Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath (13 page)

Fashion NOW. Fashion, dressing, because of your totally new situation,
no longer present problems.
BONUS: Kiss good-bye hours wasted in your INSECURE SEX YEARS trying on T-shirts. (As if there was a
magic
T-shirt! As if there was a Mister Right!) The
despair
you felt after a night in the bars when you realized your outfit was NOT WORKING! Those DEGRADING afternoons spent with people MUCH younger than you in CANAL JEANS looking for pants that showed your ASS off! Your ASS
is in great
shape, darling,
because it’s WART-FREE! (For the longest time
ever
.) In Fall ’85, you are not dressing to show your Body off. (Unless you’re a sadist; and that’s for ANOTHER COLUMN, dear.) You are dressing to be APPROPRIATE, UNNOTICED, COMFORTABLE, RELAXED. So BE CREATIVE. Fashion NOW is revolutionary because it no longer has to be validated by someone
unzipping his pants.
WHY? Because you’re off FAST-FOOD SEX. It was thrilling,
of course.
But it wasn’t doing your BODY any good. Junk food never does, darling. And it’s FABULOUS now to know you won’t be down on your KNEES over the next bimbo who walks through the door. Think of this Fall as a SEX BREAK. Think of the
New Celibacy
as a
Holiday,
a
Moment for Reflection.
Use this OPPORTUNITY to retrench, rededicate yourself to Old Ideals (which are JUST LIKE Old Clothes, darling: You can always pull them out of storage TEN YEARS LATER because EVERYTHING ALWAYS comes back! Look at NEW WAVE!). Use your OLD IDEALS to get out of TOWN, close to NATURE, read the DIVINE COMEDY, listen to ALL OF BARTOK straight through! Start writing that long-lost cousin in Sandusky, Ohio, who goes to church twice a week, is an aide in a nursing home, lifts weights, and has never even been SUNBURNED! Learn how to be a SUPERB
voyeur.
Or—if you know you’ll never be able to DO WITHOUT
indefinitely
—come to grips with the NEW REALITY. Buy a package of LUXURIOUS CONDOMS and become familiar with them at home. Then INVITE FRIENDS over and give each one of
them
a package. DISCUSS your feelings about the Icky things (the Only Way you’ll be able to have ANY SEX AT ALL in the coming years, dear) as you pass them around the table. Blow them up to wear as party hats. PARTY GAME: Try putting them on in record time. (Winner gets two tickets to
Cats
.) Learn to overcome your distaste, embarrassment, shyness, and hesitation about using them, or even SUGGESTING they be used to a prospective husband. Remember, darling, YOU HAVE NO CHOICE. It’s raincoats or
nothing
so long as the skies are POURING DOWN VIRUSES. Be SMART. BEHAVE, dear heart. Use this
incredible
time to develop your—

Attitude NOW.
What people are reading, seeing, talking about.
The Chinese are going ahead with the FOUR MODERNIZATIONS, darling, and SO MUST WE. This fall you’re WATCHFUL, WORRIED, HOPEFUL, SAD, REALISTIC, DEPRESSED, TENSE, CALM, ANXIOUS, ELATED, APPREHENSIVE, DETERMINED, BURSTING WITH ENERGY AND AFRAID TO USE IT. Let’s face it: You’re CONFUSED. You’ve never been so BESET with CONTRADICTORY MESSAGES. You want to be CALM, but you’re really NERVOUS. You want to be COMPOSED, but you’re actually UPSET. You’ve never felt SO ALIVE and never before been so CONSCIOUS OF THE PERILS involved in LIFE. You live in a culture SATURATED with COME-ONS, a society that PUTS A PREMIUM ON BEING ATTRACTIVE, but there is cancer in the air! You move through a city where you’d like to sleep with TEN MEN on every block, but you just don’t know
which ones
are LETHAL. You’re told by one set to make your body DROP DEAD, and by another NOT TO USE IT for any of those things that relieve our awful SOLITUDE. If years ago you were alienated from the world because of your homosexuality, NOW you’re alienated from
homosexuality
! Some are understandably in a state of HIBERNATION. You’re looking for a MIDDLE ROAD. The way we see it: The Oil Glut ended, and so has the SEX GLUT. And
you’re
left with the hangover. But you know we recovered from the ENERGY CRISIS and we can get through the LOVE CATASTROPHE. What to do? Press your HOLD Button. You know the NEW SOBRIETY, darling, can be a FABULOUS OPPORTUNITY. To ask just what IS going on. And how you want the FUTURE to be. Form small groups of CLOSE FRIENDS for Discussion and Consciousness-Enrichment. (Divine Henry James said, “Consciousness is everything.” Isn’t it, just.) BE REALISTIC. Ask yourself,
What would happen if the plague
stopped tomorrow?
If the folks who brought us Pearl Harbor and the SONY Walkman found a cure
Tuesday
? BE HONEST: Everyone would start
slurping
again. (
Our Mouths, Ourselves.
) The gay newspapers you’ve been reading faithfully since this started would fill up with articles on BUTT-PLUGS. People would start getting
snotty
again about rejection and selection.
It wouldn’t take much for us all to become junkies again!
But you’re
aware
of that.
And too smart to let it happen!
You want to use this time to change your WHOLE APPROACH. Because, darling, when the plague ends—whenever!—and the papers DO drag out those
in-depth
features on Art Nouveau cock rings, and the man blows his whistle and yells, “
Que la fête commence!
,” we want you to be just a LITTLE DIFFERENT.
Isn’t that what being
GAY
is
all about?
And until that happens—if the detail,
detail
, DETAIL of these endless precautions is just too much for you—then THINK BIG as you make your plans to get through this. Call the Whitney Museum,
ask for the Director
—don’t be intimidated by Authority!—and tell him you’d like him to commission CHRISTO (the artist who put sheets all over those TINY islands in Biscayne Bay, and WANTED to do the paths in Central Park) to WRAP YOU. That, darling, will solve everything and make
you
WHAT PEOPLE ARE TALKING ABOUT this fall—the
best
, most
exciting,
and
terrifying
fall of your lives! Autumn in New York! Why does it set the heart DANCING? Because this year, my darlings, you are living on the EDGE. And we want you to maintain your BALANCE.

Next month: SHOPPING.

O
F HOMOSEXUAL MEN not in monogamous pairs in New York these days, there seem to be three sorts: the abstinent, the sex junkie, and the worried sick. Our man belonged to the latter class the day he walked into the drugstore on Sixth Avenue to purchase contraceptives. The abstinent—having decided to have no sex at all—do not have to purchase rubbers; the occasion to use one will never arise. The sex junkie is still slurping away at the baths. The worried sick are worried about AIDS because they know they cannot sustain chastity with the surprising ease of some of their friends. They go to the baths and watch the sex junkies slurp but do nothing themselves; they lust after men on the street and keep walking; they form jack-off clubs, if they are practical, and if they are not, periodically succumb to strangers. After doing this they cannot sleep, however, wondering if this was the fatal trick. So one day they walk into a drugstore on Sixth Avenue with a friend and ask the clerk for rubbers, as the doctors have advised them to do.

The first rubber our hero ever saw was floating like a dead jellyfish against the shore of the Charles River in Boston one night in 1964. At the time, a student taking a break from his books, he associated rubbers with teenagers screwing in the backseats of cars in
Peyton Place
. They connoted the fifties as much as sex. Years later, he wondered why homosexual men didn’t use them—if only because the sheathing ceremony seemed to dramatize the penis; and homosexuals were always trying to dramatize the penis. One homosexual friend told him rubbers were associated with women and that was why they weren’t used. Another said, “Having sex with a rubber is like taking a shower in a raincoat.” But still he was perplexed. Given the ceremony of draping the phallus, of turning it into a plastic dildo, why didn’t the men who used cock rings use these too? Why had the man he’d seen at the Hothouse one night in San Francisco covered his bed with more tubes, coils, and metal instruments than could possibly be needed for a coronary bypass operation, or the castration of Chance Wayne in
Sweet Bird of Youth
—but no rubbers? In all those years since he spotted his first miserable used specimen, for whatever reason, condoms had been disdained by homosexual men.

So it feels strange for our protagonist to be walking into the drugstore on Sixth Avenue that day with a friend to purchase prophylactics—not to prevent pregnancy (the reason the Catholic Church forbids them), to prevent death. When he first heard on the radio that doctors suspected sperm might carry cancer, he thought it must be a fantasy of the religious right. But here he is now, asking the clerk to show them the condoms—lubricated, ribbed, plain—displayed on a shelf above them: various brands at various prices. He chooses a box of Trojans that cost approximately fifty cents a condom; neither the least nor the most expensive. The box is blue and has a photograph of a man and a woman on the beach—in love, about to be attacked by a seagull.

The friends laugh as they leave the store, but he thinks that with these condoms, his life has totally changed. Armed with six Trojans, he has found a way around the sexual block which has turned New York into a nightmare. The future is now manageable. He intends to carry one at all times, like a Boy Scout with his Boy Scout knife. He is now safe. The rubber in his pants pocket is like a crucifix in a land of vampires. It is a quarter to be put in a slot machine, or the dime he was given as a child to go out and buy a Good Humor bar; he can exchange it for sex. My little Trojan, he thinks, means I can trick again. One Trojan, one trick. He knew life did not have to be so dreary!

Then the cultural, psychological, social reality sets in—because he doesn’t know quite how to introduce the thing. He is polite. The first time he uses the rubber, his partner is a man celebrating a clean bill of health by going to the baths. (These are odd, schizophrenic times.) The stranger is too involved with his own feelings to notice him slip the rubber on, surreptitiously, like a burglar putting on gloves to crack a safe. The encounter goes well enough and our protagonist is proud of himself. A week later, however, he is so excited he does not stop to use the rubber—he doesn’t want to interrupt the crescendo of lust—and when our hero mentions afterward that he had planned to use a condom, his partner looks at him and says, “I would have been insulted.”

“Why?” our hero says. “It’s not that I think you’re diseased, but
I
may be, or either one of us. Who knows? A condom protects us both.”

Things go downhill from there. Our hero asks his next trick to use a rubber, and together they watch his penis shrivel. The next man refuses to even consider it. The third one agrees by saying, “Sure. If you eat what’s in it afterwards.”

Our hero is insecure enough already—he hasn’t the confidence of his friend, who tells him he waits till his partner is so excited it doesn’t matter, and even claims that it delights young people when he brings it out. “Oh! A scumbag!” they gasp. “I’ve never seen one!”

Our hero soon loses his initial sense of enchantment, however—and before very long he has learned why people do not want to use the things. The reason is simple: In the midst of pleasure, the rubber recalls disease, danger, death, his own friends’ illness. Its use is prudent, rational, sensible. But sex is a surrender to what is not prudent, rational, sensible. It is the escape from these. In the heat of lust—generated by small concessions that are themselves rational—he loses his resolve.

So by the time he goes home, on a sex vacation, with someone in San Francisco who puts his own brand of condoms—Ramses—on the table by the bed, he has become entirely weary of the subject. (Ramses was a pharaoh, he thinks, but these things remind me of Saran Wrap.) It was nice that he did not to have to bring the subject up, but as his partner prepares himself in the bathroom, he stares glumly at the condoms on the tabletop the way he looks at the little circle of dental instruments next to his face when he goes to have his teeth worked on. Then he examines his own little Trojan on the bedside table. By now its blue package is worn and frayed. He has carried it around so long, changed it from pants pocket to pants pocket, that he wonders if its sanitary integrity is not compromised—by a tear in the lining. (This is the objection his chaste friends have to rubbers: “Rubbers can break!”) Tears in the lining, he reminds himself, are what this is all about, so he puts a new Trojan in his pocket when he gets home.

It sits there, a sop to his conscience and little else, since after his return from San Francisco he stops tricking. He suspects he will never use his rubber. When he is rational enough to use it, he is rational enough to resist sex; and when he is so horny he does not care, he can resist nothing. The blue Trojan can be used only in between these states, but between these poles (of abstinence and debauch, fear and recklessness) he no longer exists. He is either Doctor Jekyll or Mister Hyde. He cannot arrange sex the way he arranges a trip to the beach.

Months after leaving the drugstore on Sixth Avenue, our hero knows the most effective weapon isn’t the rubber in his pocket—Fear is. Fear forms a barrier between him and the man he cruises who keeps walking because both of them are potentially diseased meat. Then one night—after weeks of Fear—he rebels, and visits the baths with his rubber, just to see men. He is so certain he won’t have sex he leaves the rubber in the locker downstairs. (How does one carry one anyway when wearing just a towel; pinched between the fingers, like a Handiwipe, or a package of peanuts the stewardess offers you on the airplane?) And then upstairs—as quickly as a spark turns a dry hillside into a wall of fire—he makes a mistake. The joke is right: A stiff cock has no conscience. It has no brains, either. He goes home afterward to such recrimination and worry, he lies awake till dawn—feeling the prophylactic of terror tighten about him.

It comes down to this, he thinks, in these peculiar times: a problem of custom, of usage, of marketing. Getting homosexuals to accept rubbers will be like getting fifty million rural housewives in India fitted for IUDs. Nothing can compete with a naked dick.

Except Fear, of course—next time he’ll try harder, he thinks. Next time he’ll use his Trojan, which sits meekly on his bedside table, more honored in the breach than the observance. Dawn brightens the bricks of the wall outside his window. He looks at the condom—the bright flag of his disposition, his constant pal, the worry beads he has carried with him for six months now, half in reason, half in superstition—and decides to put it on. “My little Trojan,” he thinks. “I might as well use you by myself, since I’m probably not going to use you when I’m with someone else.” It unwraps down from its little ring, like the train of an Italian princess in the fifteenth century, encasing the penis in a sheath as thin as filo dough, opaque and clinical in color. It’s not pretty. He smiles at the sight of himself: lying in bed with his rubber on, like a fireman suited up, or a man in a gas mask waiting for an air raid. Then he takes it off, and removes another from the box and puts that one on the table. “Good night,” he says as he closes his eyes and waits for sleep to end the confusion of his day. “Sleep tight, my little Trojan.”