The Complete Series

by Samuel R. Delany

  The above is some of what is known about AIDS to date (October 1984), though what is known has been changing month to month for more than a year and will no doubt continue to change until after a vaccine is developed. (All these statistics will be tragically outdated by the time this book is published.) What follows is generally considered reasonable speculation by the informed, or is based on it.

  Various gay men’s groups have advised gay men to put a sharp curtailment on their number of sexual contacts outside of monogamous relationships, or to confine them within known circles, closed if possible. Given the situation, total abstinence is a reasonable choice. Whatever adjustment one makes, one must bear in mind that the social path of the disease is difficult to trace, as the incubation period has been generally estimated at seven months; and, in some cases, three years or more may have passed between infection and the outbreak of symptoms. There is no hard-edged evidence as to when—or for what length of time—someone can transmit the disease during incubation. The possibility of carriers with no symptoms is, therefore, highly likely*

  Those wishing further facts and guidelines should send their questions, stated briefly, too:

  Gay Men’s Health Crisis

  446 W. 33rd Street

  New York, NY 10001

  AIDS Hotline: (800) 243-2437

  2. September 1987 Up-date: Since October ’84 when I wrote the above, the number of reported AIDS cases in the US has passed forty-two thousand. Fifty-seven percent of these are dead. There are probably as many unreported cases as there are reported ones. Some three million carriers with no symptoms are estimated. (HTLV-3 is now usually abbreviated HIV.) And both The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals and the note are documents of a more naïve time. The abstinence suggested above is unworkable. And information in any but the most clear, common, and comprehensible language is immoral.

  Ass-fucking is your biggest risk. Don’t take it or give it, to men or women, without a condom—ever! French kissing has been declared low risk. But don’t do it if you have sores in the mouth or bleeding gums. Use condoms for all penetration, mouth, ass, or cunt. Though it’s been declared medium risk, don’t get cum, piss, or shit in the mouth or swallow it. The three best slogans for safe sex are:

  1: On you, not in you.

  2: Lots of physical affection is our best protection.

  3: [This one’s the hardest and, in the long run, the most important]: Talk about what we’re going to do for three minutes first.

  With such guidelines and a wide education program, San Francisco was able to stop the increase in the percent of cases each year. And New York City was able to curtail it sharply.

  Learn them. Live with them. Teach them.

  The address and phone number remain the same.

  —SRD

  3. As I finish the proof corrections for the Grafton edition of Flight from Nevèrÿon (July 1988), there have been over seventy-five thousand cases of AIDS reported in the United States, about half of whom are dead. In spring of ’84 I could write that personally I knew no one with the disease. Today it is the single largest slayer among my friends and acquaintances.

  The Lancet medical journal published a study (by Kingsley, et al., 14 Feb. 1987, pp. 345-9), in which twenty-five hundred homosexual men, who at the beginning of the study tested negative for antibodies to HIV, were monitored as to their sexual activity for six months. The paper states: ‘On multivariate analysis receptive anal intercourse was the only significant risk factor for seroconversion to HIV…’ in the 95 men who, in the course of the study, developed HIV antibodies (i.e., who seroconverted). It also states: ‘The absence of detectable risk for seroconversion due to receptive oral-genital intercourse is striking. That there were no seroconversions detected among 147 men engaging in receptive oral intercourse, accords with other data suggesting a low risk of infection from oral-genital (receptive semen) exposure. It must be mentioned that we were unable to determine the infection status of the sexual partners to whom these men were exposed. Perhaps these 147 men who practiced receptive oral intercourse were never or rarely exposed to HIV seropositive men. However this explanation seems improbable.’ In brief, this means that in the gay community, ass-fucking is still the killer.

  I would still follow the guidelines in the previous note. But if, from time to time, you don’t, the Kingsley study suggests which ones you should worry about most.

  Of the three people invited to brunch with me in §6.3 of ‘The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,’ that July morning in 1983, one has since died of AIDS. But a few months ago I ran into ‘Joey’ on 8th Avenue. Walking on a single crutch, he had some story about how a quart bottle had come out an upper window to land on his work boot. He squatted to show me where the leather’d been cut. He had a job, he went on to tell me, as a carpenter’s assistant up in Boston but was down in New York for the weekend. He was hitchhiking back up the next day—

  ‘Joey,’ I said, ‘don’t take this wrong.’ We stood together under the grey sky. ‘But how come you’re still alive?’

  He didn’t even ask me what I meant. ‘Cause,’ he said, ‘I don’t share needles with no one, no how, no way. And I don’t take it up the ass without a condom.’ He looked at me askance. ‘You?’

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t use needles. And I don’t take it up the ass, period.’

  ‘Brag, brag, brag,’ he said. ‘Let’s go have a beer—you seen how the Fiesta’s been closed down?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘We’ll buy some and go back to my place.’

  So we did.

  —SRD

  4. When I completed correcting page proofs for this Wesleyan University Press edition of The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals, I phoned the CDC (August 1993; 1-800 342-2437) for the following cumulative statistics, reflecting information collected up to June 1993: Since June 1st, 1981, the CDC reports 315,390 AIDS cases, 194,354 of whom are now dead. Of those cases, 36,690 are listed as women; 4,710 are listed as “Pediatric Cases” (i.e., children under thirteen); 172,085 are listed as “Men Who Have Sex With Men”; 73,610 are listed as “Injecting Drug Use”; 2,760 cases are listed as “Hemophilia and blood clotting disorders” (i.e., from blood transfusions or unscreened blood products); 19,557 are listed as “Men Who Have Sex with Men and Inject Drugs”; 21,873 are listed as “Heterosexual Contact.”

  The number of monitored studies of sexual behavior and its relation to AIDS (i.e., studies in which people who begin the study seronegative keep written accounts of their sexual behavior, which are then statistically correlated with the written accounts of those in the study who convert to sero-positive) remains appallingly low. Specifically, besides the Kingsley et al. study of homosexual men reported in postscript §3, I know of only one other, The Gay Men’s Health Study, conducted in San Francisco a year before Kingsley et al. Its conclusions were the same as the later Kingsley et al. study. Since the conclusions of these studies often go against popular prejudice, however, their information, if not their very existence, is often all but buried—even though they represent the only scientific information about sexual transmission realities.

  Though I hope in the next decade it will be very, very different, still, since 1984 when The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals was written, the despair of the sexually active about AIDS has, in general, not taken the form: “It is so prevalent, how can I avoid catching it?” Rather, that despair has almost always had the form: “Surely I must already have it. What does it matter what I do? Or what I say I do?” As a sexually active gay man in New York City, I have known that despair—for years at a time!

  Though, in these very postscripts I have advocated them, personally I have never followed the “safe sex” tenets: I’ve had no anal encounters at all. At age fifty-one my oral-receptive encounters (with swallowing and the tenderest of bleeding gums) still number more than 50 a year in the New York City area (and, up to 1990, numbered between 150 and 300 a year), among which only a single partner of mine has used a condom—and then, only once. Still, according
to the most recent of my annual HIV antibody tests this past September, I remain HIV-. And Magic Johnson, so famously and publicly HIV+, claims no male encounters and no needle use at all. But such “anomalies” are why monitored studies must be done—and why speculation on “possibilities of transmission” must be banished from our talk of AIDS.

  We need hard-edged information about probabilities.

  In a number of more recent reports, people have been asked, after HIV antibodies manifested themselves, “How did you pick it up?” These reports have produced statistics from “16 percent through oral transmission” through all the “Heterosexual Contact” cases reported, male and female (7 percent of the total). But such reports can a priori reflect only what is generally already believed; they can offer no revision of that general belief toward actual knowledge. And while such statements as mine (or Magic Johnson’s) can be useful in suggesting which monitored studies must be set up and performed, in no way can either take the place of such a study itself. And such studies are useless if their results are not made widely known.

  The fact is, the majority of AIDS educators are unaware of the studies that have been done, their form (i.e., whether a given study involved after-the-fact speculations or not), or their results. That, for example, a baker’s dozen years into the age of AIDS, there have been no such monitored studies of women (or, indeed, of heterosexual men) is a murderous crime.

  At this point in time, any talk of “possibilities of AIDS transmission” is talk of superstition. (Anal receptive sex is no longer a “possible route of sexual transmission”; it is the overwhelmingly probable route of sexual transmission, homosexual and heterosexual.) Superstitions sometimes turn out to have a basis in fact. But again, we need hard-edged and repeatedly supported information about probabilities. It is probability that allows air travel—with its fatal crashes killing hundreds—to remain a viable mode of transportation for you and me, rather than to be corporate mass murder. Information on probabilities alone can make a range of satisfying and fulfilling sexual acts viable again in our society, for all of us, gay and straight. Without such information, talk of “AIDS education” is absurd: there is no information to educate with. And the 315,390 cases these baker’s dozen years have netted trumpets the murderous inadequacy of the discourse of “possibilities” on which till now people have had to base their life decisions.

  —SRD* My warmest thanks go to Dr. Marc Rubenstein for helping me with this medical note.

  Appendix B: Buffon’s Needle

  from:

  Robert Wentworth,

  September 21, 1984

  DEAR MR DELANY,

  I thoroughly enjoyed your novel, Neveryóna, which I just finished reading. I wonder, however, if you would forgive my pointing out a few mathematical inaccuracies in your discussion of Venn’s solution to ‘Belham’s Problem.’

  My interest was piqued when I read about Venn’s proposed method in Chapter 12 for determining π. I was sure that I had heard of the method before, but I never understood why it worked. So, I sat down and did some mathematical analysis to convince myself that one can estimate π by tossing a stick onto a sheet of paper ruled with parallel lines spaced a stick-length apart. The mathematics told me that, yes, the results of this experiment can be used to estimate π but that the correct method is not quite as you have described.

  In particular, if you divide the number of times that the stick crosses a line (Nc) by the number of times that the stick lies free (NF),

  you find that the results get nearer and nearer 2/π-2, the more times you toss:

  (The arrow means ‘approaches’ and the wavey equals sign means ‘approximately equals.’) Thus Nc/NF does not directly give an estimate of π. You could of course estimate π from 2 + 2/(Nc/NF) but it is simpler to estimate π by multiplying the total number of tosses (N) by two and dividing this by Nc. This ratio does approach n as the number of tosses gets larger and larger;

  On page 356 of the first, mass market edition of Neveryóna, Venn says: ‘If you throw down the stick repeatedly, and if you keep count of the times it falls touching or crossing a line, and if you keep count as well of the times it lands between lines, touching or crossing none of them, and if you then divide the number of times it touches or crosses a line by the number of times it lies free, the successive numbers that you express, as you make more and more tosses, will move nearer and nearer the number you seek.’ From what I’ve been saying, this is, of course, wrong. Venn should have said (and I assume from the rest of your novel that in some ideal reprint you would like her statement correct): ‘If you throw down the stick repeatedly, and if you keep count of the times it falls touching or crossing a line, as well of the total number of times you toss the stick at all, and if you then divide twice the number of tosses by the number of times the stick touches or crosses a line, the successive numbers you express, as you make more and more tosses, will move nearer and nearer the number you seek.’

  There is also a more subtle error present in your discussion of the method. Belham later says that with five hundred tosses he is able to get an estimate of π more accurate than 22/7. Moreover, he claims that with another five hundred tosses the estimate will be ‘a good deal more accurate.’ While this level of accuracy is possible, it is not mathematically probable. If we use 2N/Nc to estimate π, then the expected fractional error in the estimate is given by:

  (The symbol ~ means “is equivalent to.”) For N = 500, we can expect on the average the estimate will be accurate to within roughly plus-or-minus 3.4%. In contrast, 22/7 differs from π by only .0040%. For N = 1,000, the expected error is plus-or-minus 2.4%, which is only smaller than the error for N = 500 by a factor of Because the error decreases only as N gets larger in the expression that is, because with large numbers the reciprocals of square roots decrease rather slowly as the base number increases), it is hard to obtain very accurate estimates. To achieve an expected accuracy of plus-or-minus 0.0040%, you would need to toss the stick approximately three-and-a-half million times! And even if you had the persistence to toss the stick that often, the accuracy of the estimate would potentially fall short of prediction, unless the apparatus used in the experiment was made with great care:

  If the stick is ten centimeters long, the spacing of the lines must be controlled to within four one-hundredths of a millimeter if you want an accuracy of 0.04%. So ‘Venn’ method does not provide a very efficient means for determining π—although it does provide an image that resonates nicely with the rest of your story.

  The conclusions above are based on an analysis of the method which I will enclose with this letter.

  [Here is the opening of Wentworth’s Analysis of an Experiment for Determining Pi:]

  Consider an experiment in which a stylus is tossed onto a sheet of paper ruled with parallel lines spaced one stylus-length apart. The stylus is assumed to land at a random position on the paper and with a random orientation. Once the stylus lands, we observe whether it crosses (or touches) a ruled line, or whether it lies free.

  The situation that applies in a single trial is illustrated in the sketch above. The stylus lands so that it is oriented at some angle with respect to the ruled lines. Assume for the moment that θ is known.

  Let us project the ruled lines and the image of the stylus onto a line perpendicular to the ruled lines. (See illustration.) The ruled lines become points one stylus-length apart. The stylus is projected to become a length of | sin θ | stylus lengths, where the bars denote absolute value or magnitude.

  Given θ , what is the probability that the projection of the stylus covers one of the points associated with the ruled lines? Since the stylus projection has length |sin θ | and the points are separated by a distance 1, it is intuitively true that this probability must be given by:

  P(cross| θ) = | sin θ |

  Here P(cross| θ) denotes ‘the probability that the stylus crosses a ruled lined, given θ.’

  Now we must take into account the fact that in genera
l θ is not known. θ is in fact random. Since all stylus orientations are equally likely, θ may take on any value between zero and 2π radians, and the probability that θ lies between, say, θ0 and θ0 + dθ is given by dθ/27r. Thus the probability that the stylus crosses a line and has an orientation such that θ is between θ0 and θ0 + dθ is given by:

  But of course this is not really the probability in which we are interested: we would like to know the probability that the stylus crosses a line independent of any consideration involving θ. To obtain this, we integrate the above probability over all possible values of θ, thus adding up the probability contributions associated with all possible orientations:

  The probability that the stylus crosses a line is 2/π. Since the stylus either crosses a line or lies free—and since all probabilities must add up to one—the probability that the stylus lies free is given by:

  Given the above results, how can the experiment be used to determine π? Well, suppose one tries the experiment N times. On average, the number of times, Nc, that the stylus crosses a ruled line and the number of times, NF, that the stylus lies free will be given respectively by:

  where the overbars denote ‘average’ or ‘expected value.’ If N is large, we expect that N̄c will be close to Nc and N̄F will be close to NF. Given the above formulas for Nc and NF, we see that π may be estimated from the formula: