Oakland Tribune:
Learning 'Real' lessons

September 6, 2000
By Chad Jones

Judd Winick learned a lot more about the real world than he bargained for when he signed for a season of MTV's "The Real World" in 1994.

Sharing a posh San Francisco house with six strangers, Winick lived his life in front of a TV crew for six months. During that time he discovered that his roommate, Pedro Zamora, was HIV-positive, and he met and fell in love with fellow housemate Pam Ling, the woman to whom he is now engaged.

The whole experience, from falling in love with Ling to befriending and then losing Zamora to AIDS only nine months after meeting him, had a profound effect on Winick, a cartoonist by trade who still resides in San Francisco.

In the Upper Haight flat he shares with Ling, now a practicing doctor and research fellow, Winick looks back at his time on "The Real World" with mixed emotions.

"It was the most intense experience I've ever had and the hardest and most life-changing," Winick says. "The pressure to be interesting was ridiculous. When I watch the show now, I see how tight and stiff I was. I was really scared, especially in the early episodes. I look like I'm going to cave in on myself."

But watching the show, which goes into syndication across the country this fall, is difficult.

"When I see the show, I'm right back there, and it's still really fresh, really raw. Seeing Pedro is hard because it brings back the hurt, the loss, and reminds me of everything that Pedro was going to become.

"But instead of becoming this incredible person, he has become a martyr, although an important one. He was a remarkable, unbelievable person, and his being on that show has done so much good and affected so many people. But in the end, we just miss him."

Winick's friendship with Zamora, who died in November, 1994, at 22, is the subject of "Pedro and Me: Friendship, Loss and What I Learned," a graphic novel released this week (Henry Holt and Co.; $15).

After doing the daily comic strips "Nuts & Bolts" and "Frumpy the Clown," Winick decided it was time to graduate from the limited three-panel format to the long-form graphic novel - what some might call a comic book for the over-10 set - to tell the story that meant the most to him.

Growing up in Long Island, N.Y., and studying art and drawing at the University of Michigan, Winick had never met, let alone befriended, a person with HIV. After he made it through the many rounds of auditions for "The Real World," a producer asked him how he would feel living with a housemate who was HIV-positive.

"I said, `Forget about it. I'm your man. No problem.' " Winick recalls. "Here I was, this weenie, open-minded, liberal New York Jew. I should have been fine with it, but I was really scared. I put all of this in the book because I was this self-professed not-uptight guy and I had big problems.

"But it's OK to have big problems. You deal with them. You learn. I did."

During the tumultuous six months of co-habitation on "The Real World," Winick spearheaded the campaign to oust troublesome housemate Puck, an event that barely rates a mention in the book. Rather than dwelling on the show itself, Winick focuses on the strong friendships he developed with Zamora, Ling and Cory Murphy, whom Winick describes as "the little sister I never had."

"I didn't write about the show much because it has been covered to the nth degree," Winick says. "I am always asked, `Did they leave anything off the show that was important?' To which I respond: `What did they put in that was really important?' Except for Pedro and his putting a personal face on AIDS, nothing important happens on this show."

Zamora wanted to be part of "The Real World" to continue the AIDS education work he had begun several years before. After the show concluded, Zamora embarked on a national lecture tour. When he got too sick to continue, Winick stepped in and finished it for him.

"I did the lecture thing for about a year and a half," Winick says. "It was difficult, very emotional and very tiring, but I took to the lecturing well because I'm an attention hog.

"The really hard part was talking about Pedro, and after he passed away, going through it all over and over again. That's one of the reasons I wrote the book, so I wouldn't have to lecture anymore but there would be this permanent document telling the story."

Winick came under some criticism during the lecture tour. Members of the gay community and the HIV-positive community were skeptical: What right did he have to talk about AIDS and HIV? What gave him the right to lecture about a gay man living with AIDS when he was not a gay man living with AIDS?

"No one ever criticized me to my face," Winick says, "and I'm not sure what they thought I was doing. I was basically giving an AIDS 101 lecture with all the basics about the disease and about safe sex. But the focus of my lecture was tolerance, about coming from a place of fear to a place of acceptance."

Another reason Winick says he wrote the book was to continue the AIDS education work that was so important to Zamora.

"We're not doing all that well teaching young people about AIDS," Winick says. "Teens are not protecting themselves. They know they're supposed to use condoms. They know how to use condoms, but they're not doing it. That gets into a whole thing about self-respect and knowing how to negotiate sexual practices with your partner, which is something nobody ever talks about with kids."

In his book, Winick depicts a scene in which he encounters a little girl who had lost her older brother to AIDS. She cried through his entire lecture and waited around for him after it was over.

"This is one of the first stories I wrote and is one of the only sections to survive the first draft," Winick says. "This little girl couldn't really talk about her grief with anyone, and it took this idiot from TV to come talk to her school that finally opened her up.

"That's one of the things I want to accomplish with this book and one of the things that Pedro felt so strongly about. He wanted people to know they're not alone."

Winick now writes "Green Lantern" comics for D.C. Comics and "The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius" for Oni Press. He says he finally found his identity as both a writer and an artist while writing "Pedro and Me."

In the book he writes: "Aside from the friendship, love and lessons, Pedro, thank you for giving me my voice. Before writing and drawing this book, I'd never truly found my way as a storyteller. You've given me that. So once again, thank you. It's one more way that I can never repay you."

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