Sum it all up: The first sixteen years of Seth’s life were like something out of Norman Rockwell. He grew up in a Midwestern town that no one outside of the county had ever heard of. His parents were happily married. He had an older brother who he looked up to, and a younger sister who looked up to him. They took family vacations to major theme parks together, and more often than not, they sat down to eat dinner as a family without a single television turned on (and actually enjoyed the experience).

Seth had never once been a disappointment. His father was thrilled that, unlike his more academically minded older brother, Seth loved going outside to throw the pigskin around. He participated enthusiastically in Little League and Peewee Football and acquitted himself quite well at both. He was bright; not valedictorian material. He struggled with the more concrete disciplines like math and science, but had an excellent grasp of language and the more creative ways of thinking (which his mother, who had once dreamed of illustrating children’s books, adored).

When he entered middle school, when hormones began to take over, cracks finally began to appear in his otherwise perfect world. He was what was commonly known as a “baby jock”; a likely candidate to grow into the full grown version, come high school, though his sports of choice were wrestling and track and field. It was in the midst of the former that he realized why he was generally so disinterested in the braggadocio and locker room talk that his friends engaged in.

Being in close contact with other guys thrilled him. It also terrified him. He did everything he could to ignore the feelings and disguise the erections, even going so far as to date an affable female friend for the rest of his middle school career. He knew the truth though. He had access to the internet, to porn and personal sites and chat rooms. He was gay, but no one could ever know.

Depression accompanied the façade he maintained. There wasn’t anyone he could talk to. He tried leading a double life, but the first guy he met from online turned out to be ten years older than he said he was, and that was enough of that. He wouldn’t lose his virginity until he was dragged to a party by his older brother, who was a freshman at the nearby state university.

Seth had carefully avoided the pitfalls that so many teenagers fell prey to. He barely drank, just beer, and never enough to get more than buzzed. He didn’t smoke, cigarettes or otherwise. He didn’t even know how to do most other drugs; he knew there were needles, snorting and free-basing, but he lacked the technique to engage in anything of the sort. He felt safe letting go for just one night. It had been a very rough month, and with his brother and his brother’s friends egging him on, he got wasted.

He woke up the next morning with very little knowledge of what occurred. He was alone, in a bed, naked, and… sore. When he stumbled downstairs, he found out a few details of what had gone down. His secret was out of the bag. He’d apparently gotten drunk enough to flirt horrendously with one of the male party goers, and his brother had seen them stumbling upstairs together. Seth begged his brother to wait to tell his parents until he was ready, and his brother agreed.

A few weeks later, Seth met his first boyfriend at a track meet. He was from two towns over, and Seth was in love. A senior to his sophomore, Jonathan was much more experienced in the ways of gay. They started messing around, and eventually progressed to more. About four months into the relationship, Jon suggested they get tested together. It was part of his effort to educate Seth on being a proper young gay guy; get tested every six months, no matter what.

Seth got a phone call from the clinic, asking him to come back in for the results. If he was seasoned, he would have known he was in trouble. Negative STD panels were usually just related over the phone. It was only when there was something to discuss that a patient was called back to the clinic, which was typically staffed by too few underpaid people to hold hands through good news.

Thinking it was nothing, he went alone to learn that he had contracted HIV. The councilor he spoke with was very kind, very clear, very helpful. Seth was just numb. Jonathan had tested negative, but that didn’t mean anything. They’d only been exchanging body fluids for a few weeks, and he’d need to be tested again to make sure. He’d only had sex one other time, which he didn’t even remember, so the odds were against a condom having been involved. He fell apart telling Jonathan all of this, who wasn’t at all sympathetic given the fact that he might have been infected as well. Their contact tapered off after that, and Seth finally had to tell his parents not only that he was gay, but that he had the disease that every parent of a gay child worried about.

They were devastated, not disappointed. They got him on retrovirals immediately, and from that moment on, he was practically a prisoner in his own house. They were fine with him being gay, they assured him. They loved him as much as ever.

Seth couldn’t believe them. All he felt was pity, misunderstanding, judgment. Somehow word got out at school. His first thought was to kill himself, but he decided instead to leave it all behind in a different way. He took off, making cash advances on every one of his parents credit cards he could get his hands on and emptying his checking and savings accounts.

If he’d been depressed before, he spent the next two years broken and bitter. He moved in with someone seeking a roommate on Craigs List in the nearest big city. The guy was gross, but he stopped lusting after Seth when he revealed his HIV status. Seth had decided early on that from there on out, he was going to be completely abstinent. He never wanted anything to do with sex again, and he’d never forgive himself if he did to some unsuspecting stranger what some asshole at a college party had done to him.

He withdrew from society for a while, working a menial job. He spent most of his time reading and messing around on the internet. He was seventeen when he discovered the world of webcams. It was a safe form of release for his sexual frustrations. He didn’t have to reveal that he was positive for dirty talk and what accompanied it. Eventually, he got an offer from a guy he didn’t really want to cam with: 50 bucks via Paypal if he did whatever the man told him for a half-hour. The guy even walked him through setting up the Paypal account, and Seth’s career as an amateur porn star began.

In two months, he was pulling in enough to get an apartment of his own. He still kept himself detached from society, but he had a much more active online life. He was either reading (his tastes leaned toward the philosophically humorous, like Vonnegut and Robbins, or the starkly modern, like Easton Ellis, along with a good deal of assorted nonfiction), on his camera, or at the gym. Something in him still wanted to be social, it seemed, because he made a few friends when he was improving his body.

They kept badgering him and badgering him and he finally broke down and went to a club with them. Without the need to find someone to hook up with, he actually managed to have fun, with the help of some MDMA and a shot of GHB in his third drink of the night. He was far too addicted to his webcam business to give it up, but he did start taking nights off to hang out with the boys, never revealing to them that he was poz or how me paid for his apartment. He was developing feelings for one of them, though; Jaime, who, in addition to working out twenty hours a week, was a middle of the road drug dealer. They got close enough that he had to tell him, but Jaime didn’t care. They could be friends, whatever. It was only a matter of weeks before he was dragged into dealing, and not long after that, Jaime started doing shows with him. Nothing dangerous, but it was the closest thing to sex that Seth had since Jonathan, and he was pretty sure he was in love.

Jaime fucked over the wrong real drug dealer, though, and ended up disappearing before they came after him. Paranoid that they might come for him instead, Seth took the drugs he’d left behind and hopped to another city.