Scott Fried made one mistake, and he contracted HIV. Since then, he has toured the country, warning college-age kids that one mistake is all it takes.
The motivational speaker stopped at UB Wednesday night, sharing his personal experiences in the first of a series of lectures, sponsored by Hillel of Buffalo, on topics such as HIV, Judaism, sexuality and eating disorders.
Fried has fought HIV for 18 years and has spent the last thirteen of them talking to young people about the dangers of unsafe behaviors such as unprotected sex, self-mutilation and drug abuse.
As a young off-Broadway stagehand, Fried said contracted HIV in what he described as his only unsafe sexual encounter.
"I got infected the first time I had unsafe sex," he said.
Fried, 42, used experiences from his own life to relate to his audience, as well as an approach that he described as "open and honest."
He said the loneliness and depression that he felt as a university student led him down a destructive path. He talked about how accepting his own sexuality was difficult, and stressed self-acceptance as a key factor in the dangerous behaviors of all people.
Fried invoked the story of a post-Columbine shooting, where a 9-year-old boy shot and injured five classmates, and nearly killed himself.
He asked, "What is your weapon, when life sucks and you feel like you have no one to turn to?"
Communication, he said, along with self-value, was an essential part of every person's life, when facing depression or even substance abuse.
"Talk about it face to face." Fried said. "Put down the drink or the drugs and just talk."
He read one letter aloud, which he sent as a reply to a "call for help" from a young teenage girl.
"You are sacred," he said. "This is something I want all of you to know and realize."
Fried attributed the bullying and name-calling that followed him from junior high to George Washington University as another serious issue that he faced when confronting his distorted self-image, and a major cause for the mental anguish that he felt as a university student.
"That's so gay," he said, "an expression that makes my blood chill."
He also stressed the consequences of not valuing everyday life as being potentially fatal.
"I've lost many friends to AIDs," he said, while introducing a video montage of photographs and answering machine messages from those friends. Fried also composed a song for the video, which displayed only a few of the 131 people that he said he had lost.
While describing his near-lethal choice to have unsafe sex, Fried also explained how he is glad to have been able to reach people all over the world, despite his illness.
"Some people call it mistake. I call it opportunity, to learn from your mistakes so next time you can do it differently."
The lecture was sponsored by the Hillel of Buffalo, LGBTA, Residence Life, the Planned Parenthood of Buffalo, Weinberg Tzedek Hillel of Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life.
Photo: Courtesy of Matthew Messina, from the RMBERS' Instagram page
