Those who have good memories or who have been taking notes will recall the last on the list of five universal and innate value dimensions recently proposed by research is “disgust.” There has been quite a bit of discussion about “the morality of disgust.” I’ve been rereading the third of Tim Barrus’ Eighties novels about AIDS, the one called “Genocide” that is a favorite of adolescent boys out on the edge. Do not read this book if you’re easily disgusted. If you believe “cleanliness is next to Godliness,” just go away. If you are one who argues for compost-as-renewal and dirt-as-fertility, you might be okay. Maybe.
This essay is a first attempt to understand the relationships among: prejudice against those who are different, disgust with disease, the escalation from disgust to moral blame to criminal law that justifies extreme punishment, and our faulty management of the messy processes of birth, death, sex and excretion -- the four necessities of life. This is my way “in” to the book and to the real-life phenomenon of genocide.
Minorities slated for genocide are generally portrayed as “disgusting”: dirty, degenerate and contagious. Diseases are “disgusting”: vomit, diarrhea, pus. Excretion is considered disgusting: stinking, germ-laden. Some people are disgusted by the whole idea of sex and everything connected with it, like nakedness of sexual organs (including breasts). In general the value of disgust (note the root of “gust” shared with “gustatory,” meaning appetite and eating) evolved to protect against eating spoiled food, avoiding practices that are unsanitary or likely to attract insect vectors of disease, animals that eat filth and corpses (rats, pigs, dogs), places where rot and excrement collect, or signs of disease like open sores or leprosy. The weapon that has been most effective against meth use in Montana has been disgust: graphic photographs of rotted mouths and supporating skin.
I would suggest that this disgust may be a way of distinguishing between pornography and eroticism. Maybe not. But it seems a good guide to perversion and fetishes, where the conventional prohibitions or precautions become so strong and enmeshed with their opposites that they become obsessions. Like Lady Macbeth’s hand-washing.
In this book, “Genocide,” the power of Barrus’ transgressive writing violates our sense of what is disgusting more than any of the other moral values. He mixes oral with anal, the repellant with the delicious, disgust with delight. The same photograph of a hopeless bathroom shows up repeatedly in his vids, ironically, since those with the HIV virus must be scrupulously clean (their immune systems don't work). Wherever the boys are, the washing machine will run constantly. The polarities between filth and the great (and historically recent) luxury of cleanliness entwine in a strange way. Barrus celebrates the funky smells of armpits and butt cracks in a time when men are urged to use body sprays to eliminate their own pheromones. He ignores our culture’s identification of strong smells (garlic, sweat, smoke, grease, tobacco) with low class minorities. But he strongly endorses loyalty, honor, strength, love and bathtubs.
Decades ago there was a notorious murder mystery in Cosmopolitan magazine about women found dead on operating tables with their spinal columns laid open and electrical torture machines nearby. The concept was that someone had invented a drug that converted pain into pleasure. The greater the pain, the more pleasure was felt, so the women urged their torturers to go on and on until they died. Of course, it was “really” about heroin. And it was also about masochistic women hooked on abuse. And perhaps it was about the value struggle over whether women are entitled to freedom from pain in childbirth when it was fancied to be a punishment for Eve’s sin visited on her descendants.
It was so easy to assume that AIDS was a disease specific to homosexual men because sodomy mixes oral/anal/penile. The disgust of that became entwined with the disgust of the symptoms of the disease itself. It was not until it was shown that the fluids of childbirth or transfusion or injection could also carry the retrovirus that the disgust withdrew a little, but some people consider all those things disgusting. Barrus is not going to talk them out of it -- he’s going to throw it in their faces.
Several sources have led him to this. One is his own history, for instance, his attempted suicide by shotgun blast to his abdomen. He was fourteen. In addition to the necessary colostomy, which was eventually reversed, healing involved the formation of many fistulas that leaked so much nastiness that he improvised a disposable diaper taped across his belly in order to go to school where he isolated himself in the library lest someone smell him. An influence that has affected a generation of gay men is nursing innumerable cherished friends as they died of AIDS.
Hospitals are places that mix the nastiness of disease with constant dedication to the cleaning of bodies, equipment and surfaces. Babies fill their diapers with stuff that would drive a skunk out of the room, but once cleaned they are considered sweet and desirable. This interface of cleaning/healing/comforting against the ordure of illness is where Tim stands his ground in real life when he personally nurses (okay, double meaning) the at-risk boys, pulling them back from death. In fiction he presents disgust mixed with delight. He demands that we look at the mess, but then alongside it admits the sweet desirability that keeps us from simply eliminating the source.
For the reader the effect of two strong emotional forces colliding is intense, even addictive. One wants to know but dreads to know, like the consequences of a terrible accident. Some yearn to “fix” everything; others want to stamp out the irresolvable complex. These forces are strong in our culture, partly because of the compassion charities that try to help people like Haitians in the midst of mud and cholera, a fecal disease. We see them on the news. Movie warehouses are full of carefully authentic rotted zombies and crispy black victims of immolation, convincing severed heads and prosthetic wounds. We love CSI autopsies. Horror has us in thrall.
And we feel the connection with glamour, stimulation, risk, gambling, exhibition. Tim’s chapter, “Chinatown Chinatown” is about the brothers “Star” and “Adonais” (both echo Jesus) who are bodyscrapers “slushing” body parts out of the sump under the joy rides that tear people apart in the death camp that is neon candyapple Vegas in the clean dry desert. This is very much like the sequence in the movie “A.I.” where androids are destroyed for the pleasure of the flesh people. Supposedly obscenity is removed by the lack of humanness, which is distinguished from machines by the human capacity to suffer or love. Does that work in reverse? The first story in “Genocide” is about two male lovers -- shot into space to escape “the virus” -- who eventually allow their version of “Hal” the spaceship computer (who is named Tsan) to share their lovemaking. Is this an obscenity? A perversion?
When I remembered this book, I thought it was one long road story augmented with short poignant inter-chapter poems, but it is not. Rather it is a series of reflections on the forcible quarantine of illness, the obscenity of suffering, the disgust of death, the necessity of survival, the uses of flight, persecution by culture, and -- most of all -- salvation by intense relationship with another like yourself. Not long ago I watched “The Road”, Cormac McCarthy’s take on the disgust of filth and cannibalism. I have not forgotten that his roots are in southern gothic horror -- necrophilia, captivity. (See “The Orchard Keeper,” written five years later than “Genocide.”) Whether society will accept reflection on these issues depends upon the context: McCarthy discovered that they fit well with the Mexican border country. In fact, better every day that more heads are found in empty lots.
For Barrus to choose the story-core of two brothers/lovers is transgressive. This suits him, though he backed off the horror a little in the Nasdijj trilogy. As the world considers the consequences of sterility, emptiness, oppression of the many in order to support the luxury of the few, the political dimension of disease (controlling the meds), and whether ants crawling on a crucifix is more shocking than crucifying a man for teaching tolerance, surely we ought to pay attention to this testimony from a man who knows the territory, even as he tries to flee across it to escape death.
I'm not through with this topic, but this is the last in a series of three reconsiderations of Barrus’ Eighties books.
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