Spotlight on Bobbie Hondo: Trans Femme Dancer & HIV/AIDS Advocate (PART TWO)

By: Fernando Cerezo III, Queer Latinx Writer

<- Click here to read, "Spotlight on Bobbie Hondo: Trans Femme Dancer & HIV/AIDS Advocate (PART ONE)"

New York is a polarizing city, where the privileged brush shoulders with the impoverished. A city that promises to chew you up and spit you out, to test your will to stay. And the reward for sticking it out? Excess, temptation, accessibility and a city that honors the individual. At just 16, Bobbie was newly independent, to figure this city out on her own. After declining a dance program overseas and against her parents’ wishes, she landed in Queens, only a short train ride from Manhattan. She still held the struggles of her past on her shoulders, but it was a new day and Bobbie was determined to once again see her body as an instrument rather than a detriment. She briefly enrolled in Parsons School of Design and if she wasn’t in class, she was in doctors’ offices and clinics all over the city. “You have to be proactive or you will just become a ticket number.”

Bobbie arrived in New York unsure about her Cd4 count, the most important laboratory indicator of immune deficiency. She was taking Abacavir, an HIV medication that severely affects your REM sleep. But what six different hospital visits cost her in Texas was treated at a New York doctor’s office in just one afternoon. She learned about the AIDS Drug Assistance Program, a supplemental program that provided her free medications for treatment. She realized that the key to her health was specifying a formula that worked best for her. “If you’re trans and you’re taking hormone medication, then you have your HIV pills, then if you’re on psychotropics those pills all pile up… These are daily medicines and you feel them working in your body to help your cells function at half the degree they would.” So instead of the 12 pills she had taken for years, Bobbie found medications that were much lighter on her body. Her health was progressing, but she was lonely. Though during these routine visits to clinics, she met fellow patients who saw themselves in her. “I would go to all these AIDS clinics and I would get tidbits from these older queens who would give me books to read and songs to listen to. They wanted to help me grieve [the life I had] then celebrate the life I was taking on.” 

Photo by Marquale Ashley

Bobbie kept up with her health, signed up to a gym and started going out dancing in the West Village nightlife scene. Fatefully a 19 year old Bobbie came to befriend drag artists Mistress Formika, Joey Arias, Hattie Hathaway and the cheeky, southern-born, mother of Wigstock, Lady Bunny. “When I got to New York and saw them in real life my heart dropped… I was like ‘wait you’re the person from my TV set.” They saw potential in Bobbie and took her in, encouraging her to foster a relationship with drag. “I’d get to see and hear all these references and I’d just study these queen’s banter. I wanted to join the repartee but wasn’t ‘polished’ enough and they knew that… so they turned me out.” But there were queens that felt Bobbie was cramping their style and would go as far as blackballing her from gigs if she didn’t sleep with them. “Bobbie is here and she’s one of us” Bunny and Hattie testified. “I really believed I was worthless until Bunny was like, ‘do you know who the fuck you are? Show these motherfuckers how you do it!’...They gave me room to breathe for the first time, to help me get to a place where I can start creating my own history rather than being told [what to believe.]” Bobbie stepped in front of the mirror looking like a vision of herself, in voluptuous black hair, her glamourpuss face, wearing latex catsuits and Vivienne Westwood heels. 

In 2015, Lady Bunny thought it was time to bring Wigstock back. She was approached by HBO to do a contemporary look at the drag festival in the new documentary, Wig. Bobbie remembers the honor of Bunny choosing her as the cross generational gap for the film. Not only was this one of Bobbie’s wildest dreams realized but this also served as her coming out ball. She took the opportunity to share her experience with AIDS, in hopes of inspiring those who continue to struggle from lack of access and stigma.

Along with the boom in recognition, Bobbie received backlash from within her community. One older queen accused Bobbie of ruining the documentary by speaking about AIDS. “No one cares anymore. Why does everything new and gay have to be about AIDS?” she remembers him groaning. Bobbie was piercingly reminded of the exclusionary nature within the queer community.  “I spent a lot of years wearing the term faggot as a badge of honor. But when I came out as trans, suddenly all my gay friends were like ‘sorry sis you’re no longer in this circle group.’ It’s because I’m still too gay to be trans and too trans to be gay… I know a bunch of gay men and trans girls who hate me not because I’m a bitch but because I’m positive.” Some would go as far as outing Bobbie’s status in front of her and prospective lovers. They would say ‘Don’t think you’re something. You’re just AIDS on a stick’... I’m forced to realize I’m in this pocket bubble of living life one way that doesn’t scale to a large portion of people… I have been separated from the pack.” 

Romance was hardly any different. Anyone drawn in by her magnetism was swiftly repelled by Bobbie’s insistence that she wasn’t human and only the virus. So she began to date people who were also positive, who saw through her defenses and related to her trauma. As these relationships progressed, she found empathizing would fester into trauma ranking, differentiating their experience to hers. “The only thing we had in common is that we were both positive so there's a lot of shame associated there… It was very sad because you know what they’re going through and vice versa yet they’re choosing to perpetuate that self-hate.” Sex was even trickier, becoming a hotbed for insecurities. Intercourse, even consensual, was the ultimate trigger for conjuring up Bobbie’s dissonance with intimacy. During sex, Bobbie would only go on for so long before panicking and putting a stop to it altogether. These trauma attacks would come and go, lasting a couple minutes, maybe a few hours, sometimes lingering for a few days. She let go of these partners before they could inevitably abandon her. “They don’t see that side of the world; they’re not attuned to the same fears I have. For me, I really believed that I could not be loved so I left because of that fear.” 

With the uptick in education and forms of prevention, such as Truvada and PrEP, she’s seeing the veil of stigma gradually lifting. Language is changing with the current generation, differentiating “good bloods”: people who regiment their medications and “bad bloods”: for those who don’t. Living with HIV is no longer the death sentence it was in the 80s/90s. Bobbie remembers confiding her status to a lover whose response was “Well that’s what condoms are for, for people like you to have a chance at a normal sex life again.” This shift in social consciousness has allowed her access to a side of intimacy she’d felt was closed off to her. “Serodiscordant relationships I find are much easier now because people who don’t have the virus don’t seem to care. They don’t have these hang ups, so this gives you more room to not have hang ups either and to accept your whole self.” 

For so long Bobbie had been conditioned to believe her truth would be her undoing. “Tell someone you’re positive and they’re going to kill you,” was said by psychiatrists, teachers, doctors and Bobbie’s own parents. But when tasked to embrace herself wholly she’s learned that honesty is the key to loving and being loved. That to advocate for yourself means you’re advocating for others in the process. “You have to be honest about who you are in a way that is palatable for someone who doesn’t know about HIV, but in a way that’s comfortable for you.” At 26, Bobbie is diligent in reframing how we look at the reality of HIV/AIDS, to find deficiency in the stigma not the condition. “I hated when people would say ‘you’re going to have it forever.’ I always say, ‘you’re going to have it for a long time, so start learning about it.” 

Being a 12-year survivor, she has watched the pillars of stigma gradually crack under the tides of change. She raved about the pioneering work of Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who’s made a reputation of radically preventing and controlling HIV/AIDS. She also boasts about Harlem United, a non-profit organization dedicated to offering social services to vulnerable populations. Bobbie looks forward to a new world that takes the power away from HIV stigma and uses it to uplift the stories of the present. “We’re so wrapped up in glamorizing the 80s AIDS crisis. We’re so subscribed to David Wojnaroqicz’s [work and AIDS advocacy] that we are refusing to acknowledge the voices of today to grow past the 80s. I love Wojnaroqicz but he died in 1992, AIDS didn’t stop when he died. But those seem to be the only stories we continue to hear. That’s why I’ve made it my mission to speak about [HIV/AIDS] as publicly and with as much candor as I possibly can because there is a whole new world out there.”

Disclaimer: Guest blogs do not necessarily reflect the views of the ADAP Advocacy Association, but rather they provide a neutral platform whereby the author serves to promote open, honest discussion about public health-related issues and updates.