Out in the Mourifains

Confessions of aicandidate:

Openly gay, HIV+, and running for State Senate

Chris .C0zzy

BURLINGTON -- I’m just a regular guy with one exception,
I’m a gay male and HIV+. OK, two exceptions.

In attempting to write about the Who, What, Where, When, and
Why of running for state office, I realized that the “Why?” is
really a two part question. Why now? and Why disclose? Being
openly gay is considered to be bad enough, but also being
HIV+ is a different story altogether. Even in my own world of
gaydom, being HIV+ is quite a challenge. People are nice to
your face but when it comes to being intimate or, I’ll say it,
“getting laid”, it is a totally different animal. People act like it is
no big thing until you ask for the second date or if they would
enjoy company for the evening. I call it the “I like you but...”
syndrome. I have never been one to hide who I am or what I

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think, but being positive has gotten me to reexamine being so
open.

My reasons for running for State Senate were simple——I felt we
needed to get new blood in government and thought I could
further the cause of being positive. It was time to get HIV out
of the closet and into people’s minds, time to prove that being
positive is not a death sentence. For years, people have avoided
those of us that are positive. They forget that being positive is
not a bad thing but just another step in a friend or lover’s life.

The decision to run for State Senate came about from a
discussion with a good friend, and former Vermont
Representative, Thomas Fleury. I had thought several times
about running for office, but just never really got serious about
it. Tom and I were talking at a party one evening; I mentioned
that I was interested in running for office and asked for any
ideas. His initial suggestion was to run for a seat in the
Vermont House of Representatives. He later withdrew this idea
because of the strength of the incumbents in my ward. I ran
into Tom a couple of months later in Pearls, and the subject of
me running came up again. He said that the perfect office to
run for was in the State Senate. My immediate response was a
bit tentative, but Torn explained that we did not have anyone in
the Senate who was openly gay and we could use the votes.
After some thought and discussion with friends and family, I
decided that this was a job that needed to be done and started
my bid for office. After all, the least I could do was lose.

I would later discover that running a political campaign is hard

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