“”Do you know what I want?” Telly, 17, asked a 12-year-old girl in the opening scene of the movie “Kids.”
“You want to f—- me,” the girl said, half undressed. “But I don’t want to have a baby.”
“You won’t. I care about you,” he said with a gleam in his eyes. And she bought it. Later we find out that Telly, who has a fetish for sleeping with virgins, is HIV positive and has given the virus to five other people in the film.
At the end, Telly’s friend wonders, “What the hell happened?”
Well, here’s what happened: Fifty percent of people that die of AIDS are infected when they are teens, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Right now, the heterosexual transmission of HIV among teens is three times higher than among adults.
WAKE UP! Yes, I mean you, the one in the back of the class, the one who was playing with your chain or flirting with some guy or falling asleep during your sex education class. I’m talking to you, the one who shrugged it off, saying, “I already know everything about sex, why should I listen to some book when I have first-hand experience?”
This article is for you
I’m writing this article for you so that you can see what it’s really like to have HIV. You might be able to stop reading this, but you can’t stop an epidemic that puts all of us at risk. It is a lot easier than you would think to screw up your whole life, like all the people I interviewed told me.
Everyone that I interviewed was different but they all ended up in the same boat. They have HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. It didn’t matter how much money they had or what race they were or whether they were gay or straight.
Once they found out they had the virus, they had to confront the hardest thing—Sooner or later, they are going to die. Should they tell family and friends? How will they cope if their family or friends reject them? How can they live—and love—with this incurable illness?”