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You'd think I'd be used to being a pariah.

I was born a bastard; then I was an orphan. Worse, the "frog orphan." My mother had come all the way to British Columbia from Quebec to conceal her second pregnancy, and she exasperated the nuns at the orphanage because she could not speak English.

Next, I became an adoptee and an only child. These were the labels of my youth.

As I entered junior high school, I realized these labels were shaping the course of my life — even though they were beyond my ability to control.

Then three events dramatically affected the perception of everyone around me. First, I started going to mathematics classes at the University of British Columbia with three other Grade 8 students, so a welcome new label was "smart." Second, my adoptive mother was institutionalized following a three-year decline into mental illness and paralysis, and suddenly I was tainted by a proximity to "crazy." And third, I realized I was a "homo."

The loss of my mother had an enormous emotional impact. I lived with constant anxiety that I would have to return to the orphanage and the care of the Catholic Church. I had a migraine every weekend for two years, so I would be virtually comatose on Sundays when my adoptive father expected me to go to church. The change in my behaviour, plus my emerging sexual identity, separated my father and me. My new label was "sissy."

I didn't go back to the orphanage, or back to church either, after my mother was gone. I settled into a life of self-reliance.

The dominant label of my life and work became "artistic." I was "creative" and "successful," and these words dominated people's perception of me, trumping any classification by sexual preference. I came to love life and living it.

I seldom saw my father after my mother left, and when she died he took up life with her nurse. He was like an uncle to me: someone I liked and saw fairly often, but a person who was "once removed."

Eventually, I met a man and settled down, but after 14 years together he wanted out. A year after that I met someone else, and although it was to be only a brief relationship it left me with a permanent legacy and a new label.

I had AIDS. The prognosis was an indeterminate number of ambulatory years (depending on my chosen course of treatment and medications) followed by a horrific death. I was a "leper." I had hit the outsider's home run.

But wait! There was Diana, Princess of Wales, hugging one of us in a photo in the newspaper. Irony of ironies, the worst label in the world — "plague-infected fag" — was attracting social empathy and compassion.

I was dying. I would never love or make love again. If I did, it would mean a painful disclosure. I had become a lethal weapon.

But my status changed with the discovery of highly active antiretroviral therapy. It restored life and eradicated the virus.

I no longer had AIDS, but I "carried" the HIV virus. I had a new label: HIV+ or "positive." Most everyone without a personal connection to the disease does not understand the difference between having AIDS and being HIV+, but the gay community is, and must be, knowledgeable about the differences.

The funny thing about becoming "positive," however, is what a negative experience it became for me.

Viral load measures the amount of virus in the blood. For 10 years, doctors have been unable to find HIV in my blood — my level is "undetectable," and this is my new, self-determined label. I am Undetectable Man. My viral load is so low that the chance of transmission, even without protection, is very, very low, but I would never have unprotected sex.

The virus has been virtually eradicated from my body. But in spite of this medical reality, everyone who has dated me since I became positive has rejected me.

My community of gays and lesbians matured at the onset of the AIDS epidemic. They helped us when we were sick, but now that many of us live with a "chronically manageable disease like diabetes," as my doctor describes it, we find ourselves emotionally isolated. We remain lepers to those who once made quilts, wrote letters, sat bedside in palliative care facilities and made demands of a sometimes fearful, sometimes compassionate medical community, a mercenary pharmaceutical industry, an often prejudiced clerical community and indifferent politicians.

How things have changed. We can get married, but we reject men who are HIV positive, treatment compliant and without a viral load. It hurts and I am lonely. Have I fought back for a life sentence of solitary confinement? Emotional isolation is the worst thing that can be done to someone in a prison environment — it is the hell of hells. Please care about our souls as much as you once cared about our dying bodies, my brothers. You made quilts for us; won't you let us lie with you beneath them?

Chris Tyrell lives in Vancouver.