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.

SEND FIVE DOLLARS OR I'LL KILL THIS PUPPY!

Many scandals emerge from the rez.  Today’s version is a huge government grant for educating the children which evidently was skimmed for personal gain.  I know few of the people involved and have no opinion on the particulars, but I know the phenomenon well and it is not limited to reservations.  I called it “compassion trafficking.”  In its most primitive form it amounts to “send me five dollars or this puppy will die.”  Find a sorry situation that wrings the heart, propose some kind of solution because you are so tender- hearted, informed and skillful, and then watch the money roll in.  It works great: refugees, war victims, the starving, the abused, the debased innocent, the contaminated land, the stray pups.  How can one NOT send money?  Our love becomes intense, almost sexual, maybe a lifelong obsession.

Those particularly vulnerable to these appeals are likely to be folks who feel guilty over good fortune (movie stars, those in need of approval, zillionaires).   Is there something wrong with that?  I don’t think so.  Surely atonement is good, esp. when it benefits many (Carnegie’s libraries, Ford Foundation’s educational support, Jobs’ malaria project) and when it points out to the rest of us how simple measures (books and mosquito nets) can have huge consequences.  If much of the money that is sent comes from people who can scarcely spare it in their own lives, is that bad?  I don’t think so.  Do we or do we not believe in free will and self-determination?  Should we deprive anyone of the pride that comes from giving?

Human sexual trafficking is locating the relatively powerless (children, women), capturing them physically, making a profit from them until they are too old or damaged to be valuable (soon enough), and then either snuffing or abandoning them.  This is the basis of drug trafficking as well, using addiction as the means of capture and knowing that as the older users die, new users will arrive. 

 “Vote trafficking” in a democracy is not different.  Promises are the mechanism of capture, the issue is promoted until it dies of failure to deliver (or more rarely due to success), and is then abandoned for the next issue.  Advertising is also based on this premise, trafficking toothpaste and soft drinks through the mechanisms of popularity and exaggerated claims, then changing the brand to something “new” to keep the trafficking going.  This could be criticized as trivializing the far more serious trafficking of sexual victims — or war — or empty monetary instruments of conveyance.  But since it is a basic vulnerability of all human beings, the mechanism itself deserves to be addressed in all its forms, its seeming innocence as much as its obvious criminality.

Those who exploit this mechanism of compassion, of needing to help and improve the world, are normally defined by law as criminal or curbed by regulation.  Their secret — and it is easy to learn — is always to stay one step ahead, legalizing and deregulating, whether marijuana or junk bonds.  But it is also useful to forbid, criminalize, impose prohibition, because that creates an underground that drives up the profit far beyond the limits of what can be controlled by inspectors, permits, cops and judges.  Also, the seeming virtue of the criminalizers is burnished.  Complexity and overpopulation are also enablers of the criminal compassion traffickers.  

The current overwhelmed governments of nations, to say nothing of their corruption from within, allows a whole new category of trafficking in “white horse riders” who wish to be funded for seemingly virtuous reasons.  This means a constant three-level opportunity to say:  “Send five dollars or I will kill this puppy,” “Killing puppies is evil and you must send me five dollars so I can punish those killers,” or “Send five dollars and I will write a perfect law and design a perfect system for managing puppies.”   Meanwhile, the endless supply of puppies continues.  (Substitute “boys” for puppies.)  It is the social and biological forces that need to be addressed, but they are not popular.

No one thinks of compassion for traffickers and exploiters.  No one pities people so desperate that they will deprive the vulnerable they pretend to be helping.  In fact, another dimension of sexual trafficking in children is discrediting those who know and  help victims.  In the literary world this means that for every book sold because it reveals something like the suffering of children is followed by another book stigmatizing the first author, often on puritanical grounds exploiting liberal tendencies to stigmatize bad guys instead of figuring them out.

What are useful criteria for distinguishing between a scam and a true service?  When I was in seminary, I worked for a counseling center managed by a certified and constantly scrutinized Clinical Pastoral Education minister and counselor.  The lifeblood of the center was government money that came in for public support of broken families and desperate children.  Also, there was money for the development of future ministers, some money from private counselees, and money from the church that sponsored the center.  Once a month this man of good will cooked the books: that is, he shifted money around — not to benefit himself but to pick up the bill for the neediest.  His life was ten hours of work every day.  He did not live high.  He had gotten through college by living in his car and qualifying for scholarships, which are a kind of trafficking in education that benefits institutions of higher learning since scholarship money often comes from donors.  (“Send five dollars or I will deprive this student!”)  He knew that if he were found out, he was vulnerable to punishment.

These criteria are helpful:

1.  Tenacity:  Is the issue addressed over a long period of time regardless of changing fashions that offer more money for other issues?

2.  Participation:  Do those working for this cause have actual contact with the beneficiaries?  Have they actually been there, done that?  Is their lifestyle roughly the same, even if they have the independent capacity to live in a much grander style? 

3.  Identification:  Are they resisting the temptation to be “better,” the “big person” who is stooping to help the pitiful?  Or are they one of them, equal.

4.  Acceptance by the category:  If, for instance, the “puppies” are sexworkers, do they accept this charitable helper as one of them, able to see their world as they see it and therefore possibly help find a way out of it that doesn’t make victim-puppies out of them?

5.  Is the help empowering?  Will the empowerment be removed when the puppies become dogs?  Or will they suddenly be criminalized, impounded, accused?

6.  Is it first level, on the ground, in the trenches, or is it Ivory Tower critiques and theorizing working from data-surfing and bibliography?

7.  Transparency is a difficult issue.  Protecting those stigmatized can mean sheltering their particulars as much as sheltering their bodies.  Those who traffick in stigmatizing are constantly mining for info about infection, gender-identification, “failure”, insanity, arrests.  Extortion is a kind of trafficking:  “Send five dollars or I will reveal your past.”  Therefore, part of the work of opposing trafficking is opposing stigma of all kinds and possibly also the reverse of stigma, which is superiority: elitism, privilege.

8.  Systems and games are surely at the base of much woe.  Overpopulation, outmoded systems of governance, rampant capitalism (commodification), dwindling resources, lack of consensus, overspecialization, distancing from reality, self-protection, and a constantly shifting state of the planet and the knowledge of it, mean that what worked yesterday won’t work today.  (“Send five dollars and I’ll tell you the secret of the universe!”)

9.  Fear.  (“Send five dollars and I’ll tell you how to survive when the world is destroyed.”)  Best voting and war-mongering scam yet.

10.  Funding by accomplishment:  Pups should avoid dependence on both charity and institutions.  Take your life into your own hands, Pup.

11.  Charity does not entitle control or ownership of the issue, not even by the government.  How can a government “own” HIV-AIDS and suppress all differences of opinion or competition?

12.  If the category doesn’t include those who are ugly, infected, vicious, stubborn, unhousebroken, or handicapped some way, it’s not compassion.  In fact, specimens like this who turn up in “shelters” are euthanized. Mother Nature does the same thing, but doesn’t pretend it’s compassion.