AIDS

In August, 1990 the Los Angeles Times Magazine published a grim and compelling report on the crisis in AIDS care in Los Angeles County ("To Live and Die In L.A." by David Ferrell). Reading it, I felt like I had been punched in the solar plexus. Grief rose in my throat and then settled again in my chest, depressing me for days afterwards. It also caused me to think about the two people I knew who died of AIDS.

When I lived in L.A. during the late 70s, one of my house mates and her brother Michael were in business together as interior designers. They did a house for Sylvester Stalonne and befriended his first wife prior to her split with Sly. They knew Robert Rauschenburg and were alumni of the Art Center School of Design. They were hip-deep in the L.A. art scene and I loved the vicarious thrills I got from hanging out with them and schmoosing at gallery openings and the like. I used to enjoy going to their studio and just being around the artful sensibilities they continually displayed, and to peek, second-hand, into their world. It was exhilarating, big-time stuff for a boy from the sticks of rural Arizona.

Michael was a butch gay. Burly and bearded, given to a fondness for boxing and beer-drinking and the glorification of maleness. There was then, and I assume there still is, a whole swatch of male homosexuals who were the polar opposite of the effeminate male who, in our naiveté, we used to stereotypically think of as a gay man. Michael was clearly into this macho gay scene, and occasionally I got little glimpses of what his lifestyle must have been. A few times I met some of his friends. They were artists and designers and people with exquisite taste who lavished awareness and sensitivity on almost every material good in their lives. Their homes, their cars, their furnishings, everything was stylish and chosen with great care. I marveled at how much consciousness they could devote to choosing just the right piece of furniture or the perfect pair of jeans. Every material object in their world always looked so appropriate, as if its form and function and style had all been perfectly matched.

Michael always seemed to me to be out of place in his world. Inside he was very kind and soft, with this crusty exterior, and I always had the uneasy feeling that he was in over his head somehow, trying to be macho and revel in maleness when in fact this wasn't really him. And his friends were diffident toward him somehow, slightly condescending even. Almost as if they recognized instinctively that he wasn't quite cut from the same cloth.

The last time I saw Michael, he and his sister had just opened a new studio in a renovated cottage in West Lost Angeles. It had hardwood floors and log-beam ceilings and windows everywhere letting in a brightness that took my breath away. I hung out that day with the two of them for as long as I could, basking in the hip pleasures of their groovy L.A. artiness.

Three years after I left L.A. I heard that Michael had contracted AIDS and died very rapidly, breaking his sister's heart.

My friend Frankie and I hung-out together for most of a year, after I graduated from high school but didn't go on to college with most of my friends, and after Frankie came back from the big-city to spend a year or so living with his family back in small-town Holbrook, Arizona. We were sort of thrown together by virtue of being out-of-place together-- expatriates within our own home-town.

Frankie was one of those gentle souls who seem destined by their nature to be gay--there seem to be few alternatives for males with their delicate sensibilities. I enjoyed his company enormously, and I recall with fondness many evenings we spent smoking marijuana in the innocent way lots of us did in the late 60s, and watching The Avengers on TV.

I always assumed Frankie was gay, although the subject never really came up. I remember when this fact was made vividly clear. One summer a couple of years after Frankie moved back to Phoenix he returned home for a visit accompanied by his boyfriend. His boyfriend was tall and lean, with shoulder-length brown hair and full beard, sensuous features and a languid manner about him. He also wore leather sandals which were in vogue back then, and the overall effect was to make him look like a sensual, slightly provocative and very hip Jesus. Frankie brought him home as a way of coming out of the closet, forcing his family to confront the reality of his sexuality.

The fact that Frankie was gay was a bitter and hurtful realization for his family, and Frankie rarely returned to Holbrook after that summer. I saw him only fleetingly in Phoenix during the late sixties and early seventies. Over the years I kept telling myself I should look him up the next time I was in Phoenix, but I never got around to it. In the summer of 1990 I happened across his obituary in the little hometown newspaper my parents regularly send me.

There are a few things I need to say about AIDS.

First, we need to talk about something rather ugly and base. There are lots of otherwise pleasant enough folks around who believe that AIDS is God's punishment for the sin of being a queer. They assume that sexual conduct is a matter of great interest to God, and there is a right kind of sex and a wrong kind, and God is in the business of punishing the wrong kind. And this all secretly pleases them very much, because they hate and fear homosexuality and they are glad that God has decided to kill off large numbers of homosexuals, providing a vicarious gratification for their hidden desire to strike out at these perverts without having to risk social disapproval for doing so. I mean if it's an Act Of God, it's not MY fault, right?

These days it's a little socially awkward to publicly admit to holding such views. We recognize there is something a little bit icky about this, so those folks who think like this have learned to keep it to themselves. But we regularly get all sorts of indirect evidence that this attitude is alive and well in America. Consider:

During the night of November, 6, 1990 a fire raced through the 420-acre Backlot at Universal Studios in Hollywood consuming four acres of sound stages, including the sets for Dick Tracy and Universal's various trips Back To The Future. The next day a Universal Studios security guard was arrested on suspicion of arson. A few days later televangelist Pat Robertson reported that while he had not yet personally had a revelation from God on the subject, he nevertheless thought all good Christians ought to reflect on the possibility that the fire at Universal was God taking retribution for the studio's release of that blasphemous movie The Last Temptation of Christ. It was not immediately clear whether Robertson thought God had come to earth in the form of a studio security guard, or whether the guard was merely acting as an agent for a higher power. In either case, Robertson clearly though it plausible to suppose God is interested in this sort of retribution, and I dare say, he his not alone.

I suspect there are lots of people who sincerely believe AIDS is God's punishment for the sin of homosexuality. They can imagine no other possible explanation. After all, it is a sin isn't it (the Bible says so we are told), and God punishes sinners does He not, and this is clearly as punishing a thing as one can imagine this side of the brimstone pit, so, ergo, it all fits.

No friends, it does not all fit. The reason we find this such a tempting thought is because the mode of transmission involves SEX, and sex is booga-booga. We all, in some deep unexamined place, still believe sex is vaguely nasty, even if done right, and sure must be nasty as done by homosexuals. And it is this quality of nastiness which makes for all this shame and blame and guilt and punishment. So it is really not the ugly business of catching a communicable disease which is at issue, it's how people catch it, it is because they catch it from SEX. We don't really believe that people who get communicable diseases, even from their own high-risk behavior, are in general being punished by God. But we do believe that homosexuals ought to be punished by God, and so this proposition that AIDS is God's punishment of homosexuality is a handy way for us to give vent to our fears and hatred of homosexuals. It is a way of expressing fear and hatred without coming right out and saying it, because to come right out and say is now only marginally acceptable in polite society.

If this is not immediately clear, consider an imaginary counter-example, just to crystallize the principle involved. Say your saintly Aunt Millescent somehow became a carrier of some dread communicable disease, which could only be transmitted to people who innocently kissed her on the cheek. Pecking Aunt Millescent would then become a dreaded high-risk behavior leading to infection. How sinful, how wicked, how depraved. People should know better. God will get you for bussing Millescent! You see the silliness of this attitude?

Perhaps the example is too fanciful, too hypothetical, and too unfaltering to dear Aunt Millescent. Perhaps you prefer an example from life. O.K. Consider Mary Mallon, the turn-of-the-century New Yorker who came to be known as Typhoid Mary. For nearly eight years after being identified as a typhus carrier, Mary worked as a cook for numerous households in New York City, spreading typhoid fever wherever she went. High-risk behavior during this period would have been hiring a cook, and avoiding this high-risk behavior consisted of doing one's own cooking. Hardly the kind of licentiousness that is liable to bring down the wrath of God.

The point is simple, and yet so many of us are tempted to miss it. Believing that the various tragedies which befall us are God's revenge, is to betray the mentality of a human, not of a god. Only people think in this narrow, mean-spirited, nasty little way. Only people are obsessed with revenge. But it is easy enough for people to transcend this mentality, so I am sure God can as well.

Anyway, the cold statistics and inexorable logic of contagious diseases will soon make the connection between AIDS and homosexuality too tenuous to even tempt us. The State of Virginia, for example, recently reported that in the 16-month period ending in November 1990, 25% of new AIDS cases occurred among heterosexuals. (The reported national average at this time was a 5% infection rate among heterosexuals.) Virginia is a bellwether for such statistics for the mundane reason that they require full reporting of positive HIV infections, so we know more about what's going on in Virginia than in most places. Eventually, AIDS in America will become a heterosexual disease (as it is in Africa) simply because the pool of available victims is so much greater. Then, I wonder, will we see AIDS as God's punishment for heterosexuality? Probably not. The majority rarely discriminates against itself.

Despite this phony message of God's vengeance, there are a couple of very real messages in the AIDS epidemic. The universe is indeed telling us a few things, and we ought to listen.

First, life is real and earnest. Death is always a possibility. We cannot indefinitely pretend that life is an endless succession of sunlit afternoons, shopping trips and high fashion. We are not immortal, and all of the distractions with which we fill our lives will not succeed in avoiding this truth. Our sojourn here is brief. We are just on an extended visit to Planet Earth, and someday our ticket will expire.

Second, actions have consequences. Some actions lead to sanguine consequences, others lead to death. We are responsible to choose, moment to moment, how we will pass through life. We are obligated to face reality, choose carefully and live with the consequences of our choices.

Third, there are rules, not petty human rules of do's and dont's by which we judge each other in order to justify being beastly to one another, but laws of nature and of physics and biology--laws of the planet on which we reside and of the universe of which we are a part. When we ignore or violate these rules we suffer. It does no good to pretend that we can transcend the laws of our world by our stylish indifference. We must honor the rules of our world and live in harmony with them. If we don't we will suffer and we will die.

The AIDS contagion is the universe sending us these simple messages. They have nothing to do with homosexuality. They have to do with you and me. Listen up, so the universe can stop shouting at us in this sad fashion.