DESIRE AMONG THE VECTORS

It’s almost a half century since gender has been taken out of the closet in all three aspects:  desire, identity, and social role.  It’s been almost as long since a virus came out of the African jungles to devastate the demographic category of “gay men” and then slowly ooze out over the rest of the world until now most AIDS victims are heterosexual, including children.

It’s about six centuries since Europeans found the American continents and started the traffic back and forth across the Atlantic -- loot, slaves and disease.  Early cases of smallpox among the indigenes were recorded almost immediately.  Smallpox, and many other zoonoses, are thought to have originated ten thousand years ago in Africa near the Mediterranean, the consequence of domesticating animals so that they were kept in enclosures near enough to transmit viruses and bacterias to their owners.  North Americans had no defenses and were decimated.

Not long ago smallpox was eradicated (sort of, since hidden samples are suspected) and now they claim that an effective vaccine for malaria exists.  The cause of malaria is a plasmodium (one-celled parasite) that uses mosquitoes as a vector syringe.  It is also an African organism, thought to have originated in primates. 

Human beings are the most effective vectoring entity from Africa.  The cross-over diseases not only were stored in the bodies of the African people but were also carried worldwide by them.  These human-transported parasites have endangered other living beings, but the humans themselves are parasites on the whole balance of the planet.  Some believe the only “cure” is to fly to another planet where there are no living beings -- a sort of clean slate.  But a spaceship is a vector of the problem -- us, we are the mosquitoes -- or are we the plasmodia in the mosquito?

Syphilis, which no one knows the original cause of, is bacterial.  Sheep have been mentioned, but the main origin is humans indigenous to America, going back across the Atlantic.  Recent research seems to clarify (and it's only fair) that Columbus took syphilis back to Europe with his crew.  And we finally acknowledge that every member of the Lewis and Clark party was infected except Clark.  A few died of it right away, some later, and pretty certainly Lewis was one of those victims, dying in agony and psychosis before he had a chance to edit his journals.

Meriweather Lewis

“Genocide” by Tim Barrus is an anthology of short stories considering these demographic disease issues and society's reaction, mixing male same-gender bonding with indigenous American peoples, with World War concentration camps disguised as carnivals, and space travel in a spaceship so anthropomorphic that it wants to know about sex.  The concentration camps are to hold HIV-infected persons -- the model is leprosy.  In reality it was actually suggested in regard to HIV and currently practiced to confine Ebola.

There’s one more element: the needled syringe, the proboscis of the human insect which made it possible to penetrate directly into blood, as a mosquito does, by-passing the acid bath and molecular-parting-out protective metabolism of the digestive system.  The visionary sci-fi epic of “Dune” took on drugs in terms of early versions of LSD, as something to put in the mouth (watching in cowboy country, the movie version of "spice" looks a little like “snoose”) rather than the injectables of today.  

Our times have addressed consciousness in the most brutal and invasive of ways, from electroshock to solitary confinement to surgery on intimate parts.  We have neglected the aesthetic power and lyric savagery of life itself.  Somehow it has been reduced to chemically triggered fucking, plastic credit cards and 3D video.  Now ebola comes, requiring a brutal response -- shrouded attendants drenched in bleach who only bury the dead because once more we must struggle to find a cure.  But we haven’t yet cured HIV and now realize there is a whole family of filoviruses out there, each waiting its turn.

The universal element of this story is, of course, humans.  It’s not just the medical dimension of confronting disease, but also defining our response as “fighting a war”, thus leaving refugees and creating stigma.  Truth be told, someone is “getting off” on the control, the blaming, the playing at heroics, the secret conviction that it’s related to virtue and that the people with the money are the virtuous ones and therefore justified in not spending it on the infected, because surely it must be their fault somehow.  They should pay.

Blood cells under attack

This means that the fruits of war include sexual ownership of the vulnerable, esp. children, and for some tastes, esp. boys, who don’t get pregnant (though they can be infected).  Boys can be partly controlled by the hope of someday themselves growing into warriors, as though being a victim were preparation for being anything but a bully.

The motor of this social system is ignorance that there is any other way of organizing a culture, which is why the indigenous and historical contexts are so valuable.

I don’t read much gay literature and haven’t really been very deep into sci-fi since I was a kid -- so long ago that Heinlein was new.  But I did read H.G. Wells and understood that he was doing cultural criticism, trying to suggest alternatives or at least thinking about many worlds rising into consciousness as they did in the 19th century. It’s the root of “Star Trek” and all the time travel tales.

The Starship Enterprise

“Desire, identity and social role” are characteristics of individuals, but the culture as a whole must be responsible for supporting the survival of individuals, who exist in reciprocity with all other humans plus the other beings and circumstances of the planet.  Otherwise, it all collapses. The idea of taking on the predicaments of suffering people everywhere across the planet is pretty daunting, and yet we come up with shelters and food for them.  Why can’t we do that for our own boys right here in America?

“Genocide,” the Barrus anthology, is poetic riffs on “desire, identity, and social role”.  Metaphor, narrative, and theatrical climax.  He could defend it as experience, but that’s dancing too close to bull-fighting with the well-dressed Puritans who live in airport bathroom stalls, passing judgment and gas.

My sci-fi (if you choose to call it that -- some say there’s not enough sci) is feminist, I guess:  that of Ursula LeGuin (more than Atwood) because the Pacific archipelago of Puget Sound is a place I know.  Her portrait of the cultures is almost stronger than the desire and identity, but Ged wears the monk robe, confronts the wind, and is infected with a small black scuttling thing that could be taken as a disease.  He’s a boy, the essence of boy, and finds a niche rather than aspiring to a throne.  He relates to both the small clinging companion in his hood and to the dragons that climb the skies as though they were rockets.

Ged

“Genocide” was copyrighted in 1988.  It is defiantly and erotically obscene and not a chronological narrative, but vividly the product of one haunted mind in a devastating time.  The latest work, “Just Before the Cure” probably cannot be copyrighted, though it is composed, written, and filmed mostly in 2015 by a group of boys.  It is a pastiche, a jumble, remembered nightmares colliding, the product of argument among boys about things they know, a harangue, a tantrum, and a love story (inevitably). Photos, videos and music smash into bitter surrealism.  A lot has happened in the 27 years since Genocide, but not enough.  One thing that has happened is that Barrus has been pushed by activism from a “solitary genius” sort of mode into this group performance that is both much older and much newer.

"JUST BEFORE THE CURE"

I’ve been coy about my relationship with Tim Barrus, not because I’m embarrassed about it, but because the Maenads of political correctness descend on him every time his name comes up.  Leftovers of the NA flame wars of the Nineties are now dwindled down to a few low-quantum nail-biters who live on their apartment couches in a bad part of town.  As for sex -- well, stand back.  Evidently there’s no such thing as knowing too much.

Maybe there a few people out there who still think that being published is a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval but all you need to do is scrump together yettanother set of Napi stories.  (I count half-a-dozen sets on my shelves -- because they are the only thing most people can identify as Native American books, though most of them were written by white men.) Then you’re on your way to a glamorous career.  NOT.  Not Linderman, not Schultz, not Grinnell, or even McClintock.  They made a little money, not much.  These days even the people who have been successful career writers of pop genres must sweat it out, no matter how many books they’ve got on the shelf.

Anyway, publishing in the form of posting work on the Internet is free to anyone -- "quality" (whatever that is) determined by the authors and readers with no umpiring by professors, publishing or critics.   That might not last much longer.  Too many people are trying to wring profit out of the last few free-spirits left in the world.  I have an example of the fun right here:  “Just Before the Cure,” composed and posted by Tim Barrus and the Smash Street Boys.  I didn’t ask them whether I could post about it on prairiemary.  

I like it because I’m in it and so are my cats.  I didn’t have to worry about wardrobe because I am only a voice.  But one cat, Crackers, was portrayed as a master criminal which made the other one, Squibbie, jealous.  My own role varied from “favorite aunt” to straight white person with dubious interests.

There is a big serious message:  WHERE IS THE CURE FOR AIDS?  The “chattering classes” who have the contacts, education, money, and connections think that after thirty years of research, HIV is now “over.”  They are quite wrong.  It’s true enough that the virus is detectable and treatable enough that it can be controlled IF you have the money, the self-discipline, the emotional support, the transportation, and the medicine source.  Of course, the meds will still make you nauseous and maybe hallucinating -- no one knows what else.

So, like many other things in our society, HIV has become pretty much pushed off onto groups about whom no one gives a damn: underaged boys living on the streets and doing survival sexwork that is entwined with drugs; the internal Third World of Appalachia and the once-Confederate South; Native Americans; illegal immigrants; prison inmates.  They have become invisible reservoirs that constantly reseed the virus through the USA.  So much potential for control and med extortion!

I thought I was sophisticated, knowing a lot about the conventional society’s relationship with the underclasses, but I was only at the level of television series based on Crime Scene Investigation.  The writers for those series take a close interest in raw sources.  Smash Street Boys IS that raw source.  This is not polite porn with rubbers and pee or blood checks.  This is boys thrown onto the street by broken families, maybe fueled by meth, beaten nearly to death, raped in every orifice, shamed, guilted, and owned.

You wouldn’t want to sit next to them on the subway, much less live with them.  But this “dozen,” called "Smash Street Boys," has been kept busy making art, photography, and story until they’ve forgotten all about “self-esteem” and just want to get the location shots done so they can begin to edit their project.

Ironically, a few of these boys -- hand-wringingly handsome, sociopathically flattering, fashion plates and epicures -- make rock-star money.  Giving up the street means giving all that up for living with a bunch of regular guys.  But if they CAN give it up, they will live past their twenties and possibly find someone who can truly love them.  Also having the great adventure of creating something like “Just Before the Cure.”

This time it was a unhinged saga of American culture venturing into the underworld of Mexican trafficking.  In other words, it was about themselves.  Like that other plague anthology, Boccaccio’s Decameron, stories are from various points of view.  The print is mixed with art and vids.  The poetry is voice-over in a plummy but crisp English donated by a sharp-tongued professional.  For a production by adolescent boys outside the rules it is remarkably restrained.  Even so the material is scabrous and scandalous, picking up on the decayed underside of places whose boom was long ago.  

It has been slow dawning on us all that our world is shifting from idealistic and flag-waving nations -- that secretly based themselves on genocides and empires  -- to a far more subtle synergy of corporation profit at the expense of everything else, including the planet.  In fact, we now know that by plasticizing the oceans, heating the climate, exhausting the resources, and snuffing species, these profit-driven forces will probably be ended only by the end of the world as we know it.  But it’s silly to predict that, because it’s already happened.

Deleuze and Guattari -- or maybe G and D.

Aad keeps telling me that I sound like Foucault.  (Foucault sounds scary to me, even on Wikipedia.)  I’ve never gotten much farther into French post-modern thought than a little Derrida, but I did buy some Deleuze-Guattari books which were very helpful as I re-framed my thoughts.  But when I wrote an article for a journal called “Rhizomes” about this group of boys, I discovered that the radical feminist editors were afraid, AFRAID, AFRAID to publish it.  In fact, one was afraid to rent an apartment in the Portland, OR, neighborhood where I grew up because there were black gangs there.  These women were academics, non-participants that others use as authorities.  It is more accurate and helpful to depend on CSI television shows.

The “defiant” women were frank about their fears, but also demanded to know the names, addresses, DOB, photos, etc. of the boys in the group.  They had no idea that the boys’ tricks, pimps and families would try to track them down to kill them. I suppose you thought that only happened to women in the Middle Eastern Countries.  They did.  They were willing to take on African tribes who performed clitoridectomies but not gullible young women who have their labia surgically removed to make themselves more enticingly like children.  And it never occurred to them that boys could be wanted by the police.  It SCARED them.

So much of what we do is driven by fads, misapprehensions, and blaming the already stigmatized.  The world operates as a big ad agency, only partly recognized as political.  And here’s the bottom line: it’s not even about stigma.  It’s about profit.  There is more money in a cure for AIDS than there is in Viagra.  (which, paired with meth, is a very effective terrorizing drug.)  An AIDS cure would be the predator drone of meds: withholding AIDS meds strategically could mean the depopulation of troublesome countries with minimal risk to ourselves.  

"Bad Boys"

The hunt is on to find the reservoir of the virus in the body: maybe the interior of the eye, maybe the testicles, maybe the pulp of teeth.  It is already known where the reservoir of the virus is in the population: the poor, the gay, the rebellious, the incarcerated, the “bad boys.”  Like the “Smash Street Boys” with their innocent soft faces.