Richard Pérez-Feria
VEGAS INC Coverage
Perspective isn’t — by any stretch of the imagination — the sexiest word around, but it’s a word I’ve been forcing myself to think about a lot lately. A lot.
When I agreed to become the founding editor in chief of POZ, the first national consumer magazine about HIV almost two decades ago, I took the job knowing it would be the most difficult role I had filled to that point in my career. Though HIV and AIDS were terms I was familiar with—everyone alive in the 1990s knew exactly what those words meant—I personally hadn’t been touched by the fast-moving pandemic. That would soon change.
As the leader of a controversial new magazine, I had to immerse myself quickly and learn a plethora of multisyllabic medical jargon, an endless roster of governmental agencies, nonprofits, activist associations as well as reach out to every talented writer, photographer and illustrator I had ever heard of to assemble my editorial team. Launching a magazine is always a daunting task. To launch this particular magazine about this particular topic in this particular time and without significant financial resources, let’s just say that the odds of POZ succeeding were firmly slotted between slim and none. But, unexpectedly, April 1994 saw the birth of POZ to universal acclaim, for it was a stunning, important magazine that gave voice to the voiceless in an articulate, beautiful, provocative package. This little magazine that could sent shock waves through the media landscape and won an armload of awards for writing, design and, I suspect, its sheer existence.
What I took away from my years at the helm of POZ weren’t the accolades (though they were certainly very nice), but the remarkable people I met. With very rare exceptions, every single day I would encounter diverse, fascinating people—whether at lunch, in sit-down interviews, chats on the phone or at functions—who were living with AIDS. And being HIV positive in 1994 was a much scarier proposition than it is today.
A few years before launching POZ, I met a high school student who simply blew me away the second he opened his mouth. His name was Pedro Zamora, a Cuban-born kid who was attending Hialeah High School near Miami. He was a good-looking, extremely popular cross-country track team captain who happened to be gay. And, oh yeah, was newly diagnosed with HIV. He was all of 17 years old. As I sat there rapt with attention during our initial interview (I was the editor of a Miami-based magazine at the time), Pedro was an AIDS statistics machine, reciting a confounding array of medical numbers the Centers for Disease Control would be impressed by. Pedro also told me that he was acutely aware that the options were limited for his own future, but he was determined to get the word out about the benefits of safer sex. In his words, the entire world had to heed his warning.
Pedro Zamora became my friend, and the only person I knew of who was fighting this insidious disease. When he told me he was cast for the third season of MTV’s monster hit reality program, Real World, this one slated to be filmed in San Francisco, I could tell that he believed that this would be the platform he was looking for to speak out about safer sex. And what a platform it proved to be. Pedro Zamora became nothing short of a nationwide pop cultural phenomenon, just as I suspected. Before the show aired, I made Pedro POZ's third cover story — featuring a searing close-up of that face. I was happy to help lay the media groundwork for what became his most public and important year he had left on the planet.
In these unbelievably turbulent economic times, with uncertainty the only constant in the foreseeable future, I often find myself thinking about that passionate, no-time-to-waste kid I met so many years ago. What Pedro Zamora and the hundreds of other courageous HIV-positive souls I met during my tenure at POZ told me, showed me, taught me, was that there wasn’t time for any sort of pity party; life is special, not guaranteed; stop whining and start doing. All of these fortune cookie platitudes may sound hollow to the most jaded among us, but, alas, they also happen to be true.
A little while before Pedro died of AIDS, he came to see me in New York City. Though looking rundown from the national celebrity spin cycle he was in the midst of, he was still the same excitable, breathless Pedro I met in Miami. “Can you believe what’s happening, Richard? Can you believe it? People are actually listening. I think I’m making a difference.”
How many of us, facing imminent death, would give much thought to anyone or anything else except our plight? How selfless Pedro Zamora was. How beautiful. How heroic. To this day, when I want to stop feeling sorry for myself, I think of my friend Pedro Zamora.
Perspective is a powerful thing.