SID GUSTAFSON, WRITER

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Sid Gustafton, who is from the high-achieving family of Rib Gustafson, is known around here as a veterinarian like his father and brother, except that he has a specialty practice in race horses.  He teaches equine behavior, and posts on Twitter.  In addition, he writes both nonfiction and novels, often based on truth, like “Swift Dam,” just published.  The link above is to a website called “Scriggler” where you can read his story called “Smallpox.”  He often expands such stories into whole novels.  Lately he has been recording short stories on Sound Cloud, something I would like to do but never get around to actually doing.  

“Swift Dam” is about the 1964 catastrophic dam collapse on Birch Creek and the lethal consequences, changing lives and the land right up until now.  I was here at the time.

The year 1914 is the year Bob Scriver was born, and those who knew him will realize that he is sort of the inspiration for the character called Stuf.  Sid knew him mostly by stopping as a kid with his father at the Scriver Studio and taxidermy shop in the Sixties.  Raised on the Blackfeet reservation and often spending the summer cowboying with someone like Billy Big Springs Sr., Sid has more ties to the rez land and families than Jimmy Welsh. Jr. did, though no one would dare say so.  Every spring Sid goes up to the grave of James Willard Schultz, which is near the Gustafson ranch on Two Medicine, and does a little maintenance.  Schultz was a white man who married a Native American and longed to be NA.  His versions of their lives were sometimes a bit more dramatic than real, which is not an advantage in this prudish just-the-facts culture.

Sid is more romantic than I am but quite truthful once you allow for that.  “His” bears do things that “my” bears would not.  He’s inclined to mysticism and always searching for true love, but very much anchored in practical how-to.  Bob Scriver would have loved these stories.  It’s good to be near Sid some of the year and via the Internet.

www.sidgustafson.com   More books, photos, ideas.

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.

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.