“Pedro was being Pedro, just not for us, but the millions watching.” “He knew what we were thinking,” says Winick. In the first few days, Zamora let him and the housemates know they couldn’t become HIV-positive through tears, spit, and sneezing. Winick said he was nervous going into the house: While it was “fairly insignificant” that Zamora was gay, his HIV status was-before the two became such good friends-concerning. “There was no combination drug therapy, some of the most ignorant bullshit was still being said: that you could get HIV from touching people, mosquitoes, and water fountains. The impact of Zamora was so pronounced because 20 years ago, “it was an entirely different universe” for people with HIV and AIDS, says Winick. We haven’t let the kids watch ‘the show,’ as we call it,” but their 9-year-old knows enough to say, when people approach them, “Do you know them or are they fans?” Of Zamora, the children have always asked questions, which Winick and Ling try and answer as openly as possible. Pam looks exactly the same, I’m older and balder. Twenty-two! So they were 2 when it was on. “We were recently in a coffee shop and the barista said they recognized us,” he says. They fell in love in the house, and both became close friends of Zamora’s, were with him when he died, and still miss him hugely. He is married to housemate Pam Ling, who is a doctor (they have two children, aged 9 and 5).
#My friend pedro physical series
Winick, who was the cute, straight, preppy one, still lives in San Francisco, and is a cartoonist who has just been commissioned to write a graphic novel series for children. Zamora was one of modern TV’s first three-dimensional gay men: romantic, tough, funny, confrontational, and nobody’s victim. He was an uncompromising political radical, he was looking for love, and he was funny.
Zamora was handsome, passionate, and used his time on The Real World to educate and agitate. In 2014, this might sound grandiloquent and overstated, but in 1994 there were few openly gay men on TV, and few people with AIDS. Of all the Real World seasons, this remains an engraved pop-cultural memory-for Zamora, and for the conflict generated by messy, objectionable bicycle courier Puck, who the housemates ultimately grouped together to evict.īill Clinton once said that in Zamora, who died at age 22 a few months after taping ended, “young America saw a peer living with HIV.” Clinton said Zamora jolted people out of ignorance, and lived a life of “compassion and fearlessness.” And it was the season of Pedro Zamora, the young, gay, HIV-positive man, whose living with the disease on camera, humanly, day-to-day with housemates, helped shape a young generation’s more inclusive view of homosexuality and living with HIV and AIDS.
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