Macromaniacal

The lolcats phenomenon continues. This week there has been a redoubling of the meme and the pursuit of understanding concerning it across the Internet. I wouldn't be surprised if this soon landed in print somewhere like Time, Newsweek or a major newspaper here or overseas. Perhaps a small blurb on the nightly news is headed our way.

Here are some highlights:

Pop Semiotics
Lolpresidents (original)
Lolpresidents (Fark)
Slate slideshow
Information Week
Detroit Free Press (Freep)

Here are some things I missed when I wrote the original piece:

Lolsquid
Mental Floss
Roflemo
Lolbees
Lolbrarians

The Slate slideshow is remarkably similar to my original essay on the subject which appeared on icanhascheezburger.com, and it mentions most of what I mentioned, yet it doesn't mention my essay. Hrmph. With so much chatter over all of this, I suppose it is easy to fall through the cracks.

Anyway, I had some free time today and decided to put together a central hub for all things image macro we could all use to keep up with the phenomenon as it evolves.

Check it out here.

Original piece here.

Photochops

Well, the lolcat article just won't stop generating massive traffic. So, I thought fans might enjoy this as well.

Digital Elegies

A fellow college student died recently. He was killed in an automobile accident, and it took everyone who knew him by surprise.

Soon after, the Facebook page of Terry "T.J." Thomas started overflowing with messages of sympathy and remorse, electronic missives shot into the afterlife for all to see.

When I first looked over it in preparation this article, there were only a few wall postings. Now, there are dozens, most written directly to Terry as though the authors expect him to log on from the other side and smile back at the monitor from wherever he is now.

For those of you not in the know, Facebook is a social networking website. Think of it as a cleaner, more mature MySpace. It's extremely popular on most college campuses, mine included among them.

It is a sign of the times we live in. Our modern existence demands we have a cyberspace presence to go along with our meatspace one. Many people have several selves, one for each forum, message board, email and website. Anonymity helped build the web. With social networking websites, you turn the tables and put your real self on the Internet so you can connect with other real people.

It all seems natural; after all, we are social beings. But, reading Terry's Facebook page feels strange. I never knew him, never spoke to him and have never met most of the people who are writing on his wall.

Still, it's all there for anyone to see. Maybe that's a good thing. All those digital requiems floating in the ether for each passersby to ponder, perhaps this is a latent function of social networking, one we never expected to be so good for us, so cathartic.

There is a place on the Internet that collects the MySpace pages of people who have passed away. The site used to have an irreverent, darkly comedic theme to it. Those who had gone on were not honored, but made fun of. It gets lots of hits, and features lots of ads. Now the site is far more reverent, but you used to be able to buy T-Shirts there after perusing through the personal Web pages of those lost to this world, their sites still flickering like candles in a virtual cathedral.

When first logging on, you feel like the ultimate voyeur, rifling through the closets of the dead, looking under their beds and thumbing through their photo albums. Maybe it's just me, but I could only go through about ten before the weight of it was too much.

You read how they died: suicide, car wreck, aneurysm. You look at their photos: clear skin, their good side, that glamour shot they had made before they graduated, and you can sense their living intentions in the pictures they chose to upload, the likes and dislikes they slowly edited over the months and the flippant comments they left with their friends. Somehow, these peculiar, clunky documents keep them alive in a way foreign to us until now.

Then, there are those people who did terrible things. The man who shot up a gay bar and then turned the gun on himself, his MySpace page remained right where he left it for days. MySpace employees eventually took it down, but not before it was archived. The cheeky, giddy messages from his friends were replaced by angry insults from friends and loved ones of the victims. Strangely, some of the victims had their own pages too, commandeered in the same fashion by those left behind.

A few months later, the pages of many of the Virginia Tech students became social networking shrines.

For many of us, our autobiographical epithets are already written and hovering on some distant hard drive, and if there is anything that should clue you in on how different our lives are going to be in the twenty-first century, it is this.

The real-world whispers above your grave will be stolen by the wind, but the digital elegies will burn eternal.

1337 Katz0rz

I keep sane by having a kaleidescope of friends who make sense of reality in drastically differing ways, often in total opposition to each other.

For example, I have friends who hate hippies, love hippies, are hippies and don't believe in hippies. This week, I had conversations about the advantages of the old "Killer Instinct: Gold" combo system, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, fractal quilt design, the editing test for Men's Fitness magazine, the devolution of the Democratic Party, the best way to deal with Hamlet's father's ghost in a modernized production, how to cook a perfect pot of greens, sexual dimorphism in angler fish, whether finding Elvis attractive in the 1968 Comeback Special hints at homosexuality, habeas corpus, the right and wrong way to make prehistoric paper mache animals with coat hangers, continuity in the "He-Man" cartoon series, the origin of the word testify, the connection between "Sasuke" and "Takeshi's Castle," and the advantages of using MDMA in marriage counseling.

I need this sort of thing, or I might explode. I'm an information omnivore. Oh, thank you Flying Spaghetti Monster, thank you for the Internet. Thank you for net culture.

This is why I was an early convert to Internet-based journalism and literature. This is how I became addicted to Wikipedia and Rotten.com.

If you spend/have spent as much time as I do/have online, you begin to sense some of the latent functions of this medium. The Internet (yes, it is capitalized according to the Associated Press Stylebook) is the true melting pot, the true mixing bowl of subcultures and deviance. Out of it have emerged new cultures.

Sure, people self-segregate, but for people like myself this just makes it easier to buzz from flower to flower. I love to visit the Furries and the Kirk/Spock gay erotic art groups, the Bible thumpers and the body modifiers.

Sociologists must go through a lot of pants when they cruise the digital realm because subcultures are constantly spawning subcultures to the point there is a sort of electronic gravy made from all these people meeting online and simmering in the juices of screen-to-screen communication.

Leetspeak and macros are two of my favorite aspects of Internet-specific subcultures.

Like most Web-based subcultures, shared aspects arise in places where people interact the most directly - forums, social networking websites, chatrooms and Web 2.0 incarnations.

Strangely enough, though American culture is far less literate than in previous decades, we read all day long and communicate through written language possibly more than ever so in history. Words are the currency of text messaging, emails, blogs and websites. This may or may not be a good thing, considering how our communications within these arenas are so economical and utilitarian. The long-form, eloquent email is a rare bird in the cyberjungle.

Still, a fusion of sorts between learned, direct language and rapid, practical digital missives takes place with leetspeak and macros. Both relay a great deal of information in a small burst of code. Each depends on the receiver of the information having working knowledge of the culture and its references. In a sense, these serve as argots, and help identify both sides of the information transfer as belonging to the subculture where they appear. The in-joke is part of the communication. The separation of ingroup and outgroup helps drive the rapid evolution of both leetspeak and macros.

Although leetspeak has been around for a while, it has mutated into several formats, thus creating a continuum of Internet prose. At its most basic, leetspeak is pure written language slang originally used to get ideas across faster than spelling out commonly used terms like, "away from keyboard," which became AFK. Over time, usage of the acronym allowed for descriptive expressions like "He's gone AFK."

At the high-end, elitist leetspeak features letters and numbers mixed together and references to computer hacking skills are applied to everyday life; at the low end, cute terms used in text messaging and MySpace are filled mainly with acronyms for common phrases.

High-End Example: p43ar my l337 sk11lz0rz!!!1!!1
Translation: You should be fearful of my powerful computer hacking abilities.
Fear = p43ar; elite = l337; skill = sk11lz0rz.

Notice also the exclamation points include intentional errors simulating the furious smashing of the 1 key while holding shift to get the ! symbol. Someone really going crazy on the !!!!! often misses a shift press in there somewhere. Other words commonly used like "pwnd" follow the same architecture. If you defeated someone at a video game, you might exclaim the slang term, "owned!" This word has its own evolution, but once it enters into the leetspeak lexicon, it gets a new life. People rapidly typing "owned" during online game play commonly missed the o on the keyboard and typed "pwned" instead. Eventually, this became the preferred spelling along with "pwnd." Now, there are several derivatives of the word including the state of defeat as delivered by the utterer of, "Pwnage."

In the beginning, the whole phrase depends on your understanding of not just the language, but the etymology's of its terms and symbols. After repeated uses, the etymology no longer matters, just as it doesn't in normal, common English. The difference with leetspeak is how it evolves at a rapid pace so it may remain fresh and full of in-jokes and references. There is a non-directed, systemic quality to leetspeak encouraging people to play with it, experiment and add. With leetspeak, we have finally created a written language where the rules of slang are dominant.

If you have ever heard someone say "l-o-l," enunciating each letter one at a time, you have heard the the pitter patter of the next steps in human language and this blog entry. People go so far as say the three letters as a word,"Lol," or "Lawl."

Leetspeak hinges on it being read and not spoken. But, as people spend more time online, and spend more time with others who also spend time online, it becomes acceptable to maintain in group status by using leetspeak in spoken form. Thus, I've heard people say (phonetically) "pawnage," "powned," "pawned," "p-owned," and so on.

Ok, thanks for keeping up. Here comes the kicker.

This has a cyclical quality as well. Eventually, these spoken versions of leetspeak are reintroduced into the written language of the Internet. Often, it goes something like this:

Someone uses lol, which turns into the spoken "l-o-l," which then becomes "lol" but sounds like "lawl," and at some point someone in a forum thread, in response to something funny, puts up an image of Lal, the name of Data's daughter from a single, obscure "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode. It's a big inside joke on several levels, and the creator gets golf claps for pulling together all these references into one simple understatement. Everyone who gets it belongs in the in group, and the behavioral cycle is encouraged and repeated.

The image macro is born out of this cycle.

Forums typically put new posts underneath older ones. So, a direct response to someone's rant about the coming police state in America may be immediately followed by an image of Captain America crying. Everyone gets the reference and the idea. This is a very high-level, metacommunication format.

Consider how difficult it is for computers to identify faces. Consider how confirmation keys are now images so computers can't understand what is being communicated. Consider the new confirmation keys where a series of images are displayed and the user must pick which one of these is not like the other. Computers have a terrible time with this kind of task.

Communication through images is a powerful way to pass complex ideas back and forth. You see Captain America crying, and you understand a concept that would take several paragraphs of exposition.

So, image macros have really blossomed online in the last few years. Many of them take a slant on an existing meme circulating across the Internet. Of course, most of them are also designed to make you laugh along with solidifying in group status and also getting a point across.

For instance:

<-- Someone is being overly dramatic.

Someone has posted something you would like to see more of. -->

<-- Someone is being a dick. These image macros influence new leetspeak, which in turn influences new spoken leetpeak and new macros. All of this churns at a rapid pace and evolves with each new generation. Eventually, something like the "O RLY?" owls or the lolcats comes along and splinters the whole language schema into a new branch where all new in jokes, references and acceptable formats are born.

Lolcats are image macros featuring cats captioned with a specific form of language, one with no definitive label as of yet. I've seen it referred to as Kittahh and Kitteh before, but nothing has stuck. A clinical term, kitty pidgin, has also been coined because there seems to be some sort of order to the way sentences are constructed. The language may also derive from Meowchat, an IRC group who used to use similar diction when pretending to be cats online.

The phrase is usually white text with a solid black outline, and the grammar is consistently awful, as if the cat was trying to speak English but just couldn't get the conjugation right. Some have suggested these macros were inspired by the old cat inspirational poster, "Hang in there." Others suggest these simply fall into place with a long history of using anthropomorphized animals to get our kicks. Most agree the first examples of this meme appeared at the image-sharing message board 4chan where new cat macros were posted on what affectionately became known as Caturdays. These macros are used like any other, but for some reason, these have struck a chord and are mutating at an alarming rate. Now, there are several subgenres of lolcats including:

Invisible








Harbls









Oh Hai








I eated












I has...









I'm in ur...











In addition to the subgenres, new offshoots of the lolcats adhering to the same grammar rules are spawning:

Walrus (Lolrus) w/bucket

Lolgerbil/hamster

Lolgays

Loltrek

Lolgeek

Each subgenere and offshoot influences the others laterally, and the in jokes and references generated by the lolcats appear across the whole universe of macros. Some seem to have storylines. Some are direct responses to previous macro postings. For example, an invisible sandwich might soon be followed by a visible one.




Perhaps this chart will help to make sense of this.




















The great thing about all of this is how we can see new languages forming out of a new medium, and since the pace is abnormally fast, we can watch it evolve over weeks instead of decades.

It also demonstrates how the Internet changes the way we connect and communicate. These words and macros depend on the users manipulating not only the information being passed back and forth, but the format of the codes we agree on to represent the information. Strunk and White would probably be appalled, but then again, maybe not.

After all, a single image of a cat being struck by the sudden realization of how all this connects is the ultimate in clean, succinct and direct dialog.

IF YOU LIKED THIS ENTRY, YOU SHOULD ALSO READ THESE:

Flowers for Bill
Reflections on Bill Hicks

The Value of Chewing Slowly
My 10 days with Hurricane Katrina

No One's Martyr
The life and death of Pat Tillman

I Am A Man
The state of the modern male

Fumbling for a Metaphor
My first flying lesson

Spinners of Web

The men looked on as she removed the dental dam from a plastic bag. She held it up by two corners, blue and diaphanous like a veil.

“For oral sex, for safety,” said Judy Howell, “one of the things you can do is cut a condom right down the middle. Cut it in half.”

The men, black and white, young and not-so-young, nodded and grunted in agreement.

“Lay it on the vaginal area – that’s one way to do it,” Howell continued. “Or, get you some non-microwaveable Saran Wrap.”

She explained how most other kinds of cling wrap are porous, which won’t prevent HIV. It is deep into her presentation now, near the end. The homeless men shift and grumble as much as they listen.

“Here comes the dental dam,” she raised her voice and paused dramatically. Held high, the indigo square caught the light squeezed through the clouds outside and shimmered. “And it’s just about the greatest thing in the whole wide world.”

The homeless men laughed.

One man in a wheelchair, his hair and beard as wild as reeds in a pond, excused himself to take a phone call on his cell. Vincent, a gaunt and angular black man who wore a dapper hat and crisp dress shirt to better thumb his nose at homelessness itself, kept interrupting Howell to explain to the others how AIDS had long since been cured, but the government was keeping it a secret.

Howell listened to his rant, and then she went on to talk about saliva and how to pinch the air out of the tip a condom.

Vincent leaned back in his chair at the long table at the center of the meeting room as if he was a wizened traveler listening to a circus barker. The other men were propped up against the walls. A dry-erase board hung across from a bank of windows, and outside, behind the low-rent apartments and all the children making noises, the sun had all but disappeared.

“I saw this huge muscle-building guy pull a condom up his arm and up over his shoulder,” Howell said as she pretended to do the same. “Then he reached over and put a dab of Vaseline on his finger and rubbed it on there. It dissolved before our eyes.”

She has gone through this routine over one hundred times. By her estimation, she speaks to more than 2,000 people each year across southern Mississippi. She frequents schools, prisons and clinics – wherever they will have her. She is not blindly idealistic about what she does; she knows how large the battle is and how small her weapons are.

The shelter she spoke at smelled like a gym, but was clean the way nursing homes are clean. This place was hidden deep among the poorest of neighborhoods here. Sponsored by a local hospital, it was once a dilapidated hovel amid a throng of homes sagging just out of sight.

Hattiesburg is one of the larger towns in Mississippi, one thriving in the depths of the Deep South. It is both a college town and a retirement community – an oasis of franchises and mini-malls in a state covered by a pox of poverty. This is a place where chicken houses and golf courses rub shoulders. The cost of living is dazzling low. So, the mildly affluent eat and sleep well. At the other end of the spectrum, the homeless of this city are more invisible than most, more homeless than most. Many live in the wilderness though no one here knows it, or won’t admit to it.

Howell is a representative of Haven House, a place where Hattiesburg’s homeless who are also stricken with HIV and AIDS can come to get their lives back on track. It is a place where those who are looking toward an inevitable future can buy time, reenter society, get a job, an apartment, and turn their backs on what got them here.

As Howell asked the men to raise their hands if they believed one can get HIV from a toilet, she conjured up images of a teacher at the center of one-room schoolhouse.

At first glance, she comes across as an aging hippie, but soon casts her spell on you, convincing you of her true form - sad sage. Perhaps all those speeches and dour audiences have formed her into this, but she overflows with information about AIDS and HIV. She calmly articulates both local and national statistics as well as prevention strategies, visiting each topic with her wooden whistle of a voice. She laughs often, a raspy staccato, breaking off the ice shelves such themes tend create over people’s hearts.

As she spoke to the men, it was clear some of what she was doing had become automatic – a play she had performed so many times the words were came out as sing-song. Still, when the audience was willing to talk, to interrupt, she was willing to be candid.

A somniferous, slow-blinking man against the wall told her people in Hattiesburg were so promiscuous it wasn’t feasible for everyone to keep up with testing and sexual histories.

“If you know someone well enough to stick it in them,” she told him, emphasizing each syllable, “by God you ought to know them well enough to talk to them about it.”

When she goes out into the world to give these presentations, she often brings along one of the people staying at Haven House, someone close to leaving who has gotten as much as they can out of the experience. Today, it is a black man with overlong arms and legs wearing black-rimmed hipster eyeglasses who is not named Troy, but will be known as such for this story.

Troy waited his turn to speak as Howell released a fistful of brochures on the table at the center of the room. For most of the hour she has been speaking, Tory handed her props and encouraged her in the way Ed McMahon would when Johnny fell flat.

She explained to the men homosexuals were less likely to have HIV and AIDS than heterosexuals. She told them homosexuals had been grappling with the problem since the early ‘80s and had learned to protect themselves. The truth passed over them for a moment, and then she used her hands to mime the bar graphs she had forgotten to bring. She ended by addressing the necessity of clean needles and honesty. She urged them all to get tested for HIV. She introduced Troy.

Troy cleared his throat. There was a fresh silence in the room. He started by explaining T-Cells and the immune system in the most basic of terms. Then, he bluntly segued into his own history of drug use and careless sex back when he was a truck driver. He seemed articulate, but was no public speaker. He stumbled often, getting lost in the logic of what he was trying to tell. When he felt the crowd warm to him, his native slang kicked in; the tone of his voice became more aggressive.

“In September of last year,” he said, taking a breath, “I got gonorrhea from a young lady.”

He explained how he went to health department for treatment and how they gave him pills. Then, he returned to both the street and crack cocaine. Eventually, he was arrested in a complicated drug bust where the cops handcuffed all the people at the scene and sorted them out later.

The morning before this presentation, Troy and Howell sat behind coffee and cigarettes and looked on as one of the residents of Haven House left for the real world. Haven House is hidden in plain sight. To the casual observer, it looks like any of the aging homes in the city’s downtown. There is a nice front porch with a swing hovering above blue wooden floors. Plants sit near wicker furniture, and delicate wispy shades sway behind the window screens.

Howell’s other duty at Haven House is one shared by her husband Jim and the director of the Aids Service Coalition of Hattiesburg, Kathy Green.

Jim, a large man with hair so white it looks edible, coordinates the daily activities of the residents and helps them figure out the bureaucracy of modern life by training them to perform well at job interviews, filling our paperwork and managing a budget. He sets goals; the residents meet them and are ready to go out on their own in under two years.

Green is the politician and the business manager. She is blunt and insistent and seems as though she would fit in well on the floor of a stock exchange. She deals with the government and finds grant money to keep Haven House afloat.

There is a fireplace in Green’s office lined with photos of her partner and their 6-year-old child. A spent typewriter teeters on the edge of a filing cabinet. Paper work hugs a computer in the corner; above it a child’s drawing shares space with a sign that reads, “If you smoke anymore you will be switched, if you stop you will get some candy.”

Green speaks with a sharp and clear vocabulary. She is the mother brain of Haven House and fears for its safety while also dictating who can and cannot come there for help. She once ran a consulting firm and was director of planning for the city, so she has something many people devoted to helping lack – objectivity. Green knows she is running an institution devoted to the HIV and AIDS-positive homeless in a state where a city council member recently denounced a $2 million community development block grant because some of the money might reach the kind of people she looks after.

“He said people with HIV and AIDS should die,” said Green. “But, with all the people like him I have met, I see it is more about ignorance than meanness.”

Green said when she first took on the responsibility of Haven House she also had a two-dimensional view of both homelessness and HIV.

“There are 5,783 reasons a person might have HIV or become homeless,” she said. “Sometimes they are homeless people who just happen to have AIDS. Many come here who became homeless because of AIDS – the family was unwilling to deal with them. Sometimes it’s substance abuse or poor education. You can’t say it’s X, Y or Z that brings them here.”

Independence is the goal of Haven House, said Green. The people who make it through the application process, which involves sobering up and meeting a number of requirements including age, health and criminal record stipulations, run the house on their own. The employees leave every afternoon and usually do not come in on the weekends. Residents make meals in the kitchen and grow vegetables in the garden. They share a dog and an aquarium filled with fat goldfish.

Kathy and her employees make sure the pantry is stocked, the roof isn’t leaking and money for electricity and property taxes flow in.

“I feel inadequate and overwhelmed just about every day,” said Green, who added she wakes up most nights around three in the morning worrying about random problems like if she ordered enough drug-testing kits. Sometimes she gets out of bed feeling guilty for something overlooked like running a resident to the store to buy underwear. Then, on top of all of this, there is the looming presence of the intolerant Bible-belters who have yet to come around to why Haven House persists. Unlike cancer, AIDS is preventable, and typically results from a series of poor, sinful choices. Sometimes this gets in the way of charity.

“We’ve all done risky, stupid things,” said Green. “The question is, do people who do stupid things deserve to die or be ostracized?”

According to Green, Haven House is only just back on its feet. Katrina dealt $90,000 worth of damage to the building. Green remembered how some people were turned away from shelters when they admitted to having AIDS. She lamented how people in Mississippi can legally be fired for being homosexuals.

“When people condemn what we do, we turn the other cheek and hand them a brochure.”

As Green arrived for work, Howell and her husband Jim stood outside sipping their morning brew, laughing and talking about upcoming business both personal and professional. Troy lit a Black and Mild cigarillo. This is the Aids Service Coalition on a Tuesday.

Howell, dressed in denim from head to toe, headed inside to plan out her month. Her office is one of several cavernous rooms inside the old home. It smells of wood and creaks with every footstep. The corners of the hallways and the living room are lit with soft lamps, but a colossal morning sun blasts through three tall windows behind her desk. A DSM-IV sits idle beside a coloring book on a bookshelf stuffed with pamphlets with titles like “How To Find The Right HIV Combo for You,” “Managing Diarrhea for the HIV Positive,” and “HIV and AIDS Information for Inmates.” These pamphlets are all brightly colored, bold print endeavors usually featuring a series of cartoons and lists of facts. Most of them are produced by the Mississippi State Department of Health.

“There is more HIV out there than I first thought,” said Howell as she looked through her calendar. “There is more work to be done.”

Howell originally thought she would go into hospice work after caring for her parents throughout their final years. When she heard the position of house manager was open at Haven House, she leapt at the opportunity.

"In this business you tend to look for small intrinsic rewards. If a client doesn’t work out, you’re just happy to know you gave them a bed and a roof over their head for a little while,” she said, adjusting her heavy glasses and smiling. “We’re all free men.”

Howell retrieved a poster from behind a stack of cardboard boxes, boxes filled with female condoms. The poster was covered with images of healthy, beautiful people – men with rippling muscles, women with long necks and shimmering hair. She explained how people could have HIV for more than a decade before showing any symptoms. She pointed at the images clipped from magazines saying any one of these people could be infected, and people would love to have sex with them.

“With the education I do, the rewards are similar. You may talk to 100 people, but you can tell only three of them heard you. But, those three will hear and heed,” she put the poster away, “There is no instant gratification with my work.”

After Howell takes Troy to his Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, the rest of her day will be filled with phone calls to set up appointments. She will speak in front of nurses, inmates and social workers throughout the week.

She will tell them about a retired English teacher who spent several lonely years biding her time after the death of her husband. She drank herself into a dark place, but later she started dating again and started to embrace life. At 70-years, she broke her hip, and at the hospital she discovered she had AIDS. She had not been sexually active since her late 50s.

She will tell them how one of the residents last year who had full-blown AIDS called her in the middle of the night after injuring his head. She cut her hand on the door of her car before holding his head as he went into shock. His blood ran over her wounds, and she took 30 days of HIV medication before testing negative. She will tell her audience what one month of pills feels like for an HIV patient. She will tell them about screaming in her sleep and fainting without warning. She will tell them what it feels like to linger in an empty hope that this is not happening to you.

Howell will tell stories like this with a Zen calm and a matter-of-fact tone calculated to drive the point home like a nail to the forehead.

“There is this saying I love. I don’t know where it came from, but it goes like this: When spider webs unite, they can tie up lions,” Howell splayed her fingers then interlocked them. “If I can weave a spider web of education, I’m doing all I can do. I’m one more spider out there trying to spin.”

At the presentation before the homeless shelter, Troy had the crowd captivated. They were connecting to him. His honesty was crippling. In jail, a representative from the health department told him he had tested positive for HIV. When he was released, he told no one. He returned to crack, falling deeper into depression. By the time he got up the courage to return to the health department, he condition had changed.

This was the big reveal - a healthy, straight and respectable man sitting inches away from the audience had AIDS. This was the sort of education Howell intended, and as Troy told them about his weight loss and struggle to get off of the streets, the men gained hope. If he could do it, so could they – and they had a head start of sorts if they were willing to do what Howell suggested in order to remain free of disease.

Troy looked into Vincent’s eyes, “Look, I was like you. I heard about Magic Johnson and wondered if there was a cure. I’m here to tell you there is no cure.”

Vincent said nothing.

“Here I am now, I’m living with this disease and have no symptoms. I was having unprotected sex and getting high the whole time not knowing.”

The group is all leaned in, listening.

“For a long time, during my drug-using, I used to pray to God to help me to do something, to help me get off drugs. And this…” his arms were up and his hands wide, “I don’t want to confuse ya’ll or nothing. But, I thank God today for AIDS, because if it wasn’t for AIDS, I’m 90 percent sure I would be out there with a crack pipe in my mouth and a fifth of liquor in my hand. That was me.”

The room was a tomb. Troy said, “Do any of you have any questions?”

Vincent raised his hand.