Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone (5 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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The local coordinator of the FDA action leads the group in our “Seize control” chant. Rumors are flying left and right. “Is it true that the Health and Human Services demo is off?” No. “I heard that ACT UP/Boston is pulling out of the demo.” No. “Is it true that there’s no more housing available in D.C.?” No. ACT NOW is having a lot of problems reconciling the different AIDS-ACTIVIST groups. ACT UP/N.Y. was behind the FDA action; the HHS demo was added at the request of L.A. and S.F., to broaden our goals for maximum inclusiveness. I imagine that ACT NOW’s meetings are just as disruptive as ACT UP’s.
Someone asks the facilitator to repeat the demand: “If there is any on-duty member of the police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or any other law-enforcement agency, you are required by law to identify yourself.”
A policeman identifies himself.
We never expected this to happen. The meeting continues. There were no contingencies. We’re all so tired and jaded, it doesn’t matter anymore. The meeting ends at ten. Half of the group leaves en masse for Sixth Avenue, blowing whistles, shouting slogans, screaming chants. Is this any different from our other demos? Only that as a purely spontaneous demo, an unplanned event, it is unchanneled rage, unfocused anger—the closest thing to a lynch mob. Wanting no part of this, I turn left and head for the subway instead.
True Stories, Part II
 
Robert started crying at lunch because his cat was dying of gingivitis, and Robert’s blood counts were off and his doctor had him take the HIV test and he was certain that his doctor would tell him that the good news was that he was antibody-negative but the bad news was that he had leukemia like his father, and of course Robert was exactly wrong in this particular circumstance, which is to say that he didn’t have leukemia and he was antibody-positive, and what could I do but tell him that, listen, he could fall off the face of this earth and I wouldn’t blink an eye, I’d just continue shoveling down my pasta primavera; a Mack truck could go out of control, mow down several hundred pedestrians, and crash into a plate-glass window, and I would just step over the bodies on my way to the men’s room and deduct five percent from the tip, annoyed at the lack of decorum. You won’t get any sympathy from me. I mean, back in 1981, when the first person died, it was something different. Maybe then it was like Love Story and tragic and dramatic and poignant and full of pathos and grief. But now that everybody’s dropping like flies, who even notices? This is not an attention-getter. This is everyday life.
The Homo Conspiracy
 
I was sworn to secrecy; I’m not supposed to tell anyone about the Homo Conspiracy to take over the world, but life is cheap and so am I. So here’s the deal: After we’ve recruited every Boy Scout and junior programmer analyst, we’re going to place the breeders in camps, with constant disco music, which will either drive them crazy or bring them over to our side.
These are our plans: We’re going to poison the blood supply. We’re going to tattoo William F. Buckley, Jr., on his hindquarters with a branding iron. We’re going to butt-fuck Dannemeyer and then toss him into a concentration camp. We’re going to chug-a-lug Drano and hemorrhage on the Commissioner of Health’s desk. We’re going to slit our wrists and spurt blood from the jugular on the mayor. We’re going to scarf down our favorite diuretics and piss on City Hall; we’re going to mainline horse and vomit in front of the President; we’re going to jerk off on the Pontiff’s personalized toilet seat.
You’ve tried to get rid of us: Now it’s our turn to eliminate you. Imagine a world without breeders. Homos and lezzies sit sipping cappuccino at a cafe on Bleecker Street. We have nothing to worry about: We have enough turkey basters to last us until the next millennium.
Or maybe we’ll just disappear one day. Without us talented
fags
and
dykes,
Broadway will grind to a complete halt, there won’t be a single restaurant left open in the tri-state area, and hair everywhere will be
completely unhinged.
You can’t stop us now: We already control all the major advertising agencies in the country; we’ve bought the media from the kikes. Sometime next year you’ll turn on “Masterpiece Theatre” and watch homo love scenes. The kiddies will see condom commercials during the Saturday-morning cartoons. Lesbo newscasters will eat pussy during the six o‘clock news.
Night of the Living Dead
 
Middle America is scared of us, an army of perverts,
and rightly so!
We are lethal weapons. We are not innocent victims. We kill and kill again. The general population sees us as the walking wounded, an army of lepers, infected with the virus; they will wear their elbow-length yellow-rubber gloves and carry nightsticks. And we’ll shout back: “Gloves are for fisting, not arresting! ”
The most frightening aspect to them, the enemy, is that we can pass. How can you tell if you are surrounded by fags? We don’t lisp anymore. Our wrists aren’t limp. There’s no way to tell us apart from the general population because
we are the general population.
It’s Night of the Living Dead, with pod people everywhere.
Imagine the bravest army ever. Some of us are sick; some of us are covered with lesions; some of us can barely walk; some of us are asymptomatic; some of us are healthy and lending our fullest support to this cause because we are fighting for our lives!
Apologia pro Vito Sua
 
Do you know why I am telling you all of this? Do you think I’m just trying to entertain you with these out-and-out lies? You couldn’t be farther from the truth. I want to terrorize you. I want to spur you into action. I want to show you how fucking angry I am. It took five fucking years for President Ray-Gun to even say the word
AIDS
aloud. He tried to sweep the problem under the rug by creating a commission to come up with some recommendations on the AIDS crisis; he appointed some of the most homophobic and reactionary right-wing lunatics to this commission, including a Catholic cardinal; for a year, this commission met and held hearings, and with some helpful prodding by ACT UP, the commission actually came up with some reasonable recommendations ; and what did Ronnie “Bitburg” Reagan do? Ignored his own commission.
I can understand how Larry Kramer self-destructed. It’s too late for a rational dialogue with the government, when it responds only with delays, malice, and all of this talk about the “general population” not being at risk. I want you to be afraid of us. I have blood in my eyes and a fire in my belly and I am tired of watching my friends lose their minds and control of their bodily functions. At this rate, Europe will probably come up with the cure, but in the meantime there’s a lot that the U.S. can be doing. The government lies to us every day. Tony Fauci of NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) had to be up against the wall in a congressional hearing before he admitted to Congress-man Ted Weiss, a saint in anyone’s book, that he simply did not have the staff for the paperwork; aerosol pentamidine’s approval for general use was delayed for over a year and a half because
he did not have the staff.
Why did it take him a congressional hearing to tell someone he was understaffed? Because there’s no goddamned leadership and the President couldn’t care less.
Flashbacks and Postmortems
 
It’s the final Monday meeting before the action, and Bobby B. sings the new ACT UP rap song. Suddenly I find myself in the throes of a drug flashback (acid? isoprinosine? azidothymidine?): I am four years old, hands tied to the crib to prevent me from “touching” myself, totally
disempowered,
standing with the black-and-white TV on in the next room. It’s time for “The Mickey Mouse Club” show. “Sing us a song, Bobby,” chorus the Mouseketeers, and Bobby straps on his guitar, strums a few chords, and begins to sing. Bobby B. finishes his catchy rap and everyone applauds. I sit on my hands. I know, it’s just professional jealousy. Why aren’t writers ever so lionized? I don’t want to have to become an alcoholic to be famous.
National Public Radio tapes our meeting.
The Quilt fuckup has been resolved. After four thousand phone calls to the Parks Service and negotiations with the Ukrainians, the Millennial Society had agreed to withdraw to the Washington Monument area and ceded the Ellipse to the Quilt, in exchange for the use of some of the Names Project’s sound equipment.
Gregg of pirate earrings and swarthy sexuality tells us that the FDA has canceled most meetings for the day of the demo, and that employees are being encouraged to take the day off. “We have already seized control.” He leads the “Seize control” chant again. On Wednesday, there will be the last pre-action meeting. My affinity group, a nameless ragtag collection of misfits and otherwise unaffiliated homorganisms (we had formed at last Monday’s meeting; vanilla activists who wanted to be arrested for transgressing police lines), will be meeting an hour earlier.
One of the several thousand Michaels tongues me in the ear during the meeting and I lose my balance as a miniature tsunami crashes through my inner ear. Is this a proposal of marriage? I can no longer think straight.
Megamouth Michael gives a postmortem of last week’s disastrous demo. One ACT UP member was arrested for assaulting a policeman, clearly a trumped-up charge: Faggots don’t hit police, they just dress like them in riverside cocktail lounges. Megamouth was also arrested for disturbing the peace. Megamouth complains about rumors that some people are blaming him for inciting the group to do unsafe actions. To increase the level of paranoia, he tells us that the police are playing hardball now.
Stephen Joseph, the health commissioner, has been getting a lot of phone calls in the past few weeks; last Wednesday, the police woke up and questioned an individual at his home at five in the morning. Our legal-support team hands out a flyer titled “SILENCE = GOLDEN”: We don’t have to say anything to the police. It’s the old “right to remain silent” clause. Some splinter group called Surrender, Dorothy may be behind the phone calls. “Don’t call Stephen Joseph unless you’re a close friend,” we are advised.
I leave the endless meeting at ten for dessert: another sugar infusion and a caffeine injection.
Pornography, Music Videos, and Blood
 
I’m pissed about the timing of Wednesday’s meeting: I’ll miss the vice-presidential debate. I never watch television. I bought the boob tube only as an accessory for my VCR. I try to keep an even split between the adult and nonadult movies I rent. Luckily, PBS carries the debates an hour and a half later: It was doing live coverage of some Wagner operafest, and some of the divas had a mud-wrestling fight in the middle, forcing a delay in broadcasting the debates.
My affinity group meets in the pantry, with yet another Michael facilitating. In our disaffected group, this is pretty much equivalent to taking control. No one has any specific ideas. We just want a simple, vanilla arrest: to transgress police boundaries, get arrested, post bail or pay our fines, and be back in time for the evening news. Some of us are willing to get dragged off by the police, but only as long as the cameras are covering us. None of us is interested in dragging out the civil-disobedience thing to the point of noncooperation with the police, refusal to identify ourselves at the courts (or using pseudonyms like Tony Fauci or names of recently deceased PWAs): We all have gainful employ. We have a discussion about why we are protesting at the FDA and why we are prepared to get arrested. As with any group of more than three people, one or two people talk constantly for the sake of self-expression, and the rest nod agreement. Consensus is reached. Michael H. has devised a theme for our group: Tell Me Why. He has composed a list of around ten questions, like “Why has the FDA approved only 2 drugs when 130 drugs have proven effective against HIV in vitro?,” and so on. He is going to make up signs with questions on one side and “TELL ME WHY” on the obverse side. Another member of our contingent volunteers to make armbands. And we have our own theme song, “Tell Me Why,” by the Communards. Our support person, who won’t be arrested but will track us through the legal system and carry our valuables and medication, hands us an information sheet to fill out. This is our second sheet: We filled another one out at the CD training session. I just love, filling out forms. The form has the usual categories : home and work phone numbers, savings-account number, religious disaffiliation, hidden tattoos on buttocks and ankles, and so on.
The group meeting starts at 7:30. We get yet another form to fill out: The earlier forms have been discarded. I’m pleased that ACT UP/ACT NOW has effectively demonstrated the imitative fallacy by mimicking the FDA’s bureaucracy.
Gregarious Michael asks us what we’re going to do in less than a week. “Seize control!” is the resounding reply. We’ve already started to seize control. For the week of the protest, all FDA employees will be using photo IDs. Police will guard the entrances. There will be barricades on Tuesday. The woman in charge of public relations at the FDA calls Michael daily. The FDA is scared. It thinks we will be dumping bags of contaminated blood on the premises.
Peter shows a video of the FDA. We get handouts describing the physical layout from the Metro stop to the building. A sympathetic judge has volunteered to keep the courts open for us on Wednesday; Maryland celebrates Columbus Day on Wednesday, October 12. Nearby jails are overcrowded; the police may move us to a high-school gymnasium. Attracted by the fetish appeal of high-school locker rooms, several more members of ACT UP immediately volunteer to get arrested.

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