Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath

Grief

In September, the Light Changes

The Beauty of Men

Ground Zero

Nights in Aruba

Dancer from the Dance

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Copyright © 2008 by Andrew Holleran

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America.

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Set in 11.5 point Garamond by the Perseus Books Group

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Holleran, Andrew.
  Chronicle of a plague, revisited : AIDS and its aftermath /Andrew Holleran.
     p. cm.
  “Some of the pieces in this collection originally appeared in
Ground Zero
, published in 1988 by William Morrow and Company, Inc.”
  ISBN-13: 978-0-7867-2039-2 eBook ISBN: 9780786731923 (alk. paper) 1. AIDS (Disease)—New York (State)—New York. 2. Male homosexuality—New York (State)—New York. I. Holleran, Andrew. Ground zero. II. Title.
  RA643.84.N7H65 2008
  614.5’993920097471—dc22

2007053067

First Da Capo Press edition 2008

Published by Da Capo Press
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
www.dacapopress.com

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

L
EARNING A BOOK is out of print is a blow to an author. It’s not that the copies in print have been destroyed, but that demand for the book is so low the publisher cannot justify printing any more. When I went looking for a copy of
Ground Zero
last winter, I was lucky to find one in a college library in Washington, D.C., on a shelf of other books about AIDS. The “Date Due” slip told me the book had been checked out only twelve times in twenty-four years; and not at all from 1992 to 1998 or 1998 to 2006. This had to do with a professor teaching, then dropping, a course that required the text, I thought—what else keeps these books alive? The volumes on the shelf around mine looked equally untouched, as if they all had been put to sleep, like the awful time itself.

The awful time is what
Ground Zero
was about. I chose the title, long before 9/11, because it felt as if AIDS had exploded in New York like a bomb among gay men and left a crater in our lives. Now, however, Ground Zero means a real crater in Manhattan.

For this and other reasons, there seems to be little need to revisit the years when AIDS arrived in New York. These essays are being reprinted, in fact, only because Dale Peck and the English editor Richard Canning were upset that certain books written during the AIDS epidemic by people like Allen Barnett, Harry Kondoleon, Christopher Coe, David Wojnarowicz, and John Weir not only were out of print but, they felt, had not received their due because of the times in which they were published. So they spoke to Don Weise, an editor at Carroll & Graf, about launching a series of reprints, a series now in abeyance because of the demise of that publisher. (
Ground Zero
was the only one that squeaked through.) What drew Weise to the project, however, is still valid: He was afraid that this part of gay history was being forgotten.

I realized I had forgotten life in New York in the eighties when I began looking through
Ground Zero
. In fact, what struck me immediately as I leafed through its pages in the college library was that New York in 1983 now seemed as exotic as ancient Egypt. It was like opening up a tomb to come upon quotes from people whose voices, scattered throughout the essays, I’d not heard in more than twenty years. I’d forgotten my roommate’s telling me, “I don’t like looking at pictures of dead people.” I’d forgotten a friend saying, “I wasn’t doing anything everyone else wasn’t.” Or another friend whispering to me at the baths, “The germs don’t need me.” But it was these voices of the dead that summoned up for me that awful time when no one could see the way out.

That no one could see the way out explains the essays in
Ground Zero
. In 1980 I was writing a column in the magazine
Christopher Street
called New York Notebook.
Christopher Street
was a new magazine founded by Charles Ortleb and Michael Denneny, among others, to provide a venue for writing about a subject (gay life) for which till recently it had been hard to find a home. Before AIDS hit, my column dealt with art exhibits, dance clubs, the music they played, and other minor issues of urban gay life. Then, around 1982, something called “the new gay cancer” appeared. I was not sure how to write about it. My first column on this topic (“Journal of the Plague Years”) was a satire: a fantasy on cryogenics in which I imagined having oneself frozen till the unpleasantness was over and then awakened, like Rip Van Winkle or Walt Disney. Alas, this was not an option.

Instead, many people died; others took care of them; still others organized. Everybody was afraid. It’s the latter emotion that pervades this book. A quarter of a century later, the essays in the original
Ground Zero
seem to me to be about three self-centered fears: Was I going to die? Would having sex kill me? And, What could I write about now? Laid end to end, these columns remind me of a reader who accused me of something the Jesuits call “morose delectation”—an addiction to melancholy. At the time I wondered if he was right; now this does not even seem a question.

In the end, I see now, I was one of those people who were frozen, if not cryogenically, by AIDS. I did not join Act Up; I did not write a play or memoir, or demonstrate; I moldered in a subset of gay men called “the worried well.” Though the worried well did not think their worries worth attention (because they were not sick), as psychologist Clifford Odets pointed out later, such men had their own problems: survivors’ guilt, withdrawal, and depression. Negative
and
negative, uninfected and pessimistic, I felt there was nothing we could do about AIDS except wait for a scientist to find a cure. Reading
Ground Zero
today, the monotony that permeates this collection of columns—published in a monthly magazine, but read here, back to back, in book form—seems exacerbated by a dreadful fatalism and a sense of impotence.

Writers feel impotent to begin with, I suppose—onlookers, not actors—but at no time did commentary seem more pointless than 1983. I had originally taken on the column in
Christopher
Street
to solve a literary problem: the difference between nonfiction and fiction. I thought a nonfiction column might help me see what that was, and whether there was any point in writing fiction at all. By the time
Ground Zero
came out, in 1988, real life had trumped the question: Fiction seemed beside the point.

For what imagined story could match what was going on every day in gay New York in the eighties? The wish to pay someone to freeze you till it was over, like the mad scientist in one of Charles Ludlam’s plays, made sense. Even Ludlam could not, I suspect, have imagined what finally happened to him. What happened to him, and was happening to others, was so bizarre that the first time I mentioned AIDS in my column I was afraid I would annoy readers (for the same reason hosts told guests not to bring it up at dinner). So I made sure to follow every column about AIDS with one that was light or funny. (Hence six satires on safe sex in the original book, which I’ve removed.) Eventually there was no need to apologize for mentioning AIDS—one had to apologize for not mentioning it—and, by 1986, I was writing only two kinds of essay: descriptions of New York–as–a–cemetery and elegies for friends.

When
Ground Zero
came out in 1988, a reviewer in San Francisco dismissed it as being too conventional. I agree. If the times demanded an extraordinary response, this wasn’t one. Years later Andrew Sullivan would write a piece for the
Times
called “When Plagues End,” which said that, now that there were anti-retrovirals, the plague was over, and AIDS was a manageable illness like diabetes. During the eighties there was no such comfort. Africans called AIDS “The Horror” for good reason. AIDS quickly converted people in their twenties into old men who were blind, mad, wasting away, racked with fevers, chills, pneumonia, diarrhea, Kaposi’s sarcoma, dementia, and other diseases made possible by a total breakdown in the immune system. Living in New York, I wrote, felt like attending a dinner party at which some of the guests were being taken outside and shot, while the rest of us were expected to continue eating and making small talk. Let me update this: AIDS worked its way through gay New York with the malicious eye of the sectarians in Iraq—assassinating, it seemed, all the best people first. When the movie
Longtime Companion
came out, Vincent Canby denounced it in the
Times
for featuring only white, middle-class gay men, but they were in fact the group that AIDS first attacked in the United States.

To be more exact, the first targets of AIDS were Haitians, hemophiliacs, and homosexuals: not exactly the mainstream. Perhaps that was why this new disease did not receive the immediate attention accorded, say, the pneumonia spread by a cooling system in a hotel in Philadelphia where a group of Legionnaires (white, middle-class, straight) had met. Perhaps that explains the ostracism and the panic—when TV crews refused to interview AIDS patients, and bodies were left unclaimed by funeral homes, and Pat Buchanan said gay teachers should be fired, and William Buckley Jr. suggested people with HIV have this status tattooed on their arms (something, ironically, the porn star/writer Scott O’Hara did years later, after he got tired of sex partners rejecting him when he told them he was Positive). African American churches refused to even discuss the subject, and only now, as I write, have the president of South Africa and his minister of health ended their policy of refusing to provide HIV medicine because—he claimed—AIDS is caused by poverty, not HIV, and—she said—it can be cured with a diet of beets and garlic. This nonsense, alas, is still going on as I write this, at the cost of numberless lives.

The schism between Africa and the West, however, was hardly worse than the division between gay Americans who had HIV (Positives) and those who did not (Negatives). This was not something I felt I could write about at the time, though early on it struck me that this difference trumped every other. That is why the writing in
Ground Zero
seems to me to have the frightened, solemn air of someone visiting an intensive care unit. When the dance critic Arlene Croce asked in
The New Yorker
how she was supposed to criticize a ballet about AIDS by a choreographer who had AIDS, she was predictably assailed for inquiring, but her question was valid. Who had the right to write about AIDS at all, much less make judgments? The only people, it seemed to me, with authority to do so were people with HIV.

In 1985 it was considered wrong, for instance, to discourage, much less stigmatize, people with AIDS, which led to practices that slighted not only basic tenets of public health (e.g., tracing of sexual contacts) but certain values on which literature depends, like candor. In other words, how could one impress on the Negatives the horror of AIDS without disheartening the Positives? The argument over what people with HIV should be called (
not
victims), the campaign to detach AIDS from homosexuality in the public mind, the drug companies’ glossy ads that showed handsome young men with HIV perched on cliffs—as if having the virus were nothing more than a reason to go rock-climbing—were all a form of spin. Reality was much more disturbing. The argument that Gabriel Rotello made in his book
Sexual Ecology
—that until a core group of gay men stopped infecting others, the plague would go on—went unheeded, as did Larry Kramer’s call to “Stop screwing!” There was, of course, a moral, if not scientific, solution to the epidemic from the start; yet it took decades before a slogan like “Let AIDS stop with me” could be used; and it is possible only now to say things that were considered unspeakable at the time.

AIDS silenced some writers, in fact, at the same time it freed others. Robert Ferro so resented the devouring of gay life by AIDS that he not only kept his own disease secret, but refused to even use the word in his last novel, for fear of letting this virus reduce his writing, too, to an aspect of the plague. Larry Kramer, on the other hand, not only helped found Act Up, but wrote
The
Normal Heart
,
The Destiny of Me
, and
Reports from the Holocaust
. David Feinberg and John Weir burst on the scene with AIDS novels. Paul Monette, who’d been writing unproduced screenplays in Los Angeles, wrote a memoir (
Borrowed Time
); a book of poems (
Love Alone
); an autobiography (
Becoming a Man
) that won the National Book Award; and a final meditation,
Last
Watch of the Night
, before dying. Others, like Randy Shilts, George Whitmore, David Wojnarowicz, Essex Hemphill, Samuel Delaney, and Alan Barnett, wrote nonfiction that many people consider their best work. Edmund White said the short story was the best fictional form in which to deal with AIDS and then proceeded to show why in “A Darker Proof.” Felice Picano waited years before telling his story in his novel,
Onyx
. In the theater, William Hoffman, Harry Kondoleon, Scott McPherson, Craig Lucas, and Tony Kushner wrote plays that got considerable attention; even Charles Ludlam, we learn in his biography, considered
Salome
—a play in which he lay onstage in the robes and jewels of a Carthaginian princess, surrounded by a glistening pod of musclemen from the Sheridan Square gym—his response to the epidemic.

Ludlam in mascara, headdress, faux pearls, and breasts was a High Camp answer to a situation so horrible one did not know whether to make fun of it or be very, very serious. But in any case art was no substitute for a cure. There was something about AIDS that plays and books could not touch; the only thing, I wrote, people wanted to read was a single headline: CURE FOUND. Meanwhile lovers were jumping out of windows in suicide pacts or walking into moving traffic. Yes, the arts absorbed the new subject matter, but so what? At a writers’ conference in Key West in 1993 called “Literature in the Age of AIDS,” Tony Kushner began his remarks by saying he felt guilty being flown around the country to appear at arts festivals while people were dying. On the street, individual loneliness deepened despite the cultural response. Twenty-five years later I open a drawer in my bedroom to find a pair of socks and there, alongside my LITERATURE IN THE AGE OF AIDS T-shirt, is a heap of unused condoms sloshing around like a school of sardines; and I am transported back to a time when we regarded everyone as a potential killer.

The resulting personal isolation was an ironic counterpoint to the image of a gay community that AIDS coverage was painting for the American public at the time. Coverage of AIDS outed gay people and gay life—normalized them, at a terrible price: AIDS simultaneously destroyed that world as it was being revealed. The plague fragmented, Balkanized, gay people. Either you were sick or well; Positive or Negative; in Act Up or home reading; had friends who were sick or knew no one who was; could plan for the future or could not; had decided to stop having sex altogether or went on, with periodic bouts of worry. The fact that even nations could not agree on the risk of oral sex—Canada/Europe versus the United States—meant that everyone had to devise (and still devises) his own code of conduct. People were on their own. They scuttled about the battlefield as best they could, not knowing whom to trust: the voices that urged abstinence or the harangues of groups like Sex Panic, who argued that AIDS was nothing but a campaign to stamp out gay liberation; the forces that demanded the bathhouses be closed, or the voices that said they were the best venue for safe sex.