“David was a great…athlete.”
Oh my God, his friends realized, this was going to complete the nightmare.
“He loved to go to the gym.”
These are stories but the pain they contain is immeasurable. The impact of these losses requires a consciousness beyond most human ability. We grow weary, numb, alienated, and then begin to forget, to put it all away just to be able to move on. But even the putting away is an abusive act. The experiencing, the remembering, the hiding, the overcoming—all leave their scars.
These are stories, but the pain they contain is immeasurable. I met novelist John Fox once. He was enraged. I met playwright John Russell once, he was delighted. Robert Hilferty and I visited Iris De La Cruz, a member of PONY (Prostitutes of New York) and author of the column “Iris with the Virus” in the PWA Newsline. She was on the ward at NYU, laughing, joking, and barely able to breathe. Then we went upstairs to see Phil Zwickler in co-op care. His care partner was his mother, who was only sixteen when he was born. Essex Hemphill and I both gave keynotes at the first Outwrite: Lesbian and Gay Writers Conference in 1991 in San Francisco, and there I saw Craig Harris, so sick he had to lean on the podium, sweating and shaking, to give his speech. As Jim and I ran the MIX Festival together for seven years, and when I graduated, transferred it to a series of younger curatorial talents, every year our filmmakers would die, their work disappear. I saw a gorgeous Super-8 by Mark Morrisroe, of two drag queens acting out Tennessee Williams's play Hello from Bertha, and then he died and I thought it was lost. We tried for years to find it for MIX and then gave up, imagining that the flickery Super-8 original that Ela Troyano and Tessa Hughes-Freeland showed in their New York Film Festival Downtown had burned with Mark's life. For decades I remembered the film and talked about to younger people, wanting it to live somehow. And then, in the spring of 2011, artist Dan Fishback texted me from Artists Space, where he had seen a preserved print—and included the news that the drag queens were played by Taboo and Jack Pierson, while Mark himself was the Dying Swan.
When Matthew Shepard was murdered in Wyoming in 1998, I showed up along with five thousand other queers for his political funeral. It was a transitional crowd. There were guys in suits, a lot of younger people who'd never been in a real demonstration, and a lot of friends from the old ACT UP days. The feeling in the crowd was unusual. It was something I'd never experienced at a demonstration before. No, actually I had seen it once, in a photograph in Gay Community News of an ACT UP member, the late Jeff Gates, being arrested. Jeff had been part of the Nicaraguan revolution—getting roughly arrested did not faze him in the least. In the photo, the cop held Jeff's head down flat on the hood of a car. Jeff was looking at the camera with a very certain calm. Like he was waiting for a bus. That's where these demonstrators were at, psychologically. There was an absorbed alienation, a lack of concern, really. We'd seen it all. It was an action of the emotionally experienced. No matter how stupidly the police behaved we all knew exactly what to do. There was a beautifully acquired and deeply nonverbal communication. We just stepped around them, kept going forward, ignored them, their horses, their insipid threats. At one point they thought they had us cornered until we simply stepped out onto vehicle laden Sixth Avenue, and started marching downtown, against traffic, over the cars. And I realized that this efficiency, this wisdom and calm unstoppability, was the result of compartmentalized grief. This alienation, this total disregard, this lack of fear, this common understanding, this quiet perseverance, the impossibility of either being stopped or getting upset about anyone trying. Our disappeared friends had taken our fear with them. After all, they knew what we did, who we were. Without them, so much of what we the living have done also goes unremembered. Increasingly, I vaguely recall my dead friends and in those ways I vaguely recall myself.
Rereading Stan's novels was a strange experience. This good man who was a loyal friend, who had impeccable taste in literature, who started a literacy program at the New York Lesbian and Gay Community Center to teach gay people how to read, who has a library named after him, who published some of the most interesting gay male work of our era, this guy could not really write. I feel guilty saying that because I know how much Stan wanted to be a great writer. But on the other hand, one of the paradigms we've created about AIDS is that of the dead genius. Of course, most of the people who died were not geniuses or great. They were just people who did their best or didn't even try at all. Some of them were nasty and lousy, others mediocre. Some knew how to face and deal with problems, others ran away and blamed the people closest to them. Stan was unusual because he gave so much to other people, both personally and in his never-ending contributions to the community. These actions alone make him exceptional. But, as an artist he had—as one colleague put it—“an ear of lead.” Yet, his death and loss is just as horrible, even though he never wrote a great book and possibly never would have.
I'm older now than I was when we were friends and when Stan died. I've suffered more and learned more about people. This makes me appreciate him so much more. Looking over the Guy Davenport monograph, I am impressed all over again. How many writers take the time to praise another living writer? Most people can't, they're too small. Because Stan did not become the kind of writer he wanted to be and yet was able to see and praise beauty in someone else's work, he was an exception. That's what made him such a great reader and publisher. He had that rare maturity not to project. Those of us who are experienced death watchers know that many people die resenting the living. But up until the last time I saw him, Stan appreciated other people. When they were evil, like the guys who destroyed Amethyst Press, he knew it and had appropriate anger. But when people had integrity and depth, he loved his friends. How many others can have that said about them?
The first person I really knew who die of AIDS, died when I was twenty-four. The last person I knew died last year, but actually he had a severe crystal meth problem. But for the first fifteen years, the centerpiece of my young adulthood, I watched many people die and suffer and in the end forgot many of them. And all along it has puzzled me that the AIDS experience is not recognized as an American experience, while for me it is the American experience. How can something be equally the and equally not? Because it belongs to people still considered, even postmortem, to be second-rate and special interest. It has not been integrated into the American identity of which it is a product. AIDS most often appears as a banal subplot point in some yuppie's inconsequential novel, or a morose distortion in a stupid movie. But no true, accurate, complex, deeply felt and accountable engagement with the AIDS crisis has become integrated into the American self-perception. It puts those of us who do know what happened in the awkward position of trying to remember what we used to know in a world that officially knows none of it.
Certainly my outlook on mortality is altered by these experiences. I think about the deaths of my parents quite differently than I would have if I had not become accustomed to seeing so many thirty-year-olds in their coffins and urns. I have expectations every day that others should have basic knowledge about weakness and know how to take care of people, how to maneuver a wheelchair. That there is an unquestionable responsibility to pick up the phone and ask someone how they are doing, even if it makes you feel uncomfortable. I guess this was a lesson for me that feeling comfortable cannot be the determining factor in my actions. I feel resentment towards older people experiencing the deaths of their friends for the first time in their eighties— wondering where they were when we experienced it more times than we can acknowledge. I wonder about the parents and siblings and classmates and colleagues of all our dead friends. What do they say about themselves on this matter at this late date? Occasionally, when writing this book I read sections out loud to various people who happened to be around. I could tell who didn't get it, because all they could do in response was recount the one justifying story of the one person they knew who died of AIDS. They made it be all about them. No one who lived in San Francisco
or New York at that time, or even now, should have only one story about AIDS. It's like proof that they didn't do anything. If they could stop making everything be about them, and learn something, they would be asking questions. Not telling some banal anecdote.
Looking back on these events of the past allows me to recapture the feelings of the past. I remember feeling accountable to others and responsible to intervene on their behalf, and I clearly remember others who did not share those feelings and how much destruction they caused by inaction.
Autobiographically, the AIDS experience may be where I came to understand that it is a fundamental of individual integrity to intervene to stop another person from being victimized, even if to do so is uncomfortable or frightening. That the fear and discomfort must be separated from the decision to act. Fear can be acknowledged, but fear cannot be the decisive factor. Fear must be separated from action in order for some reach towards justice to be maintained. I understand that the gentrified mind insists on the opposite, that things are the way they are because it is neutrally and naturally right, and that trying to disrupt that “natural” order is both futile and impolite. But I know from having been an AIDS activist that this cultural message is a lie. In a moral world, the message of AIDS activism would not be exceptional or stigmatized, it would be normal and expected.
Gentrification culture makes it very hard for people to intervene on behalf of others. The Nasdaq value system is and was a brutal one. Being consumed by it and being shut out of it are both deadening and result in distorted thinking about private sectors, economic and emotional. Gentrification culture is rooted in the ideology that people needing help is a “private” matter, that it is nobody's business. Taking their homes is called “cleaning up” the neighborhood. ACT UP was the most recent American social movement to succeed, and it did so because AIDS activist culture of the 1980s was the opposite of Gentrification culture: it held as its organizing principle that seronegative people had a responsibility to intervene, to join their energy with seropositive people's own enormous expenditure of energy so that they could have power over their own fate. Under gentrification our lives became more privatized. That zeitgeist had broad implications, hard to challenge. We had to “act out” in a characterological sense, to stand up to it. Gentrification culture was a twentieth-century, fin de siècle rendition of bourgeois values. It defined truth telling as antisocial instead of as a requirement for decency. The action of making people accountable was decontextualized as inappropriate. When there is no context for justice, freedom-seeking behavior is seen as annoying. Or futile. Or a drag. Or oppressive. And dismissed and dismissed and dismissed and dismissed until that behavior is finally just not seen.
Every historical moment passes. The era of gentrification is hopefully an era of the past, although in this transitional moment we don't know what will replace it. McCarthyism passed, even the Holocaust passed. Outliving the historical moment with your integrity intact is a risky business. I'm glad I witnessed the beauty of ACT UP so that I know it is right and possible to intervene on behalf of others, thereby repositioning one's self towards the acknowledgment that other people are real, even if they have less status and are more endangered.
And all this catalog of loss brings me back to Kathy Acker, who was more special to me than all these guys, as a woman novelist who didn't simply tell the culture what it already believed. Kathy and I were friendly acquaintances. I had a very positive experience of her, I was not her equal, I was much younger and respected her. I did not compete with her and— perhaps as a result—she was very generous to me. As AIDS and gentrification have stripped away the context for her memory, I want to take the time to remember her here.
Our first contact came from her. She reviewed my novel After Delores in the Village Voice in 1988. There was nothing in it for her, believe me. I had no currency, no connections. I couldn't help her in any way. She just liked my book and she said so—how ungentrified of her. One of the organizing principles of gentrified thinking is to assess everyone based on what they can do for you, and then treat them accordingly. But Kathy was acting from the old school—care about something because it's interesting, has heart, and opens a perceptual door. I had picked up a copy of the Voice on my way to the Pitt Street pool, and lay on the concrete rim, lazily turning the pages until I suddenly saw my own name next to hers. I was so unconnected that no one had told me this review was appearing or that it had in fact, already appeared. She wrote, “Formed by emotion, this novel is as personal as any lyric poem.” I looked out in the sweltering day, the city was so hot the light blurred everything. And so there was nothing but streaks of bathing suits, the parade of skin tones, and the sounds of neighborhood kids. I dove in the pool and started swimming, and suddenly, as I was propelling myself under the surface, I realized that Kathy Acker had liked my book, and I said out loud under water, “Oh wow.”
After that sometimes she would call when she was in New York and I would go over to the Gramercy Hotel, where she liked to stay. I went to her readings and that's how I truly learned to read her work. She read out loud with a timbre and punctuation that were not necessarily obvious on the page. Hearing her made reading her work so much easier. When I came to San Francisco she came to two of my readings and asked engaged, respectful, and helpful questions during the postreading discussions. I went to her house in Cole Valley and looked at her massive library. She would read every book by an author. She had more curiosity that way than most people. She had read every book by Norman Mailer, which I remember really striking me as he was entirely irrelevant to everyone else I knew. She took me to a meal at Duboce Lunch, a groovy place in San Francisco set up by Dennis and Cornelius, the guys who had run the East Village nightclub 8BC back in New York. The other lunch guests were Aline Mayer, Karen Finley, Carolee Schneeman, and photographer Mathew Ralston. Kathy and I went to PS 122 together to see Diamanda Galas perform Schrei X. The word reached me that Kathy was dying on someone's couch in San Francisco. I never actually heard the entire story clearly, but my incomplete impression is that she had had breast cancer, had decided on a prophylactic mastectomy, but did not have her nodes done. Went to a faith healer and believed she had been cured. I think she even wrote a text about being cured of cancer. Finally Aline and Mathias Viegener intervened. Mathias became the executor of her estate. It is amazing that someone who fought so hard for her work was so unwilling to die that she did not appoint an executor until the last minute. If she hadn't, her life's work would have reverted to a half-sister she hadn't seen in decades. Aline and Mathias drove Kathy to an experimental clinic in Mexico where she died. Thanks to Amy Scholder, I spoke to Kathy on the phone three days before her death. I asked, “What are you thinking?” And she said, “Get better, get better, get better.”
In our handful of rich encounters, Kathy and I talked quite a bit about the Diary of Anne Frank. Having been born in New York as a German Jew in 1948, Kathy grew up as many of us did— with this paradigmatic document of the Jewish woman writer as visionary and martyr. To be a German Jew of that generation was to feel entitled and endangered. She was born Karen Alexander, from the kind of family known to New York Jews as “Our Crowd”—her family, the Alexanders, along with the Lehmans, Loebs, Ochs, et cetera were the best educated, wealthiest, and most sophisticated Jews in the world. It was at Brandeis, the Jewish university, that she studied Latin and Greek, found her Jewish husband Robert Acker, dated John Landau (who eventually produced the film Titanic), and roomed with Tamar Deisendruck, another offspring of intellectual Jews who later became an acclaimed composer. Kathy came from a tiny ethnic group responsible for originating the most influential theories of the twentieth century: Marxism, psychoanalysis, the theory of relativity, and postmodernism.
What she had in common with the tradition of Benjamin, Arendt, et cetera was what Carla Harryman called “comprehensive knowledge.” Kathy was a profound intellectual, able to produce work that incorporated so many different dimensions of thought simultaneo
usly that it eclipsed the capacities of many people. She was able to fully comprehend the cultural product of the dominant culture and of the many margins, and therein lay her problem. For, emotionally, Kathy was average. She had no family. She was an abandoned, traumatized person and did not have a noble emotionality. Artistically and intellectually, however, she was exceptional. Inherent in her supremacy was a certain kind of expectation. A complex one. On one hand, she knew realistically the great value and achievement of her work. She was clear and confident of its merit. Her work was grappling with things that matter, both formally and in terms of content and perspective. There was a discovery in the writing. Her books were objects that young women would take off shelves and put into each other's hands. Life giving. She was highly inventive, not derivative. She was very generous in that her work was emotionally honest and explicit. But because she understood the true value of what she was offering the reader, she expected a broad recognition and gratitude.
The great contradiction in Kathy's life was that she had inherited wealth, and therefore her life was not a consequence of her actions. She could live at a level beyond what money she actually earned. Just for the record, having someone else pay for your education, your home, your equipment, clothing, gym, bar bill, whatever, separates one from the experiences of most people. Regardless of how much they may know better, many people who are not the source of their own financial lives are both infantilized and tyrannical. They seem to believe, on some level, that they deserve this advantage. In Kathy's case, her background and financial cushion gave her a sense of entitlement that was unreasonable.
The problem is that most people are average. This includes people who run universities, publishing companies, and the rewards system in the arts. Most people look at something that is not familiar and think it is wrong. Very few people are able to look at an authentic discovery and be grateful. For that context to exist there has to be a true avant-garde, a large, vibrant community of people willing to think, fuck, love, live, and create oppositionally. Although Acker was an object of mockery or neglect from the establishment because of her singularity, she had a context of people, like young me and my friends, who loved and learned from her. Her death, in the midst of the AIDS crisis, was another elimination of free space, another shrinking of the community of noncorporate thinking. Another victory for the power of homogeneity.
The Gentrification of the Mind Page 7