AS THE WORLD TURNS -- THE CASTRO

In the Fifties in Portland, OR, when I first began to be old enough to travel around the city alone via bus, I was always careful to sit on the side of the bus where I could see the old warehouses where gypsies lived.  The doorways were draped so it was impossible to see in, but the women often sat on chairs along the sidewalk.  Darkly beautiful, wearing bright flowing gowns, they might have been up to something nefarious since they were in the shady part of town, but to me they only represented glamour in the original sense of magic.

Our house was near the corners of NE 15th and Alberta.  In my childhood it was a European immigrant neighborhood: Swedish bakery, Scots doctor, Greek grocery store, and so on.  Alberta, of course, was named for Queen Victoria’s daughter.  After I had grown up and left, the neighborhood turned black and the street I had walked to elementary school, Sumner, was considered a gang street where cops went carefully.  At night there was shooting.  The shops and the apartments on top of them deteriorated.  

Then gays and hispanics moved in.  Now Alberta is an arts and bodega street.  My mother lived in the same house until 1999.  A cousin of mine lives up 15th a few blocks, across the street from the doctor’s house my paternal grandparents bought when they came back to the States from Manitoba.

So when doing research for another project, I came across the history of the Castro District in San Francisco, less well-known than the “hippie” Haight-Asbury, I was intrigued.  I’ve always been interested in enclaves and bubbles of culture, where they come from, how they morph, and where they go.  This applies to both Valier and the Blackfeet Rez — it’s part of their charm, their historical flavor.

All-male Miners' Ball

I was surprised to learn that in the 18th century the area was Russian.  In 1809-1917 Finland, then a satellite of Russia, used the settlement to serve merchant and naval fleets with a heavy Finnish participation.  Finns are tough, practical, and free-thinking, with the liberal wing of the Lutheran church overlapping enough with Unitarians that the clergy serving Montana’s Finn communities hired Unitarian ministers.  Many Finns settled in SF during the Gold Rush.  Finnish Club No. 1 was established in the Castro District in 1882.  A bathhouse was built about 1910.  After the disastrous 1906 earthquake and fire, many Finns moved to Berkeley.

A decade or so after WWII when many families had left because of prosperity that produced suburbs, two new concentrations formed.  I’ll directly quote from Wikipedia:  “The U.S. military dishonorably discharged thousands of gay servicemen from the Pacific theater in San Francisco during World War II (early 1940s) because of their sexuality. Many settled in the bay area, San Francisco and Sausalito. In San Francisco an established gay community had begun in numerous areas including Polk Street, the Tenderloin and south of Market Street. The 1950s saw large amounts of families moving out of the Castro to the suburbs in what became known as the "White flight", leaving open large amounts of real estate and creating attractive locations for gay purchasers. By 1963, the Castro's first gay bar was opened called the "Missouri Mule”.

This is one of the unintended and rather unacknowledged consequences of WWII, another attempt on the part of government to control the nature of populations.  The Navy’s failure to understand that gays can be tough enlisted men meant that when were surprised by individual examples, the gay men were pushed out.  Since they were clustered on the mid-California coast, they magnetized into a functional community.  

A parallel example might be the Native Americans who formed communities along the coast in order to work in the factories that supported the war effort.  A second set of Native Americans arrived in cities when Eisenhower tried to extinguish the reservations by sending the people to cities, but not supporting them there, so that they ended up in ghettos, making common cause with blacks and hispanics who had also come to build ships and planes, but were at loose ends when the war ended.  The groups had been mostly rural, which made them sympathetic to each other.  And they were all stigmatized.  Black Power taught Red Power.

“Beat culture erupted in San Francisco in the 1950s with a rebellion against middle class values and thus became aligned with homosexuality and other lifestyles not part of mainstream culture. The beat poets who relocated to San Francisco from New York flourished in San Francisco's permissive atmosphere, and some like Allen Ginsberg were openly gay.”  This literary dimension easily merged with academic study of gays, called “queer studies”.

Being gay was neither rural nor urban, and not related to skin color, but, in addition to natural sexual preference, came out of military background, working-class.  Not so much the officer elites.  Wikipedia:  “Some of the culture of the late 1970s included what was termed the "Castro clone", a mode of dress and personal grooming that exemplified butchness and masculinity of the working-class men in construction—tight denim jeans, black or sand combat boots, tight T-shirt or, often, an Izod crocodile shirt, possibly a red plaid flannel outer shirt, and usually sporting a mustache or full beard—in vogue with the gay male population at the time. . .”

Cross-dressing exploded into a show biz performance art that might or might not signal trans-sexuality.  Presentation as advertising was the idea, in the sense of big birds with splendid plumage.  Today people can change physical gender.

Alfred Laliberté's "Les petits Baigneurs," 1915 restored 1992 at Maisonneuve public baths, Montreal, Quebec

“Public” baths exist where people have no bathrooms at home, as in immigrant tenements, and were meant as a public health measure.  Urchins were made to bath naked to so they could be checked for sores and bugs.  With an all-male gay community used to communal showers, baths were a natural venue.

Then came HIV/AIDS and a new kind of war, just as deadly as combat.  The men rallied to comfort each other, but despair and terror crept through lives.  Still, it didn’t extinguish the identity of the area as a special community that has now expanded to LGBTX, people who are in solidarity to defend their right to be different.  But then they had to defend their right to be the same, as in marriage and raising children.

The next challenge is upon them now: a form of “gentrification” which is not focused on reclaiming the graciousness of the housing, but rather on crowding in tech workers for the cyber-industry.  The world is based on change, each new phase displacing the old.

I watch all this from my celibate redoubt much in the way that I watched the gypsies from the bus, a kind of sympathetic outsider.  Unitarian congregations often share buildings with the Metropolitan Church.  They are not monsters to me.  But they do have a bit of a dark edge.  Like military people.  Or rez folks.

THE CHIMERA WITHIN

The New York Times thinks that if they tease me with headlines they assume I want to read, then I will be provoked enough to subscribe to their newspaper.  They think I am like the people they know.  They don’t know that there are people who are not like them.  (See reference to monkeys’ ignorance in yesterday’s post.)  But I bounce off their teasing by googling the subjects of their headlines to find other sources for information.  

Sometimes the subject itself rebukes me harshly for not already knowing things about it.  Like today’s refusal to let me read Andrew Sullivan’s review of David France’s book version of a movie called “How to Survive a Plague” meant that I realized I’d never seen that movie, so I went to Netflix and watched it just now.  I looked at the numbers go by and watched the people age, both victims and Dr. Fauci who has been a prime medical spearhead, and I wondered why I didn’t know more about it at the time.  

It wasn’t until I began to “talk” on email with Tim Barrus that I understood that a huge and significant movement in the world had mostly passed me by.  I should have known, since in 1981 when the first signs appeared I was at the U of Chicago Div School, taking classes in medical ethics.  I don’t remember Don Browning ever saying anything about AIDS.  The cases we tried to resolve were about melanoma and major burns.  Just as agonizing, but not socially entwined.  “Behavior-related” sniffed senators who probably never had had real sex in their lives.  One would as soon kiss a lizard.

In my circuit-riding years I knew a minister with AIDS but no parishioners.  (We didn’t separate HIV and AIDS in those days.)  “Gay” was a different issue.  I’ve always known “gays” of many different kinds.  (I put quotes because I don’t see the category as being so hard-edged as some do.)  In Saskatoon the most stigmatized group was aboriginals, not gays, and the small UU fellowship did not want to address those issues.  Their primary worry was environmental.  The later UU “Welcoming Congregation” movement was about as much about growth as about justice.

In Portland in the ’90's the issues were blacks, drugs, and shooting in the streets — sort of muddled up together.  Back in Montana I was doing memoir and Western art bronzes until I got the bio of Bob Scriver finished and published:  “Bronze Inside and Out”.  Then there was a kind of space.  And Tim Barrus showed up.

There are cases, genetically proven, of “chimeras” created by two conceived blastomeres, twins, which began to develop side-by-side but then relented and resorbed one of them while the other went on to develop into a person with the nearly quenched one silently folded inside.  I’ve meant to develop that into a short story about people who sometimes seem to be two people and — actually — really are.  In fact, I’ve been accused of being two people myself: one that was compliant and cooperative and one who was outraged and uncontrollable.  It’s one of the things Barrus and I have in common.  People think one can control their internal chimera and make a moral issue of it.

We write.  We read each other’s writing.  We don’t agree.  My little town has grizzly bears in the night, following the edge of the lake.  His has mountain lions coming down to drink from the child’s wading pool he and his boys have put out to make an oasis.  We know forest fires.  Even the conflagrations of the heart.  

AIDS now is often a syringe disease: injectable drugs carrying virus into the blood.  Syringe disease, like all addictions, is a pain-based disease caused by poverty, failure, desertion, and being stuck in a life you hate.  Now we can see in the brain by using fMRI’s, both the craving addiction of the syringe drugs and the emotional suffering it’s trying to address, but doesn’t.  The official declaration that research finally shows this is what’s happening is at:  https://addiction.surgeongeneral.gov/surgeon-generals-report.pdf

Basically, too many people in this country are miserable and they are miserable because they don’t have enough to eat, or proper shelter, or meds — not even for deadly diseases they can pass on to everyone else.  Not just HIV but also TB, Hep C.  Our leaders don’t care.  At least that’s the evidence.  And despite the valiant and mostly successful efforts demonstrated in the movie “How to Survive a Plague” or the efforts to stop the poisonous industrialism of a pipeline through drinking water in North Dakota — we don’t seem willing to open up to each other.  But healing addiction must be done in a group.

Barrus and I know that opening up is dangerous to ourselves and others.  Part of the misery of our country is the constant attacking and blaming of each other which has made a the shambles of our culture.  (Shambles once meant a butcher’s slaughterhouse.)  Some are trying to revive those assumptions, but they’re gutted.  

So how do we rebuild a culture of solace and growth?  Do you have to be told?  It’s the very thing we keep unfunding when money is short:  the humanities.  That’s why they’re CALLED that, because they create human values and explain and sustain them.  Stories, images, songs, and dances — those are the humanities.  When Boccaccio’s characters were faced with the plague that emptied Europe, they holed up and told stories.  People still read them.

I save everything I find that Tim wrote.  Such a packrat.  I save a lot of what I write, but I’m getting better at believing that writing is like “Bartholemew’s Hats” — do you remember that storybook?  How every time he took his hat off there was a more splendid one underneath it?  Most people who say they are writers don’t write very much.  Then they say they have writer’s block.  But they really have not-writer’s block.

For Tim and I it’s quite different.  The dialogue of the chimera in each of us is so intriguing to the chimera across from us, we just can’t stop with the hats.

"AS IS:" Reflections

Edinburgh production

There are two good ways to enter a world that is to most folks quite unknown.  One is through a pair of lovers and one is through commerce.  On one hand is Romeo and Juliet and on the other hand is the Silk Road.  To penetrate unknown worlds is deadly dangerous, but people do it anyway, out of love.  And other things.

“As Is” was the first play about the beginning of AIDS, written by William M. Hoffman and first produced at Circle Repertory  where it was directed by Marshall W. Mason, a friend of mine from undergrad years whom I had kept track of through mutual friends.

Explaining how he began writing this play, Hoffman says:  

“All around me was illness and death.  I fell into a depression.

“So, sometime in 1982, as a sort of therapy, I started to express my feelings on paper.  I decided to write a play about a man named Rich — a writer and runner — who comes down with AIDS, his former lover, Saul, and their friends and families.

“I did my research, I visited friends who had the disease; I talked with a hospice worker; I went to support groups; I attended lectures; I made field trips to the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (the most important organization dealing with the disease in New York City); I spent hours eavesdropping in gay bars, taking the public pulse.

“I was willing to go to any lengths for my play, except to imagine myself having AIDS.”  

It didn’t work until he let himself be funny — death humor is a part of eloquence.  At the time he began he was writing the libretto for “The Ghosts of Versailles” — why couldn’t his dying men be as eloquent?

“The opera is set in an afterlife existence of the Versailles court of Louis XVI. In order to cheer up the ghost of Marie Antoinette, who is upset about having been beheaded, the ghost of the playwright Beaumarchais stages an opera.”  The play satirizes this opera-in-an-opera and asks the audience to accept fantasy as it shifts the terms of the scenes.  There are YouTubes.

Though Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1993) pulled in ghosts in the form of angels, “As Is” only included dying people.  Still, it certainly must have prepared the way for the more elaborate and complex “Angels.”  The earlier Hoffman play was workshopped in scenes at Circle Repertory, everyone feeling their way into an unknown future.  In that year ('82) I was just leaving seminary and had almost no consciousness of HIV.  My “ethics of dying” class (taught by Don Browning) used melanoma as the worst case scenario.  But that’s not far from Kaposi’s sarcoma.

I left formal ministry in 1988.  By that time a valued colleague had died of the virus in spite of his partner, an MD, using every resource he could muster. By 1993 I was returning from Heart Butte, where some students were quietly gay, to Portland where the city was aswirl with needle drug users and uncloseted gays.  Arthur Ashe died of AIDS that year.  It was no secret, not much of a surprise.  The disease and its consequences swept over the continent faster than anyone could react effectively.  It’s still happening.

Marshall says in his production notes for "As Is":  “I feel it is important that the actors remain on stage as much as possible, to witness as a community the events of the play in which they do not participate as characters.  The audience must be kept from feeling “safe” from this subject, so the actors of the “chorus” must act as a bridge between the fictional character and the real theater event . . .The desired effect is to assist the audience in a catharsis, as they are required to contemplate our common mortality.”

Marshall's production of "Trojan Women" at NU.

Dennis Parichy did the set, for both this and "As Is."

These ideas — from staging to moral passion — came from NU where Mason directed a performance of the “The Trojan Women.”  I was in it as a chorus member.  Characteristic of Alvina Krause’s acting classes and directing critiques was that they centered on high principles.  She came into theatre through the Methodist Garrett Seminary on campus, where she taught interpretation which segued into the stage as part of the School of Speech.  Greek theatre is the origin of catharsis, going back to Aristotle’s “Poetics” and usually taken to mean purification or purgation.  Theatre/opera/Greek plays are strongly Sacred.  

This is the thread I follow.  The Lutheran minister who headed my CPE program always said that one purpose of a congregation is to witness as a Greek chorus does and that nothing significant in human life is “real” to a person until it is witnessed by someone who grasps the meaning.

AK could not have seen a production of “As Is” or even have been aware of AIDS, since she died in 1981, but I would love to know her reaction and I expect Marshall would as well.  She had a lifelong female companion but veered off abruptly on certain subjects.  She was an Edwardian, very daring but only when totally hidden.  And yet she believed in going to the bony heart of pain and loneliness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcalL3C-zH4 is a sample of the TV production in 1986.  Though it was also written by Hoffman, the change of medium loses the stage fluidity and the chorus, but somewhat preserves the contrapuntal “libretto” of a scriptwriter who writes for opera and hears words as opera.  I’d much rather see a stage production, though film in the last 34 years has loosened up and learned a lot, so is far more musical.  The play did well enough at Circle Theatre (49 performances) to move to the Lyceum on Broadway for 285 performances.  I've only read the script and seen the YouTube clip.

Playing around with possibilities, one wonders what would have been different if this play had been written and produced by someone in San Francisco.  In retrospect, what if the first deaths of AIDS, in the Seventies which included women and children had become the markers for the disease instead of seeming like undiagnosed anomalies at the time.  The identification of HIV with gay men  — not just gay but sexually interactive — has skewed understanding and response ever since.  By 2015 the disease is still predominantly male in terms of new diagnoses but skews to Southern blacks.  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_HIV/AIDS)

Can the impact of a play confronting this first of the mysterious jungle-emergent viruses ever be equalled by a play about ebola or Zika?  Were there plays as personal about malaria or yellow fever?  About polio?  Does Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” count as a film about the Black Plague that emptied Europe of a third of its population?  

As far as I know, no one has written a play from the indigenous point of view portraying smallpox at the time of its genocidal sweep in this intimate Manhattan way instead of broad political strokes.  Part of the power of “As Is” comes from the self-analyzing tight friendship and family circles of the specific Manhattan society with their feeling of being an elite.  Native Americans and maybe Blacks have seen so much hardship, they are not surprised and far more fatalistic.

"The Normal Heart" was developed at about the same time as "As Is," and produced soon after the more personal play.

HOW BAD IS IT? REEEEEALLY BAD. AIDS.

Despite major medical advances and more than 30 years of effort, the United States is still in danger of losing the war on AIDS, according to the country’s top disease-control official.

In an essay in The New England Journal of Medicine published on Tuesday, World AIDS Day, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Dr. Jonathan Mermin, the agency’s chief of AIDS prevention, paint a bleak picture of the fight.

“Hundreds of thousands of people with diagnosed H.I.V. infection are not receiving care or antiretroviral treatment,” they wrote. “These people account for most new H.I.V. transmission.”

There are 45,000 new H.I.V. infections each year, the article noted.

In an interview, Dr. Frieden said he “still views the glass as half full.” While medicines are improving, legal barriers have been lifted and Americans are getting tested, more people with H.I.V. need to be put on treatment and kept on it.

While the article’s language was dry and academic, some AIDS experts said it amounted to a call for radical changes in how the disease is fought. But those changes can be made only by state and local health departments, over which the C.D.C. has little control.

“Tom is giving the view from 30,000 feet,” said Dr. William Schaffner, the chairman of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University. “He’s trying to be the conductor of a disparate orchestra in which the drums and trombones have different bosses and are paid by different people.”

Other experts complained that Dr. Frieden should have gone further, calling for much more funding, a heavier reliance on preventive drugs and the decriminalization of H.I.V. transmission. “It’s a pretty weak piece,” said Mark Harrington, the executive director of the Treatment Action Group, an AIDS activist organization.

Dr. Frieden was effectively calling for H.I.V. to be fought the same way that syphilis and gonorrhea are, “and we’re doing terribly on those,” Mr. Harrington sai

He and other advocates urged wider adoption of a multipronged approach to treatment and prevention like that used in San Francisco, which offers services to the most difficult patients, including addiction and mental health treatment, help with housing and even escorts to the hospital.

Among the most notable failures cited by Dr. Frieden and Dr. Mermin:

• Nearly 65 percent of the estimated 1.2 million Americans with H.I.V. are not on treatment; many disappear right after being tested. Those patients, whose H.I.V. is undiagnosed or newly diagnosed but who are untreated, account for 90 percent of all new infections.

• Infected people are rarely asked to name their sexual partners so that health providers can reach out to them. When health providers do have names, little is done with the information.

• Risky behaviors — including unprotected anal sex and needle-sharing — appear to be increasing.

• Infection rates are rising among young gay men, especially blacks and Hispanics.

The essay is a follow-up to one Dr. Frieden wrote for the journal for World AIDS Day 10 years ago, when he was New York City’s health commissioner. 

That one was equally pessimistic and dryly radical. In it, Dr. Frieden expressed frustration with “AIDS exceptionalism” — laws that made it difficult for public health authorities to treat AIDS as they might tuberculosis, syphilis or meningitis.

A decade ago, it was almost impossible to even test for H.I.V. because intensive counseling was often required first, which took time and money and scared people off. Lab results were reported to health officials with no names attached, leaving them unable to find infected people or to tell if treatment was working.

Dr. Frieden argued then for a public health approach to outweigh a strictly medical one. The difference is that a medical doctor’s first duty is to the patient, while health officials like him are charged with protecting the population at large.

The two come into conflict, for example, when an infectious patient willfully refuses treatment and keeps passing on a disease. In the 1990s, during an outbreak of drug-resistant tuberculosis in New York City, Dr. Frieden famously detained patients who refused to take their pills, locking them in hospitals for months until they were cured.

In 2005, he advocated H.I.V.-control measures that he said would “offend both sides of the political establishment.” Condoms and clean syringes were needed even if conservatives disliked them, he said, and the tracing of sexual partners needed to be done even if H.I.V. activists opposed it.

Some of those goals have become law.

Although H.I.V. testing is not mandatory except in the military and under a few other circumstances, the counseling requirement has been dropped. Many hospitals test all patients unless they specifically refuse, and some cities even pay people applying for driver’s licenses to take H.I.V. tests.

Lab results are now reported by name almost everywhere. That makes it possible for local health workers to contact patients to make sure they receive help and to ask for the names of their sex partners so they, too, can be treated.But that is failing, Dr. Frieden said in the interview. Only about half of those testing positive for H.I.V. are ever asked for names, and those who choose to answer “named relatively few.”

Local health departments lack the staff to trace contacts. “To be fair, it’s legitimately hard,” Dr. Frieden added. Some people find sex partners through apps like Grindr without ever learning their names.

New tests can detect the virus within 10 days of infection, but they are not being used enough, he said. An estimated 155,000 Americans with H.I.V. do not know it. And of those who are tested, 20 percent already have AIDS or are close to it — meaning they may have been spreading the virus for years.

The C.D.C. recommends that sexually active gay men be tested four times a year, but that rarely happens.

Treatment is also inadequate. Multiple studies have shown that patients who are immediately put on drugs remain healthy longer and stop infecting others. Yet only about 36 percent of those infected have prescriptions, Dr. Frieden said. (Others have put the figure higher. In San Francisco, 82 percent of H.I.V. patients get prescriptions.)

The national averages are dragged down by states, mostly in the South, that have high H.I.V. rates but rejected the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid, which would have covered testing and treatment.

There have been important scientific advances, like new milder drugs and the rollout of Truvada, a pill that prevents infections.

But “the fact that the dial hasn’t moved on 45,000 new infections a year is a tragedy,” said Mitchell J. Warren, the executive director of AVAC, an organization lobbying for AIDS prevention.

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.

"THE FRUIT BAT" (Fiction)

The nickname came first.  His real name was Rudy, which the kids rhymed to Fruity.  He looked it up online to make sure, but they all knew they meant he was gay.  He just liked to look things up.  The suggestion was that a “fruit” was easy-pickin’s, soft and pretty, low-hanging, as though gay and female gender characteristics were the same thing.  He was more tough-minded than most of the guys, which they never realized, so he sort of picked up their “fruit” thing and ran with it.  

He was a pretty good artist and began to specialize in paintings of piles of fruit that had, when you looked closely, the spheres of skulls and the long banana curves of snakes mixed in with the apples and oranges.  He liked the textures, the reticulations and blushes, making their skins gleam, seemingly wet, beaded with some mysterious fluid or honey, and sometimes bruised with rot.  The guys thought that was cool.  They all called his paintings “Forbidden Fruit.”  Like they knew what that meant.  None knew anything about the Garden of Eden and almost everyone was under sixteen.

He didn’t always go to their level -- literally.  He loved parcours, high running over the buildings of the city, and since it was a warm climate place with lots of room for buildings to spread out instead of being high-rises -- but a high crime rate so there were lots of connecting walls -- it was pretty easy.  The roofs in this dry place didn’t have a lot of pitch.  There were almost paths across the skyline and ridges.  He went out at night.  In the daytime he had his favorite places to sleep, roosting near building exhausts if it were cool.  So that accounted for the “bat” part of his nickname.

Lately the name had taken on a more ominous meaning, because ebola was a plague on the land and the virus was said to be carried by fruit bats with their sharp faces and wingspans a yard wide.  The town wasn’t in Africa, but still . . .

   

He had not told the guys that he was HIV positive.  How it came about was the same as usual -- meaning it just sort of happened.  He wasn’t having sex or anything. Not exactly.  No IV drugs.  But it was sort of a footnote to a life with a lot of subtle complexities that didn’t bear monitoring.  For all he knew, he’d gotten HIV from his mother at birth.

He and his mother had lived in an old hotel that the college had used for dorms, but then times got good for them and the college built a proper dorm, so this sagging warren of rooms off halls just sort of devolved.  His mother had birthed him young, which was why her family threw her out, but it was a rich family and somehow a trickle of money always got to her.  She was an addict in a classical way: opium.  Most of the time she was nodded out, so he just took care of the two of them.

This is not Hong.

Across the hall was a guy named Hong who had AIDS, not just HIV.  He was a Ph.D. ethics scholar, very gentle and quiet.  He looked out for Fruity and his mom.  Then one day the mom just disappeared.  No one saw her go, except someone said a taxi came for her.  She might have died or been locked up somewhere.  Eviction notices had come for the little studio apartment.  She would not have left him if she’d thought of him, but she forgot everything.  He just moved across the hall to live with Hong.

Hong made his living by contracting to grade papers for professors who preferred to give lectures and write their own books.  He made careful marginal notes analyzing structure and explaining grammar but didn’t much address the content.  At first he paid Fruity to be his courier since he hated to leave the building.  Then, since as he said, Fruity was already his sub-contractor, he trusted him to correct the multiple choice test answer sheets.  

That went well until optical scanners were invented.  But by that time he was painting and they sold well on campus.  Kids love that kind of stuff: the grotesque, the dangerous, whatever they were pretty sure their parents would hate.  As every artist should, he had a good line of talk, thanks to Hong, who often discussed the papers he was working on.  They sat with their shoulders together at the little kitchen table and talked about choices and situations and rule-based decisions.

When they fell in love it was not really like falling, but more like a natural progression, and the ethics of it seemed obvious, a matter of affinity and then bonding in which the physical merely followed the emotional.  It was like eating the fruit after it had been painted so that it wouldn’t spoil.  The skulls and snakes were there, but weren’t they organic and natural?  Wasn’t the demonizing of them, the suggestions of death, only a way of dealing with the reality that was part of their lives?

Not that they were stupid.  Hong maintained his regime and checkups.  He got Fruity signed up with an invented student identity so he had access to HIV meds.  They researched via their smart phones.  And they were careful not to have sex with others because that would be wrong, quite apart from the infection, because it would break the intimacy that was their justification.  They ate carefully, calculating nutrition and staying on schedule.

In spite of it all, Hong died.  No one knew the Fruit Bat existed except some students and they didn’t know anything specific -- just assumed.  The apartment eviction notice came but by that time the Fruit Bat had been doing parkours long enough to know the roofs of the town and campus well, even places where he could stash his canvasboard and paints, though he mostly never kept more than he could carry in his backpack.  

He was thin but graceful with eyes that were observant but never stared.   People liked him and bought him coffee and doughnuts for the sake of his conversation, but he found he was running short on protein and learned to net pigeons to roast over a small camp stove.  He reflected on the ethics and decided that pigeons were natural prey, meant to be eaten.  He felt invincible, above it all, and enjoyed watching the people down below.  His favorite place was the top of the chemistry building where the long graceful limb of an elm shaded one corner.

Then he saw the real bats.  They had found a vent that gave access to an under-roof.  At sundown they poured out like a vapor, barely noticeable unless one were prepared and watching.  They were silent.  He found one dropped on his roof, not quite dead, and examined it closely, carefully using a stick.  It had a white nose.  When he recharged his cell phone in the library that afternoon, he used the big computers to read up on the fungus that was killing off the bats across the country.  Like the fungus that had killed off the frogs.  All the little creatures.  A bat is a predator, though it only eats insects.  What is a fungus?  Or a virus? Were they even alive?  He had been feeling feverish.  He was out of compliance with meds.

That evening, for the first time, he missed his footing and fell.  The skull and snake had found him.  In the short moments while the Fruit Bat was more or less really flying, he remembered that one of the topics with Hong was what people thought if they were about to die and knew it.  Life flashing and so on.  For him, the answer turned out to be, “I’m coming.”  He had barely time to wonder if that were a sexual pun.

His autopsy was done by a sophisticated college crew.  They found he was carrying the microbes for HIV, pneumonia. athlete's foot, some minor infections and psittacosis but not rabies. They thought he had jumped on purpose and wrote “suicide” as the cause of death.  But they were wrong.  Who ever knows what goes on in another person’s mind?