Darrick Meneken

By Darrick Meneken 

Oz is probably the most popular dance club in New Orleans. It’s certainly the most popular gay dance club. In the Big Easy, where bars go all night, Oz never closes its doors. Customers dance topless and go-go boys gyrate above the crowd. This is where our story begins, in the French Quarter, before Katrina, a place where Cree Gordon spent three months drifting like jazz music through the humid air. In tight pants and tiny tops, he became a regular at clubs such as Oz.

“Men wanted me because they thought I was cute,” he says. His voice is sassy and a slight southern drawl has all but vanished since he moved to the West Coast more than a year ago. He’s bi-racial, with caramel skin a soft mix of coffee and cream. When he smiles, his face stretches like silly putty, collecting at the lips as if invisible hands were pulling on his cheeks.

Cree hails from the sultry sugarcane country between Lafayette and Baton Rouge in southern Louisiana. Born Christopher Gordon, his nickname Cree stuck by the time he was a junior in high school. His thin features border on gaunt, and on any given day you never know what color his hair will be. He’s nothing if not effusive in speech and eccentric in dress. He often ends sentences with “it’s whatever” or “it happens” and enjoys wearing pastel pink and purple T-shirts printed with acerbic messages. One reads: You don’t know my name but your boyfriend does.

In New Orleans, his slender silhouette and impish charm made it easy to grab men’s attention. “I was a smart ho,” he says. “I knew how to work it.” And indeed, he was working. When the nights got late, Cree ran his fingers up his slim thighs, threw back his long hair, and stepped out onto steamy sidewalks that stretch beneath iron lace balconies. On his best night he made $200. He doesn’t call it prostitution, preferring the term “survival sex.” He was homeless; a place to stay or a hot meal was sometimes his only fee. He’s not sure how many men he slept with during this time — at least forty — but after three months, he quit. He’d fallen in love with a man from Eugene, Oregon, and headed west.

To get from New Orleans to Eugene, Cree rode a bus for two and a half days. It was raining when he arrived, and morning fog clung to the wet one-way streets that grid downtown.  Aside from a sore back and two days of missed sleep, he felt good. It was to be a fleeting feeling. “He’s a closet case,” he now declares of the man he moved more than two thousand miles to be with. “He didn’t want his roommate to find out he was gay.” Homeless again, Cree moved into a recovery house and lived on food stamps. He hung out at a drop-in center for homeless youth. When HIV Alliance’s Kelly Moore came to the shelter and offered him ten bucks to take an HIV test, he agreed.

Moore, a soft-spoken woman with large eyes and a morose expression, is the counseling and testing director for HIV Alliance. In Cree, she found a young man with a passionate personality. “I was impressed with him,” she says of the then 19-year-old Cree, just a month removed from his hustling days. “Sometimes it’s hard to elicit information about risky behavior,” she says. “But with Cree it didn’t take long for him to open up. There was less shame.” Moore administered the oral swab test and told Cree he could receive his results — and the ten dollars — in two weeks.

Cecilia, Louisiana, is little more than a gathering of houses at the intersection of three state highways, a Piggly Wiggly grocery store and incessant acres of sugarcane. The locals, at least the white ones, take pride in the Confederate general buried in their cemetery. This is where Cree grew up and where, at 14, he announced he was gay. His dad, by then long divorced from his mom, didn’t take it well.

“My father stopped doing stuff for me when I came out,” Cree says, pushing specifics aside. As a child, Cree changed homes with the regularity of the sugarcane harvest. He says he was “tossed around” and that his parents never showed him unconditional love. In turn, he has trouble moving forward with any type of relationship with them today. He now calls his parents by their first names. “I don’t have that respect for them,” he explains. “I don’t like either one of them.” Then he backpedals. “I need to let go of all those negative things. I might write them a letter.”

During his junior year in high school he moved out and attended a boarding school for gifted teens across the state. Once, a man asked him out to the movie Ali and later invited him home. From there the details abate. Cree thinks he was drugged. “I remember him giving me something to drink,” he recalls. “I remember lying down in the bed and him taking off my clothes. And then I kind of passed out.” He woke up naked and pinned stomach down with the man forcing himself on him. The following day it hurt to walk. In the bathroom, he found blood in his stool. Like that, Cree lost his virginity. “I don’t count it,” he says. “I didn’t tell anybody. I didn’t think about it. I tried to be like it wasn’t true.”

One good memory from back home is senior prom. Cree slipped into silver high heels and a dress of red sequins. His hair, uncut for two years, draped to his back. And his date, a girl, donned a tuxedo and top hat. Before their arrival they got drunk. Through half-blurry eyes Cree recognized his decorated high school gym — the same place he sat through PE classes afraid to break a sweat. Before the night ended, an upbeat tune spilled over the floor and he danced with the prom king.

A few months later he enrolled at Xavier University in New Orleans and dove into the city’s happening gay scene. He ambitiously celebrated Mardi Gras in the French Quarter, openly twirling his ... well, you know ... in the street. “I said, ‘OK, I’m going to snag me three different dudes and they’re going to be from three different states.’” He doubled the goal. “Most of the time I just did it for the attention,” he says. He wasn’t yet charging.

Despite parental conflicts, Cree was back in Cecilia soon after Mardi Gras. By April, just a year after senior prom, he’d dropped out of Xavier and was home cooking meals, cleaning house, and longing for the French Quarter. He told everyone he was going for a visit, packed a single bag, and bought a one-way ticket. By day, he snoozed under leafy trees on the banks of the Mississippi River, a modern-day Huck Finn hiding from his past. But unlike Huck, Cree didn’t free a slave as much as he enslaved himself. “I’d pretend for a night or a weekend or whatever that the person I would go home with cared about me,” he says. As for condoms, only some men used them.

A year later — just eight days before his twentieth birthday — Cree arrived at HIV Alliance in Eugene to get his results. Inside, Moore prepared to deliver the news. “That’s definitely the hardest part of the job,” she says, “telling somebody that they have HIV.” Cree responded with shock, and a few tears after the news set in. It was, however, not a complete surprise. “He told me that he had had a dream that he’d come in to meet with me and that I’d given him his result,” Moore recalls. “That it was positive.

The dream was prophetic in another way, too. “My dream kind of skipped,” Cree remembers, “and I was speaking in schools.”

Cree began attending the University of Oregon in winter 2006 and hopes to earn a family and human services degree. He still receives  food stamps and now lives in a sparsely furnished two-bedroom apartment paid for by the Oregon HOME Tenant-Based Assistance program. He’s an active member of the Black Student Union and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer Alliance.

“You know when you’re friends with someone and you can’t remember the one thing that made you friends? I think he just kind of has that personality that makes you think you’ve known him forever,” says Felecia Wheatfall, who met Cree through the Black Student Union. “He’s really active and really involved in trying to make a change.”

Of 330,000 Lane County residents, Cree is one of the 200 to 300 the HIV Alliance estimates are living with HIV/AIDS. Before testing positive, he had unprotected sex with two males in Eugene — the thirty-something man he left New Orleans for and a seventeen-year-old boy. Both have since tested negative.

Cree hasn’t yet begun taking the drug cocktails that extend life for many HIV and AIDS patients. Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy, also known as HAART, was introduced in the mid-1990s and have altered the perception of AIDS as a death sentence. Previously, the average lifespan from original HIV infection to death was ten and a half years. With HAART, the average lifespan is 17 years, meaning Cree will probably die before his 40th birthday. “He’ll be better some days than others,” Martin says. “(But) he’s not going to get over this.”

Cree won’t begin a HAART regimen until his doctor says so. There are some intense side effects, and for now, based on his comparatively healthy viral load and cell count, waiting seems wise. Wheatfall, who as an elementary school student watched AIDS kill one of her aunts, is pleased with Cree’s robust and active pursuit of his goals. “He’s planning for his future just like anyone else,” she says.

In early May, Cree was awarded The Pride Foundation’s James and Colin Lee Wozumi Scholarship, given to select HIV-positive students who focus on the virus’ treatment and eradication. The $1,200 award was accompanied by a $1,000 Phil Sullivan Scholarship for students with significant financial need, also delivered by The Pride Foundation.

Today, Cree is twenty-one years old and remains sexually active. “I always let them know,” he says. As he talks, a small collection of colorful awareness bracelets rings his lower arm: blue for Don’t Hate, rainbow for Gay Pride, and red for AIDS Awareness. “If you care about somebody, that kind of stuff doesn’t matter,” he says. “It’s just going to be there.” His days of unprotected sex, however, are somewhere in a land called Oz.

There’s no way to know who gave him HIV. Based on his viral load, he can only say, with tragic irony, that he contracted it while using survival sex. Asked if he has any regrets, he shakes his head. “The thing is, I made a choice. I don’t want somebody to feel sorry for me, because I’m not going to feel sorry for myself.” Two days after receiving his test results, he reopened the door at HIV Alliance. “I was like, ‘OK Cree, you can do one of two things: You can dwell on a bad situation and make it worse, or you can educate yourself and find something good about.’ So, that’s what I did.”

A version of this story was first published in the Spring 2006 edition of FLUX magazine.