of the epidemic remember what that was like. The fear, and really just the other-ing that happened. While I think that my experience might be different, there really is a commonality. I really feel a common bond with other people with HIV, because often we can talk about those feelings of internalized depression that we have, the shame, and ultimately the way that we are treated now. So there really is a common bond that I feel with people.
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