How AIDS has Changed Gay AmericaWhen the first purple lesions announcing AIDS, or as it was first known GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency), appeared, and men on the two coasts began losing their friends, the sex frenzy was at its height. VD clinics were running at peak capacity. Even though gay men were graduating from medical and nursing schools in greater numbers than ever before, there were not nearly enough of them to serve the rapidly expanding gay enclaves in New York, L.A. and San Francisco, much less the second wave communities in Miami, Houston, Atlanta, Chicago and New Orleans. Doctors and gay men remained, at best, suspicious of each other. When a handful of men organized the Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York in 1981, they did so precisely because they saw too many of their friends dying and too few doctors and public health officials paying any attention. Not only did city health officials in New York and San Francisco show little interest in the fledgling AIDS epidemic. There was in fact, little they could say that would carry much credibility; the doctors seemed always to have been preaching against gay sex. Warnings that sex could give you cancer--in the form of KS lesions--sounded like just another barrage of homophobic prudery.
Even the gay activists who founded GMHC were denounced. One gay New York writer accused activist Larry Kramer of self-hating emotionalism because of his attempts to draw attention to the mounting toll of KS cases. "I think the concealed meaning of Kramer's emotionalism," Robert Chesley wrote to the New York Native, "is the triumph of guilt: that gay men deserve to die for their promiscuity .... Read anything by Kramer closely. I think you'll find that the subtext is always: the wages of gay sin is death .... I am not downplaying the seriousness of Kaposi's sarcoma. But something else is happening here, which is also serious: gay homophobia and anti-eroticism." Kramer, as reported by writer Randy Shilts, responded that it was "stupid to rail against the very presentation of these warnings."
The division between Kramer and Chesley over eros and disease, the tension between medicine and sex, ran through gay neighborhoods all over the country, especially in the major cities, and it shaped both the progress of the epidemic and of gay men's eventual activist response to combating the epidemic. The most rancorous of the battles in San Francisco centered around the closure of the bathhouses in 1984. Leading gay activists denounced the bathhouse operators as little more than profiteering murderers, while the activists themselves who assisted the city health department in winning closure were called self-hating "quislings" who would eventually lead all gays into quarantined concentration camps.
"AIDS is like the Holocaust," he says, "in that we have to go on living as though it were not happening, just as Jews in the camps could bear their existence only by living as though they were not facing death in the gas chambers and the ovens." To live in the face of AIDS, to live in the communities where one of every two gay men had been infected and seemed, without a cure, sure to die, is to live a life of resistance.
ΑπάντησηΔιαγραφήThat life of resistance was at once spiritual, militantly political, and irrepressibly intimate in its sense of collective nurturing. Yet nurturing of what? Of sick individuals, surely. AIDS has flushed the newspapers and the airwaves with tales of great suffering and personal sacrifice, of heroic and tireless hospital teams like those on San Francisco's famed Ward XX. The rabbi was claiming more: Not only to care for the fallen, but to go on living, as an act of positive resistance, not in denial of death and disease but in spite of it, knowing elsewhere in your mind that you will probably succumb to it. The act of resistance is the active assertion that gay human beings have not disappeared and are continuing to pursue the fullness of their physical, political, spiritual and emotional existences, acknowledging that the alteration of any one of these is not the same as the elimination of it. For the activists, nurses, researchers and community workers fighting AIDS to have excised sex from their lives would have meant succumbing to an existential death in advance of biological death."
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