Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone (15 page)
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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
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35. Lynch Jesse Helms.
36. Fight sexism. Join NOW. March in the next pro-choice demonstration in Washington.
37. Fight racism. Let your elected officials know it is unacceptable to play golf at a restricted club.
38. Call for full funding of the Ryan White CARE Act.
39. Visit a friend in the hospital.
40. Go to benefits for AIDS organizations.
41. Donate money to AIDS organizations.
42. Volunteer time at local AIDS organizations.
43. Date people who work at AIDS organizations, or at least take them out to lunch.
44. Hang an AIDS banner from a prominent location (a highway overpass, a tall building, a church steeple, Marky Mark’s underwear).
45. Buy more of those sexy
Red, Hot and Blue!
T-shirts.
46. Disrupt a politician’s speech, demanding a response to the AIDS crisis.
47. Eviscerate Jesse Helms.
48. Organize a Tupperware party and distribute condoms, fact sheets, and safer-sex information.
49. Interrupt a live-news broadcast with AIDS-specific information and demands for continued coverage of the AIDS epidemic.
50. Become knowledgeable about the crisis. Learn the science. You are your best expert.
51. Combat AIDS-phobia in the workplace.
52. Nuke Jesse Helms.
53. Remember your friends who’ve died of AIDS.
54. Volunteer at an HIV ward.
55. Be sex-positive.
56. Fight to get women, IV-drug users, and people of color into drug trials.
57. Send postcards to the CDC demanding that it expand the definition of AIDS to include gynecological manifestations.
58. Tie up a discriminatory insurance company’s fax and phone lines for a day.
59. Eliminate Jesse Helms with extreme prejudice.
60. Get arrested at an AIDS demonstration.
61. Stage a massive die-in on the lawn of a repressive politician’s home (say, Jesse Helms‘s, for example).
62. Cover a repressive politician’s home (say, Jesse Helms’s, for example) with a condom the size of the Goodyear blimp.
63. Understand AIDS as a medical and political crisis.
64. Listen to Larry Kramer.
65. Don’t believe everything you hear.
66. Don’t believe everything you read in the papers.
67. Fight against AIDS hysteria. Spitting at a police officer is not “assault with a deadly weapon.”
68. Be compassionate. We are all innocent victims.
69. Demand that public officials address the burgeoning TB epidemic.
70. Lobby for increased drug-treatment slots.
71. Flay Jesse Helms alive.
72. Combat homelessness. Support housing, not shelters.
73. Donate furniture to Housing Works, AIDS Resource Center, and other AIDS organizations that house the homeless.
74. Join ACT UP.
75. Volunteer to be on a community constituent group to give input on trials run by the AIDS Clinical Trials Group.
76. Build a mock graveyard of tombstones of people who have died from the government’s neglect of the AIDS crisis and place it in a prominent location.
77. Fill a casket with bloody bones and place it in a prominent location with AIDS-related messages.
78. Set up a table or hand out flyers in a local shopping mall, town square, or community center.
79. Wheat-paste attention-grabbing posters or flyers around your community.
80. Organize a teach-in on AIDS-related issues at a local school, YW/MCA, YW/MHA, PTA meeting, church, mosque, or synagogue.
81. Donate services for a fund-raiser. Perform your amateur-magician act; read palms; tell horoscopes; kiss strangers; perform acupuncture; swallow swords; recite humorous anecdotes; make huge batches of marshmallow treats.
82. Never share needles. Clean needles and works with bleach between uses.
83. Don’t be afraid to date someone with AIDS.
84. Although I haven’t gotten any symptoms yet, my T-cells are lousy enough to qualify whenever they get around to changing the goddamned definition.
85. I’m in the book.
86. Don’t hide from AIDS. Go to plays and movies that deal with the crisis. Read books that address AIDS.
87. Rent an advertising billboard and let your community know that the AIDS crisis is not over.
88. Fight against quarantines of HIV-positive people.
89. Cuisinart Jesse Helms.
90. Share your knowledge with your friends.
91. Organize a postcard mail-in campaign to a local legislator asking him or her to lobby the President for national leadership in response to the AIDS crisis.
92. Write letters to the editor of your local newspaper, discussing AIDS-related issues.
93. Phone in to local radio talk-shows and discuss AIDS-related issues.
94. Ask your local library to prominently display books and literature on AIDS and AIDS-related issues.
95. Organize a massive demonstration in front of a local government building that will raise public awareness about AIDS-RELATED issues and the lack of federal leadership in responding to the AIDS crisis.
96. Take over the offices of a local politician, insurance company, or drug manufacturer: Chain yourselves to a desk or doorway and refuse to leave until your demands have been met.
97. Kill Jesse Helms. And while you’re at it, take care of William Dannemeyer.
98. Do something every day to fight the AIDS crisis: Write a letter, make a phone call, attend a benefit, sleep with a PWA, set yourself on fire on the steps of the White House as a gesture of anger at the President’s shoddy response to the AIDS crisis, write a check, share a drinking glass, visit a friend in the hospital, etc.
99. Don’t burn yourself out trying to do everything all at once. Take care of yourself.
100. Use your imagination.
My friend Jim Baggett asked me to contribute a list for a benefit program. LIFEbeat, a nonprofit AIDS fund-raising organization associated with the music industry, was kicking off with a concert by the Pet Shop Boys, one of my favorite groups. I gave him a list of ten, and he said that I could do better than that. Incorporating some suggestions developed for the Kennebunkport action, when six busloads of ACT UP members invaded President Bush’s summer retreat on Labor Day in 1991, I was able to get up to around ninety. I simply interspersed ten ways to kill Jesse Helms: Think of it as filler. I was predictably excoriated in the press. A columnist at the New York Native who didn’t attend the benefit chose to review the program. He chided me for the inappropriateness of attacking Jesse Helms, who had just undergone invasive cancer surgery. In earlier work, I had written against the Native’s AIDS coverage. I felt its editorial slant on AIDS was purely lunatic fringe and completely irresponsible to the gay and lesbian community. And now I had succeeded in achieving a level of ignominy so low that the Native hated me more than Jesse Helms.
Cocktails From Hell
Fidelity is difficult for me in friends, lovers, and drugs. That’s why I’m so pleased that my current personal health-care practitioner has put me on an excitingly varied new regimen of antiretrovirals! Not merely combination therapy, where I repeatedly batter the human immunodeficiency virus with toxic drugs and hope I myself don’t expire from the impact of these blows; not merely alternation therapy, where that squirmy little virus gets a barrage of one-two punches. No, I am now doing alternating combination therapy. One month of AZT and ddI, and the next month of AZT and ddC. Second verse, same as the first. Et cetera ad perpetuity, or until the side effects overwhelm me or they lose effectiveness, which they may already have, or until the next generation of antivirals comes of age or until the insurance runs out or until I get in touch with my inner child.
It’s sort of like subscribing to Harry and David’s Antiretroviral of the Month Club.
I had been taking AZT for more than two years. To be precise, I took my first pill of AZT at an ACT UP meeting on August 28, 1989. The date is emblazoned in my memory only because I forced my fictional alter ego, B. J. Rosenthal, to take his first pill of AZT on the very same date under identical circumstances. Fearing the ravages of premature Alzheimer’s and AIDS-related dementia, I find these mnemonic devices quite helpful. Embarrassingly, a few weeks ago at work I was compelled to leave my office for a brief period on an urgent mission: in search of the Luke Perry cover of
Vanity Fair.
In the interim, I forgot the door combination. I felt sheepish enough to call a co-worker from a pay phone on the street. He slyly gave me the wrong combination.
Vanity Fair.
In the interim, I forgot the door combination. I felt sheepish enough to call a co-worker from a pay phone on the street. He slyly gave me the wrong combination.
Originally appeared in
QW,
September 6, 1992.
So let me state for the written record that I took my first pill of ddI on Monday morning, May 11, 1992, at approximately 6:45 A.M. Actually, I took my first
two
pills at 6:45 A.M. The drug ddI comes in 50 and 100 mg dosages, and my doctor advised 150 mg, twice a day on an empty stomach. I had the script filled the previous Friday; I let it sit over the weekend. No sense in rushing into things. Fools (and Judy Davis) rush in Where Angels Fear to Tread. A friend in Dallas, Texas, who recently found he was seropositive, despite years of rigid precautions save the occasional unprotected blowjob without ejaculation, told me he was planning on canceling a trip the following Tuesday should his T-cells be low enough to warrant starting AZT, because he wanted to monitor his condition under his physician’s care. I told him that he might as well go; he could always Federal Express the daily blood tests to Metpath. As if. Oh, well. These
are
stressful times.
two
pills at 6:45 A.M. The drug ddI comes in 50 and 100 mg dosages, and my doctor advised 150 mg, twice a day on an empty stomach. I had the script filled the previous Friday; I let it sit over the weekend. No sense in rushing into things. Fools (and Judy Davis) rush in Where Angels Fear to Tread. A friend in Dallas, Texas, who recently found he was seropositive, despite years of rigid precautions save the occasional unprotected blowjob without ejaculation, told me he was planning on canceling a trip the following Tuesday should his T-cells be low enough to warrant starting AZT, because he wanted to monitor his condition under his physician’s care. I told him that he might as well go; he could always Federal Express the daily blood tests to Metpath. As if. Oh, well. These
are
stressful times.
So what is ddI like? Imagine a huge white SweetTart the consistency of Kaopectate (that “pleasant-tasting antidiarrheal”). See Figure A to the right, Actual Size. After you’ve finished this article and you’ve read the phone-sex ad on the obverse side, you may cut out the sample ddI pill (Actual Size) for your own personal glory hole.
You can either chew ddI or mix it with water. If you choose to chew it, you will experience a sensation not unlike licking a sex partner’s underarm after he or she used an antiperspirant with aluminum chlorhydrate. I prefer mine with water. I took my second dose of ddI on Monday May 11, at 9:00 P.M., at a meeting of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, at Cooper Union. I had purchased for this eventuality an 11.2-ounce bottle of Evian water, no doubt in tribute to Madonna’s memorable performance in
Truth or Dare.
For some unfathomable reason, the 50 mg pills are just as large as the 100 mg pills. I gingerly opened the bottle and prepared to gently drop my two horse pills down the cavernous mouth. Appallingly enough, the pills were too large to fit. I had to break them up into quarters before shoving them down the mouth of the Evian bottle. I was agitated. I agitated the bottle. I wondered whether there was a brand of bottled water with a wide enough mouth. I myself rarely have problems fitting large objects into my own mouth. I gulped down twelve ounces of a tart, cloudy liquid and considered the alternatives: Chinese herbs, drinking my own urine, or an uncertain and untimely death. Some residue lay at the bottom of the bottle, impossible to dislodge without creating another water-faucet cocktail. I discarded the remains in the nearest receptable.
Truth or Dare.
For some unfathomable reason, the 50 mg pills are just as large as the 100 mg pills. I gingerly opened the bottle and prepared to gently drop my two horse pills down the cavernous mouth. Appallingly enough, the pills were too large to fit. I had to break them up into quarters before shoving them down the mouth of the Evian bottle. I was agitated. I agitated the bottle. I wondered whether there was a brand of bottled water with a wide enough mouth. I myself rarely have problems fitting large objects into my own mouth. I gulped down twelve ounces of a tart, cloudy liquid and considered the alternatives: Chinese herbs, drinking my own urine, or an uncertain and untimely death. Some residue lay at the bottom of the bottle, impossible to dislodge without creating another water-faucet cocktail. I discarded the remains in the nearest receptable.
Henceforth I took my ddI with one or two ounces of water. Less is more. I break the tablets into four or five pieces and then stir them with a teaspoon. My friend Tom used to use cocktail shakers. Perhaps I could host a party of blender drinks: blue whales, saltless strawberry margaritas, and ddI cocktails. Daniel mixed his ddI with orange juice because he couldn’t stand the taste. After a long weekend in Montreal over Memorial Day, I decided New York water mixed better than Canadian water; it must be the mineral content. I considered buying a coffee grinder before remembering that I didn’t drink coffee. Somehow, a mortar and pestle reminded me of high-school chemistry labs and a series of failed experiments: In tenth grade I must have copied my entire chemistry notebook from Robert Strauss, and I ended up with only a C.
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