Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone (6 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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Another Michael rubs the back of my neck.
Stephen from the Issues Committee tells us about the Bush initiative, which we expect will be unveiled on Friday, to preempt our demo. This proposal theoretically should speed up drug trials: The FDA would give tentative approval to drugs after phase-2 trials, and final approval after phase 3. The FDA would be more involved in planning trials. On the surface, this sounds promising. But Stephen explains that it’s just reshuffling the same deck of cards. Former debutante Anne, our media expert, demonstrates the proper response for TV and radio. We shouldn’t give thoughtful and well-reasoned commentary: We should talk in direct, simple statements; we should talk in headlines. Anne supplies what is destined to be the cry of the nineties: “It’s a lie, it’s a sham, it won’t work!” We all chant in unison.
True Stories, Part III
 
Peter was dead for a month before someone finally returned my last message. We had both gone on our respective trips: He went to L.A., and I went to Scotland. I suppose I received a postcard from him postmortem. I called once and his best friend, Amy, answered the phone; she said he was very ill and that they were looking for a twenty-four-hour nurse; it was only a matter of time.
Dazed and Confused
 
My alarm goes off at 4:45 A.M. on Saturday. I stagger into the bathroom and sneer at the mirror. Outside it’s raining. I toss some magazines I had gotten for the bus into my backpack. Search for an umbrella. I’ve left my five serviceable umbrellas at pornographic-movie theaters, art galleries, cocktail lounges, and other disreputable venues: My sole remaining one is the pink fag number. The bus shouldn’t leave until 5:30; there’s no point in being early. I decide to forgo the cab and take the subway for that proletariat feel.
I’m not the only one subcomatose on the subway at 5:10 A.M. The feds have cordoned off my car and declared it a fashion emergency. A woman in her forties, clad in a pant suit resembling a bad Basquiat done on heroin, snores caustically. One man sleeps on his back, reeking of urine. The rest have their heads buried at the chest, against the window.
Cheery ubiquitous Brian from the Bronx is there, a bright beam in the haze of radical somnambulists. No one should be allowed to smile before 4:00 P.M. I put on my sunglasses and pretend he doesn’t exist. Coffee is quaffed; donuts are devoured. People mill about aimlessly. I find a kindred spirit. The bus shows up an hour late. We file listlessly onto the bus, preparing to catch up on the missing hours of sleep. All is quiet, save for the lesbian in drag who converses with the certified hair-emergency about the eternal verities: relationships, therapy, and life after high school. I feel old, wizened, decrepit, fossilized. The driver decides to make us chill out by turning the AC on high. He yells at someone for opening the hatch. Why do we collect a tip for him at the end of the journey? The reflex of the two-dollar-per-person rent levied every Monday? Because we are incapable of cognitive action at this point.
Dentists are rumored to be in Washington this weekend, along with the Ukrainians. I wonder if some AIDS activists will organize a terrorist action to steal dental dams en masse.
Bamboozled into the Conference
 
The bus drops us off in front of a junior-high school. I’ll be sleeping with radicals tonight. I’ve signed up for group housing in a seminary, instead of staying at a hotel, in order to undergo as many hardships as possible: living the gritty, sweaty, low-budget activist lifestyle. I want to take a shower and lie down for a nap. Unfortunately, group housing is unavailable until the evening. I have no other recourse than to attend the AIDS-activist teach-in.
I stagger to the registration desk, to find out there’s a sliding-scale fee of ten to twenty dollars for the conference. No one from New York City was apprised of this. Raggedy Maria, surrounded by her ever-streaming hair, sits on the steps outside and says, “Don’t pay it.” Washington organizers grumble that if ACT UP/ New York had given them more financial support, the fee wouldn’t have been necessary.
As we file into the auditorium (I’ve paid ten dollars, because I have no intention of going to the Sunday ACT NOW conference, which sounds as if it will be like an eight-hour meeting of ACT UP dominated by the radical fringe), two men hand us stickers that say “TOUCHED BY A PWA.” Both side walls are decorated with large paintings announcing the “Why I Will Vote Essay Contest ‘88.” Harried Heidi from New York, who was asked to speak a scant fifteen minutes earlier to preserve gender parity (because no women had been scheduled to deliver opening remarks), informs us of this fact irritatedly, and since she has nothing prepared, she bitches about the conference registration fee instead. This is the perfect opening for the two-day event. Contingents are battling in internecine warfare and the conference hasn’t even begun!
A man from PISD (the latest acronym, standing for People with Immune System Disorders, created at the San Francisco ACT NOW conference a few months ago in the name of inclusiveness [the more the merrier!], a new subgroup of disaffiliated and debilitated, which includes PWAs, PWARCs (Persons With AIDS-Related Complex), People with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and People with Existential Ennui, among others) gives a rousing speech of unification and sexual liberation. He thrills us with his vibrant testosterone. I wonder why he doesn’t give out his phone number. The stage is flanked by “SILENCE = DEATH” and “ACTION = LIFE” banners; the latter is ACT UP/L.A.’s flip version, pink on white, as opposed to New York’s pink on black. Keep your sunny side up!
The afternoon is divided into four time slots; at each time, there are four sessions running. I go to a session on AIDS education. A California activist talks about the latest quarantine proposition on the November ballot. While we are stuck with demons and the figurative Lyndon LaRouches and William Dannemeyers, these poor souls have to devote all their time to fighting the literal ones. An educator from Eugene, Oregon, states that her hometown is the amphetamine capital of the world. Hmm, wonder how much a roundtrip ticket to Eugene is. She is trying to educate gay men in her town about safe sex, but an estimated thirty percent have unprotected anal intercourse in Eugene. Cancel my reservation. After twenty minutes of general discussion, the meeting is broken into three submeetings by the facilitators, who have had only two hours of sleep the previous night, because several participants are complaining that it isn’t possible to get to her or his particular issue in such a large setting. At that point, I decide to constitute my own group and disappear. I fear I would be too conspicuous in my silence. A few months earlier, at the San Francisco ACT NOW conference, groups decomposed into smaller and smaller groups, eventually disintegrating into elementary particles: quarks generally of the strange flavor.
I return to the auditorium, where a woman of color is speaking. After fifteen minutes she interjects that she didn’t know she was going to speak and apologizes for not having a proper presentation planned. I listen to the litany of outrages: Although 14,000 AIDS cases have been reported in Africa to date, a more realistic estimate is 140,000; on the average, women die six months after diagnosis, while gay white men last two years; currently AIDS is spreading primarily through intravenous-drug users via contaminated needles and their sexual partners, drug-abuse treatment programs have not expanded to help stem the epidemic, and there are no comprehensive needle-exchange programs in the United States. She accuses the government of conducting genocide with AIDS, as smallpox was deliberately spread to the Indians in infected blankets: This killed half of the American Indian population. At the end of her session, the room opens up for questions, and it’s an ACT UP/N.Y meeting in microcosm, with commies, pinkos, members of the Workers’ World Party, socialists, and other socialites; the solution is reached through petitions, revolutions, and cocktail parties.
Some members from the ACT UP/N.Y Issues Committee conduct a one-hour version of the FDA teach-in. A cute blond named Mark with a necklace of worry beads is surprisingly articulate as he wends his way through several decades of government regulations and historical precedents. During a break, United Fruit Company, a political-comedy group, does a few skits: A preacher and four singers perform homilies to sodomy; a vampire is killed with a wastebasket filled with used condoms; a drag queen, mistakenly arrested at a demonstration, comes up with a complete change of clothing from her clutch purse.
I scramble downstairs to catch the tail end of a session with John James, who publishes
AIDS Treatment News.
A few radical faeries sit interspersed with the rest in the cafeteria. You know the type: beards and skirts. I’m falling asleep, barely conscious at this point. John James praises Larry Kramer and Project Inform for bringing the drug problem to the attention of the news. Someone asks about the syphilis-is-AIDS theory, and the typhoid quack on Long Island. Penicillin doesn’t seem to work, but the killed polio virus looks promising; unfortunately, the supply has been cut off. The hottest drugs now are CD4 and ddI. I don’t know what the acronyms stand for.
A British Canadian long-hair in colorful tights talks about having to smuggle drugs across the border: The only approved treatments there are AZT and aerosol pentamidine. The word
empowering
is used at least three times this afternoon. An activist says that community involvement is empowering. I reach for my gun. There seem to be three levels of commitment: politically acceptable (and tax-deductible) service and health organizations, otherwise known as death services, underscoring the adage “the only good fag with AIDS is a dead one”; alternative treatments (holistic, guerrilla buyers’ groups, etc.); and political commitment (preaching to the converted, we are designated level three). As usual, the White Middle-Class Gay Men bemoan the fact that the political groups have so few members other than WMCGM: Is it lack of interest? Poor outreach? And, of course, a non-white, non-middle-class gay man in our midst takes extreme umbrage at this remark; I make my getaway on the pretense of running to the john.
The bathroom (a stall-less toilet, a single urinal, and a sink) is identified by a sheet taped to the door, with the inscription “MEN” (crossed out), “BOYS” (crossed out), “MEN” (crossed out), “SAFE-SEX CLINIC-BRAILLE VERSION.” The alternative gender’s powder room has a similar sign: “WOMEN,” “WOMYN,” “WOMIN.” At this point, I find myself in an altered state brought on by sleep deprivation: My interpretation of these events is necessarily deranged.
We are going to the seminary at 7:30. Unfortunately, the candlelight vigil at the Quilt is scheduled for 7:00. I sit on the floor and wait, passively, watching an attractive man in a leather jacket place a sticker on the floor. The sticker says “A GAY MAN WAS HERE.” He appends by way of explanation, “But the conference was boring so he left.” According to Susan Sontag, the only intelligence worth having is skeptical, critical, and analytical. I dig.
We walk over to the church. Luggageless, curious Michael joins us. He had gone over to the ceremony at the Ellipse and met us on the way back to the now-locked junior-high school. Michael tells us that some ACT UP members started chanting “Silence equals death” during the candlelight march. Michael tells us in wide-eyed amazement that gradually the chant spread through the entire march. Jesus Christ! I think to myself.
It’s just a metaphor, for godsake.
It wasn’t meant to be taken literally. But some people just can’t keep their goddamned mouths shut for five minutes without bursting into some chant.
We are staying in the basement of a church, which has dormitory bunk beds and several showers. There are enough beds and couches for everyone; unfortunately, we’re short on sheets and pillowcases. Charlie from Toronto makes an emergency run for bedding. I join a group of hardy rebels for a quick dinner, thinking I will collapse at ten. But we wait for news from Charlie. We finally leave at ten, when I’m just about to pass out from exhaustion. After a seemingly endless Metro ride and an equally taxing walk, we arrive at an Ethiopian restaurant, where we wait another half hour for Charlie. I pause to savor the oxymoronic irony of Ethiopian restaurants. I’ve seen too many posters for famine relief. Another Michael defends Megamouth during our hearty repast. “He’s not afraid of looking silly to make a point.”
“But exactly what is his point?”
I’m too tired for cynicism.
We return by late-night cab. I stagger to bed, an upper bunk. Beneath me a woman sleeps. Eleven frazzled radicals are sleeping in this room. Someone asks me my name, shortly before I lose consciousness. “I like to know the names of the people I sleep with.” How eighties. I sigh, remembering the old days.
Making Out on the Names Quilt
 
On Sunday I fall madly in lust with a Californian named Bill. Bill’s former lover died of AIDS four years ago; his current lover’s former lover died of AIDS three years ago; his current lover has ARC. Love among the ruins. If only I had an attention span sufficiently long enough to have a lover. As an act of social disobedience we make out on the Quilt.
The Names Quilt covers the equivalent of seven football fields on the Ellipse. Three-by-six panels—ranging from simple, touching, and heartbreaking to campy and outrageous—memorialize the dead. They range from a plain sheet of fabric with a Perry Ellis label to an elaborate sequined piano for “Watermelon Diet” Liberace. Even Roy Cohn, the most evil queen who ever lived, is remembered with several panels.

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