Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath (7 page)

T
ODAY THE GALLEYS of a book called
When Someone You
Know Has AIDS
arrived. The book is addressed to two sorts of people: those with AIDS and those caring for people with AIDS. Since the line between these two categories is a thin and shifting one and merely the passage of time can put one on the other side of it, the book, like everything else about It, is something you grit your teeth to read, in order to prepare yourself for any new shocks. It would not be too much to suggest that much of a person’s reaction to the subject of AIDS is directly related to his chances of getting it himself. If the man beside you at the lunch counter as you sip your soup can say vigorously, emphatically, “They should put them on an island and let ’em all die,” that is because he has no fear of getting AIDS himself. The homosexual has no such option; he’s part of it. What part he may not know. What part he may not want to know. But AIDS is not the only thing spread by a virus. Six years ago the media were so silent on the subject, gay men could not get the
New York Times
to even mention the fund-raiser they held at Madison Square Garden to raise money for AIDS research. (The same weekend a march up Fifth Avenue in support of Israel was also ignored by the paper; the following week, deluged with protests from both groups, the
Times
apologized in print to only one—it was not the homosexuals.) But now one can hardly pick up a newspaper or turn on the television without confronting the subject. Most of us have seen the statistics by now. Many of us have seen our generation wiped out in announcements from the Harvard School of Public Health. Some of us have been told we were terminally ill by Barbara Walters. Which is why one stops reading the stories finally, turns off the TV when the topic is introduced, or closes the galleys of books like the one that arrived this morning, wondering if—when dying—you will think,
Oh,
this
was covered in
chapter six!
(As a friend said, “No one has to teach me how to die.”) As admirable as the writing or publishing of books about AIDS may be, I really don’t know who reads them with pleasure—because I suspect there is one thing and one thing only everyone wants to read, and that is the headline CURE FOUND.

Someone at the Whitman-Walker Clinic in Washington said that working with AIDS is like “staring at the sun”—so, in a way, is even reading about it. When the plague, or rather knowledge of the plague, appeared in New York several years ago, I remember hosts telling guests that they were not to talk about it at dinner. It spoiled the party. A few years later I was so worried that the subject would repel readers (I still assume this, since I, too, am a reader and that is my reaction) that I discussed it only when I had to; eventually, just as the dictatorial cruelty of AIDS touched everything, it seemed I had to, all the time. But though I relieved my own anxiety and depression by writing about AIDS in these essays (“Do you feel a
duty
to write about AIDS?” asked a friend), I turned myself, as a reader, to pure escape.

That first summer I picked up a novel by Henry James I’d not finished years ago,
The Wings of the Dove.
It, too, was about death: the untimely death of someone young and fortunate. Then I read the life of Henry James himself, wondering how we had gone from his sense of Victorian repression (“Live, live all you can, it’s a mistake not to!”) to our present predicament. But his biography could not explain the appalling news on CBS.

Journalists, said Schopenhauer, are professional alarmists, but if their news was needlessly plunging people into gloom (a man in Italy who confused his flu with symptoms of AIDS shot himself, his wife, and his child; a friend in New York took an overdose for the same reason), the facts seemed for a long while to justify their headlines. That was so because, from the start, fact has far outstripped fiction in this matter. Fact has been, like the virus itself, something individuals and society have had to struggle to catch up with, in a state of shock. Writers who dealt with homosexual life before the plague—the manners and mores of the homosexual community—have been quite left behind by a change of circumstances that blew the roof off the house they had been living and writing in. A novel about AIDS was written early on called
Facing It,
but that was just what I didn’t want to do; at least in literary terms. Novels weren’t needed; one only had to read the series of interviews carried in the
Washington Blade
with a man named Engebretsen, who allowed a reporter to visit him periodically as he withered away. The truth was quite enough; there was no need to make it up. To attempt to imagine such scenes seemed impertinence of the worst kind.

Meanwhile the
New York Post
began to shriek lurid headlines that in more innocent times many of us had collected as High Camp: lovers jumping out of windows, hospital patients diving ten stories onto the sidewalk. The sexual practices of men who went to the Mineshaft were now known by married people who went home to Kew Gardens on the subway after a day spent working in Manhattan. Words and concepts previously thought too shocking to be mentioned came across the airwaves on National Public Radio, and I began to read books about other epochs in history when people had been subjected to cruel and unusual catastrophes. The Black Death was the most obvious; but when I looked at
The Decameron,
I saw the plague was merely the pretext for its storytellers to entertain each other with bawdy tales about ordinary life. So I turned to books on the French Revolution and the Terror (which is what most gay men in New York were going through at this time, exactly). The gouged eyeballs, footmen hacked to death in Marie Antoinette’s bedchamber, beheadings in the Champs de Mars on guillotines that were, like AIDS, not always swift or instantaneous, seemed to match what we were being rapidly reintroduced to: the savagery of life. A savagery most Americans have always been spared. Then one evening I found an old issue of a
National Geographic
devoted to excavations at Herculaneum, the city destroyed along with Pompeii by the eruption of Vesuvius—and found the image I’d been searching for, in the skull of a woman with teeth clenched against the gas, pumice, ash suffocating her and her companions on a beach, as they tried to flee a city as helpless and startled and devastated as my own seemed to be. Disaster, real disaster, always comes as a shock.

A friend who was writing a novel on AIDS (it seemed inevitable there would be novels; indeed, most perversely of all, those being published that dealt with gay life, but did not deal with AIDS, were dismissed, reprimanded, for this fact) said he refused to write a “gloom and doom” book—but that was all there seemed to be around. Each time one tried to outline such a novel, one could not imagine the plot that would stand for, or include, all the stories one heard every day happening in reality to friends and their families in New York City and elsewhere—stories that broke the heart, if the heart was not anesthetized already. Writing about It, besides, presented an ethical dilemma: How could one write truthfully of the horror when part of one’s audience was experiencing that horror? How to scare the uninfected without disheartening those who had everything to gain by cherishing as much hope and willpower as they could? “Don’t you think it’s time now,” a friend said, “to introduce some light at the end of the tunnel?”

In those plays and films we had grown up with, of course it was, but when one sat down to think of some such illumination, there was nothing the
Times
had not done already in articles on AZT, or the galleys of the book that came today. Surely things had improved, in relative terms; one thinks still with pity of those friends who were the very first to get sick. Their dilemma and anger (“Why me?”) were so awful; the first visit I made to a friend in the hospital convinced me, as I left his room, that the only moral thing to write now was comedy—anything to amuse, to distract, to bring a laugh, an escape from this dreary, relentless, surreal reality. But when it came time to make jokes, the air in which laughter thrives seemed to have dried up. How could one write comedy when the suffering was real? How could one write at all, in fact, when the only work that mattered was that of the men organizing social services, taking care of friends, trying to find a microbiological solution to a microbiological horror in laboratories we could not see? When World War I began, even Henry James abandoned fiction altogether—that huge edifice of prose, that elaborate manor house of tales and metaphors—and went to London to visit soldiers back from the front. (As had Whitman during the Civil War.)

And just as James realized that novels were beside the point, or were at least momentarily repudiated by the fantastic brutality of war, so now the act of writing seemed of no help whatsoever, for a simple reason: Writing could not produce a cure. That was all that mattered and all that anyone wanted. One couldn’t, therefore, write about It—and yet one couldn’t not. A vast sense of impotence—the same helplessness the doctors were beginning to feel—spread over everything. The only conceivable function of writing about It seemed to be to relieve the writer’s own anxiety and depression; but who needed that? The
Times
was now running virtually an article a day about some aspect of the plague: its effect on the arts, its effect on doctors, its effect on fashion, its effect, even, on the Pines. Films made for television, plays, and short stories began to appear. Publishers wanted a novel. The novel is occasionally the way we bring some sort of order to the disorder of life. But
this
disorder seemed way beyond the writer’s powers. Literature could not heal or explain this catastrophe; the one thing about the plague that became clearer as it progressed was its senseless, accidental, capricious quality. This dumb virus killing the thing it fed on, destroying an organism infinitely more complex, advanced, skillful,
human
than it: Was there a lesson to be learned? Yes. That we live on a planet in which many forms of life still feed on each other. Beyond that—despite the vast “I told you so” of the Bible readers—there was nothing else to say. Not about homosexual life, certainly. If the homosexual lifestyle that had evolved before the plague was good or bad, contributed or did not contribute to human happiness, that was an issue to be addressed on its merits or lack of them. No one had led it, after all, in the light of the plague. No one expected it to charge that sort of price. The wider the field the plague moved across, the more unrelated its targets—nuns, babies, African heterosexuals, American homosexuals—the more meaningless it became. The plague may well turn out to be an irrelevance, an aberration, an interruption in the flow of history—a kind of fatal flu that had no more moral or metaphorical or social significance than the common cold. World War I, we say, had causes, meanings, lessons. The Spanish influenza, which carried off hundreds of thousands after the war, did not.

And yet because as long as it lasts, we must think of it as a war and not some fatal flu, writing about AIDS will appear, and in the short term will almost inevitably be judged, I suspect, as writing published in wartime is: by its effect on the people fighting—in other words, as propaganda, not art. Indeed, it will have to be about fighting—it must be in some way heartening—it must improve morale, for most people to allow it a place of honor. Otherwise they will dismiss it as useless, discouraging, immoral, like any art that accepts surrender during a war; even though the plague has in reality produced a deep depression—a depression that alternates between numbness and horror, fatigue and fear. For a certain segment of the American population, the plague has been a cram course in death.

For this very reason friends argue that gay life has come of age in dealing with all this suffering, that gay men and their relationships with one another have been changed forever. But I wonder. What is there to learn? A great many people lived a certain life that, within the bounds of what they knew at the time, was reasonably safe. But, like schoolchildren who learn years later that the school they attended was lined with asbestos; or like families who are told, twenty years after buying a house, that they live on a mountain of PCBs, the homosexuals who lived in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles in the seventies, lived with a devotion to health and appearance that was part of their stereotype, learned afterward that all the while there was an invisible germ circulating in the fluids of their sexual partners that was capable of entering the body; of lying undiscovered, unnoticed, unseen for several years; and then of destroying the system of biological defenses by which humans have been able, through eons of evolution, to live on the planet. This plague was retroactive—and hence it seemed doubly meaningless, doubly unfair. It was so unfair that it belonged to that category of events—earthquakes, droughts, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions—that simply happen and that engender in those who survive nothing more than a reminder of how unstable a planet this is. Someday writing about this plague may be read with pleasure, by people for whom it is a distant catastrophe, but I suspect the best writing will be nothing more, nor less, than a lament: “We are to the gods as flies to wanton boys; they kill us for their sport.” The only other possible enduring thing would be a simple list of names—of those who behaved well, and those who behaved badly, during a trying time.

I
T’S LATE AUGUST, and Sheridan Square is mobbed. I’m not sure what Sheridan Square is, exactly—the stretch of Seventh Avenue that people cross at Christopher Street; the cement island with the newspaper kiosk and subway entrance; or the triangular park with the statue of General Sheridan in it, to the east of both. Whether or not any of these is the actual “square,” the two sides of Seventh Avenue are so different that Christopher Street is obviously broken up by something. To the west of Seventh Avenue, all the way to the river, the street that has given its name to a magazine, a parade, a financial services company, and other businesses has been, for some time now, a busy, commercial, sometimes sleazy, public
paseo
of a sidewalk. The part of Christopher Street east of Seventh Avenue that borders the park, however, has always seemed to me one of the quietest oases in Manhattan. Every time I enter it, walking west down Grove, or Christopher Street itself, it looks to me like a little slice of Paris or London. There’s something dignified, quiet, and elegant about this pie-shaped patch of the city. And the park is what gives it this character; the park in which I have never stopped, until today.

The first thing I notice when I sit down—between a friend (on my left) and a beautiful stranger (on my right) who drunkenly asks if I’ve heard if the hurricane has hit Florida yet—are the statues; the gay “monument” whose installation was announced years ago and then postponed for some time. Long enough, at least, for us to stop thinking that these George Segal statues—of two men standing, two women seated on a bench—would ever be put up. But here they are. The sculpture group is not what you would call inspiring. In fact, one could write an essay on the change in values, style, mores, reflected in the contrast between General Sheridan on his stone pedestal and these four wan figures on the ground—but I’m glad it’s here. The trouble is the figures look as if they are made of wet paper towels, and the expressions on the faces are so—expressionless. The men seem not very happy about meeting each other, or whatever they’re supposed to be doing, and the women are positively stolid. Indeed, they seem deeply glum.

In contrast, the homosexual life around us is unbelievably kinetic—men of all ages, shapes, sizes, and fashion sense are crossing Seventh Avenue in the August sunlight, heading down Christopher or Washington Street. They don’t see us. We sit inside the tiny park like divers in a cage, while everything else swims past, in this voyeur’s paradise of a city. The people on the benches facing one another in the park are black and white, middle-aged and young, mostly male. To the left of the sculpture, two men in off-white clothes sit side by side—in color and expression, not unlike the statues—and every five minutes, another pair of gay men comes into the park to photograph each other, with one arm around the shoulder of the Segal sculpture: laughing, smiling tourists, apparently, making a photograph that will be an amusing record of their trip to Greenwich Village when they’re back home (in Rio, or Jersey City). The sunlight dapples the ground. Cabs float past. The west end of the park narrows to an arched entrance covered in wisteria: very nineteenth-century, with connotations of a gazebo or a theater set. It couldn’t be prettier. But the prettiest thing of all, the best part of it, is simply our ability to sit here, unmolested, or lie down in the case of my friend, for as long as we want. I’m relieved—because I don’t know where to go next. As Hannah says in the movie
The Night of the Iguana
, “Oh God, please can’t we stop now?”

We’re stopped, all right. After an unnerving scene in a restaurant across the street, a little pub called the Lion’s Head, just a few doors down from the original Stonewall Inn, the birthplace of it all—a pub, like this park, I’ve walked by a million times without ever stopping in, till today. It’s my friend’s condition that has brought us to both places: his manic desire to go out, even though he’s anemic, has two T-cells, Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions on his ear, chest, face, neck, and legs. He looks like a homeless person; he has all day, since I met him outside his hotel near the South Street Seaport, where he was lying in the sunlight on the sidewalk when I arrived. Instead of suggesting we move indoors, I sat down with him and learned, as we conversed, how easy it is in this city to live on the street. No one even glanced at us. Then we got in a cab and came up here, looking for a restaurant he could not find, till we simply had the driver stop and got out here: Sheridan Square. The place a gay man in New York in the seventies could always return to, the place a gay man felt he belonged, or at least could use to gather his thoughts and make phone calls till he found out where he was going next.

The Lion’s Head was a discovery. The waiter was very considerate. Every place we’ve gone to eat—America, Spaghetteria—has been considerate. It’s so obvious my friend has AIDS, you get a table real fast. If you want to be seated very quickly, take a Person With AIDS to dinner. Everybody’s respectful. But it’s been embarrassing, because Jeff has been behaving like a diva. He orders gazpacho, and pours his lime rickey into it to improve the taste, and then ends up putting his cigarette out in the bowl. Food is always ordered, and never eaten. He just wants to smoke. He calls for water, and then the check, in a peremptory, powerful voice that carries through the restaurant. The volume of his voice comes in surges; he starts in a normal tone, and then, if you try to speak, or he sees some potential opposition, or any reason whatsoever to speak loudly—such as the waiter standing a few tables away—the volume surges with alarming force, like something carried on an updraft, and becomes quite loud. All this is deeply embarrassing to someone brought up to be polite. And fascinating at the same time—because it’s a scene. It’s theatrical. It’s sad. It’s like going to a restaurant with Death in Ingmar Bergman’s
The Seventh Seal
.

Now he’s at rest—lying down on the bench, his skinny, skinny legs dotted with lesions, some of them covered by his Ralph Lauren shorts. Or are they Banana Republic? Whatever, he is, and has always been, the most acutely perceptive person I know on the subject of fashion, which he studied years ago at F.I.T., before going to work at Saks, before deciding he despised retail, before meeting a porn star/landscape gardener and moving to San Francisco, where he went to work for AT&T, and then, after the lover died, developed AIDS himself and came back east to be with his family. His arm lies across his eyes. His other hand is on his chest. On his legs are two large scabs where two lesions were lasered; on his hooded sweatshirt is the word COLUMBIA. The night before, at Spaghetteria, he put the hood on and ordered the waiter to turn down the air-conditioning because he had AIDS. Incredibly, in a restaurant filled with other people, the waiter complied. PWA power. It’s still potent in New York. My friend’s a sacred totem. He’s also somewhat nuts. But then this city has had that on its streets for years and years now, and to its great credit, we can sit here in this park in perfect freedom.

Quelle
collection: in this little park. I’ve been studying people on the subway this visit, wanting to go up to each one and say, “How did you get here? What section of what immigration law—what jet plane—when, and why, and where were you when you made the decision to come here?” We are beyond the United Colors of Benetton at this point. Which is more startling—the ubiquitous nightmare of AIDS, or the sense that the city is just a turnstile people rush through, to be succeeded by other groups? I sit, slack-jawed,
bouche bée
, at history’s unfolding. Who’d have thought any of this in 1973? No wonder I
plotz
this afternoon, grateful to be sitting between my friend and the drunken beauty with the beer can in a brown bag in this park with its two monuments—one to the Civil War, one to gay people. Perhaps the George Segal sculpture makes sense in the end, because, amazingly, everyone on these two long benches is a George Segal sculpture. That’s the point of a George Segal sculpture—and the history of art, and politics, for that matter: from the heroic, elevated (General Sheridan) to the mundane, pedestrian (the people on the benches). Just pour the plaster right over us. What the iron fence of this paved-and-planted triangle has momentarily captured from the city’s teeming sea this afternoon would serve as a sculpture just as well. We’re a collection ourselves, I’m thinking as I sit beside the friend I last shared New York with in the mid-seventies. Our friendship has a sort of epic sweep. The sort you find in thick paperback novels, or films like
The Way We
Were
: individual fates worked out in a current of history that becomes apparent only after the lives are lived. Who’d have thought there would be a monument to gay people in Sheridan Square, and Jeff lying on a bench beside it covered with KS? I couldn’t make this up in a novel, I think as I sit there. We’re all that’s left of a certain time; washed up in a park we never sat in all those years, grateful we can sit here now, out of the rushing stream, permitted, here in the heart of things, to be utterly out of it. Oh, the humanity of parks!

Or at least this particular enclosure. How many times, in a city so big, so gay, one never thought it needed a gay focal point, one has ended up here, after all. Here, where the Sheridan Square Gym used to float above Tiffany’s, the coffee shop, not the jeweler, where one could eat beside a plate glass window and watch gay men go by beneath the weight-lifters who used to take their breaks between sets at the windows of the gym, their beefy, pumped-up arms on the windowsills, waving at their friends down below. Here, where the VD clinic used to be, where I learned, to my surprise, that I’d been exposed to hepatitis B. Here, where Charles Ludlam finally found a permanent theater—at One Sheridan Square—though the sliver of piazza immediately before it has been renamed in his honor. Here, where the Stonewall Riot occurred. Here, where George Whitmore, whose book about AIDS was called
Someone Was Here
, lived at Number Thirty-nine. Here, where the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore has operated for years. Here, where a single street, Christopher, runs the gamut from the tony apartment building at the corner of Greenwich Avenue to the drag queens from the Bronx, and the AIDS hospice Bailey House, at the west end. Here, where it has all come down to these wan, dough-colored, expressionless zombies George Segal has made to commemorate gay men and women and their struggles.

Some struggles! I met Jeff when he was twenty-two, still a student at F.I.T., so young, with such high spirits, he seemed ready to pounce when he shook your hand. Even at the Tenth Floor, that tiny dance club where we met, there was an intense energy about him which found its minor expression in the way he walked, almost bouncing on the balls of his feet, and smoked one cigarette after another; a young man who loved fashion, nightclubs, and the serial romances he had with the older men he called Daddies. Jeff, who loved Fire Island and Flamingo, whose best friend used the computers of the law firm he worked for at night to compile a directory of men with big dicks in cities all across the country, a sort of Baedeker the two of them used when they traveled. Jeff, who finally moved to the gayest city of all, after he met the porn star/landscape gardener from San Francisco at a sex club off Tenth Avenue: a somber, almost religious place with long hallways of cubicles with communicating glory holes, where one night the porn star dropped his pants and revealed himself, Jeff said, to be “all dick.” Jeff, the Irish American Catholic, who translated the devotion he’d felt as an altar boy to an adult preoccupation with the male form, and never lost his desire for ecstasy, transcendence. Jeff, who, when he said good-bye at the airport to the hot Italian he had ended up with in Connecticut, had gone into the men’s room to stand beside him at the urinal and take one last look at each other’s penis. Jeff, so health-conscious he would write paragraphs about the beneficial properties of broccoli in letters after he moved to San Francisco, letters that I had never been able to throw away because they were so full of hope and excitement and engagement with life, with their exclamation points and underlined words, their ten handwritten pages on a yellow legal pad, written when he was perpetually about to go out. Jeff, who was so aware of the importance of skin care he put cucumber slices over his eyes to banish wrinkles, who now lay beside me on a bench covered with purple spots, still full of some residue of nervous energy, essentially out of his mind.

The arm across his eyes is the most eloquent pose he could have adopted: the age-old gesture of a grief, or horror, beyond one’s ability to comprehend. Outside the fence, on the other side of Jeff, I see a blond man with a crew cut who looks no more than twenty-five walking slowly down the sidewalk with a cane, in jeans and white T-shirt. He is very handsome. And, like Jeff, out on the street, despite everything.
Bravo
. Suddenly the beautiful drunk with the canal-green eyes lurches to his feet and walks out of the park, with his beer in a brown paper bag. Four queens get out of a cab. In a few hours people will be converging on The Monster. The friend who lives on this block, on Christopher Street, does not go out at all. He stopped looking several years ago. “Because I’ve
had
sex,” he said, when I asked why. “Because what I want now isn’t sex, it’s emotional.” Ah, I think, the old bugaboo—Loneliness—and the longing for Love: still so elusive after so many years of trudging this street. When they find the cure for AIDS, will they find the cure for that? Perhaps the reason the men and women in the George Segal sculpture look so bland, so lifeless, so wan, so blank, is that no sculpture could express that reality of gay life: its personal, emotional content. All that makes these figures homosexual is the fact that the men stand beside each other, and the women sit together. But what else could the sculptor have done? Shown them having sex? Exchanging phone numbers? Glancing back at one another over their shoulders? Taking a blood test? Easy enough to depict a general with a sword. Impossible to portray this other, different struggle—so unheroic, so isolating, so riddled with self-loathing and contempt. The irony of all the attention, the consideration, that gay people now receive—from the maître d’ at America to the speeches at the Republican and Democratic conventions to this statue in Sheridan Square—is that most of it has come about at a horrible cost. All societies are founded on the blood of young men, wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Assimilation, too.