This is the alternative argument embedded in the Church’s recent grappling with natural law, that is just as consonant with the spirit of natural law as the Church’s current position. It is more consonant with what actually occurs in nature, seeks an end to every form of natural life, and upholds the dignity of each human person. It is so obvious an alternative to the Church’s current stance that it is hard to imagine the forces of avoidance that have kept it so firmly at bay for so long.
For many homosexual Catholics, life within the Church is a difficult endeavor. In my twenties, as I attempted to unite the possibilities of sexual longing and emotional commitment, I discovered what many heterosexuals and homosexuals had discovered before me: that it is a troubling and troublesome mission. There’s a disingenuous tendency, when discussing both homosexual and heterosexual emotional life, to glamorize and idealize the entire venture. To posit the possibility of a loving union, after all, is not to guarantee its achievement. There is also a lamentable inclination to believe that all conflicts can finally be resolved; that the homosexual Catholic’s struggle can be removed by a simple theological coup de main; that the conflict is somehow deeper than many other struggles in the Church—of women, say, or of the divorced. The truth is that pain, as Christ taught, is not a reason to question truth; it may indeed be a reason to embrace it.
But it must also be true that to dismiss the possibility of a loving union for homosexuals at all—to banish from the minds and hearts of countless gay men and women the idea that they, too, can find solace and love in one another—is to create the conditions for a human etiolation that no Christian community can contemplate without remorse. What finally convinced me of the wrongness of the Church’s teachings was not that they were intellectually so confused, but that in the circumstances of my own life—and of the lives I discovered around me—they seemed so destructive of the possibilities of human love and self-realization. By crippling the potential for connection and growth, the Church’s teachings created a dynamic that in practice led not to virtue but to pathology; by requiring the first lie in a human life, which would lead to an entire battery of others, they contorted human beings into caricatures of solitary eccentricity, frustrated bitterness, incapacitating anxiety—and helped perpetuate all the human wickedness and cruelty and insensitivity that such lives inevitably carry in their wake. These doctrines could not in practice do what they wanted to do: they could not both affirm human dignity and deny human love.
This truth is not an argument; it is merely an observation. But observations are at the heart not simply of the Church’s traditional Thomist philosophy, but also of the phenomenological vision of the current pope. To observe these things, to affirm their truth, is not to oppose the Church, but to hope in it, to believe in it as a human institution that is yet the eternal vessel of God’s love. It is to say that such lives as those of countless gay men and lesbians must ultimately affect the Church not because our lives are perfect, or without contradiction, or without sin, but because our lives are in some sense also the life of the Church.
I remember, in my own life, the sense of lung-filling exhilaration I felt as my sexuality began to be incorporated into my life, a sense that was not synonymous with recklessness or self-indulgence—although I was not immune from those things either—but a sense of being suffused at last with the possibility of being fully myself before those I loved and before God. I remember the hopefulness of parents regained and friendships restored in a life that, for all its vanities, was at least no longer premised on a lie covered over by a career. I remember the sense a few months ago in a pew in a cathedral, as I reiterated the same pre-Communion litany of prayers that I had spoken some twenty years earlier, that, for the first time, the love the Church had always taught that God held for me was tangible and redemptive. I had never felt it fully before; and, of course, like so many spiritual glimpses, I have rarely felt it since. But I do know that it was conditioned not on the possibility of purity, but on the possibility of honesty. That honesty is not something that can be bought or won in a moment. It is a process peculiarly prone to self-delusion and self-doubt. But it is one that, if it is to remain true to itself, the Church cannot resist forever.
When Plagues End: Notes on the Twilight of an Epidemic
November 10, 1996 | THE NEW YORK TIMES
I
First, the things I resist remembering, the things that make the good news almost as unbearable as the bad.
I arrived late at the hospital, fresh off the plane. It was around 8:30 in the evening and there had been no light on in my friend Patrick’s apartment, so I went straight to the intensive-care unit. When I arrived, my friend Chris’s eyes were a reddened blear of fright, the hospital mask slipped down under his chin. I went into the room. Pat was lying on his back, his body contorted so his neck twisted away and his arms splayed out, his hands palms upward, showing the intravenous tubes in his wrists. Blood mingled with sweat in the creases of his neck; his chest heaved up and down grotesquely with the pumping of the respirator that was feeding him oxygen through a huge plastic tube forced down his throat. His greenish-blue feet poked out from under the bedspread, as if separate from the rest of his body. For the first time in all of his illnesses, his dignity had been completely removed from him. He was an instrument of the instruments keeping him alive.
The week before, celebrating his thirty-first birthday in his hometown on the Gulf Coast of Florida, we swam together in the dark, warm waters that he had already decided would one day contain his ashes. It was clear that he knew something was about to happen. One afternoon on the beach, he got up to take a walk with his newly acquired beagle and glanced back at me a second before he left. All I can say is that, somehow, the glance conveyed a complete sense of finality, the subtlest but clearest sign that it was, as far as he was concerned, over. Within the space of three days, a massive fungal infection overtook his lungs, and at midnight on the fourth day his vital signs began to plummet.
I was in the hall outside the intensive-care room when a sudden rush of people moved backward out of it. Pat’s brother motioned to me and others to run, and we sped toward him. Pat’s heart had stopped beating, and after one attempt was made to restart it, we intuitively acquiesced, surrounded him and prayed: his mother and father and three brothers, his boyfriend, ex-boyfriend, and a handful of close friends. When the priest arrived, each of us received Communion.
I remember that I slumped back against the wall at the moment of his dying, reaching out for all the consolation I had been used to reaching for—the knowledge that the final agony was yet to come, the memory of pain that had been overcome in the past—but since it was happening now, and now had never felt so unavoidable, no relief was possible. Perhaps this is why so many of us find it hard to accept that this ordeal as a whole may be over. Because it means that we may now be required to relent from our clenching against the future and remember—and give meaning to—the past.
II
Most official statements about AIDS—the statements by responsible scientists, by advocate organizations, by doctors—do not, of course, concede that this plague is over. And, in one sense, obviously, it is not. Someone today will be infected with HIV. The vast majority of HIV-positive people in the world, and a significant minority in America, will not have access to the expensive and effective new drug treatments now available. And many Americans—especially blacks and Latinos—will still die. Nothing I am saying here is meant to deny that fact, or to mitigate its awfulness. But it is also true—and in a way that most people in the middle of this plague privately recognize—that something profound has occurred these last few months. The power of the newest drugs, called protease inhibitors, and the even greater power of those now in the pipeline, is such that a diagnosis of HIV infection is not just different in degree today than, say, five years ago. It is different in kind. It no longer signifies death. It merely signifies illness.
The reality finally sank in for me at a meeting i
n Manhattan this summer of the Treatment Action Group, an AIDS advocacy organization. TAG lives and breathes skepticism; a few of its members had lambasted me only nine months before for so much as voicing optimism about the plague. But as soon as I arrived at the meeting—held to discuss the data presented at the just-completed AIDS conference in Vancouver, British Columbia—I could sense something had changed. Even at 8 p.m., there was a big crowd—much larger, one of the organizers told me, than at the regular meetings. In the middle sat Dr. David Ho, a pioneering AIDS researcher, and Dr. Martin Markowitz, who presided over recent clinical trials of the new treatments. The meeting began with Ho and Markowitz revisiting the data. They detailed how, in some trials of patients taking the new protease inhibitors used in combination with AZT and another drug called 3TC, the amount of virus in the bloodstream was reduced on average a hundred- to a thousandfold. To put it another way: most people with HIV can have anywhere between five thousand and a few million viral particles per milliliter of their blood. After being treated for a few weeks with the new drugs, and being subjected to the most sensitive tests available, many patients had undetectable levels of the virus in their bloodstreams. That is, no virus could be found. And, so far, the results were holding up.
When Ho finished speaking, the questions followed like firecrackers. How long did it take for the virus to clear from the bloodstream? Was it possible that the virus might still be hiding in the brain or the testes? What could be done for the people who weren’t responding to the new drugs? Was there resistance to the new therapy? Could a new, even more lethal viral strain be leaking into the population? The answers that came from Ho and Markowitz were just as insistent. No, this was not a “cure.” But the disappearance of the virus from the bloodstream went beyond the expectations of even the most optimistic of researchers. There was likely to be some effect on the virus, although less profound, in the brain or testes, and new drugs were able to reach those areas better. The good news was that HIV seemed primarily to infect cells that have a short half-life, which means that if the virus is suppressed completely for two years or so, the body might have time to regenerate tissue that was “aviremic.” And since the impact of the drugs was so powerful, it was hard for resistance to develop because resistance is what happens when the virus mutates in the presence of the drugs—and there was no virus detectable in the presence of the drugs.
The crowd palpably adjusted itself, and a few chairs squeaked. These are the hard-core skeptics, I remember thinking to myself, and even they can’t disguise what is going through their minds. There were caveats, of course. The latest drugs were very new, and large studies had yet to be done. There was already clinical evidence that a small minority of patients, especially those in late-stage disease, were not responding as well to the new drugs and were experiencing a “breakout” of the virus after a few weeks or months. Although some people’s immune systems seemed to improve, others’ seemed damaged for good. The long-term toxicity of the drugs themselves—their impact on the liver, for example—could mean that patients might undergo a miraculous recovery at the start, only to die from the effects of treatment in later life. And the drugs were often debilitating. I tested positive in 1993, and I have been on combination therapy ever since. When I added the protease inhibitors in March, the nausea, diarrhea, and constant fatigue had, at first, been overwhelming.
Still, after the meeting, a slightly heady feeling wafted unmistakably over the crowd. As we spilled out into the street, a few groups headed off for a late dinner, others to take their protease drugs quickly on empty stomachs, others still to bed. It was after ten, and I found myself wandering aimlessly into a bar, where late-evening men in suits gazed up at muscle-boy videos, their tired faces and occasional cruising glances a weirdly comforting return to normalcy. But as I checked my notebook at the door, and returned to the bar to order a drink, something a longtime AIDS advocate said to me earlier that day began to reverberate in my mind. He had been talking about the sense of purpose and destiny he had once felt upon learning he was positive. “It must be hard to find out you’re positive now,” he had said darkly. “It’s like you really missed the party.”
III
Second, the resistance to memory.
At six o’clock in the morning in the Roseland Ballroom in Manhattan on a Sunday last spring the crowds were still thick. I had arrived four hours earlier, after a failed attempt to sleep. A chaotic throng of men crammed the downstairs lobby, trying to check coats. There were no lines as such, merely a subterranean, almost stationary mosh pit, stiflingly hot, full of lean, muscular bodies glacially drifting toward the coat-check windows. This was, for some, the high point of the year’s gay male social calendar. It’s called the Black Party, one of a number of theme parties held year-round by a large, informal group of affluent, mainly white, gay men and several thousand admirers. It’s part of what’s been dubbed the “circuit,” a series of vast dance parties held in various cities across the country and now a central feature of an emergent post-AIDS gay “lifestyle.”
When people feared that the ebbing of AIDS would lead to a new burst of promiscuity, to a return to the 1970s in some joyous celebration of old times, they were, it turns out, only half-right. Although some bathhouses have revived, their centrality to gay life has all but disappeared. What has replaced sex is the idea of sex; what has replaced promiscuity is the idea of promiscuity, masked, in the increasing numbers of circuit parties around the country, by the ecstatic drug-enhanced high of dance music. These are not mass celebrations at the dawn of a new era; they are raves built upon the need for amnesia.
Almost nothing has been written in the mainstream media about these parties, except when they have jutted their way into controversy. A new circuit party, called Cherry Jubilee in Washington, incurred the wrath of Representative Robert Dornan because drugs had been used in a federal building leased for the event. The annual Morning Party in August on Fire Island, held to raise money for Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York, was criticized on similar grounds by many homosexuals themselves. But in general, these parties have grown in number with a remarkable secrecy, reminiscent of the old, closeted era when completely bifurcated gay lives were the norm. But their explosion on the scene—there are now at least two a month, involving tens of thousands of gay men in cities as diverse as Pittsburgh and Atlanta—is interesting for more than their insight into party culture.
The events are made possible by a variety of chemicals: steroids, which began as therapy for men wasting from AIDS and recently spawned yet another growing sub-subculture of huge bodybuilders; and psychotherapeutic designer drugs, primarily Ecstasy, which creates feelings of euphoria and emotional bonding, and ketamine, an animal anesthetic that disconnects the conscious thought process from the sensory body. On the surface the parties could be taken for a mass of men in superb shape merely enjoying an opportunity to let off steam. But underneath, masked by the drugs, there is an air of strain, of sexual danger translated into sexual objectification, the unspoken withering of the human body transformed into a reassuring inflation of muscular body mass.
As the morning stretched on, my friends and I stood in the recess of a bar as the parade of bodies passed relentlessly by. Beyond, a sea of men danced the early morning through, strobe lights occasionally glinting off the assorted deltoids, traps, lats, and other muscles gay men have come to fetishize. At the party’s peak—around 5 a.m.—there must have been about six thousand men in the room, some parading on a distant stage, others locked in a cluster of rotating pecs, embracing one another in a drug-induced emotional high.
For a group of men who have witnessed a scale of loss historically visited only upon war generations, it was a curious spectacle. For some, I’m sure, the drugs helped release emotions they could hardly address alone or sober; for others, perhaps, the ritual was a way of defying their own infections, their sense of fragility, or their guilt at survival. For others still, including myself, it was a puzzle of impulses. The need to
find some solidarity among the loss, to assert some crazed physicality against the threat of sickness, to release some of the toxins built up over a decade of constant anxiety. Beyond everything, the desire to banish the memories that will not be banished, to shuck off—if only till the morning—the maturity that plague had brutally imposed.
IV
I talk about this as a quintessentially homosexual experience, not because AIDS is a quintessentially homosexual experience. Across the world, it has affected far, far more heterosexuals than homosexuals; in America, it has killed half as many intravenous drug users as gay men. And its impact has probably been as profound on many heterosexual family members and friends as it has been on the gay men at ground zero of the epidemic. But at the same time, AIDS was and is inextricable from the question of homosexuality in the psyche of America because it struck homosexuals first and from then on became unalterably woven into the deeper and older question of homosexual integration.
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