July 2, 2002, after a routine quarterly blood test, Javier learned he was HIV positive. He’d been living on the West Coast after college, before his parents got sick, hoping to find the growth he’d seen from his friends who’d left New York for somewhere else. Like a good New Yorker, he hated it out there. He missed that “grungy, rusty thing about New York that like makes sense to my soul.” But he met a man there, and they were in a long-term, monogamous relationship—I’ll let him tell it.
“We were in a relationship,” he says. “And it was an adult choice to not be safe because I was with my partner.” The man knew he was HIV positive, according to Javier, but didn’t say anything. That’s why Javier is so public about his HIV status; if it weren’t a terrible stigma to have HIV, the man might have told him instead of withholding it from him.
Javier spent three days in deep depression after he learned his diagnosis. But then he realized he had to take care of himself. He got up, he sought help, he found support groups, but also: He went home.
In New York he told his parents and let them support him emotionally. He found a doctor who gave him an aggressive course of medication. He took pills that tasted like rust and made him break out in hives. He itched so badly he had to stand under the shower to get any relief. Within six months, HIV was undetectable in his blood. Now, he says, he’s pretty sure his T-cells are better than anyone else’s in the room. He’s had long-term relationships since his diagnosis—not right now, no time for that now—but before the show, a lot of times when he’d tell a guy about his status, they’d beat it fast.
“There was such ignorance about what HIV even was,” he says. “I mean the fact that someone could say, ‘You have AIDS.’ ‘No. I have HIV. Do you know the difference? Right.’ The fact that the behavior that was permeating at the time was men would ask each other their status and one of them could easily lie and just say I’m negative and they would have unprotected sex. But here I am coming at you saying I’m fully HIV-positive and I’m letting you know that and there are ways to be safe. But you’re gonna shun me but then be unsafe with someone you’ve just met?”
But listen to what happens next. Two years after his diagnosis, Javier confronts his old boyfriend. Flies across the country and tells him that he’s HIV positive, that he’s angry and wants an answer. But the guy just sits there and says nothing—he says nothing.
And right then, Javier took a breath and felt overcome by compassion. He didn’t yell at him. “I realized how much pain he must be in.” And so Javier forgave him, with his words and with his heart.
“I don’t know where it came from,” he says now. “I can’t tell you where it came from.”
We’re done eating, and Javier asks if I’d like to see his garden. He keeps one on the roof of the marquis of the Richard Rodgers theater, so that he could be alone for a few minutes on performance days, and so that he could watch things grow. The rooftop garden sits on a balcony that faces 46th Street, and sometimes he walks to the edge and people scream that they love him, and he screams back that he loves them, too. But mostly he likes being alone, watering a big vat of soil and talking to his plants.
Late last year, just as Miranda won his Genius grant and began thinking about leaving the show, Javier found a lump on his body, and when he had it investigated, and learned he had cancer. After all that, cancer.
Just like the last time he got sick, he experienced all the things that come along with a thing that is plenty hard enough already, thank you very much, only this time he was a prominent figure. Organizations reached out to him, some really nice ones, but some with the obvious, unsubtle intent of binding his name to their PR emails. It happened so often that he has decided not to say publicly what kind of cancer he had, because he doesn’t want to be the poster child for a particular cause—just a general one, one in which you don’t keep secrets about your health because there’s no real reason to. There are still the people, he learned, that think you shouldn’t tell anyone if you have cancer. And there it was again, a stigma against the thing that is happening to so many people that literally no one benefits from keeping quiet about it. Patients don’t feel better, and people don’t know how to treat them. We don’t know what to say when we finally learn what’s going on. We don’t know how to help. “Say the damn thing out loud,” he says now. “Talk about the thing. We gotta talk about it. We gotta talk about it. It’s not gonna change. They’re not gonna learn. I’m not gonna learn. We’re not gonna grow.”
But Javier didn’t do any of that at first. At first, he didn’t say a word. He performed for six weeks, knowing he had cancer, not telling the cast yet, just trying to process it. He kept looking for the reasons—what had he eaten or exposed himself to? Was it where he lived? Was it his diet? He blamed himself for everything.
He took two months off from the show. He wanted to return, but what if he didn’t recover? “I didn’t know,” he says. “I didn’t know.” He did his treatments, he meditated, he listened to his doctors. “I just focused my energies on it, and finally when I started seeing progress, I started to believe there was hope that I could be back.”
By the time he took the stage again, he’d lost so much weight that the costumes hung loose on him. He doesn’t doubt himself often, but that night he did. It was the rest of the cast, he says, who got him through the performance, who loved him and were lifting him somehow. He felt their hands on his back. “There was no one who didn’t believe in me in that moment.”
In the show’s final scene, Hamilton, now dead at the hands of Burr, reaches out to help Liza over the threshold of her own death 50 years later. He takes her hand and walks her to the front of the stage. Javier cried through the whole scene. He looks straight ahead into the middle distance as he tells me this with his forearms on his thighs and his hands folded; it’s the only time during our conversations that he doesn’t look me in the eye. Finally, he snaps out of the memory, and he looks at me and says, “How do you describe the feeling that you’re alive? That’s what it was. I was still here and…wow.”
You couldn’t seem to die, I say to him. But he shakes his head and tells me I don’t understand. No, he says, “I’ve died several times already.” That’s what it feels like to him. He is not the person he was when he went into that clinic to hear his routine HIV test results; the person he was died right there, in that chair, and he walked out someone different. He died again when the oncologist told him that, yes, the lump was something they had to talk about, and things were about to change once more. Another quick and irrefutable death. The human brain cannot keep on encountering and surmounting such things, and so each time, to survive, you become another person. And each night on stage you die again and you take a bow and you find out who you are again, because now you know what it is to live.
In his garden on the roof, there’s a purple orchid, a gift from someone who attended the show, and he potted it among his other plants a few weeks ago, and when he brings the watering can near it, he notices something new: a tiny bit of green in the purple.
“Look,” he says. “A sprout.”
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