Blogger Andrew Sullivan got word that his green card had finally been approved in an email (subject line: “Congrats”) from his immigration attorney. And so concludes Andrew Sullivan’s 18-year journey to tear into American politicians while claiming to be one of the people they represent, which makes posts like this one all the more genuine.
It has been a journey of 18 years – the promise of a new life and a new start for a jejune, precocious kid from England somehow always coming with an asterisk, the shame of my illness conflated with this crushing fear that I still did not belong and would probably never belong to the country I had fallen in love with. Nothing scared me as much; nothing was able to get into my heart and soul with this level of anxiety and fear. Not HIV. This was deeper than HIV. It was a threat to the home from where I could fight the HIV. Nothing in my future could confidently be planned; everything was a gamble that one day, I could actually, simply, finally be secure in my own home with my own husband in a life that would have been so hard to rebuild from scratch somewhere else. That fear hanging over my head never left me from June 23 1993 to a few hours ago.
David Ehrenstein
Patient Less Than Zero is STILL jejune!
robert in NYC
Oh please, Sullivan, a life you could never rebuild from scratch anywhere else? Gays have far more equality and mobility in the country of your birth and marriage equality is on the agenda to allow British gays to have civil marriages and straights to have civil partnerships. Over here, we have to be very careful where we choose to live and most of us can’t afford to move to the five states which provide a fairer sense of equality. You choose to live in Massachusetts to get any semblance of equality where you married your partner yet have NO federal recognition of your marriage and denied the benefits thereof, but your fellow British gays can live anywhere in their own country and be treated fairly, much fairer than we are or could ever imagine. What’s with his bleary-eyed romanticism?
Richard
Ok, I am HIV+, so I don’t intend this in any sort of negative way against poz people, god knows we take enough s**t from the gay community as a whole and I don’t want to start anything that could further contribute to it, but is anyone else curious as to how this man managed to complete an immigration and naturalization request while infected? My understanding is that the US extended open travel, but not open immigration, to people with the virus. Were any strings pulled for Sullivan that might not have been pulled for, say, 99.99% of the rest of the world?
Joetx
I’m not a fan of his.
He was a war hawk & has Republican/Libertarian views on the economy (i.e., cut taxes for corporations).
matthew
@Richard: Hi Richard…emmm…I’m HIV-, so take take that with a grain of salt, I guess.I know Sully was very vocal and active in lifting the ban on HIV+ partners patrioting in the USA; he finally did (after an 18 year fight), so I’m real happy for him.
Joetx – Yep…he was a warhawk. And yeah, he swings toward Bullshit/Libertarian/Rand nuttiness too often, but he’s a beautiful writer, especially when he’s writing from my position.
So, like you said “I’m not a fan of his.” but he’s erudite and knows how to string words together, and that, finally, means something to me.
Cheers, friends!
Matthew