Sunday, June 04, 2006
REMEMBER
This is AIDS' 25th Anniversary.
I don't know how they count it but we all remember that it was 1981 when we first heard the news.
It is a slow motion version of 'where were you when........'.
Only, it would be 'how did you hear'? 'When did you take it seriously for the first time?
I first heard about it through the gay media coverage of the famous NYTimes series that broke the news of a 'new gay cancer'.
I can remember the denial that we all felt. There was a lot of scurrying around looking for the cause.
No one thought that the cause was our own capricious behavior.
Well, the virus too.
I remember that, for awhile, they thought it might be 'poppers' (amyl nitrate inhaled). Then maybe, well no, it couldn't be that. And what about..........
For some, those questions still arise. As people deny the Jewish Holocaust, there are still people who deny the virus holocaust and un-safe sex as the cause.
Most famously, a great gay literary magazine Christopher Street, forgot their primary purpose and became advocates for alternative AIDS theory and foundered on the rocks of real science.
Our first hand experience was not slow.
We knew NYC guys from our annual visits to a gay resort in St. Croix.
One year, 1980, there were a bunch of healthy guys and the next year, 1981, one member of a couple we knew had a 'strange form' of lymphoma. He was dead by the summer.
The year after that, (1982) there was word and evidence of 5 or 6 guys. That summer, it hit Boston.
To say that the epidemic exploded would be an understatement.
There is no telling young men today what that was like.
Friends would be vibrant and healthy one week and then be declining and wasting away; age 40 years in a few months and die.
We had to learn new words like Kaposi's Sarcoma and Pneumocystis; new terms to describe behavior; dementia. And we learned how to be with friends who were hopeless and helpless in the face of their opportunistic infections; all of them weird and sort of space-alienish.
Death was a weekly event.
In the beginning, when no one seemed to be able to pinpoint a cause, everyone got crazy about what to do or what not to do to be safe.
A few men I know gave up sex forever.
There was no information on incubation. We all tried to remember who we had been with and how we had been with them. And then we counted.
The last man I spent any time with, before John, died. We were told that we would have to wait as long as ten years to be safe. That number changed but I can tell you that when the HIV test became available there was anxiety at each test for a very long time.
How many friends did we lose? Uncounted.
I quit going to memorial services. One had to harden oneself. Or I thought I did. Now I wonder at what cost.
In those early days there was great solidarity around finding a cause and then prevention of the disease.
If there are good things that come out of the AIDS experience it is that building of community.
The gay culture changed radically. When we were first a couple it was sort of bad form to be 'out of the action'. Suddenly, couplehood looked very good.
Some think that the thrust for gay marriage comes out of that time of finding partners and staying with them and building lives together beyond the party and the sex. Not to say that it was not already happening. But, it began to make sense for basic reasons and many men began to fear and loathe aloneness as a result of the plague.
One symbol of our solidarity was the AIDS Quilt.
I can remember the first time we saw it. It was still small enough for most of it to be spread out in the Armory on Columbus Avenue. It had Boston panels.
We sat on the floor and cried our way through the quilt.
Now, the quilt is a relic, the largest example of home-craft, an interesting icon. But it is still beloved, nonetheless.
Here is a nice article from the LA Times about it:
I had forgotten that each panel was the size of a grave.
So where are we today?
I don't know.
There are still new rates of infection. Unsafe sex. The deniers. The party goes on.
There is an alternative.
In any event, it is a battle now joined across the board. Gay men no longer bear the weight of the disease alone. In a way, the fact that the stigma is gone, is a bad thing. It propagates the belief that there are no consequences for unsafe behavior; that a cocktail of drugs will keep you healthy, wealthy and wise; and, oh yes, pretty.
But, you know, guys still die. We see it. Sometimes it seems that half the gay men I meet are HIV positive. But that is in a general population. And my magnifier at work. I personally know only a few poz guys and they are doing very well.
We know from experience that the cocktail is not forever for most people. The battle continues.
It is not over.
25 years and still counting.
