Visions and Revisions

by Dale Peck

  His mother, he told me the second day we were together, had been a Holocaust refugee, fleeing Germany as a little girl and taking up residence in England. She moved to the States, married Derek’s father, who was a businessman based in Chicago, while Mrs. Link taught French at Tulane. It was a stuffy family dynamic. Derek was mostly raised by nannies and only saw his mother an hour a day, right before bedtime—from an early age she insisted he only speak to her in French so that he would learn the language. His father came to New Orleans on the weekends, and the family had at least one formal meal together, served by the maid. Derek recounted his week during soup or salad, his mother during the main course, his father during dessert and coffee (to this day, Derek told me, the sight of a waiter approaching the table to clear makes him talk faster). Boarding school in England seemed like an idyll at first, Lord of the Flies meets the video for “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” but at fifteen or sixteen or maybe seventeen Derek had what was in effect a nervous breakdown, and eventually refused to leave his room. The school contacted his parents but they refused to come get their son, and after it became clear that they weren’t bluffing the school had no choice but to put Derek in a mental institution, where, doped up on Thorazine, he lingered for nine months. Eventually Derek’s maternal grandmother, who still lived in England, took him in, but Derek ran away and soon enough was hustling on the streets of London, which is probably when he was infected. After a year and a half of this he sent a set of faked O levels? A levels? to Columbia University and, when he was admitted, guilted his parents into paying for it. He did two and a half years at Columbia, then transferred to Bard, where he began hustling again, and after he graduated he moved to Boston to pursue a painting career. He’d had two solo shows and one group exhibition, or one solo show and two group exhibitions, and played in a punk band with three other gay boys, all of whom were fucking one another without condoms, when one of them, Stephen, was admitted to the hospital with PCP. The other members of the band got tested, which is when Derek found out he was positive. After Stephen got out of the hospital, Derek took him to the gay bars in the South End, and on their way home they were bashed by the group of boys mentioned above. Stephen was still weak, and to give him a chance to get away Derek threw himself at the attackers, ended up so badly beaten that he had to be hospitalized for two months, with, among other things, a collapsed lung. Stephen died less than two years after he first fell ill, at which point Derek gave up painting to become a full-time activist.

  He still carried Stephen’s driver’s license at the time we met. I saw it. I held it in my hands. I noted the familial resemblance between Stephen and Derek and the gleam that came into his voice when he looked at the picture, which makes it that much harder for me to believe that everything I’ve just told you is a lie. The Judaism—the Holocaust—the move to England and the nervous breakdown, the time spent in a mental institution and hustling on the streets and above all the HIV infection: every last detail was a fabrication save, perhaps, his name, invented for who knows what reason and perpetuated with some major or minor variations not just to me but to all of ACT UP, right down to a supposed outbreak of Kaposi’s sarcoma—on his genitals, so that he wouldn’t have to show anyone. Yet despite the enormous psychic energy it must have taken to maintain this pose for, what, five years? seven? Derek was also one of the nine or ten most important AIDS activists in the United States. He smuggled unapproved medications into the country for PWA buyers’ clubs, discovered $50 million in unspent federal money that was subsequently poured into AIDS research, and, after taking a job at Gay Men’s Health Crisis, became one of the chief lobbyists and architects for what eventually became ADAP, the AIDS Drug Assistance Program, without which tens of thousands of New Yorkers, including many of my friends, could not afford their meds.

  I say he did all these things despite the energy it must have taken to maintain his assumed identity, although I wonder if it should be because. Because no matter how urgent the task, the kind of work that Derek and the other members of T&D and TAG did was, from any rational point of view, impossible. They were artists mostly, a few guppies, a few people like Derek too young to be anything yet. None of them had a medical background, and while they were trying to earn a living and trying to stay alive they were also giving themselves a crash course in virology and epidemiology and bureaucracy at the city, state, national, and international levels, and while they were educating themselves they were also taking on doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies, the New York Stock Exchange and the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases and the Centers for Disease Control and the House of Representatives and the Senate and three successive presidents, and, with the help of a few thousand legmen, they won. They changed the way AIDS was talked about, the way it was studied and, most importantly, the way it was treated, and they did it all without giving in to despair or anomie, to the crazy-making frustration that any engagement with the health care bureaucracy is bound to engender, although in their case the frustration was magnified to an existential level and manifested itself as terror and rage. And they didn’t give in to that terror either, or the rage. David Wojnarowicz’s fantasy of shooting politicians with syringes filled with HIV-positive blood remained a fantasy, though whether that fantasy was a greater goad to politicians or AIDS activists is hard to say.

  To suggest, however, that most of the members of T&D and TAG did what they did because they were HIV-positive is to forget that thousands upon thousands of HIV-positive people, many of whom were financially or educationally better suited for the task, did not fight in the same way, or at all. What I mean is, I don’t believe it was empirically necessary for Derek to adopt the identity of an HIV-positive person in order to become the kind of AIDS activist he became. But he did, and he immersed himself in his role to such a degree that he put himself at risk of actually seroconverting. One of the great pleasures of our sex was that I didn’t have to take my dick out of his mouth before I came, could let go of that last little piece of self-consciousness that safe sex requires and immerse myself, in all senses of the word, in sexual abandon, and not come back to the real world until the sound of Derek slurping up the last drops of my jizz reached my ears. I don’t know if he also engaged in unprotected anal intercourse, but the fact that he was willing to let a stranger come in his mouth suggests the degree to which he had subsumed himself in his adopted identity. Suggests that there was a deeper process of self-abnegation and -invention involved, something that went beyond AIDS or sexuality to the inescapable contingency of the self—of, to use Leo Bersani’s term, personhood, the existential status “that the law needs in order to discipline us, and … to protect us.” I won’t say that Derek wanted to opt out of that discipline, or that protection, but his relationship to it was obviously conflicted, as if he had internalized the “crisis of representation” Simon Watney detailed in Policing Desire and amplified it into an identity—as if, to invert Andrew Sullivan’s equation, he had come to believe that the only existence that had any meaning during a time of plague was as one of the infected. And though few people would have endorsed this position openly in the years before combination therapy became available, the number of gay men who hurriedly capitulated to HIV after 1996—their surrender guided (goaded?) by a new pornographic lexicon of “bug chasers” and “gift givers,” the redefinition of “breeder” from a derogatory term for a heterosexual to an heroic name for a man who “gave” his HIV to his partner—suggests that from the beginning of the epidemic part of the fascination with AIDS was the desire to have it. To live with it? To die from it? I suspect it’s probably neither, which is to say, I suspect the HIV these men wanted is the kind that Andrew Sullivan wrote about so winsomely rather than the actual virus in his body, the phantasmatic kind that brings “meaning” to life rather than sickness or pain or death—the kind that Derek had in other words, rather than the kind my friend Gordon had, and that killed him in 1996.

  Which brings
me back to my original question: did pretending to be HIV-positive help Derek do the work that he did, or was it incidental? I don’t know the answer to that question, nor do I know how you’d ascertain it. Certainly not by asking Derek: why in the world would you believe something a pathological liar told you? What I do know is this: we were walking down 14th Street one day, either between First and A or A and B (I remember we passed the post office) and I was asking him why he’d stopped painting. There was more than a little uneasiness behind my question, because a part of me considered the time I spent as an activist as time I didn’t spend writing, and vice versa. But I was surprised by Derek’s answer. Art interfered with a direct experience of the world, Derek told me, and he wanted to experience the world firsthand. I asked him to elaborate and without missing a beat he pointed to a homeless man sleeping on the sidewalk. It was January, and the man was covered by newspapers, and Derek said, Art is like those newspapers. It covers up the real world, and the best that you can hope for is to see something through it. But whatever you see is going to be colored by art. Obscured by it. You’re not going to see the real thing. You’re going to see the artist’s interpretation. Implicit in Derek’s notion of art is the idea that it’s always representational, of processes and ideas as much as objects and people. Most artists I know accept the idea that mimesis contains a greater or lesser degree of falsity even as its core—its intention—remains truthful, but what Derek seemed to be telling me was that, however much truth there is in representation, the intention is always false. To falsify. I didn’t want to believe that then and, twenty-three years later, I still don’t want to believe it. But I’ve always believed it—have believed it helplessly, which is why I’ve never even tried to make art that depicts the world as it actually is, but instead try to make art that points out its own biases, its own falseness, and the necessary illusions without which life is impossible. So that, if nothing else, the reader will know that what he’s looking at is fiction, not history, and certainly not the world. I believed in 1991, when I was twenty-three years old, that those two or three dozen words were the single most important lesson anyone had ever taught me about the moral stakes of all forms of representation, political as well as aesthetic, and I believe it still. When I wrote in my journal that Derek was “a more authentic version of myself,” I believed that he had genuinely endured the horrors, as a child of violence and a gay man in a viciously homophobic society, that I had only witnessed, and I believe it still. I believed that Derek lived his life by a moral code I only made feints at, and even after I found out that the biography he’d presented me was not just false, but malignantly so, in light of the pain his revelation inflicted on those men and women who had loved him, and fought beside him, and in some very real sense died for him, I continued to believe it.

  I believe it still.

  15

  Everyone has his or her own library of that terrible time. For most people it probably consists of newspaper articles, a connect-the-dots narrative told in the epidemic’s infamous acronyms: GRID and HTLV-III and PWA, KS and PCP and CMV, NIAID and ACT UP and WHO. Perhaps you saw Angels in America on Broadway or in a regional production; perhaps you saw or read And the Band Played On and maybe one or two more books: Paul Monette’s Becoming a Man, Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World. A small group of us devoured everything we came across, from the crackpot theories of Peter Duesberg to the radical epidemiology of Michael Callen, along with the hundreds of novels, memoirs, and polemics that charted the emotional, intellectual, moral, and symbolic space between these poles. To another, equally select group, AIDS literature was a catalog of titles perused on the shelves of other people’s apartments, perhaps during a cocktail party, perhaps during a hookup when the host was in the bathroom. Two or three books were regarded as a sign of admirable interest in current events, a certain depth of character even; but too many could provoke nervous speculation: Is he …? and, even more alarmingly: Should I …?

  To claim that some of these ways of reading about AIDS are better than others is to miss the point of writing about AIDS. Literature facilitates empathy as well as understanding, and for that reason the mere fact of a book’s existence can effect extraordinary personal change. But because literature can only enfold the present within its scope by displacing it in time, it has the effect of rendering the events it describes contained, finished, past. As a consequence, fiction and drama, memoir and poetry and history serve first and foremost as memorials: to worlds lost or worlds that never were. For the literature of a disease whose final chapter was for fifteen years almost certain death, there was a resonant if morbid appropriateness to this translation. Many of those early texts are what might be called hopeful elegies: books in which protagonists declined and often died but a community soldiered on, and even grew stronger in the face of so much desolation. Whether you think literature facilitated the political transformation of gay life or merely benefited from it depends on how cynical you are; certainly it didn’t have the same effect for IV-drug users, nor again for Haitians or African-Americans, let alone Africans. In either case, the first decade and a half of the AIDS epidemic produced a concentrated body of books, plays, poems, and essays, many of which now seem, like the devastating interval they chronicle, a part of ancient history.

  My own library of AIDS literature begins with the phrase “Mark was ill, dying perhaps; say no more” in the excerpt from Robert Ferro’s Second Son that appears in the first Men on Men anthology, published in 1986.* That sentence, hinged on the almost perversely optimistic use of the word “perhaps,” swings between the incontrovertible facts of illness and death on the one hand, and, on the other, the idea that literature might succeed in capturing the overwhelming nature of “the plague” only by avoiding it, or at least not tackling it head on. Hence the decision not to name the disease in this and many other stories and novels of the mid-eighties, as well as the fact that death, though never denied, was left out of the text far more often than it was in life. But beginnings imply endings, and for me the inevitable conclusion came with Rebecca Brown’s The Gifts of the Body in 1994. The diffuse storylines of Brown’s narrative reflected the changing demographics of the epidemic, and Brown was also one of the last writers who managed to avoid what had by then become the nearly universal practice of ennobling sick people merely because of affliction. Allen Barnett’s “HIVs” and “HIV-nots” proved the first in a long series of puns, as organizations took names like ACT UP, Body Positive, and Visual AIDS and writers titled their books Eighty-Sixed, A Matter of Life and Sex, Love Undetectable, and Cocktails. God knows I wasn’t immune to this trend: the original title of this section of this essay was “Preaching to the Converted.” It served as the foreword to an anthology of AIDS fiction called Vital Signs, which was part of Transmissions, a series of reprinted books about AIDS. I’m only grateful that I came up with the title Shoot to Kill after my first novel had gone to press.

  But the main reason The Gifts of the Body comes at the end of my personal list of books about AIDS is because it was published just before protease inhibitors and combination therapy radically changed the course of the illness. These treatments didn’t obliterate mortality but they did, for those who could get them, attenuate it, rendering the already nebulous “meaning” of dying and disease that much harder to express. Eighteen years later, literature has yet to find a way to communicate that ambiguity, perhaps because contemporary writers have shirked their responsibility, perhaps because it’s still too soon, or perhaps simply because it can’t. This isn’t to say that good and even great books about AIDS stopped being produced after 1995 and ’96, but they appeared in isolation rather than in concert, fueled by individual rather than collective consciousnesses. The moral, mortal urgency that set fire to the pens of a half generation of writers tempered as death eased its hold on our lives as well as our imaginations, and though this is in many ways a victory, it has the taste of defeat. For too many, AIDS has become just one more of lif
e’s hardships borne by other people—people who live in other cities or other countries; who lead other ways of life; who are other people’s concern, other people’s problem. But to spend too much time wishing that contemporary books about AIDS were as “good” as the ones that came out before 1996, as potent, as numerous, as widely read, is to miss what should be an obvious point: AIDS didn’t happen to make literature better. Literature just happened to get better in response to AIDS, at least for a while. Though that body of work may not tell us exactly where we are now, it does tell us how we got here—how we wept, raged, fought, and fled; how we made space in our beds for everyone our partners ever slept with or resigned ourselves to sleeping alone; how we loved, how we lost; how we died, but above all, how we lived.

  HISTORICAL MARKERS ARE symbolic and often arbitrary, and the milestones of personal lives—measuring, as Didion once put it, “the distance we have come from the world”—are no less performative. For me, the suicide of the novelist Heather Lewis in 2002, virtually unnoticed by the publishing community, marked more than a personal loss, but the end of yet another era in literature. The moment I am referring to—the movement—had its roots in the AIDS epidemic, but by the time Heather and I began our careers in the early nineties it had come to shape the sensibility of a larger community. The community I am talking about was political, but it was also, hugely, artistic, and just as AIDS activists were neither exclusively gay nor exclusively male, neither was this new movement, which wasn’t even exclusively about AIDS. That’s because, while the disease itself was an affliction of sex and needles and bad luck, the epidemic was a catastrophe—in Larry Kramer’s word, a “holocaust”—of genocidal neglect. Whether you were victim of or witness to this bureaucratic delinquency, you couldn’t help but feel that everyone was fighting to stay alive in the 1980s, and to those artists who were already alienated from mainstream values the epidemic seemed symptomatic of western culture’s fascination with gluts of sex, death, and debauchery. And so, just as World War I gave us the Lost Generation, AIDS gave us Generation X, and its literary expression, New Narrative. It was this movement that inspired both Heather and myself at the beginning of our careers.