![my friend pedro physical my friend pedro physical](https://duncannagle.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/hqdefault-63.jpg)
I ask Winick if he felt the housemates were fairly portrayed.
![my friend pedro physical my friend pedro physical](https://images.nintendolife.com/66121b4d01b5f/1280x720.jpg)
Then, quickly, I just liked him, and then I was worried about his welfare, although he didn’t want us to feel that.” I was frightened by the idea of living with someone with HIV. I could take the credit for being the liberal I always claimed to be, but I was 24 and still had a lot of blank spots. Within an hour he was my roommate, and within a week he was my friend. Winick envisioned “a virus on two legs,” such as he had seen on the news, “but we ended up with Pedro. The producers had asked the housemates first how they felt about living with somebody who was HIV-positive, then that they would be living with somebody who was. At 17, Zamora was diagnosed HIV-positive, and even prior to appearing on The Real World had become a well-known and respected advocate and campaigner around HIV education. His father was supportive of him when he came out. He had left Cuba, where he was born, aged 8 with his parents. Zamora had had a dramatic life up until appearing in the show. Pedro looked like he’d stepped out of a soap opera: He was handsome, charming, funny, and passionate.” The face of AIDS, prior to Zamora, notes Winick, had been Ryan White, the Indiana teenager who became infected with HIV after a blood transfusion, “and on the news, all those men who were so skinny they looked like they’d been at Auschwitz, covered in KS lesions. “Pedro was being Pedro, just not for us, but the millions watching.”
![my friend pedro physical my friend pedro physical](https://wallpaperaccess.com/full/2008728.jpg)
“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.
![my friend pedro physical my friend pedro physical](https://static0.thegamerimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/pedro-physical-edition.jpg)
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.