Author and motivational speaker Scott Fried spoke last night to students about dealing with collisions between internal and external personalities in the context of living with HIV in a Pearson Hall lecture sponsored by the Queer Straight Alliance.
Fried began his talk, entitled "AIDS, Love and the Secret Lives of College Students," by discussing his high school years. Then, he said, he first began to notice a distinction between his public life at school and his private life at home.
Fried would come home and listen Air Supply's "All Out of Love," a song that Fried's brother referred to as "gay music."
"I would be in the middle room, my sister fighting with her boyfriend, my brother fighting with himself and me in the center," Fried said. "My bedroom was my private sanctuary, so I could push away the whole world that I lived through in school."
"I wasn't in love and I wasn't out of love, but I was definitely lost," he added.
Fried said he used to feel empty and would yearn for someone or something to fill a void in his life that he could not clearly define.
After graduating from high school, Fried attended The George Washington University, where he was ridiculed for being homosexual even though he had not yet identified himself as such. As a result of a homophobic incident at GW, Fried said, he transferred to New York University.
After graduation, he had his first sexual experience with another man, in which he contracted HIV and his "two worlds" finally collided, he said.
Three major points dominated his message last night: that "you are enough," that "you deserve the life that you want" and that "life sometimes sucks, and that is OK."
When he was younger, Fried said he lived "a life of exclamation points" in which sentences were short. Yet he encouraged the audience to look beyond short sentences, adding commas and clauses to sentences -- changing thoughts from "life sucks" to "life sucks at this time in my life."
"I see that HIV taught me how to look at life in a whole different way," Fried said. "I've learned so much in the process, most of which is that who I was when I was your age ... was enough, was a person who had a right to his feelings and his dreams and who he wanted to be."
Fried referred to people like the man with whom he first had sex as strangers who could fill the void and save him from the emptiness he often felt. Sex was his "weapon" or device to combat the inherent contradiction in his personality between wanting to be with men and fearing the thought of being a homosexual, he said.
This contradiction is an acceptable part of life, according to Fried.
"You have permission to be a contradiction, permission granted starting right now to not make sense," he said.
Toward the end of his talk, Fried said he would have liked to have opened up to someone earlier, especially since discussing his feelings might have prevented him from practicing unsafe sex.
"I wish I could have found one person who I could empty my pockets to," he said, adding that sometimes people simply need someone to listen to their secrets.
Fried came out to his parents at the age of 30, after he had already contracted HIV. He said he was now in awe of younger people who have come out much earlier.
The lecture was followed by a question-and-answer session, a memorial video to the friends Fried has lost to AIDS and a reception at the LGBT Center.
