At Christmastime when Shaun Hauk was a boy, his mother took him and his brother for car rides, away from the north Rapid home where they lived, across the tracks and up and down West Boulevard, to see the lights sparkling along the snowy roofs and glowing from within the tall pine trees.

Today, Hauk lives three blocks off the boulevard, in a one-bedroom house with original hardwood floors and a white picket fence, just like he imagined. He has a yard to mow, rose bushes to revive, antiques to arrange just so and a cat to feed.

The thing he wants to complete the picket-fence picture is a husband, he said with a little laugh, but Hauk is patient.

It took him until his late 30s, after years of self-destructive behavior, he said, to accept the central fact of his life: that he has AIDS. It colors nearly everything he does and every relationship he has, and, as full as his life gets and as much as he is living, he is still living with AIDS.

But now that he has been back in Rapid City for eight years and has a social life of neighborhood friends, family, dances and low-key cocktail parties, Hauk, 45, is comfortable talking about it and has been able to play a supportive role for others in Rapid City who learn they are HIV-positive and wonder what to do next.

"I just want to let people know it's not a death sentence," he said.

Hauk was born at the old hospital just down the street from where he lives now. His parents divorced when he was 4, and welfare helped his mother raise Hauk and his older brother. They lived on Denver Street, where the civic center is now, when the 1972 flood struck Rapid City. Then they moved to a trailer on Ellsworth Air Force Base.

Hauk remembers the sense of security he felt leaving that trailer to move into Lakota Homes, where he had his own room and a fenced yard with a gate he could close.

He describes his childhood self as a loner, someone who knew he was different, but didn't know what it meant to be gay.

It was when he left Central High School at 16, joined the Job Corps and met openly gay people that he decided, "It was OK to be out there."

But back home in Rapid City, in the early 1980s, his mother worried for his safety. Hauk hung out with a gay crowd, a scene of airmen and older guys who came from towns all around to have parties at hotels. At bars in the city, telling people he was gay got him into fights, which he fought. "I figured, I'm from north Rapid."

Then he saw something in the news about Cheeseman Park in Denver, where gay men went to see and be seen, and more, and a move to the city sounded appealing.

"I could be more accepted there," Hauk said.

Word of a "gay plague" spread in the community. Hauk had night sweats and diarrhea. He got tested.

It was before the first approved drug to treat AIDS came on the market. It would be eight years before Magic Johnson announced he was HIV-postive and was leaving basketball. A decade before "Angels in America" won the Tony Award.

Few gay men who contracted HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) in the early '80s have lived as long as Hauk has, but it happens. There are different strains of the disease, and people's bodies respond differently.

Hauk looked back on that time and said, "I don't want anybody to live with what I've gone through the last 20 to 25 years."

He watched friends die and became a loner, feeling isolated even from the gay community, where some didn't want to be associated with anyone with this scary new disease.

He moved between Rapid City and Denver, worked on and off as a telemarketer, a cook, a construction worker. But he said he became paranoid that someone would find out and was terrified that he would get injured on the job and infect someone else.

Angry, lonely, in denial, Hauk would drink to forget, to try to kill the virus. He'd drink and tell people he had HIV, then sober up and tell them, no, he was just kidding, he was fine.

Hauk came home to Rapid City for the last time in June 2000. His tattooed arms were scrawny, his face sunken. His T-cell count was just 23, "full-blown AIDS."

"I basically came home to get ready to die."

After years of his neglected health, Hauk's doctors at the Community Health Center helped him get on the right medications: the "cocktail" that wasn't available when he was younger.

"They did what they were supposed to do and brought me back to a healthy situation," he said. "I'm one of the lucky ones."

Hauk lived with family and friends, then for nearly six years at the Star Village complex, before moving this summer into his home, rented from a gay friend who lives in the neighborhood, who remodeled it and collects rent under the federal government's low-income housing voucher program.

Hauk gets disability payments under Social Security and groceries from the food bank and mission.

He is recovering from a stroke six months ago and said he's like a cat with nine lives.

If that's true, he's trying to make this one a long time.

When Hauk was drinking, life went by fast.

Now, he wants a slower life. He takes Rapid Ride around town since he gave up driving. He pokes around in antiques shops, looking for new treasures. He gets together with friends and with a group of gay men from throughout the Hills who meet monthly.

He spends time with his mother, and he said they are like friends. His big, biker brother - who stuck up for him in fights but disapproved of his being gay - and Hauk don't talk much. Hauk only recently told him about his AIDS and that his story would be in the newspaper.

"He said, 'You have to be who you are.' It made me feel very special, like I'm really his little brother now. We're brothers and we have issues, but we love each other and that's all that counts anymore."

Hauk said it's impossible to put the disease out of his mind. He's reminded each time he takes his medicine. It has affected his physical and mental health, too; he has arthritis and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

He dates but only people who are also "positive."

He tells everyone he knows, to protect them, and because he's not afraid.

"I'm not going to go into a cave when there's a world to live in," Hauk said.

Lately, he's been helping at The Center West, the gay advocacy and resource center in Rapid City. He talks to people newly diagnosed with HIV about what to expect and wants the younger generation to remember that it's still a serious threat, even if it doesn't get the attention it did in the 1980s. But he also wants them to know they can still have a full life with HIV, thanks to new treatments.

Hauk sometimes gets "itchy feet" and wants to move back to a city. But then, he said, "I'm tired of the cities. I'm tired of the attitudes."

He said he's going to stay in his picket-fence house at least a year, try to give back to the community and decide if he wants to be here permanently now, in a town where he has friends and a support system.

Wherever he ends up, Hauk says he knows how he wants to be treated: "Accept me for who I am, not for where I'm going in life."

If you go

What: Rapid City Second Annual AIDS Walk today

When: 1 p.m. registration; 2 p.m. opening ceremonies; 2:30 p.m. walk starts; 4:30 p.m. reception for participants at 1103 12th St.

Where: Memorial Park band shell

Speakers: House District 33 candidate Kimberly Henderson and city Alderwoman Patti Martinson

Why: The walk benefits national HIV/AIDS research and advocacy and the Center West.

Get tested: The Center West will conduct free, confidential HIV testing at the event. The test involves a mouth swab, and people can stop in for their results in about seven days.

AIDS in South Dakota

* A total of 554 cases of HIV and AIDS have been diagnosed in South Dakota from 1985 through 2007. Pennington County had 126 of those.

* There are about 340 South Dakotans living with HIV or AIDS.

* About one-third of South Dakotans with HIV and AIDS are men who contracted the virus through gay sex. About one-quarter contracted it through heterosexual sex. About one in six got it through intravenous drug use, and the rest through blood transfusion, from their mothers or in unspecified ways.

* In 2007, 25 new cases were reported in the state, 14 in men and 11 in women.

* South Dakota and its neighboring states have some of the lowest rates of new HIV and AIDS cases reported in the country.

Source: South Dakota Department of Health