Joseph Kibler goes shoe
shopping every three weeks. That’s how often his black Airwalk tennis shoes have to be replaced because of the “massive holes” caused
by the hobbling and feet-dragging when he walks.
But the frequent trips to
Payless Shoes don’t bother him. They are a symbol of how far he has come.
Kibler, a 22-year-old casting
director, was diagnosed with HIV when he was only a year old. His body didn’t
develop normally. Doctors told his mother they didn’t know how long her son
would live, let alone whether he would ever be able to walk.
The first few years of Kibler’s
life were filled with doctor’s visits, purple casts that covered his legs from
toe to hip and lots and lots of pills. When he grew older and still couldn’t
stand or walk, he was put in a wheelchair.
At the time, Kibler believed he
couldn’t walk because of cerebral palsy, not HIV. His mother, who was also
HIV-positive, had kept it from him because of the stigma surrounding the
disease during the early 90s.
It wasn’t until he was 12 years
old and a doctor accidentally let his real condition slip that Kibler knew the
truth.
“That ride home was a ride home
that I won’t forget,” Kibler said of the day his mother explained to him how he
had gotten HIV and what it meant to be positive.
She told him she hadn’t known
she was infected until he and his twin brother John, who died from the virus at
the age of 15 months, were diagnosed.
He said he remembers feeling
hurt, scared and confused.
“A lot of it had to do with the
fact that my dad was the reason that my mom got infected and I hadn’t really
been close with my father,” he said. “He wasn’t around. He was there, but he
was in and out.”
Kibler’s father cheated on his
mother one week before their wedding and contracted the virus and infected her.
Then he was told he had to hide
his condition from friends, from teachers, from everyone.
“For a good deal — seven or
eight years — I kept it quiet and didn’t talk about it, which was very hard
being 15 or 16 (years old),” he said. “I didn’t know how to talk to girls first
off, let alone how to even approach the subject of HIV. Not even to my
friends.”
In high school, Kibler told a
few close friends that he had HIV.
“I felt privileged that he trusted me enough to tell me the truth,” said
Tara Brown-Ogilvie, who went to school with Kibler. “I think that it really
strengthened our friendship.”
Brown-Ogilvie said Kibler used to tell her about the three and four-hour
trips he would take by taxi, bus and train to get to theater auditions when he
first moved to Los Angeles from Florida.
“He still pushes through even on the roughest of days and has
accomplished so much,” she said. “Joe truly lives in the moment.”
It wasn’t until he was 18 years
old that Kibler went public about the cause behind his disability. It was
during an exercise at theater camp, where each student had to get on stage and
tell the group something they had never told anyone before.
“I took it as my biggest
opportunity and among 40 or 50 friends that I’d probably known about three
weeks, I said: ‘My name is Joseph Kibler and I’m HIV-positive.’”
The camp was a turning point in
Kibler’s life. He felt the weight of his condition lifted. The outpouring of
support he received from friends gave him the encouragement to continue
fighting against his condition.
By that time, Kibler had
advanced from a wheelchair to crutches after years of physical and occupational
therapy. Toward the end of camp, one of the directors presented Kibler with a
cane that had been signed by students and faculty.
“That really gave me the
motivation to get to where I could walk with a cane,” he said.
Later that year, he took his
first steps with his cane and today he jokes about losing it just like anyone
else would misplace their keys.
“I spend 15 minutes sometimes
looking for it in the morning,” said Kibler, whose furniture is arranged so
that he can navigate his apartment without a cane. “The cane is always getting
away from me.”
Kibler said his greatest
accomplishment was last year when he completed the 6.2-mile AIDS Walk Los
Angeles course, the farthest distance he had ever walked.
“I had trained and spent an
entire month getting to that point,” Kibler said. “I didn’t feel (the strain on
my legs). I didn’t feel the fatigue. There were so many people believing in
me.“
He had attempted the walk in
2009, but a fall forced him to drop out and put him back in a wheelchair for
several months to recover.
Kibler, who graduated from the
Los Angeles Film School last December, used the walk as the centerpiece for a
documentary he is making about HIV and AIDS awareness and his personal struggle
with his diagnosis and disability.
His initial plan was to create
a short public service announcement about the virus, but Mark Bashian, who
taught Kibler at the film school, had a different idea on how to spread
awareness.
Bashian said he felt that
Kibler’s story was so personal and touching that it could be a lot more
powerful as an 87-minute documentary than a 10-minute commercial. He signed on
to direct “Walk On” and became a self-proclaimed HIV statistics guru.
“If we end up helping one
person to be more educated about HIV and AIDS, we’ll have done our job,”
Bashian said.
Kibler’s mother refused to be
interviewed for the documentary and doesn’t like to talk about her condition.
However, Bashian flew her to California to see her son cross the finish line at
the walk last year.
“She lived in Florida and she
couldn’t come out to see even though she really wanted to, or at least that’s
what she told me,” Kibler said. “She was there at the finish line and that was
probably the best part of it. The fact that she could share that and could be
there for it.”
These days, Kibler takes eight
pills a day to contain the virus and visits his doctor every three months. He
gets up at 6 a.m. each morning to work on the documentary and spends his
afternoons working on different casting and producing projects.
For the most part, he lives his
day-to-day life as anyone else would, just with a few more falls.
“It’s a privilege to fall for
me,” he said. “If I can fall and then get back up, that is something I couldn’t
do 12 years ago. I would rather do that every single day than go back to being
in a wheelchair.”
