AIDS Sunday Livestream Sharing

https://www.facebook.com/hkbmcc.org/videos/1738653566341361

What I just shared during BMCC’s World AIDS Day Sunday livestream:

2020’s World AIDS Day was my 25th since being diagnosed HIV-positive. At twenty, when I first went to the hospital, I did not imagine I would leave — let alone live to forty-five.

Last week at BMCC’s 28th anniversary celebration, our lead pastor at the time asked: “Are there any brothers or sisters who’d like to come out and share?” I did not raise my hand. What I wanted to say was: BMCC, for many, is a “gay church,” or a church that welcomes everyone. To me, it is the only church in Hong Kong where I feel I belong and feel safe.

Here there are men, women, and transgender people; LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+; Chinese and non-Chinese; the hearing and the deaf. So diverse, so rainbow. A Sunday service of a few dozen people can run in four languages simultaneously — Cantonese, Mandarin, English, sign language — that’s remarkable. Even more remarkable, for me, is that here there are both HIV-negative and HIV-positive people.

Ten, twenty years ago, I once came out to a pastor in a mainstream church — about both my orientation and my HIV status. They no longer allowed me to join the fellowship small-group; they told me not to go with brothers and sisters for tea after service, only to fast food places where everyone ate separately. Their ignorance about AIDS at the time, I can understand.

But the church sent two brothers and sisters to study the Bible with me — they wanted to study Romans, to convince me that homosexuality is a sin and that Scripture taught it. They would not, like BMCC, tell me that reading the Bible must move beyond its specific historical, cultural, geographic, and temporal context — that passages which seem to condemn same-sex behaviour are actually about Gentiles worshipping idols, not about homosexuality.

Thank God I found BMCC, came into contact with queer theology, met so many witnesses here — and was set free, was renewed.

Perhaps because most people here are LGBTQ+, the difficulty of coming out about a dual identity (gay and HIV-positive) is easier to understand. When I told some brothers and sisters about my full identity, instead of being excluded I received much support and encouragement.

I will always remember 1997, when a brother or sister asked me: “If you were to die tomorrow, would you have any regret?” I answered honestly: “I’ve never been on a plane!” So they pooled around three thousand dollars so I could fly for the first time — to Taiwan, to Tongkwang Presbyterian Church for sexual minorities, to the Taiwan Lourdes Association — to meet brothers and sisters who, like me, were both LGBTQ+ and HIV-positive Christians. I felt God’s call there, to bravely step forward and let one life influence another.

AIDS is no longer the deadly disease it once was. A few years ago at an international conference, an expert said that if forced to choose between Stage 2 diabetes and HIV-positive status, he’d take HIV. With consistent treatment, HIV-positive people today live very normal lives.