WORLD AIDS DAY: A REAL STORY

Why do I care about “gay” men?  It depends on how you define them, which is part of what makes them interesting.  They are a “thought category” rather than a species.  The actual phenomenon of sex with the same sex is present in a low percentage of mammals of several kinds, which includes humans, but that’s only part of the story.  The real story is how cultures deal with such a difference.  Some say “Aauugh! kill!”  Some say, “Come sit by me, dahlin’.”.  Some just shrug.

Our still-recent sexual revolution changed everything for everybody, at least those who had access to birth control in the form of a pill, those who had been part of the extreme physical life of war, those who were seeing a heterosexual pattern of hedonism that stiffed families, those women who had been earning a living doing “man’s work,” and close after that the disappearance of hard physical labor that men used to do when machines took over.

I suppose the first grownup gay man I knew personally, if only slightly, was the uncle of a classmate in elementary school.  He was her mother’s brother, a young man quite cultured in the Portland, OR, early Fifties.  He took the two of us to the ballet and briefly we stopped by his apartment for some reason.  It was the first time I’d been in an apartment building that had carpeted halls.  His place was elegant.  In my mind, therefore, gay men were a civilized and elite group.  I did not see them as evil vampires.

In the great chess game of social competition, any “group” is of interest from a sociological point of view.  But then individuals from that group can be of interest from a psychological point of view.  Even more powerfully from a narrative point of view.  Any characteristic that causes a person — esp. a child — to become isolated, search for answers, struggle through ordeals and confusions, and finally find “the others” is engaging in what Joe Campbell called the Hero’s Journey, which is a big part of our American mythic history.  But we don’t like the versions in which the hero dies, suddenly and for no reason.  

Today is World AIDS Day.  The drugs are good but not curative, the cost of them is sky-high, the distribution of them is complicated by extortion and blackmail on an international level, and STILL people don’t know they have it.  The venues of blood-borne contagion — sex and injected drugs — require secrecy, even secrets from oneself.  I don’t have AIDS.  I have Aging.  It is a behavior-related condition, like AIDS.  You can hasten or delay it by what you do.

Beyond that, I’m interested in the narratives about any individual interacting with social groups, particularly individuals in a diaspora, dispersed from their origins but carrying them inside — the way all of us carry DNA and memes from our ancestors.  That means indigenous people, sexually atypical people, red-heads, and metaphor-gifted people.  That last means the visionaries, the writers, the painters, the musicians who crave expression enough to do the daily practice that makes masters.  

Some cultures, fearing dissension, will try to suppress individuals, but when it comes to the artists, authorities can only compress and politicize the objects of their fears.  Persecution teaches them to cooperate, to care for each other, and to keep on going through the dark in the belief that if dawn doesn’t come for them, it will for someone else.

Because this is World AIDS Day, there will be tweets and posts and formal essays.  The group of young men that I’ve been following for the last decade have posted the public service videos they’ve made by matching their stories with images.  Real Stories Gallery.  Don’t look for them if you’re prissy or scared or coping with the world by denying everything outside your local horizon.

Gay people are like indigenous people in that their identifying traits are so stigmatized and stereotyped that those who haven’t been clued in cannot recognize them.  Indians and gays are scattered among us, unrecognized.  The first Indians I knew, Miss Colbert (Chinook) and Mrs. Eagle (Sioux) were elementary school teachers in Portland, OR.  No one thought about it.  Mrs. Eagle was quiet but taught my brother to read at last.  Miss Colbert was a respected tribal elder who wrote books.

Red-heads.  Oh, you know about “Anne of Green Gables,” esp if you’re a liberal who watches PBS.  Although the real story, which was Lucy Maude Montgomery’s story, ended in her suicide.  Her life was one of struggle.  My mother used to ask me why I couldn’t marry a nice Presbyterian minister.  Lucy Maude did that.  He was bipolar and she spent her life trying to feed their family (2 sons) and fend off curious people so he could keep his congregation.  She even preached in his stead if his emotional paralysis were active.  She wasn’t an orphan.  Her father abandoned the family.  She lived with him and his young wife for a little while as a near-adult.  It was loveless.

Back to boys who come to puberty with the realization that their body is not responding to girls but to other boys.  This difference can make them pull off to the side, marking them as vulnerable because exceptional, and attracting those who will exploit that.  How they respond will be unique to the other factors in their lives and might turn out happily.  But in times as chaotic and treacherous as ours, with as many drug-gripped families as ours, with as much floating violence as our culture supports, a boy needs both luck and help.  

A pretty and bold boy can do well for himself, seemingly, if he engages in sexwork.  Until he gets beat up.  Or worse: the usual STD’s and then HIV.  Often contracted in prison while serving a sentence for drug use, used for numbing to do sexwork.

Why should an old woman care?  I’m in a place, a small town next to a rez on the high prairie, where HIV is rare and yet it’s here.  It hits all levels: the low because they’re dumb and the high because they’re gifted enough to be traveling participants in conferences and panels where they are exposed to temptation among the elite.  Once HIV affects people one cares about, how can you turn away?

Some people will say the very fact that I live here and am not an activist except by writing amounts to “turning away.”  But activists don’t have the time to read and ponder that is my antidote for Aging Syndrome.  I’m leaving a snail trail that is probably already fading, but it’s not nothing.  Most of the time I’m not alone — there is a diaspora of people who care.

THE FIRST GAY MEN I KNEW

I have a hard time addressing the issue of HIV-AIDS for a number of reasons. One is that I care too much, but that's more a result than a reason.  Another reason is the irrationality of it all.  I do not understand the stigma.  It does not match my experience.

These elegant gay men did not attend NU, because they were black.

The first gay men I knew were people studying theatre at Northwestern University.  Subterraneously, the School of Speech in the late Fifties had become welcoming to closeted young gay theatre people, partly because of a half-acknowledged and extremely effective acting teacher who was female-partnered.  I say partnered because it’s impossible to imagine these dignified persons rolling around on a bed waving sex toys, which is usually how people see non-conforming identities.  Theirs was truly a partnership.  They didn’t live together until retirement but traveled together on vacations.  In summer they cooperated to manage a repertory resort theatre.

The gay men, frankly, were using me as a disguise.  Eager, childish, introverted, I made no demands.  They were prosperous, handsome, gifted, generous people.  I thought all gays were like that.  Even now very few of them will talk about it but most seem in good health.

The first person I knew personally who had AIDS was a fellow Unitarian minister from Canada in 1987.  He was young, but we collaborated on a theology of Landscape: the Prairie, and that brought us together.  At ministers’ meetings he had a little pill box with a timer in it and we grew used to its beeping.  In spite of an MD partner and an important minister father who knew how to use clout, he died.  It has not been a secret.  The meds simply were not developed in time to save him.

Over the years since, I’ve heard rumors now and then about former students -- often the most gifted ones, dying of AIDS.  It almost seemed to be a natural consequence due to being exceptional, independent, creative.  Especially because of the Unitarian connection to the Transcendentalists, I related it to the plague of tuberculosis that killed so many prominent New England thinkers. Thoreau, for instance, and the sister of Louisa May Alcott.

Ho-Chunk Girls with smallpox

Because much of my life has been involved with the Blackfeet reservation, I know lots of poor, alcoholic, mentally damaged, lost souls, but few of them are alone unless they fight off everyone, which some do.  To be Indian or affiliated with Indians is to be in community.  When one reads Indian history, one meets the grisly ghost of smallpox.  It was a disease of Indians, a racist disease, because Indians genetically had no immunity.  Another epidemic nearly claimed my mother as a child: the Spanish Flu, named for a country that was blameless, a viral killer of the young and healthy.  The death toll exceeded that of WWI.

When I became an animal control officer in Portland, going door to door to solve problems, I met isolated old people, drunks, loonies, teen mothers, parolees, and a whole household of cheerful transvestites.  Because AC officers were technically part of the sheriff’s department, specialized deputies, the curtain that ordinarily keeps people from knowing about extreme events was pulled back, and fucking the Thanksgiving turkey was the least of it.  We saw death in all its animalness, including human.  We saw deadly living conditions.  The street kids in Portland -- who have the advantage of public fountains big enough to bathe in downtown -- clustered up, sometimes in plain sight.  One old woman lived in the women’s restroom of the Portlandia Building through the winter.  Some called her “the Bride” because she wrapped herself in white plastic.

Economics can easily be a plague.  Get one step down and you’re forced down two more.  When the only thing keeping you alive (food stamps, day care, housing, clinics) is de-funded in order to afford a new sports coliseum, I call it “murder by pencil”.  This economic murder is the withholding of help from anyone stigmatized and the constant effort to stigmatize MORE people.  The idea is that they don’t deserve help, that they are Other, wogs, subhuman, Devil’s spawn, or simply livestock kept only because they are productive in terms of reproduction and work.  They are sacrifices in the name of greed.  The Great Scandal is that the most conservative pencil murderers are the ones who claim to be Christian.  And of course, by underfunding programs meant to help people or by creating impassable thresholds, the government is a big-time killer.

But things are changing, the backlash is beginning.  When the Mormons recently attacked homosexuality thousands simply cleared the pews.  Who expected that?  Clearly not their own leaders.  It happened all at once so onlookers noticed, but it’s been happening gradually to many denominations.  Ever since the Pill separated sex from babies, everything has been “scrambled eggs.”  The old rules had been enforced by unwanted pregnancy.  But we separated sex from love all by ourselves.   One of the worst scrambles has been the abandonment of boys by families who instead of fathers either have nobody or a parade of moochers.

I have not thrown myself into the AIDS fight, at least not exclusively.  I try to keep up by reading, but I confess that I’m not a narrow-issue person.  I look for the deep constants, the biology triggers gone wrong, the constraints of a changing planet.  It seems to me that ebola and HIV and rabies are not so different from each other -- all deadly viruses.  But in our minds they are anchored by their origins in our consciousness.  Rabies in America is still a small town issue, the previously trustworthy dog gone mad.  Ebola plainly “belongs to” Africa.  And HIV is gay, connected to Biblically defined sin and flamboyant licentiousness in SF.  Consciously or not, HIV's early efficiency at killing and the idea that it was a deserved punishment made leaders secretly approach it as surefire death. (“Whew!  Now we’re rid of those troublemakers!”)  Now that science has unraveled the mysteries of the cells almost to the final knots (there's really no such thing), and people can be saved (at great cost for which read “profit” for manufacturers and professional advice-givers), we’re stuck because we still think HIV is not a virus but bad behavior.  If only bad morals would kill the oppressors instead of the wicked.  

By accident and by osmosis, in my mind I have the morality and value of the gay community upside down from what other more conventional people think.  Partly because of the men I knew in an elite, privileged community and partly because of an arts education (haute couture, ballet, post-modern philosophy) that has always valued the European notion that the atypical achiever is liable to be gay and a crusader for justice, I see their situation in regard to AIDS as more like that of the Jewish intellectual -- vulnerability to holocaust by brutes and dictators. aided by public resentment over imagined greater prosperity.

Young, gay Oliver Sacks

Therefore, recovery from the Holocaust (if there can be such a thing), should be relevant to gays.  Needle drugs are an “evil” source of HIV now, quite apart from sex.   But the need to get money for drugs means paid sex (as an alternative to theft and other violence) which spreads the infection that pushes the need for money for drugs again -- both the drugs to address the virus and the drugs to address the addiction -- which is now pressed by the need for relief from providing paid sex.  A knot in an economic rope.

There are two consequences of this knot: distrust of the government and other institutions since they are NOT understanding or responding in any effective way; and more pencil death, defunding.  More and more money for practical solutions is being diverted to high-priced ineffective “research,” guiding money to the already wealthy, paying minimum wage to the resentful clinic clerks who throw drugs into a bag for a customer they despise. More knots.

Reflexivity

I am not gay and I am not male and I am not HIV poz.  So?  I’m human.  Maybe that counts.  Maybe if that counted for everyone, we’d at least reliably get HIV meds to everyone who needs them without having to wrap them in contempt.  My problem is that gay poz guys don’t believe I can be sympathetic or even understand.  Just like any guys, they think I’m a nuisance.  And I am.  I’m like that person sitting on a cushion, leaning against the wall, watching, listening, not smoking.  They assume criticism.  They're right.  I am criticizing the whole system.

CHARRED BONES

“Fire Shut Up in My Bones” by Charles Blow is in its debut publicity wave and deserves close attention.  Blow is a strong, inspiring person who lives up to his intention of always being brave and honest.  What follows is not intended to discredit him in any way.  But I want to question the definition of his book as a “Black” book, his life as a “Black” life, his problems with intimacy as “Black.”  I think he is in danger of being ghettoized.  We already think of the "down low" and MSM as Black behavior.

Repeatedly “Black” is used as a way of pushing away issues that are really those of all of us.  But it is also an advantage for Blow because he is part of a solid community, the “Black” one.  Charles Blow is not named Gene Robinson, but he has that community behind him.  Other writers do not.  I’m saying there’s a camel coming into the establishment tent (for which I am glad) and that only the nose of the camel is black.  The rest is camel colored.

Charles Blow

It's not just a white problem.  In terms of demographics, Black keeps overwhelming red.  On the one hand, the AIM movement came out of the street Indians of Minneapolis observing Black Power and following their map.  On the other hand, the Native Americans -- because they are a decimated and diasporia/confined population -- is always on the graphs as a single-digit number.  In fact, there is probably a little Indian in all of us.  Looking at Charles Blow, knowing he grew up in rural Louisiana, I suspect that he’s got more than a little Native American blood in him.  Runaway slaves were given shelter by tribes, captured Indians were enslaved.  Being Native American is not so easily defined, esp. since sometimes death can only be evaded by hiding, even now.

Blacks contact me to ask how they could find out if they were part Blackfeet.  (Don't call -- there's no way unless you've got a family provenance.)  Almost always they are probably not, but it seems to them a way of ennobling their families and evading the Mandingo syndrome. Mandingo is another of those syndrome novels that I would never have read except that I found it as a much-worn paperback in a house I rented.  The building had stood open for several years so I don’t know who had been reading this raggedy copy, but it is about an exceptional slave who is tormented by whites.  Individual versus society.  Mandingo (it’s the character’s name) is forced into a pot and boiled alive, suggesting both the fate of missionaries in the world of cannibals and the proverbial frog in heating-up water.  I've never seen the movie.

from www.beyondthisplace.com -- Black frats

Charles Blow has gone the conventional academic route, submitted to the group (Black frat) in “a trauma of cohesion” -- hazing -- which I presume was not quite like joining an LA gang, but on the same principle.  He has been a public journalist for a long time, a popular and appealing man.  His stories (I haven’t read the book yet) are supposed to be as much about manhood as about black.  Though he began this manuscript as short personal pieces, before he got to publication he had an editor/coach to help him make decisions.  He’s used to that, he can deal with it, he does not need to defy anyone.  Authority has been on his side.

The gay issue turns out to be a bit of a sidebar, but he firmly defends the right of individuals to escape the dyadic coercion of American white society which thinks it is the mainstream, but probably isn’t anymore.  Same as Britain.  We are at least bracketed by immigrants.  The extreme contemporary version is the right wing of the Islamists.  Even the gay movement is now various, and may have lost power because of lack of cohesion, which may be in part due to acceptance into the lives of young urban people.  They just say, "whatever."  Anal intercourse?  Oh, yeah.  Cheaper way than condoms to avoid pregnancies.  HIV?  "You can live a normal life, man."  (For a price.)

But there are still those out there who are not struggling with fire in their bones because their bones are already charred.  Their problem with identity is maintaining any kind of coherence at all.  They would be alone and unknown except for the efforts of a few dedicated people.  The ones I know work through real-stories-gallery.org.  The idea is not for some major handsome strong figure to speak in retrospect about his suffering, but rather to let today’s suffering kids speak for themselves through video.  Many are poly-lingual in an oral world but illiterate in print.  Not all.  And they all speak image -- and dance.  And tech.

I’m not talking to Charles Blow, except to say, “Good on you, man!”  I’m not wanting him to turn into a flag-carrier for abused boys, black or any other color.  I’m talking to all the people who will read Blow’s book and say to themselves secretly the equivalent to NIMB (Not in My Backyard)  which is maybe NTDWM  (Nothing to Do with Me).  Sexual abuse of children, esp when intimacy between adults is described only in terms of sexual desire and violence, is so widespread -- we now realize reluctantly -- that the trouble is not just about the pervie deviants who live across town and don’t look like us.  It IS us.

Looking back over my 75 years I’m embarrassed and grieving over the times I failed to realize what was going on and why.  I probably intervened a couple of times, but nowhere nearly as much as I ought to have.  I’m finding that people are more and more anxious to go underground, actively scared of being identified -- even in the most conventional terms -- not anything they could be criticized or criminalized for being.  This is especially true of Native Americans. Every clue might be followed up by Seizers, the name the NA people gave to soldiers, and then the men who went by contract to grab kids and force them into boarding schools, without even telling their families.  Now they use Facebook.

What I’m saying is that the black nose on this camel can be followed -- I hope WILL be followed -- by the whole animal.  I want the tent to fold.  It’s like the tents put up over crime scenes while the technicians work.  At first it’s a protection but there comes a time to remove it, or it becomes only a way to hide things.  People get too used to it.  It becomes an illusion about polite society.

Blow’s title, "Fire Shut Up in my Bones," is intriguing. It's Biblical: 

Jeremiah's Complaint  Jeremiah 20:9

…For each time I speak, I cry aloud; I proclaim violence and destruction, because for me the word of the LORD has resulted In reproach and derision all day long. But if I say, "I will not remember Him or speak anymore in His name," then in my heart it becomes like a burning fire shut up in my bones; And I am weary of holding it in, and I cannot endure it. For I have heard the whispering of many, "Terror on every side! Denounce him; yes, let us denounce him!" All my trusted friends, Watching for my fall, say: "Perhaps he will be deceived, so that we may prevail against him And take our revenge on him."…

I don’t know whether Blow is aware that for people carrying the HIV virus, one of the most common problems is pneumonia.  One of the last ditch meds for pneumonia is prednisone.  It is generally effective, but in the case of those carrying HIV, it is more likely than in non-poz populations to trigger Avascular Necrosis, death of the bones due to lack of blood supply.  No one knows what causes it, no one knows how to cure it.  For those bones, the fire has gone out -- they don’t get the oxygen that supports fire.  Charred and splintered, they can be replaced by steel. 

I am entertained by the notion that the New York Times is riding on the coattails of their only Black columnist who is now surfing a big wave (I love mixed metaphors) by advocating unique and fluid sexuality in each person, esp. since his life has been an adventure in presenting deliberate and conscious conformity.  He learned table manners and a new voice, but couldn’t make his sexuality conform.  I still wonder whether he knows of any Native Americans in his family tree.  (I don’t see genealogy as legal categories and entitlements -- I see them as being like tree rings, marking good times and bad.)  So now we have three metaphors: coats, waves, trees.  Pay no attention to that camel.  It just wants in.