Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath (18 page)

W
E WERE SITTING on a porch in Florida this afternoon leafing through the portfolio of photographs a friend had brought over, half watching the butterflies in the geraniums, when I came to the portrait of a handsome man and asked who this was. A man in San Francisco, my friend replied, who had just walked out on his lover. “And you know what his exit line was?” he said. “‘When you get the night sweats, you’ll know you’ve got it.’”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“He has AIDS,” my friend said of the good-looking man with the mustache and wavy hair. “He had it when he began the relationship, but he told his lover if they kept a positive attitude, they wouldn’t get it. Now, of course, the boyfriend’s got it, and when it happened,” he said, pointing to the photograph, “he packed his bags and walked out, saying, ‘When you get the night sweats, you’ll know you’ve got it.’”

“But—but—,” I said, incredulous, dumbfounded, staring at this handsome man in the photograph, “who is he?”

“He’s smart,” said my friend. “He’s a psychologist. He wanted to get AIDS.”

“Wanted to?” I said.

“He went out to the baths, just when it began, when he knew it was dangerous, and put his ass up in the air,” he said. “He wanted to get it.”

“But how does the lover feel?” I said, pointing to the adjacent photograph, a man with a dark beard and friendly eyes. “The one he gave it to?”

“He has chronic hepatitis,” my friend said. “His stomach is swelled out to here,” he said, drawing a potbelly in the air. “He just thinks it’s one more version of being dumped on by life.”

When I first heard stories—like this one—I didn’t believe them; they belonged to that realm of rumor in which the gossip is made up out of whole cloth, merely because it’s so dramatic. No one would do that in real life, I thought. It just isn’t believable. The first story I heard—about five years ago—involved the death of a decorator in New York whose brother flew east from California to attend the wake and stayed with a man I’ll call Bob. The brother was attractive, and one evening after the wake, talking things over before the fireplace, Bob and the brother ended up having sex. When the sex was over, Bob asked the brother what he would do with all the money he’d inherit from the decorator; the brother replied, “Spend it. I have AIDS, too.”

Surely this was made up, I thought; no one could possibly do that. It’s certainly true, as Scott Fitzgerald wrote, that a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth, but I could not even imagine the person who would knowingly expose another person to the virus. I had trouble with people who littered; I wanted them arrested and given the electric chair. I knew the junk that clogged the mangroves in which gay men cruised at Virginia Key in Miami, soiled the dunes at the gay beach south of Jacksonville, was proof that gay people, yes,
even
gay people,
were slobs. But I had perhaps a rather exalted vision of homosexuals; I suspected, in some chamber of my heart, that they were, well, neater, nicer, more sensitive than the rest. Mayor Lindsay used to say, “The trouble with New York is that there are too many slobs.” But I didn’t include the gay community in that; I found it hard to believe—and very discouraging—that they even littered.

But then a few years of the plague, and more stories of this sort, passed, and the next one I heard about someone I knew sounded a little more imaginable: A young man just out of the hospital after a bout of pneumocystic pneumonia went to the Saint to celebrate, met someone, and took him home. Hmmmm. One
would
go to the Saint to celebrate, perhaps, that was not unlikely, and perhaps in the mood created by the place, the dancing, one might meet someone, and . . . but there it stopped. People do not murder other people casually. Surely he would have told the person he had just got out of the hospital, and so on.

And then, shortly after hearing this story, I read about Fabian Bridges. Fabian Bridges was just a newspaper article at first—about a male prostitute shunted back and forth between two cities that didn’t want him, because he had AIDS and the judge thought the only solution was to put him on a bus out of town. Put this way, I felt sorry for Fabian Bridges; then I saw him in a documentary on television. On television Fabian Bridges was seen haunting the seedier parts of cities (those blocks that look exactly alike in Pittsburgh, Houston, Jacksonville, New York: the dirty bookstores, the theaters, the parking lots), after being asked by a doctor in the most patient, cajoling, restrained manner, to stop having sex. Stop having sex was what Fabian somehow seemed unable to do—though he voiced a mild regret at having ejaculated inside a customer (a man he’d come to like). This wistful regret was the only one Fabian Bridges evinced; friends who saw the film explained him away with brain infection—the virus had already destroyed his ability to act morally. But I wasn’t so sure; it seemed possible to me Fabian Bridges was just one of those horrors—a morally inert succubus drifting through life without much will to do right or wrong. Who knows? The gay community in Texas did what the courts and police could not—took Fabian in, got him off the street—and then death took him off the planet. But not before, one assumes, he had taken others with him.

We read daily now of prostitutes of both sexes who refuse to stop working, even though they have AIDS. There is an ex- American army sergeant being tried in Germany right now for having had sex with three men and not telling them he had the virus; the case has been clouded by the fact that one of them, a Spaniard, also had AIDS at the time. My, my. It just goes on and on. Admit the principle, and there is no end to the permutations.

I was watching TV with a friend the evening the death of Rock Hudson was announced. After asking me in a curious voice why gay men were so promiscuous, my friend then inquired, “Why did you
trust
one another?” The question gave me a moment’s pause; I had never thought of it in those terms before—terms of trust. I said, “Because there was no reason not to. Everything could be cured with some form of penicillin.” Yet now that I reflect on it all, it seems to me that not antibiotics but trust was the thing that made that life possible: the assumption that the person you slept with would not knowingly infect you with anything vile. Trust was the basis of the whole system—the Visa card that sent you to Brazil, Berlin, or California with the prospect of romance. (The thing that impelled people to go these places, soon after the plague appeared in New York, in fact, on the assumption that It hadn’t arrived there yet.) There were exceptions to all this, of course. I got crabs in those days more times than I could count; by the twentieth time, I was less strict about waiting a few days after dousing myself with A-200 before going out again. I got amoebas and learned, after the fact, I’d been exposed to hepatitis; but I considered most of these just occupational hazards, germs swimming in the community pool, and not the malicious, much less lethal, act of any particular person. True, there were nights when, at the baths, I would see a man leave someone’s room and the door to that room open a moment later to take on a new visitor—and I would think,
The fat, lazy cow. Can’t even go
downstairs and shower between encounters.
And in my disgust I would eventually walk past that open door to see who the slob was. He was always someone ordinary, I mean, without any distinguishing marks that set him apart from everyone else at the baths; and that, of course, is the trouble with trust now.

The rumor that AIDS had been spread by an airline steward had been around several years; the version I heard featured an Australian on Air Qantas. The airline steward, of course, has always personified a certain aspect of gay life—the most complete version of the fantasy; to be a new face in Rome, Paris, Cairo, London, Madrid—all in the same week, to sleep not with everyone in your gym, but with the whole world. It seemed, at a certain age, the only thing to do; an adventure one would be a fool not to spend at least a year on. Promiscuity and jet travel were somehow twins—synergistic. How else to get It from a green monkey in the interior of Africa to a penthouse in New York? The tracing of Patient Zero in Randy Shilts’s new book on AIDS is not only a dramatic case of mystery solving; it’s the culmination of all those stories about this person—this gay person in whom I could not quite believe—that have been floating around for years now. No wonder the mainstream press picked up on it. It finally gives a face to what has been so far faceless. It crystallizes all the anger and moral outrage that have been gathering without an object. The steward from Air Canada reduces a force, a vast dilemma, to what even an age accustomed to institutional power hungers for—the story of a single human being making a choice between right and wrong, good and evil. Gaetan Dugas, apparently, made the wrong choice. Gaetan personifies, in what we’ve read of him so far, a recognizable type in gay life: the vain and careless Queen. The Pretty Boy with the not-so-pretty value system. The Moral Slob. The Femme, oh very, Fatale. Flying from place to place, the man at the baths who—I presume—opened his door a moment after the last man had left and did not bother to go downstairs to shower; who, when the lights came up, if what we read is true, commented casually on his Kaposi’s sarcoma as “the new gay cancer. Perhaps you’ll get it, too.”

A friend with AIDS gave some advice about having sex nowadays that still seems excellent: “Have sex,” he said, “as if everyone is infected.” What better guide? Standing in the Jewel in New York, watching the men go up and down the aisle, I can easily imagine now that some have AIDS. (In fact, someone told me last week that people with AIDS go there.) Why not? What else would you do if you had AIDS? Would you not more than ever have to be there, to cruise, to forget, to feel alive? Fabian Bridges, Patient Zero, are only extreme versions of something in many of us; we have all fudged reality a bit in the past five years, I suspect—behaved with standards that now seem to us lax and self-deluded. Indeed, the longer the plague goes on, and the more pervasive our exposure to it, the more unappetizing sex becomes—sex that seems risky, that is. But this psychological barrier, this distaste, was not always there; it took years to coalesce and solidify. The trouble is we know now that a person can give someone AIDS in several moral states—not knowing he has it, knowing he has it but not thinking what he does is dangerous (“Just keep a positive attitude!”), knowing he has it and passing it on out of despair, revenge, indifference, hatred, selfishness, or sheer amorality; having a hole where the conscience should be, or a vengeful feeling that what the community gave to him, he can give back. It’s the same principle, after all—the man who goes out with crabs and the man who goes out with AIDS. Only crabs can be killed with A-200; the virus cannot. And with that fact, all trust dissolves.

The truth is, most people are not amoral—most of them care very much about not endangering someone they have sex with—but the fact that some are is enough to shut down the whole system. It’s a bit like the Tylenol scare—most of the bottles on the shelf were surely safe, but the possibility that one of them might contain poison was enough to make the manufacturer withdraw the product. AIDS destroys trust. We cannot possibly investigate, much less be responsible for, what the man we are attracted to has done with the past five or seven years of his life. We can’t guarantee ourselves. This limits sex with each passing year. It shuts down a whole system of behavior, a community; it builds a wall between each of us. AIDS is a form of pollution; in this case, polluted semen and blood. We’ve spoiled even that. AIDS is a form of terrorism—sex becomes Paris the summer the bombs went off. Nobody goes. Like Central Park—empty at night because everyone’s afraid of muggers—homosexual life becomes a vast empty space from which everyone has withdrawn. We look at one another not merely as appetizing possibilities, possible boyfriends, fantasies, pleasure—we look at each other as lethal instruments, threats, dangers, obstacle courses, things one would have to sift through a whole host of tests in order to eat. Sodomy—the central ritual from which all else proceeded—is out of the question. Kissing, fellatio, all must be weighed. The tree of sex shrivels up. When I go to the Jewel in New York, or the baths in Jacksonville, I see what I’ve come to call the Same Nine People. They’re not exactly nine, and they’re not always the same, but almost, and you get the point. The fact is, there do not have to be a lot of Patient Zeros out there to destroy the way of life we had evolved; there just has to be one. As long as a friend writes me from San Diego that a man he knows in an AZT program out there called to ask him if he had any ethyl chloride for the march in Washington—because he thought it the greatest cruising opportunity ever—well, that’s enough.

One afternoon last spring we took a walk down to the Morton Street pier and found a wire-mesh fence along its perimeter to keep people away from the rotting timbers at the edge. Not in New York, of course: There were still people sunbathing along the margin, beyond the concrete divider and the silver fence. One in particular was nude; the sun gleamed on every pore of his bare back and buttocks, the tiny hairs on his forearm and neck—and I stood there for a moment staring at him, wondering which one of us was confined. The nude beyond the chicken wire fence was one of those images that express the whole dilemma. Or the nude behind the Plexiglas panel, in the bookstore off Times Square a friend of mine repairs to after an exhausting day at work—the individual booths are all separated by transparent walls, like a handball court one can see into, and the men stand in their separate cells, jerking off to one another. Or the dance floor at Track’s. It’s filled with people dancing; the handsome men take their shirts off at a certain point, as they used to formerly, observing rituals practiced by a court that no longer exists. It is all muted, a ghost of itself, all difficult to explain, till I see a muscular man beating a stick against a gourd while a woman dances to his syncopation and, as she whirls around, read what the sweatshirt she’s wearing says: CHOOSE LIFE. That is the caption that explains the dance now, and our whole community. You’ve heard of postmodern. This is post-trust.