Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone (10 page)

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Authors: David B. Feinberg

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BOOK: Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone
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I don’t consider myself disabled, just disappointed. My doctor recommended I contact someone in San Francisco to get on a Chinese herb protocol. As usual I procrastinated. Then I saw Woody Allen’s
Alice
and the effects of herbs on Mia Farrow. When I realized I might be able to conjure up Alec Baldwin as a former lover, I was all gung-ho on the idea. At my next visit, I told my doctor I hadn’t gotten around to it yet and he asked me what my most recent T-cell count was; then he told me it was okay, my count was too low for the protocol anyway.
I’m another example of that odious bugaboo, a white male socialized in this patriarchal society, a mess of all the -isms that I combat as best I can: a sexist feminist, a homophobic queer, a racist honky, a self-loathing narcissist, an anti-Semitic Jewish atheist, a leaden prose stylist, with trace elements of looksism, ageism, and ableism. I believe a distinction can be made between sexual predilections and tastes and -ismic behavior: For example, a gay man who sleeps with men exclusively isn’t exhibiting sexism against women in this.
I was at the gym a few months ago and a therapist who is definitely in the top ten on the Billboard chart of sauna pigs said, “HI, DAVE, HOW ARE YOU? HOW ARE YOUR T-CELLS?” and I said, “Fine,” and he said, “I’VE BEEN DOING INTRAMUSCULAR ALPHA-INTERFERON FOR THE PAST TWO MONTHS, AND I FEEL GREAT; MY T-CELLS WENT UP THREE HUNDRED POINTS,” and I said, “Great,” and he said, “YOU REALLY OUGHT TO TRY IT; THE ONLY DRAWBACK WAS THE FLULIKE SYMPTOMS I EXPERIENCED,” and I said, “I’ll think about it,” and then I fled to the gym floor and wondered whether he ever needed to use a speakerphone and thought maybe I could try to recruit him to ACT UP demos to lead chants where we didn’t have permits for megaphones and wondered whether this was a new ism, internalized HIV-o-phobism, or just personal privacy or simply the desire to tell others one-on-one my seropositive status myself before, during, or after seduction attempts.
I once saw a panel where a black lesbian feminist spent her entire speech denying she was speaking for all black lesbian feminists. I’m embarrassed that on some level my work is just one prolonged apology, including this speech. I’ve felt fraudulent my entire life: At this conference, surrounding myself with writers somehow legitimizes the doubt that I am a writer. I feel spectacularly unqualified to talk from the viewpoint of AIDS symptomatic individuals. Nevertheless, I think it’s important to self-identify publicly as being on the HIV-AIDS spectrum. It’s difficult. I wrote a piece about taking AZT for The Village Voice biweekly AIDS column last March and told my mom about it so she wouldn’t read it on page-six gossip columns first, and then the piece was bumped for a newsworthy item. It has been continuously bumped for newsworthy items and I have this dreadful fear that they will run this piece the week after I die. I wrote an extremely personal piece for
Fame
on AIDS drugs and problems with the system of drug development and approval;
Fame
went under with my article at the presses. I sent it to
Wigwag
and the next day I read
Wigwag
went under. If anyone knows of any bothersome magazines better left unpublished, let me know and perhaps I can sink them, too.
I’m wearing a Diseased Pariah button (“KISS ME, I’M A DISEASED PARIAH”) given to me by
Diseased Pariah News’s
cranky editor to co-opt and reclaim a derogatory term, albeit with a black-humor smirk, much as “queer” has been recently reclaimed. I think it’s great when bisexual women identify as lesbians, when straight men and women support ACT UP. I was initially somewhat conflicted when I found out an HIV-negative person claimed he had AIDS to a news reporter at an ACT UP demo last year: Was he cheapening the suffering and nobility of someone who did have AIDS? But in ACT UP/New York, we have made a conscious decision to say we are all HIV-positive if arrested so the police don’t split us up. The HIV-negative person was acting in solidarity.
I’m living in prospective dread. Sometimes I feel I’m an accident waiting to happen. Maybe I’d be a more appropriate panel member in five years; maybe that would be too late. I could have a narrow window of vulnerability. Now I’m on the sidelines, vicariously experiencing symptoms through hospital visits, treatment and data newsletters, medical reports, and the
Physicians’ Desk Reference.
I’m waiting in line for the amusement-park ride. I have that increasingly popular fantasy to booby-trap myself with dynamite near death and explode in anger literally and figuratively at Jesse Helms. I have a goal of getting five books out, enough to make a mark, although this is shockingly egocentric; I feel like a dog marking trees and fire hydrants for posterity. It is extremely doubtful that issue will ever result from my spilt seed, unless someone can ultracentrifuge HIV out of my semen. On the other hand, I know, like every other teenager (my psychological age), that I will live forever.
Certain autobiographical elements inevitably filter into my fiction. I try to deal with sex as honestly or dishonestly as I do in life. In
Eighty-Sixed
I felt it was important to be graphic about sex, since I was extremely graphic about that truly obscene subject, death. The Puritan in me consciously avoided the erotic: I didn’t want to pander or arouse. I wrote the most graphic scenes with clinical detachment. Blame it on six thousand years of Jewish guilt. If I can’t have fun, why should anybody else? My next book,
Spontaneous Combustion,
a collection of stories disingenuously marketed as neither novel nor short stories, follows the continuing saga of Benjamin Joseph Rosenthal. It contains several stories with strong sexual content. In one story, Benjamin has a relationship with a seronegative person. I deal with elements of disclosure, sexual risks, and safe sex here. Gays call straights breeders. I myself am a person without color. I’m sure we’ll come up with a derogatory term for neggies soon enough: Aseptic? Hermetically sealed? Sheltered? Or maybe just shy. David Wojnarowicz and Phil Zwickler collaborated on a short movie called Fear
of
Disclosure, in which Zwickler on voice-over talks of a sexual apartheid arising between positives and negatives. Yet I certainly don’t feel people have an unalienable right to have sex with whomever they want. It takes two to tango (or, in certain cases, more: Adultery requires at least three). The slippery paradox is that when you disclose your HIV status to someone mature, it usually won’t make a difference; however, if you are responsible enough to disclose your status to someone whose emotions are stronger than his intellect, he will respond with visceral fear, no matter how safe the sex might be. I personally am annoyed at those who don’t get tested now. People who say HIV doesn’t cause AIDS might as well say that sperm plus ovum don’t cause pregnancy. Those intangibles who aren’t tested who don’t want to have sex with those who have been are intellectually fraudulent. Yet every informed individual has a perfect right to make any decision she or he wants to.
I personally feel much more comfortable having intimate relations with someone who is HIV-positive. A friend told me that he would tell a prospective sexual partner that he was HIV-positive, but not that he had AIDS. There are levels of stratification: people who have sex only with blonds with T-cell ranges of 250—350 and penises between five and nine inches. AZT-phobes may have difficulty dating AZT-philes, much as carnivores do dating vegetarians. Characters in my stories use subtle ways of disclosing their status, by saying “I started going to ACT UP after I tested positive” or “My nebulizer’s broken—may I borrow yours?” or “After I tell you I’m HIV-positive and you run screaming from the room, can I give you a sensual massage using only my tongue?” It’s become just one more potentially disastrous secret to divulge to a prospective boyfriend, along with “I’m incapable of long-term relationships,” “I have a lover,” or “I live in New Jersey.”
I wrote
Eighty-Sixed
under a generalized dread. I took the HIV-ANTIBODY test the morning that I delivered my manuscript to my editor, expecting a chance of one in a hundred of acceptance and slightly higher odds on turning out positive. After I got my results, I became consumed with the insane fear that the normal publication delays for such trivial things as editing, catalog copy, getting blurb quotes, selling it at a sales conference, and then getting advance orders from bookstores were all part of a conspiracy to delay so I might have a posthumous publication—books of the recently deceased sell so much more, and there’s a lesser likelihood of an audit by the estate; no one would be constantly nagging to be taken on a publicity tour, and so on. Although earlier drafts of a few stories in
Spontaneous Combustion
were written before, the bulk of them were written under the malevolent cloud of HIV- positivity. The content appears to me to be the same anxiety-ridden prose.
Writing is hard enough without disability. I go through endless avoidance activities: dusting the plastic blow-up pink flamingos, checking for the mail hourly, cleaning ashtrays although I don’t smoke. I even have a full-time job, programming computers and mismanaging personnel, exclusively designed to avoid writing. I was hysterical after dapsone turned my entire body into a five-foot radish. It is difficult to write a review of a Canadian novel for an esteemed publication that is due the following morning (not, as previously assumed, the day after) at midnight when discovering a crab louse that had somehow miraculously escaped three cleans ings with A200. It is difficult to write notes for a session on disability and sexuality in a faraway city between bathroom sprints after drinking a gallon of Colyte flavored with sugar-free powdered lemonade, in preparation for a colonoscopy the following afternoon, another senseless diagnostic test undergone in the interest of better bilking the insurance mill.
HIV/AIDS pretty much covers the spectrum of disability: People can go blind, become paralyzed, get dementia. Some drugs have side effects of lowering desire. Robert Ferro wrote a beautiful scene in
Second Son
in which two men with AIDS simply slept together. In
Afterlife,
Paul Monette honestly described sexual dysfunction in a relationship between two HIV-positive AIDS widowers. Gary Indiana wrote of sex, desire, and neurotic fear of AIDS in
Horse Crazy.
In my book
Eighty-Sixed,
I wrote a reductio-ad-absurdum list of safe-sex guidelines in the age of anxiety. Allan Barnett’s “Philostorgy, Now Obscure,” which has the distinction of being the first story in The
New
Yorker with a gay man who has had more than two sexual partners in the past ten years, had a touching love scene between two ex-lovers, which for purely esthetic reasons didn’t make it into the magazine. Peter McGehee’s exuberant freewheeling sex in
Boys like
Us seems just like the old days, only now with condoms.
HIV/AIDS differs from many disabilities in that it is generally progressive, thus short-term. A few years ago the five-year fatality rate after a defining opportunistic infection was eighty-five percent. With medical progress, AIDS is evolving into a chronic, manageable disease, like diabetes, but this may not happen for the same five years, or for ten years, or for more. It’s hard for me to write about AIDS: It’s difficult to face yourself, confront your worst fears. I’m by nature a cynic, a pessimist. On the other hand, it’s cheaper than therapy. On the (third?) hand, my former therapist died last year; I need not specify of what. It’s also difficult to write about sex. Sex is a very private act. A certain part of me doesn’t want to reveal everything, the frailties contained in the sexual act. But the best writing for me confronts the most difficult issues. Being a New York creature, I thrive on stress.
My editor has given me complete support in writing about sex and writing about HIV—although he decided against including “Queer and Loathing at the FDA” in Spontaneous Combustion because he felt it would confuse people into thinking that my writing wasn’t fiction at all. Books dealing with HIV/AIDS aren’t going to sell like Danielle Steel, but neither are books with primarily gay content. I write about sex and sexuality in a safe context as most do—even Dennis Cooper’s ritual disembowelment scenes don’t involve HIV transmission. My aim is to reflect experiences of being HIV-positive and gay life so people can recognize their feelings and feel less isolated.
There are an estimated 1.5 million HIV-positive individuals in the U.S. This estimate hasn’t changed over the past few years. I guess we can all stop demonstrating and go home now: The epidemic is over, according to the government. But I have a sneaking suspicion that things will continue to get worse before they get better. I feel compelled to testify. I will continue to write about AIDS as long as I am able to because, in a sense, there really is no other topic.
I wrote this piece for a panel at the second Out Write conference for gay and lesbian writers in 1991 in San Francisco. I was placed on a panel called “Writing and Disability.” I felt somewhat illegitimate. Allan Barnett was offered my spot first; he declined, and proceeded to give a painful and maudlin paper on the difficulties of writing with AIDS for a fiction-writing panel. (He died on August 14, 1991.) I didn’t have access to a personal computer: I was on vacation in San Francisco and hadn’t finished this paper when I left New York. Consequently, it was handwritten. I had no idea how long it would take to read. At the conclusion of the panel, a lesbian complimented me on it, then proceeded to lecture me because the two men on our panel spoke for twice as long as the women. Luckily for me, no one from the audience addressed me during the question-and-answer period of the panel discussion. I am terrified of impromptu questions. This piece appeared in a somewhat different form in
NYQ.
It served as my introduction to the magazine. I was somewhat reluctant to submit it, as
NYQ
had published a piece about AIDS and writing a few weeks earlier.

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