My friend across the table says, “I don’t know how much longer I can go on.… Maybe I should just kill myself.” I looked up from the Frankenstein doll, stopped trying to twist its yellow head off and looked at him. He was looking out the window at a sexy Puerto Rican guy standing on the street below. I asked him, “If tomorrow you could take a pill that would let you die quickly and quietly, would you do it?”
“No,” he said, “Not yet.”
“There’s too much work to do,” I said.
“That’s right,” he said. “There’s still a lot of work to do …”
I am a bundle of contradictions that shift constantly. This is a comfort to me because to contradict myself dismantles the mental/physical chains of the verbal code. I abstract the disease I have in the same way you abstract death. Sometimes I don’t think about this disease for hours. This process lets me get work done, and work gives me life, or at least makes sense of living for short periods of time. Because I abstract this disease, it periodically knocks me on my ass with its relentlessness. With almost any other illness you take for granted that within a week or a month the illness will end and the wonderful part of the human body called the mind will go about its job erasing evidence of the pain and discomfort previously experienced. With AIDS or HIV infections one never gets that luxury and I find myself after a while responding to it for a fractured moment with my pre-AIDS thought processes: “All right this is enough already; it should just go away.” But each day’s dose of medicine, or the intermittent aerosol pentamidine treatments, or the sexy stranger nodding to you on the street corner or across the room at a party, reminds you in a clearer than clear way that at this point in history the virus’ activity is forever. Outside my windows there are thousands of people without homes who are trying to deal with having AIDS. If I think my life at times has a nightmarish quality about it because of the society in which I live and that society’s almost total inability to deal with this disease with anything other than a conservative agenda, think for a moment what it would be like to be facing winter winds and shit menus at the limited shelters, and the rampant T.B., and the rapes, muggings, stabbings in those shelters, and the overwhelmed clinics and sometimes indifferent clinic doctors, and the fact that drug trials are not open to people of color or the poor unless they have a private physician who can monitor the experimental drugs they would need to take, and they don’t have those kinds of doctors in clinics because doctors in clinics are constantly rotated and intravenous drug users have to be clean of drugs for seven years before they’ll be considered for experimental drug trials, and yet there are nine-month waiting periods just to get assigned to a treatment program. So picture yourself with a couple of the three hundred and fifty opportunistic infections and unable to respond physiologically to the few drugs released by the foot-dragging deal-making FDA and having to maintain a junk habit; or even having to try and kick that habit without any clinical help while keeping yourself alive seven years to get a drug that you need immediately—thank you Ed Koch; thank you Stephen Joseph; thank you Frank Young; thank you AMA.
I scratch my head at the hysteria surrounding the actions of the repulsive senator from zombieland who has been trying to dismantle the NEA for supporting the work of Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe. Although the anger sparked within the art community is certainly justified and will hopefully grow stronger, the actions by Helms and D’Amato only follow standards that have been formed and implemented by the “arts” community itself. The major museums in New York, not to mention museums around the country, are just as guilty of this kind of selective cultural support and denial. It is a standard practice to make invisible any kind of sexual imaging other than white straight male erotic fantasies. Sex in america long ago slid into a small set of generic symbols; mention the word “sex” and the general public appears to only imagine a couple of heterosexual positions on a bed—there are actual laws in parts of this country forbidding anything else even between consenting adults. So people have found it necessary to define their sexuality in images, in photographs and drawings and movies in order to not disappear. Collectors have for the most part failed to support work that defines a particular person’s sexuality, except for a few examples such as Mapplethorpe, and thus have perpetuated the invisibility of the myriad possibilities of sexual activity. The collectors’ influence on what the museum shows continues this process secretly with behind-the-scenes manipulations of curators and money. Jesse Helms, at the very least, makes public his attacks on freedom; the collectors and museums responsible for censorship make theirs at elegant private parties or from the confines of their self-created closets.
It doesn’t stop at images—in a recent review of a novel in the new york times book review, a reviewer took outrage at the novelist’s descriptions of promiscuity, saying, “In this age of AIDS, the writer should show more restraint …” Not only do we have to contend with bonehead newscasters and conservative members of the medical profession telling us to “just say no” to sexuality itself rather than talk about safer sex possibilities, but we have people from the thought police spilling out from the ranks with admonitions that we shouldn’t think about anything other than monogamous or safer sex. I’m beginning to believe that one of the last frontiers left for radical gesture is the imagination. At least in my ungoverned imagination I can fuck somebody without a rubber, or I can, in the privacy of my own skull, douse Helms with a bucket of gasoline and set his putrid ass on fire or throw congressman William Dannemeyer off the empire state building. These fantasies give me distance from my outrage for a few seconds. They give me momentary comfort. Sexuality defined in images gives me comfort in a hostile world. They give me strength. I have always loved my anonymity and therein lies a contradiction because I also find comfort in seeing representations of my private experiences in the public environment. They need not be representations of my experiences—they can be the experiences of and by others that merely come close to my own or else disrupt the generic representations that have come to be the norm in the various medias outside my door. I find that when I witness diverse representations of “Reality” on a gallery wall or in a book or a movie or in the spoken word or performance, that the larger the range of representations, the more I feel there is room in the environment for my existence, that not the entire environment is hostile.
To make the private into something public is an action that has terrific repercussions in the preinvented world. The government has the job of maintaining the day-to-day illusion of the ONE-TRIBE NATION. Each public disclosure of a private reality becomes something of a magnet that can attract others with a similar frame of reference; thus each public disclosure of a fragment of private reality serves as a dismantling tool against the illusion of ONE-TRIBE NATION; it lifts the curtains for a brief peek and reveals the probable existence of literally millions of tribes. The term “general public” disintegrates. What happens next is the possibility of an X-ray of Civilization, an examination of its foundations. To turn our private grief for the loss of friends, family, lovers and strangers into something public would serve as another powerful dismantling tool. It would dispel the notion that this virus has a sexual orientation or a moral code. It would nullify the belief that the government and medical community has done very much to ease the spread or advancement of this disease.
One of the first steps in making the private grief public is the ritual of memorials. I have loved the way memorials take the absence of a human being and make them somehow physical with the use of sound. I have attended a number of memorials in the last five years and at the last one I attended I found myself suddenly experiencing something akin to rage. I realized halfway through the event that I had witnessed a good number of the same people participating in other previous memorials. What made me angry was realizing that the memorial had little reverberation outside the room it was held in. A tv commercial for handiwipes had a higher impact on the society at large. I got up and left because I didn’t thin
k I could control my urge to scream.
There is a tendency for people affected by this epidemic to police each other or prescribe what the most important gestures would be for dealing with this experience of loss. I resent that. At the same time, I worry that friends will slowly become professional pallbearers, waiting for each death, of their lovers, friends and neighbors, and polishing their funeral speeches; perfecting their rituals of death rather than a relatively simple ritual of life such as screaming in the streets. I worry because of the urgency of the situation, because of seeing death coming in from the edges of abstraction where those with the luxury of time have cast it. I imagine what it would be like if friends had a demonstration each time a lover or a friend or a stranger died of AIDS. I imagine what it would be like if, each time a lover, friend or stranger died of this disease, their friends, lovers or neighbors would take the dead body and drive with it in a car a hundred miles an hour to washington d.c. and blast through the gates of the white house and come to a screeching halt before the entrance and dump their lifeless form on the front steps. It would be comforting to see those friends, neighbors, lovers and strangers mark time and place and history in such a public way.
But, bottom line, this is my own feeling of urgency and need; bottom line, emotionally, even a tiny charcoal scratching done as a gesture to mark a person’s response to this epidemic means whole worlds to me if it is hung in public; bottom line, each and every gesture carries a reverberation that is meaningful in its diversity; bottom line, we have to find our own forms of gesture and communication. You can never depend on the mass media to reflect us or our needs or our states of mind; bottom line, with enough gestures we can deafen the satellites and lift the curtains surrounding the control room.
Thanks: A.N., J.E. & R.E. (ACT-VP)
The Seven Deadly Sins Fact Sheet
Edward Koch. Every day, new yorkers who are AIDS workers see the human toll that their mayor’s refusal to deal with a health crisis extorts from the sick. So they have no reason to believe the mayor has any sympathy for people with AIDS. Koch has stalled, ranted and raved, and in general done everything he could to avoid dealing with the AIDS crisis.
• He has spent woefully little and at this point in time has left 8,000–10,000 P.W.A.’s (People With AIDS) homeless in the streets. At a recent city agency meeting city officials heard testimony that projected 33,000 homeless people with AIDS living on the streets of N.Y.C. by 1993. Congressmen were assured by representatives of the city that no one should worry, these people will be dying so quickly from lack of treatment that there will be no visible increase of homeless P.W.A.’s on the streets. Letting landlords warehouse apartments and letting city-owned buildings remain bricked up while he spends taxpayers’ money for rat-infested welfare rooms to the tune of $1500 a month per room for those homeless who manage to get help through city agencies.
• He has done nothing for foster care or treatment, only grandstand announcements of programs that never get done (housing, etc.).
• He has come out against legislation acknowledging domestic partners.
• Even AIDS workers familiar with all of the above were aghast when the mayor earlier this year revealed the depth of his fear and loathing. In the latest installment of his autobiography (this one a co-production with the cardinal) the mayor relates a visit he made to a local ward for children with AIDS. Handing out cookies to the kids, he was so overcome with revulsion that he rushed to the nearest sink and tried to wash the experience away, in effect literalizing what he has been doing since this crisis began: Distributing sweets and washing his hands.
Cardinal John O’Connor. The world’s most active liar about condoms and safer sex. No set of AIDS statistics alarms demographers more than the apparent spread of HIV infection among new york city’s adolescents, many of them latino, many of them in neighborhoods dominated by the church.
• PREFERS COFFINS TO CONDOMS: At Covenant House, a supposed safe-haven for teenage runaways who frequently have to resort to hustling and prostitution for survival while on the streets, NO condoms or safer-sex information available, although there is a high rate of recidivism. The archdiocese, which runs Covenant House, as well as keeping these children ignorant and putting them at great risk in order to maintain their “moral” code, will simply tell them it is their fault as they lay dying. NO safer-sex information or condoms talked about in parochial schools and catholic-run youth agencies.
• Archdiocese serves on the Board of Education’s AIDS Advisory Committee and lobbies heavily and incessantly against teaching about safer sex and/or condoms.
• VATICAN’S POSITION ON VIOLENCE AGAINST LESBIANS AND GAYS: October 31, 1986 (after Gay Rights Bill passed) VATICAN LETTER: “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons” (issued by Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith). Section 12 (violence):
“.… when homosexual activity is consequently condoned, or when civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the church nor society at large should be surprised when other disturbed notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase.”
Cannibal?—The hierarchy of the american church appears to have dug in for the long last supper. Aside from recent harassment of people who believe in choice with regard to abortion (threats of excommunication, etc.), O’Connor, who missed his calling on soap operas, is installing a raised press platform in St. Patrick’s Cathedral for television crews and reporters. His spokesman explained, “We have been planning this for a long time as a way of balancing the press’s and the worshippers’ needs.”
Rep. William Dannemeyer (R-CA). Asked president Bush to denounce a federal study of suicide containing research by a san francisco social worker that links young gays’ and lesbians’ suicidal tendencies with alienation from a society largely unaware of their existence. The congressman’s latest homophobic volley charged that the inquiry “adds legitimacy to the heretofore crime of child molestation.”
Lesbian and gay young people who take their own lives account for 30 percent or more of all u.s. suicides, according to san francisco psychotherapist Paul Gibson. Dannemeyer called on Bush to “affirm traditional family values by denouncing the portion of the report that deals with homosexuality.”
In the report, Gibson said that the root problem of gay youth suicide is a society that discriminates against and stigmatizes homosexuals while failing to recognize that a substantial number of its youth has a gay or lesbian orientation. (Contact Gregory King of the Human Rights Campaign Fund regarding a news release dated November 5, 1989, (202) 628-4160.) Dannemeyer is a longtime homophobic crazy regarded as a nut case by his congressional colleagues. Also the author of a book that declares homosexuality to be a curable illness—a position that contributes to violence against lesbians and gays.
Stephen Joseph. Shut down bathhouses in n.y.c. rather than treating them as possible places where education about AIDS and safer-sex possibilities could take place. Not long ago, in epidemiology so shoddy it shocked even the establishment, his Health Department had revised its estimate of HIV infected gay and bisexual men in n.y.c.—from 250,000 to 50,000! Why? The city’s evolving party line now said the epidemic was one of drug users and their families. The city could not afford to recognize that, measured in the mounting body count, the epidemic among gays was far from over. This new ideology (and the attendant specter of funding cuts) had required a new epidemiology. In his performance on the witness stand Joseph had given the department’s de facto homophobia his inimitable chilly imprint.
• He uses irrelevant analogies from san francisco figures, thereby refusing to accurately count HIV positive gay men. Refused, as does the Centers for Disease Control, to acknowledge that lesbians are at risk and have contracted AIDS.
• He hasn’t pressured the Board of Education to do a real AIDS education program in the schools.
• Hasn’t insisted on
declaring a state of emergency.
• Has pushed testing and contact tracing as opposed to prevention and treatment; especially treatment.
• Wanted to outlaw anonymous testing and institute mandatory contact tracing. Has been nothing but a stooge for Koch. Lucky for n.y. he resigned recently.
Jesse Helms. One of the more dangerous homophobes in the continental united states. Finds the human body, itself, obscene. Was responsible for the original NEA flap and has made thinly disguised racist statements detailing his reactions to certain Mapplethorpe photographs—statements concerning interracial couples. Sends out photographs of himself to citizens and newspapers in a tireless self-enriching, self-promoting campaign whose policies and statements contribute heavily to the murder of and violence against lesbians and gays in this country as well as creating myths about AIDS that keep people stupid and ignorantly at risk for contracting the disease. Has introduced legislation that denies federal funding for any program that mentions homosexuality. Has succeeded in getting such legislation passed by using a campaign of intimidation that most politicians bow to. Cut out any and all AIDS education funding that relates to gays and lesbians. Introduced legislation that we must now live with that prevents any HIV positive people or PWA’s from entering any border of the U.S.A. as well as deporting people with green cards forcibly tested and found to be HIV positive. Designed the New Chill that has swept through the arts community, causing institutions, artists, and curators to censor themselves rather than contest him. Fascists wearing conservative drag have mounted Helms and ridden him through the foundations of the Constitution. Even a true-conservative would recognize the recent Frohnmayer attacks as a trampling of the First Amendment—Helms just about had a media-induced orgasm.
Close to the Knives Page 11
