Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone (12 page)

Read Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone Online

Authors: David B. Feinberg

Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Memoirs, #Gay & Lesbian, #Nonfiction, #Literature & Fiction, #Essays & Correspondence, #Essays, #Politics & Social Sciences, #Social Sciences, #Specific Demographics, #Lesbian; Gay; Bisexual & Transgender eBooks, #LGBT Studies, #Gay Studies

BOOK: Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone
11Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Originally appeared in
QW,
May 17, 1992.
 
Of course, what I should have said was, “It’s quite understandable that you wouldn’t remember me because, being a clone, I look exactly like the last fifteen men you’ve had sex with, whereas your quite distinct acne scars make you what Natalie King Cole sang last year in the necro-incest duet with her dead father,
unforgettable.”
But now everyone I meet wants to have
relationships.
I refer specifically to the failed actor I met last month under extremely tawdry circumstances at my gymnasium whose testicles I have, in fact, felt in the palm of my hand, as if I were comparison-shopping for produce at the local A&P. Quite exquisite, I might add. Well, Walter (not his real name) decided that he wanted to get to know me better before we did the nasty. Gleefully, I referred him to the local bookstore, thinking that perhaps he could purchase and read both of my admittedly autobiographical novels. Since he felt a need to get to know me better and I didn’t necessarily feel the same need, I didn’t understand why I had to be physically present as he “got to know” me. Nonetheless, I proceeded to undergo a series of quite enjoyable (and to my mind, quite beside the point) dinners and movies and the occasional shopping expedition with him: I believe they’re known as “dates” in common parlance. Still no nookie. “Walter” still felt that I was primarily interested in having sex, and the only reason that he was the object of my interest was physical proximity. Frankly, I didn’t understand how we could have sex otherwise.
I decided to do what I usually do, which is make a list, comparing reasons to sleep with someone immediately and reasons not to:
Reasons Not to Sleep with Someone Immediately 1.
 
I decided that I would write the second list first, and by the time I finished the second list, perhaps one or two reasons to wait would spontaneously occur to me.
Reasons to Sleep with Someone Immediately
 
1. Your combined T-cells taken as SAT scores wouldn’t get either of you into the tiniest, most decrepit community college in the state of Iowa, and they have open admissions there.
2. To know, know, know you is not necessarily to love, love, love you. As a matter of fact, the more appropriate proverb here is “familiarity breeds contempt.”
3. “I’d love to blow you but I just did pentamidine” doesn’t really cut it as a good excuse. Why else did God invent breath mints and peppermint-swirled candies?
4. Just because he suffered the humiliation of having his braces entangled when he kissed his second cousin Matilda when he was fourteen, there is no reason to repeat the trauma at thirty-five by getting his IV entangled with yours at some future date.
Carpe frenulum!
Seize the Dick!
5. Sexual intercourse can be an extremely intimate form of nonverbal communication. If he really wants to know you better, what better way than by fornication? Indeed, sex can function as an excellent “ice breaker” in terms of breaking down barriers and thus facilitating future intimacy. On the other hand, if he wishes to keep his distance, there is a multitude of ways to have sex that would not necessarily impinge on anyone’s personal space.
With Jeffrey Dahmer in prison and Roy Cohn most decidedly dead, I still haven’t come up with any adequate reasons not to sleep with someone on the first date. I suppose there’s always that character issue. You could fall asleep next to some gorgeous hunk and wake up next to a design professional or, worse yet, an actor. But, hey, why be picky? Discrimination is against the law. Moreover, it’s tacky. If anyone knows of any good reasons to wait, please let me know. You know where to find me.
I alienated at least three people with this piece. I wrote it for
Diseased Pariah News,
but because of DPN’s backlog, it was eventually published in
QW.
AIDS and Humor
 
If art is to confront AIDS more honestly than the media have done, it must begin in tact, avoid humor, and end in anger.
Avoid humor, because humor seems grotesquely inappropriate to the occasion. Humor puts the public (indifferent when not uneasy) on cozy terms with what is an unspeakable scandal: death. Humor domesticates terror, lays to rest misgivings that should be intensified. Humor suggests that AIDS is just another calamity to befall Mother Camp, whereas in truth AIDS is not one more item in a sequence, but a rupture in meaning itself. Humor, like melodrama, is an assertion of bourgeois values; it falsely suggests that AIDS is all in the family. Baudelaire reminded us that the wise man laughs only with fear and trembling.
—Edmund White, “Esthetics and Loss,”
Artforum,
January 1987
 
Delivered as a talk at OutWrite on March 20, 1992; published as “Is Humor an Acceptable Way to Deal with AIDS?” in
The Advocate,
Issue 609, August 13, 1992.
 
Well, it’s a beautiful argument. I don’t know about you, but I was convinced, at least for the moment. Good writing can persuade one of almost anything. Extraordinary how potent cheap logic is.
At the same time, the argument is completely vacuous. Out of context, the statement “AIDS is a rupture of meaning” is so ludicrous it’s almost funny, a beautiful phrase, but itself an absurd rupture of logic, or perhaps symptomatic of a beleaguered author’s cerebral hemorrhage.
That’s the trouble with pontifications from
Artforum
and the like. Grand pronouncements are good for rhetorical discussions and little else. If you’re clever enough, you can easily come up with just as convincing an argument on the opposing side of the issue. Save it for the high-school debate team.
It’s completely unnecessary to demolish his arguments point by point. I need only mention several examples of the successful use of humor in art about AIDS: William Hoffman’s play As
Is;
Paul Monette’s novels
Afterlife
and
Halfway Home;
Peter McGehee’s novel
Boys like Us;
Christopher Durang’s monologue about AIDS in
Laughing Wild; Diseased Pariah News;
John Weir’s
The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket;
Victor Bumbalo’s play
Adam and the Experts;
Matias Viegener’s story “Twilight of the Gods”; and my novels,
Eighty-Sixed
and
Spontaneous Combustion.
Indeed, it is hard to find any work that does not at least deal with humor peripherally, save the sober sanctimonious holier-than-thou
Death Be Not Proud
school of humorless literal-minded writing.
I read
Death Be Not Proud
in high school and loathed it. I couldn’t stand this flawless paragon with a brain tumor. I felt as if I were trapped at a six-hour testimonial dinner on an ocean liner. The poor kid was merely a composite of every good trait imaginable: He ceased to be an individual.
I’m not going to produce a pretentious series of implacable dictims and Rules One Must Follow if one is to write about AIDS with humor. I’m not going to hand out lofty precepts from this lectern like “Ensure that you include a partially abled ovolactovegetarian lesbian of color in a prominent position in your work not as tokenism but as affirmative action” or “All writing must deal with the AIDS crisis in an ethical fashion, and all other writing, such as the ritual disembowelments of a certain perennial Lambda Literary Award nominee, is inherently decadent and morally corrupt.”
My goal here is to simultaneously demystify and obfuscate, two words I swore I would never use in polite company. Just kidding. There are no rules. You do whatever you can. You do whatever works. Instead, I’m going to suggest several ways that humor might be effectively used in writing about AIDS.
 
Consider the centrality of humor in everyday life. People are constantly making jokes. Waitresses wisecrack as they pour you a cup of java; the four hunky window washers whom you secretly envision in some porno scenario are in fact joking about the clutter in your office and secretly redesigning it; girlfriends dish one another at the gym; your mother complains about the fact you haven’t called in a million years with an amusing twist of irony; your boyfriend offers to play “Hide the Sausage” with you; it goes on and on.
Nothing is off limits to humor, not even the Holocaust. I recall the scene in Paul Mazursky’s movie Enemies, when Angelica Huston announces to Ron Silver, “I’m dead.” Mel Brooks wrote a movie that centered on a surprise hit play called
Springtime for Hitler.
Perhaps the only time the limits of taste were breached in the past twenty years was with the television sit-com “Hogan’s Heroes,” which took place in a German prisoner-of-war camp during World War II.
Joseph Heller’s masterpiece about war,
Catch
-22, is perhaps the best example I know of black humor. Heller comments on the absurdity of life during wartime with a deadpan voice. He achieves his great effect at the climax by juxtaposing humor with tragedy. The reader is softened for the kill with jokes; at the end, no punches are pulled. This contrast can achieve a great emotional impact.
In an absurd world, humor may be the only appropriate response. I used a quote from Barthes as an epigraph to
Eighty-Sixed:
“What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.”
Humor is a survival tactic, a defense mechanism, a way of lessening the horror. I would probably literally go mad if I tried to deal with AIDS at face value, without the filter of humor.
Once you joke about something, you appropriate it, you attain a certain amount of control over it. For example: “My T-cells recently dropped below my IQ. It’s a good thing I’m not Amy Hempel, or I’d be legally dead.”
Humor is also used as a distancing medium: You can’t stare directly at the sun. When someone asks, “How can you be so flip?,” I respond, “How can you not be?”
There’s always that ever-popular gallows humor. I’ve occasionally played a game of trying to think of extremely inappropriate songs to be played at one’s memorial: Maureen (Queen of Disaster Movies) McGovern’s “There’s Got to Be a Morning After,” Marilyn McCoo’s “One Less Bell to Answer,” and Peggy Lee’s immortal “Is That All There Is?” come to mind.
Noel Coward wrote: “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.” I’ve always had a weak spot for cheap humor: the silly pun, the bad joke.
Joni Mitchell, that great Canadian sage of our time, equates laughter and crying as methods of emotional release in her classic “People’s Parties,” one of those favorite songs I used to listen to when I was an adolescent girl in Syracuse, New York. It has been suggested that perhaps I still am that same adolescent girl. In any event, faced with the AIDS crisis, sometimes one laughs to avoid crying.
I’m interested in the joke that makes you wince as you laugh or suppress a smile; the joke that simultaneously appeals and appalls; the joke on the edge; the uncomfortable joke; the joke that catches you unaware, where your first response is to laugh and you immediately check yourself, ashamed.
 
Some may say that only HIV-positive writers can deal with AIDS, and they are beyond criticism. How can someone personally unaffected by the epidemic accuse a writer with AIDS of acting inappropriately, disrespectfully, and without dignity? This argument is absurd. As if identity can authenticate work. Gary Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” episodes show one doesn’t have to be seropositive to write about AIDS with humor.
Humor is extremely subjective. If it misfires, it can be deadly. Of course, everything I’ve said will sound ludicrous and hopelessly pompous to someone who doesn’t “appreciate” my sense of humor, and I use the word appreciate guardedly; I mean someone who has similar tastes in humor as I have. Failed humor trivializes tragedy and offends the reader, as I’m sure I’ve offended many.
When the humor doesn’t work for you, consider the moral intent of the writer. AIDS jokes are generally repugnant because the intent is to poke fun at people with AIDS. A few years ago, I read a novel with an AIDS theme and it rang patently false to me. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what I didn’t like about it until someone told me that the author wrote it hoping it would be turned into a disease-of-the-week movie. If you dislike a work, consider what the author’s intent was: Did the author try to share experiences and use humor to get closer to the bitter truth, or was the humor merely added to be outrageous? Before you completely dismiss a work as bankrupt, consider the underlying intent. This is not how you judge a work on literary merit, but how you can forgive one for failing.
I wrote this for the third Out Write conference in Boston, 1992. I was on a panel with John Weir, Victor Bumbalo, and Matias Viegener. Larry Kramer spent the conference disrupting the
Q &
A portions of the sessions with pointed questions, and then storming out angrily. “Can anyone explain irony to me?” was his pointed question. Unfortunately, we all tried but failed.
I’ve been called the Henny Youngman of AIDS by a columnist in that most esteemed publication, the New York Native, but that was by the same person who referred to my best friend in the entire world, John Weir, as “the late John Weir” in another column. John, who is very much alive, was inspired to write a letter to the editor to the effect that reports of his early demise were gross exaggerations. Following is an excerpt from his letter
(New York Native, August 24, 1992):
Then an unnerving thing happened. We were strolling past the Chelsea Hotel, when an old friend of mine walked out of the lobby and shrieked. “What are you doing here?” he said. I admitted that I still got north of Fourteenth Street, occasionally, shocking as that sounded. “No,” said my friend, “I mean, what are you doing on the planet? I thought you were dead.”
In fact, I had assumed that he was dead, too, since I hadn’t seen or heard from him in about two weeks.
“I’m still here,” I said, reassuring him.
My friend looked disappointed. “Now I’ll have to put you back in my Rolodex,” he said, disgruntled.
 

Other books

Blood Rites by Elaine Bergstrom
Time Salvager by Wesley Chu
The Trouble with Tuck by Theodore Taylor
Surviving the Fog by Stan Morris
The Christmas Journey by Winnie Griggs
Red Moon Demon (Demon Lord) by Blayde, Morgan
Presidential Lottery by James A. Michener
Siege Of the Heart by Elise Cyr
Winds of Change by Jason Brannon