Good Vibrations Magazine

One week ago today was our annual moment to think about AIDS: to ponder the recent statistics telling us most Americans still don’t know whether or not they’re infected — at 55%, it’s good that it’s a lower number than it used to be, but it’s still way too high (plus, most importantly, it includes people who have HIV right now but don’t know it). Time to hope the new studies that suggest Gilead’s drug Truvada might have prophylactic effects on the virus (at least for some people) might move us further in the direction of stopping the epidemic. A day to wonder what on earth got into the Pope, who just a couple of years ago was telling Africans not to use condoms and who now, apparently, is carefully considering the lives and souls of male prostitutes. Bully for him, he of the bully pulpit that sometimes is the very definition of “bully.” This might signal an incredibly important cultural shift — though apparently that notion is making conservative Catholics pretty cranky.

All those topics are worthwhile to think about, of course, even though I confess I have a similar take on the matter as my friend Cory Silverberg, who reminds us that the “fuzzy math” of World AIDS Day only includes the people we can reach, research, culturally recognize. That is, all those numbers (and the conclusions we draw from the numbers), are useful insofar as they’re correct, and they’re only correct to the extent that we are truly inclusive. And pretty much every entity with a stake in this epidemic has a problem with diverse behaviors and identities, a problem with inclusivity, at least sometimes. Thanks for writing about that, Cory.

But what I really want to do on World AIDS Day every year is engage in acts of remembrance. Goodbye, again, to so many remarkable people: David Lourea, Steven Brown, John Lorenzini, Roan Simone Pony, Bradley Rose, Cynthia Slater, Lou Sullivan, James Campbell (whose life and death got me involved in AIDS activism in the mid-1980s, when things were so different, but not different enough, than they are right now. I wrote about James in my essay in PoMoSexuals).

These are just a few of the people I knew personally who were taken too early by HIV: activists, artists, sex community people. I can’t make an even-close-to-comprehensive list of everyone I’ve known, without a day to sit in silent contemplation as I call up their faces and memories. Really that’s what I should have done with my day on December 1: retreat into past recollections and relationships, making my resolve for AIDS Day + 1 Week (not to mention the entire remainder of the year) that much stronger. I didn’t have time for that, or didn’t take it: work, life, everything else impinged on the memories as they always do. But I want to ask all of you to commit acts of remembrance with me, if not right now, then all year long.

Everyone who’s been important to us is worth remembering, of course, not only those who died of AIDS; but everyone who has died of HIV disease has died, completely or a little bit, because our culture has a rough time being as open about sexuality as we need to be, as unashamed, as frank, as curious, as compassionate about difference, as aware that difference isn’t the same thing as an “at-risk group.” Groups aren’t at risk — people are, and behaviors shared by people who identify many different ways are the highways adopted by the bugs who gave us this epidemic.

Actually, let me say that a different way. The virus that puts us at risk uses our blood, our wet and slippery parts, our sexual fluids as a pathway. But the highways down which HIV death travels are actually ignorance, shame, bias and neglect. And I really don’t want one other crucial road to become blocked: that of our memories. In the early days of the epidemic, our memories made the most powerful activism out of people grieving over lost loves, family and friends, and kept each memory alive via the AIDS Quilt. Today there are so many individual memories that it is overwhelming. And if that isn’t true in your own life? Even if you don’t live in a community that HIV has obviously decimated, you live in a country ravaged by this illness (and the social sickness that has let it go on this long), a country that has lost so many bright and creative lights to AIDS that we will never be able to measure what we’re missing and what it means.

The simple things each of us can do to respond to this knowledge: Talk frankly and comfortably about sex. (It’s a requirement for us to talk about safer sex and risk.) Play safe. Donate what you can to organizations that work to end AIDS and its cultural and personal ravages — or volunteer extra time if you’re able.

Do you have energy for more than just the simple stuff? OK: Fight homophobia. Work to end poverty and racism. Hold the politicians accountable who play with lives, demographics, health care, and resources as though they’re on a massive Monopoly board. Everyone can do something, and it shouldn’t be only on World AIDS Day that we are asked to think about doing it.

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