The anxiety of AIDS
Today, December 1, is World AIDS Day. Doubtless, rallies will be held, solemn promises made, governments nudged to do more. Even as antiretroviral therapy becomes cheaper and preventive methods like PrEP become more common, there is no denying the sly (and open) discrimination still heaped on HIV-positive people.
Battling breast cancer, Susan Sontag wrote about the hierarchy of ailments in 1978: “Cardiac disease implies a weakness, trouble, failure that is mechanical; there is no disgrace, nothing of the taboo that once surrounded people afflicted with TB and still surrounds those who have cancer. The metaphors attached to TB and to cancer imply living processes of a particularly resonant and horrid kind.”
Sontag wrote “Illness as Metaphor”, from which the above extract is taken, before the AIDS epidemic hit the west. In time, she would acknowledge AIDS as the newest malady in a historical chain that puts its carriers beyond the pale of normal society. From gay men to prostitutes, AIDS, at least in its early days, hit those on the fringes the hardest. As last year’s Dallas Buyers Club reiterated, American society, right from the government down to the health agencies, turned a blind eye to the threat from AIDS because the first victims were “dispensable”.
Hearing about the rapid advances in AIDS treatment is a mixed blessing. Of course, as a target audience, it is good to know that should I happen to contract HIV some day, better and cheaper medical care is in the offing. But the relaxation that one feels at the advancement of medical technology must be juxtaposed with the ideology of AIDS and what it means for gay men.
On Planet Romeo, the website for gay men, there are over 500 people online at any time. But the initial thrill of discovering a community can quickly peter out. Within a few months, one comes to realise the depressing lack of choice. The few people one has met, and perhaps slept with, have vanished into the ether. Others have become friends, and therefore, cannot beromantic partners. Still others one may desire intensely but are not interested in one.
The gaze then becomes permanently acquisitive. One looks out everywhere. Not merely for companionship, but a sensation of completeness. Strangers’ eyes, their gestures, the tilt of their head can become momentary pleasure points. Interaction with others can become premised on their beauty. And love can be sudden and fleeting.
Love then can be had from anyone. Picture a gay man. In the absence of commitment, he has opted for sex as a means tointimacy (itself an act of love, if you will). Picture him orchestrate a sexual encounter. He is doing this after some time and is anxious to please and take back a good memory. He wants his recollection of this upcoming moment to be gentle — his love life, after all, is circumscribed by moments like this one — and he is keen to build it to an agreeable eventuality.
The man he meets, let’s call him X, is tender with him. They share a wordless space that is near - sacred in its simulation of his long-held desires. Let’s assume that X is the top, viz, the one who penetrates, and enters him gently. At this point, he does not wish to reprimand X or bring a halt to the proceedings by asking X to put on a condom. It’s not that he is horny, or careless. If anything, he is too careful.
As X moves inside him, he wonders if now is the right time to bring up the topic of the condom. But he reminds himself, again, that what he has right now is special, and to remember it as so and to be able to return to it as so, he must let the moment overtake him. He stays quiet.
Later, when they are done, he worries. But not enough to get himself tested. Every time the thought seizes his mind, he tells himself it would be a little out of place, even pedantic, to worry about HIV when X had been a vessel of such sweet pleasantness.
Hesticks to this. He is not being mawkish. What he had shared with X was real, more real than worries about his health or his future are. It reminds him of that character in Queer as Folk, a student of Ben’s, who went to a “bug party” –a party where you had indiscriminate sex with people, a few of whom were positive—to be rid of the fear of AIDS once and for all.
No, he is not fatalistic. He loves his life too much, and he is sure he will get tested one of these days. But he also understands the romance of that position—a wish to throw dust at life’s certainties. That day he wanted a little love, and he got a little love, and he would be damned if he let AIDS anxiety play havoc with it.