About five years ago I had sex with this guy I met at a party. In the bathroom of his apartment I noticed a dozen bottles of pills–all familiar AIDS meds. The fact that he had AIDS wasn’t an issue and didn’t cause me anxiety, as we didn’t do anything unsafe. The sex was fine, but the events before and after were weird, and we didn’t speak to each other again. When we would find ourselves standing next to each other in a bar or in line at the grocery store we would pretend not to recognize each other. At those times I would comfort myself by thinking, “Well, he’ll be dead soon, and I won’t have to deal with this bullshit anymore.” And when I did stop seeing him around I assumed he’d died.
Thanks to new drugs, PWAs–People With AIDS, in case you haven’t been paying attention–don’t seem to be dying anymore. Men and women near death just a few short months ago are running marathons, dumping boyfriends, being dumped by boyfriends who’d been quietly looking forward to being widows, and checking out of AIDS hospices. Stories proclaiming the end of AIDS have also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Advocate, the Wall Street Journal, Slate, New York magazine. Even ER has aired a back-from-the-dead episode.
But it was the deaths of presentable, middle-class, well-spoken white people that made AIDS a crisis–the poster people, gay and straight, who have access to the new drugs, the people who don’t seem to be dying anymore.
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Access to drugs is now the central controversy. For activists, the fact that “people are dying” is no longer the issue. The issue is that some people are not. At the extreme end, a discredited ACT-UP chapter in San Francisco–one of the few surviving chapters of a once mighty movement–is demanding that people with AIDS reject the new drugs. It can’t be because the drugs don’t work–the evidence that they do is overwhelming. The only possible reason to urge people to refuse the drugs is so that more will die, thereby keeping the pressure on government and science to produce a one-world solution. If the dying in the West slows or stops, the pressure will ease. ACT-UP–whose very first slogan, before “Silence Equals Death,” was “Drugs Into Bodies”–is asking people with AIDS to shut up, refuse drugs, and drop dead.
I feel cheated. AIDS stalked me for 15 years, almost the entire time I’ve been out of the closet. But it never got me. I am still, after more than a decade’s worth of calculated risk taking, uninfected. I know my fair share of dead people, but no one I was particularly close to died. A few casual ex-boyfriends checked out, but not until long after we’d lost touch. Their lives had become abstractions to me; why should their deaths have been anything more? I found one ex’s name on the Quilt in Washington, D.C., seven years ago. “Wow, Joe died,” I thought to myself, looking at his little piece of glory. “Gee, I hadn’t heard.”
I told him that I would be there, that I would make time, that he could count on me. On the way to my new HIV negative boyfriend’s apartment, I thought to myself, “Here we go. This is it, time to earn my AIDS stripes–maybe I should keep a journal.” I’d read Paul Monette’s On Borrowed Time. I’d seen Longtime Companion four times. I knew what was expected of me, and I was–what? Strangely thrilled? Morbidly excited? Anticipating grief–fantasizing about your own death or the death of a loved one–has an element of heady pleasure to it. I walked home absorbed in a fantasy about Michael’s death: As he slowly came apart, I would divide caretaking chores with Michael’s best friend (and fellow ex-boyfriend), Philip. I would accompany Michael to the hospital, yell at doctors and nurses, pick up his meds, bring him groceries, sit with him when he was sick and watch videos. I was prepared to wipe shit off Michael’s soon-to-be-bone-thin legs, carry him to the shower and the toilet and the couch. And when the time to die came, whether he selected the time or the disease dictated it, I would be there to hold his hand and tell him to let go.
So I will never get to wipe shit off his legs, fetch his meds, or hold his hand and say, “Let go.” And the new drugs are making it look like I may not get to say that to anyone, not for years and years and years. Not until I’m old, and Michael’s old, and Philip’s old. Not until we’re all ready to say it.
