I nodded quietly as Bryan told me about friends he had buried, as one must when hearing other people’s war stories, attention being the only appropriate contribution. One of his greatest friends had died just weeks before the drugs became available. “What happened in 1996, then? ” I asked. “How did things change when the drugs came out? ”
Bryan sputtered, the way he does when three books are trying to exit his mouth at once. “Everything changed! The whole body of assumptions everyone carried around was gone. The death sentence was gone, virtually overnight, and the disease immediately went underground. Within a breathtakingly short period, it went from being a thing everybody talked about to a thing nobody talked about.”
“How do you think people my age and younger are dealing with it? “
“When you have sex, you mean? You’re all as sexually active as gay men have ever been. But you’re wrestling with an unseen ghost. In the days of the death sentence, they told us how to minimize risk, and they told us all the time. Now the level of HIV education has plunged. The focus is on treatment instead of prevention.”
He’s right: at last year’s International AIDS Conference in Vienna, Vancouver’s Dr. Julio Montaner, whose research team was among the first to prove the efficacy of those drug cocktails, led the cry for “treatment as prevention” (the idea being that lowering viral loads through drugs ultimately lowers transmission rates). But the pendulum has swung so far away from targeted prevention initiatives — posters above urinals at gay bars, say — that a Canadian group of veteran gay health activists has brought a complaint before the Human Rights Commission, demanding that funds be supplied for gay-specific campaigns. Gens Hellquist, who spearheads the action, told me that homophobia keeps our government from allocating health funding to underserved gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans communities. And other health activists told me that the initial push to categorize AIDS as “anyone’s disease” (i.e., Magic Johnson got it and so can you) means that any proposal containing the word “gay” is now less likely to receive funding.
Public health strategists might point out that while early HIV reports, back in 1985, showed that gay men accounted for over 80 percent of cases, that number has dropped to 42 percent today. However, they still make up the largest category; heterosexual transmission accounts for only 31 percent of new infections. And although a great deal has been made in recent years about rising rates among women, the proportion of female cases stopped growing more than a decade ago.
Meanwhile, a startling new study out of Vancouver tells us that of the more than 20,000 gay men who live there, nearly one in five has contracted the virus. The same study found that almost a quarter of those men under age thirty have never even been tested.
or my friends and me, “post-AIDS” refers to more than a disease. It means post-protests, post-outrage, post-victimization. It touches our entire lives and leaves us with a deep-seated and cruel distaste for the sissy boys who have dominated our representation in films and TV (after all, wasn’t it the bottoms who got AIDS?). It means vainly attempting to make up new ways of talking, walking, and loving, because the old ones carry the stain of disaster. We are the first generation of gay men to grow up free of overwhelming oppression and imminent crisis. Growing up after AIDS means profiting from the civil rights battles it occasioned.But in some ways we are still hopelessly lost. A generation of men who could have been our mentors was decimated. The only thing we learned from observing them was to ruthlessly identify “AIDS face,” that skeletal appearance the early HIV drugs wrought on patients by wasting away their bodily tissues. But those faces grow more rare each day. And without the agonizing deaths to serve as warnings, without the ravaged bodies that once testified to the reality of HIV, many of my peers have found themselves “slipping up” during sex without being terribly concerned.
Gay men, like anyone, are well aware that we ought to use condoms. Just as the more than five million smokers in this country realize that the benefits of nicotine are limited to momentary gratification. Just as the more than two million Canadian diabetics know that chocolate cake is a transitory pleasure with real consequences. We, none of us, live rational lives. We rely on concerted efforts by health agencies to counter the haplessness of our lived experience. And this is doubly so when it comes to HIV; having never known a world without the virus makes it hard to even notice the thing. How long, really, can a small segment of the population be suspended in catastrophe?
I’m the same age as the epidemic. By my first birthday, eight young gay guys in New York had developed purple tumours on their skin, which turned out to be a rare cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma. Those boys had AIDS, though there wasn’t a name for it yet.
That year, 1981, an unknowable number of men slept (shamefully or shamelessly) with each other and unwittingly consigned themselves to early deaths. That year, before the tears and the placards, before the suicides, the broken families, and the funerals, an inferno began its relentless unfolding. (One of the most insidious characteristics of HIV is that it can take years before its effects are felt, which leaves one plenty of time to unknowingly pass it along.) That year, my future best friends and I, seemingly far removed from AIDS and from each other, learned to crawl in the undestroyed homes of our parents.
In 1983, Time magazine made AIDS its cover story — “The AIDS Hysteria” read the cover line — and my mother, fascinated, preserved that issue by pressing it between books on a shelf, where it sat, undisturbed, for decades.
At twenty, I told her I was gay. I managed this feat, unforgivably, during a ten-minute coffee break, when she stopped by a café I was working at. She mostly said the right things. But when I came home later that day, she was slumped on the stairs beside a forgotten load of laundry. “I just worry,” she kept saying. “I worry for your health.” We both knew what she was talking about.
