My Deliverance

I

"Faith" is a fine inventionWhen Gentlemen can see!—

emily dickinson

Groundhog Day 1988. I walk home in slush and sleet from a public health clinic in New Haven. I've just gotten the news that I am hiv-positive. I'm twenty-seven years old and six weeks away from taking my pre-doctoral orals at the Yale School of Drama. I get back to my apartment and call my best friend, David, who, in his hyper-Catholic way, says he wishes he could die for me instead. I was raised Catholic myself, but I wouldn't go that far. My second call is to my boyfriend, a panicky grad student who hasn't kissed me for fear of the virus. I have taken the test with the now-dashed hopes of extending our romantic repertory.

The third, and most essential, call is to my mother, Carolyn, who became a born-again Christian when I was a teenager and is now so deeply fundamentalist that she does everything but handle snakes and drink poison in His Holy Name. Telling her I'm hiv-positive means telling her I'm gay.

I begin with my orientation, which doesn't surprise. She says that for years she has been "receiving messages from the spirit world that I am in the lifestyle." I cannot imagine what those might be: the clomping around in my grandmother's high heels as soon as I could walk; the Trolls my mother made homemade dresses for on her sewing machine; the blue willow porcelain tea set I yearned for every year from the Sears Christmas catalogue; the show tune collection; the memorized Lily Tomlin routines; the Junior Year in Paris? But because I'm vulnerable, and because I love her, and because I've just received what was then considered a death sentence, I say "yes" when she asks me, very simply, whether I will accept Jesus Christ as my personal lord and savior.

I get off the phone a baby Christian, of all things. I tell no one in New Haven of this change. I throw myself into my studies, ace my orals, and at my mother's suggestion, dip now and again in Psalms and Proverbs. Denial and Psalm 91:2–3 are my prophylaxis: "I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress; my God, in him will I trust. Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence."

My younger sister, Margarette, is getting married that same May. In another call, my mother tells me that when I come home for the wedding, she'd like to take me downstate to visit a preacher she knows in Farina, Illinois, for some healing. I have since had two appointments at Yale Health Services. My doctor, a brusque Welshwoman with hair like a hat, says she can do nothing for me except monitor my progress, or rather, to my mind, chart my decline. There are no drugs for her to prescribe. There are only blood draws. The yellow biohazard sticker placed on my health file is vexing. I have nothing to lose, surely, so I agree to my mother's plan.

In the five-hour car trip to Farina—an apt name, since in my experience born-again Christians are starch fiends—I reveal my gay history, and my mother reveals that Al Cobb is an intercession minister, and that what he is going to do is cast the demons out of my body.

Illinois, you may already know, is a flat, treeless state scraped clean by the glaciers. That Reverend Cobb and his wife manage to live on an actual incline, in a house hidden by a stand of scrub pine, scares me not a little as we motor up the driveway. We enter the house, which is decorated very '70s grandparent comfy: chairs that swivel, shag carpet in the living room, rag rugs over speckled linoleum in the kitchen, cheery trivets with Godlike sayings on the walls, a small tv with antennas on a rolling metal stand, a Crock-Pot in use...