Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath (10 page)

T
HE FEAR IS of course unseemly—as most fear is. People behave at worst with demonic cruelty—at best oddly. Even among those who are good-hearted, the madness breaks out in small ways that bring friendships of long standing to an abrupt end. When the plague began and the television crews of certain stations refused to work on interviews with people with AIDS, I wanted to get their names, write them down, publish them on a list of cowards. When the parents in Queens picketed and refused to send their kids to school; when they kicked Ryan White out of class in Indiana; when people called in to ask if it was safe to ride the subway; when Pat Buchanan called for a quarantine of homosexuals; when they burned down the house in Arcadia, Florida, I felt a thrilling disgust, an exhilarating contempt, an anger at the shrill, stupid, mean panic, the alacrity with which people are converted to lepers and the lepers cast out of the tribe, he fact that if Fear is contemptible, it is most contemptible in people who have no reason to fear.

Even within the homosexual community, however, there was despicable behavior: men who would not go to restaurants, hospital rooms, wakes, for fear that any contact with other homosexuals might be lethal. At dinner one night in San Francisco in 1982, a friend said, “There’s a crack in the glass,” after I’d taken a sip of his lover’s wine, and took the glass back to the kitchen to replace it—a reaction so swift it took me a moment to realize there was no crack in the glass; the problem was my lips’ touching it—homosexual lips, from New York: the kiss of death. I was disgusted then, but the behavior no longer surprises me. AIDS, after all, belongs to the Age of Anxiety. My friend was a germophobe to begin with, who, though homosexual himself, had come to loathe homosexuals. The idea that they could now kill him, or his lover, fit in with his worldview. AIDS fed on his free-floating anxiety about the rest of modern life: the fertilizers, pesticides, toxic waste, additives in food, processing of food, steroids given cattle, salmonella in chickens, killer bees moving up from Brazil, Mexicans sneaking across the border, poisoned water, lead in our pipes, radon in our homes, asbestos in our high schools, mercury in tuna, auto emissions in the air, cigarette smoke in the restaurant, Filipinos on the bus. The society that could make sugar sinister was ready, it would seem, to panic over AIDS, so that when Russia put out the disinformation in its official press that AIDS was the work of a germ-warfare laboratory run by the Pentagon, it was only repeating a charge made by homosexuals convinced that AIDS is a right-wing program to eradicate queers.

God only knows what AIDS will turn out to be, years and years from now. Perhaps, in 2050,
60 Minutes
will reveal it
was
a CIA foul-up. But this general panic, this unease, this sense that the world is out of control and too intimately connected, is not
all
the Fear is among homosexuals. The Fear among homosexuals is personal, physical, and real. It is easy enough to dismiss the idea that the CIA set out to exterminate homosexuals; it is not so easy to dismiss the fact that—having lived in New York during the seventies as a gay man—one can reasonably expect to have been infected. “We’ve all been exposed,” a friend said to me in 1981 on the sidewalk one evening before going off to Switzerland to have his blood recycled—when “exposed” was still the word used to spare the feelings of those who were, someone finally pointed out, “infected.” The idea—that everyone had been swimming in the same sea—made little impression on us at first. At first I did not grasp the implications—because then the plague was still so new, and its victims so (relatively) few, that most gay men could still come up with a list of forty to fifty things to distinguish their past, their habits, from those of the men they knew who had it. Five years later, that list is in shreds; one by one, those distinguishing features or habits have been taken away, and the plague reveals itself as something infinitely larger, more various, more random, than was suspected at the start—as common as the flu—indeed, the thing the doctors were predicting a repeat of: the Spanish influenza following World War I.

Predictions like these, above all, intensify the Fear, to the point that one tenses when a story about AIDS comes on the evening news—and wonders: What new sadistic detail? What new insoluble problem? One looks away when the word is in the newspaper headline and turns to the comics instead. One hopes the phone will not ring with news of yet another friend diagnosed, because one can always trace a flare-up of the Fear—an AIDS anxiety attack: that period when you are certain you have
It
, and begin making plans for your demise—to some piece of news, or several, that came through the television or the telephone. Sometimes they are so numerous, and simultaneous, that you are undone—like the man walking down the boardwalk on Fire Island with a friend one evening on their way to dance, who, after a quiet conversation at dinner, suddenly threw himself down on the ground and began screaming, “We’re all going to die, we’re all going to die!” He did. Sometimes it hits like that. It appears in the midst of the most ordinary circumstances—like the man on that same beach, who, in the middle of a cloudless summer afternoon, turned to my friend and said, “What is the point of going on?” (“To bear witness,” my friend responded.) The Fear is there all the time, but it comes in surges, like electricity—activated, triggered, almost always, by specific bad news.

The media are full of bad news, of course—the stories of breakthroughs, of discoveries, of new drugs, seem to have subsided now into a sea of disappointment. They do not sound the note of relief and hope and exultation they once did—that dream that one evening you would be brushing your teeth, and your roommate, watching the news in the living room, would shout, “It’s over!” and you would run down the hall and hear the Armistice declared. Instead, the media carry the pronouncements of the Harvard School of Public Health, the World Health Organization, dire beyond our wildest nightmares: What began as a strange disease ten or twelve homosexuals in New York had contracted becomes the Black Death. Journalists, as Schopenhauer said, are professional alarmists, and have only fulfilled their usual role: scaring their readers. They are scaring them not just to sell newspapers, however, or to keep them in their seats till the next commercial. They are scaring them so that they will protect themselves, and, at the same time, inducing despair in those already infected. There’s the dilemma: They’re all watching the same TV, reading the same newspapers.

After a while, the Fear is so ugly you feel like someone at a dinner party whose fellow guests are being taken outside and shot as you concentrate politely on your salad. There is the school of thought that says the Fear is a form of stress, and stress enhances the virus. Like the man so afraid of muggers he somehow draws them to him, the Fear is said to make itself come true, by those who believe in mind control. As a friend of mine (so fearful of the disease he refused to have sex for four years) said, “I got everything I resisted.” So one becomes fearful even of the Fear. The Fear can be so wearing, so depressing, so constant that a friend who learned he had AIDS said, on hearing the diagnosis, “Well, it’s a lot better than worrying about it.”

He also said, “I wasn’t doing anything anyone else wasn’t.” Which explains the Fear more succinctly than anything else: Tens of thousands were doing the same thing in the seventies. Why, then, should some get sick and not others? Isn’t it logical to expect everyone will, eventually? The Fear is so strong it causes people to change cities, to rewrite their pasts in order to imagine they were doing less than everyone else; because the most unnerving thing about the plague is its location in the Past, the Time allotted to it.

Were AIDS a disease which, once contracted, brought death within forty-eight hours of exposure, it would be a far more easily avoided illness—but because it is not, because it is invisible, unknown, for such a long period of time, because it is something people got before they even knew it existed (with each passing year, the time lag gets longer), the Fear of AIDS is limitless. Who has not had sex within the last seven years—once? (The nun in San Francisco who got AIDS from a blood transfusion given her during an operation to set her broken leg, and died, her superiors said, without anger or bitterness.) (The babies who get it in the womb.) There’s a memory—of an evening, an incident—to justify every fear. And nothing exists that will guarantee the fearful that even if they are functioning now they will not get caught in the future. The phrase that keeps running through the fearful mind is: Everyone was healthy before he got sick. One has to have two programs, two sets of responses, ready at all times: (a) Life, (b) Death. The switch from one category to the other can come at any moment, in the most casual way. At the dentist’s, or putting on your sock. Did that shin bruise a little too easily? Is that a new mole? Is the sinus condition that won’t go away just a sinus condition? Do you feel a bit woozy standing at the kitchen sink? Do you want to lie down? Is the Fear making you woozy or the virus? Have you had too many colds this past spring to be just colds? Thus the hyperconsciousness of the body begins.

Your body—which you have tended, been proud of—is something you begin to view with suspicion, mistrust. Your body is someone you came to a party with but you’d like to ditch, only you promised to drive him home. Your body is a house with a thief inside who wants to rob you of everything in it. Your body could be harboring It, even as you go about your business. This keeps you on edge. You stop, for instance, looking in mirrors—or at your body in the shower—because the skin, all of a sudden, seems as vast as Russia: a huge terrain, a monumental wall, on which tiny handwriting may suddenly appear. The gums, the tongue, the face, the foot, the forearm, the leg: billions of cells waiting to go wrong. Because you read that sunburn depresses the immune system, you no longer go out in the sun. You stay in the house—as if already an invalid; you cancel all thoughts of traveling in airplanes because you heard flights can trigger the pneumonia and because you want to be home when it happens, not in some hotel room in Japan or San Diego.

And so the Fear constricts Life. It suffocates, till one evening its prey snaps—gets in the car and drives to the rest stop, or bar, or baths, to meet another human being; and has sex. Sometimes has sex—sometimes just talks about the Fear, because a conversation about the danger of sex sometimes replaces sex itself. The Fear is a god to which offerings must be made before sex can commence. Sometimes it refuses the offering. If it does not, it takes its share of the harvest afterward. Sex serves the Fear more slavishly than anything. Even safe sex leads to the question: Why was I even doing something that
required
condoms? The aftermath of sex is fear
and
loathing. Death is a hunk. Sex and terror are twins. AIDS is a national program of aversion therapy.

The Fear is also extremely self-centered, above all personal, and leads you to acts of insensitivity. One day you spill your fear about the sex you just had to a friend who—you remember too late—has had AIDS for a couple of years now. He has lived with his own fear for two years. Your friend merely listens calmly, says what you did does not seem unsafe, and then remarks, “What I’m getting from what you’ve been saying is that you’re still afraid.” Of course, you want to reply, of
course
I’m still afraid!

“But you have no reason to be,” he says, from the height, the eminence, of his own fear, digested, lived with, incorporated into his own life by now. “If you don’t have it now, you won’t.”

Another friend has told you, “The doctors think we’re about to see a second wave of cases, the ones who contracted it in 1981.” Going home on the subway, your fear takes the form of superstition: He should never have said that! He himself had said (a remark you’ve never forgotten) that he was diagnosed just at the point when—after three years of abstinence—he thought he had escaped. It’s the time lag, of course, the petri dish in which the Fear thrives. Of course, you are afraid; every male homosexual who lived in New York during the seventies is scared shitless. And a bit unstable, withdrawn, and crazy.

The tactlessness of venting your fear to a friend who already has been diagnosed is symptomatic of the Fear. People who are afraid are seldom as considerate as those who are not. The ironic thing about my last visit to New York was that the pair of lovers I know who have AIDS were cheerful, calm, gracious, well-behaved. Those who did not were nervous wrecks: depressed, irritable, isolated, withdrawn, unwilling to go out at night, in bed by ten, under a blanket, with anxiety and a VCR. The Fear is not fun to live with, though when shared, it can produce occasional, hysterical laughter. The laughter vanishes, however, the moment you leave the apartment building and find yourself alone on the street—falls right off your face as you slip instantly back into the mood you were in before you went to visit your friend. The Fear breeds depression. The depression breeds anger (which must pale beside the anger of people who have it toward those who don’t: Why me? Why should
he
escape?). Friendships come to an end over incidents that would have been jokes before. People withdraw from each other so they don’t have to go through the suffering of each other’s illness. People behave illogically. One night a friend refuses to eat from a buffet commemorating a dead dancer because so many of the other guests have AIDS—“They shouldn’t have served finger food,” he mutters—but he leaves the wake with a young handsome Brazilian who presumably doesn’t, goes home, and has sex. We all have an explanation for such actions, for our choices of what we will do and what we won’t; we all have a rationale for our superstitions. Most of it
is
superstition, because that is what the Fear produces and always has. Some of it is just muddled thinking, like the logic of the nightclub patrons in Miami who said they did not worry about getting AIDS there because it cost ten dollars to get in. And some of it is perfectly rational, like the apprehension that convinces people they should not take the Test because they would rather not live with the knowledge that they have antibodies to the virus. (Today, the news announces a home test that will tell you in three minutes if you do, or don’t—not much time for counseling!)