Out on a Limb

by Andrew Sullivan

  In so many ways it was a bizarre turn of events. In the past, plagues were often marked by their lack of discrimination, by the way in which they laid low vast swaths of the population with little regard for station or wealth or sex or religion. But AIDS was different from the beginning. It immediately presented a political as much as a public-health problem. Before homosexuals had even been acknowledged as a central presence in American life, they were suddenly at the heart of a health crisis as profound as any in modern American history. It was always possible, of course, that, with such a lack of societal preparation, America might have responded the way many Latin American and Asian countries responded—with almost complete silence and denial—or that the gay world itself might have collapsed under the strain of its own immolation. But over the long run something somewhat different happened. AIDS and its onslaught imposed a form of social integration that may never have taken place otherwise. Forced to choose between complete abandonment of the gay subculture and an awkward first encounter, America, for the most part, chose the latter. A small step, perhaps, but an enormous catalyst in the renegotiation of the gay-straight social contract.

  And an enormous shift in our understanding of homosexuality itself. Too much has been made of the analogy between AIDS and the Jewish Holocaust, and they are, indeed, deeply distinct phenomena. One was an act of calculated human evil, designed to obliterate an entire people from the center of Europe. The other is a natural calamity, singling out a group of despised outsiders by virtue of a freak of nature, and a disease that remained asymptomatic long enough to wipe out thousands before anyone knew what was happening. But insofar as each catastrophe changed forever the way a minority group was viewed by the world, the two have eerie parallels.

  The hostility to homosexuals, after all, has far more in common with anti-Semitism than it does with racism. Homosexuals, like Jews, are not, in the psychology of group hatred, despised because they are deemed to be weak or inferior, but precisely because they are neither. Jews and homosexuals appear in the hater’s mind as small, cliquish, and very powerful groups, antipathetic to majority values, harboring secret contempt for the rest of society, and sustaining a ghetto code of furtiveness and disguise. Even the details resonate. The old libel against Jews—that they would drink the blood of Christian children—has an echo today in the bigot’s insistence that he has nothing against homosexuals per se, but doesn’t want them allowed near his kids. The loathing for each group is closely linked to fear—and the fear is fanned, in many ways, by the distortion of a particular strain in Christian theology.

  But that fear was abated, in both cases, by extraordinary contingent historic events. The Holocaust did many things to the structure of anti-Semitism, but in one hideous swoop it helped destroy the myth that Jews were somehow all-powerful. The mounds of bodies, the piles of artifacts, and the grotesque physical torture that the Jews of Europe suffered did not exactly indicate power. Out of that powerlessness, of course, came a new form of power, in the shape of achieved Zionism. But the idea of Jewish victimhood seared by mass murder into the Western consciousness was seared indelibly—and it remains one of the strongest weapons against the canards of anti-Semitism today.

  Similarly, if on a far smaller scale, AIDS has dramatically altered the psychological structure of homophobia. By visiting death upon so many, so young, AIDS ripped apart the notion of subterranean inviolability that forms such a potent part of the fear of homosexuals. As tens of thousands of sons and uncles and brothers and fathers wasted away in the heart of America, the idea that homosexuals maintained a covert power melted into a surprised form of shock and empathy. For some, the old hatreds endured, of course, but for others an unsought and subtle transformation began to take shape. What had once been a strong fear of homosexual difference, disguising a mostly silent awareness of homosexual humanity, became the opposite. The humanity slowly trumped the difference. Death, it turned out, was a powerfully universalizing experience. Suddenly acquiescence in gay baiting and gay bashing became, even in its strongholds, inappropriate at a moment of tragedy. The victimization of gay men by a disease paradoxically undercut their victimization by a culture. There was no longer a need to kick them, when they were already down.

  I think this helps explain the change in the American psyche these last ten years from one of fearful stigmatization of homosexuals to one of awkward acceptance. And it’s revealing that the same thing did not really happen to the many other victims of the plague. With inner-city blacks and Latinos, with intravenous drug users, there was no similar cultural transformation, no acceleration of social change. And that was because with these groups, there had never been a myth of power. They had always been, in the majority psyche, a series of unknowable victims. AIDS merely perpetuated what was already understood and, in some ways, intensified it. With gay men, in contrast, a social revolution had been initiated. Once invisible, they were now unavoidable; once powerful subversives, they were now dying sons.

  AIDS, then, was an integrator. If the virus separated, death united. But there was a twist to this tale. As the straight world found itself at a moment of awkward reconciliation, the gay world discovered something else entirely. At a time when the integration of homosexuals into heterosexual life had never been so necessary or so profound, the experience of AIDS as a homosexual experience created bonds and loyalties and solidarities that homosexuals had never experienced before. As it forced gay men out into the world, it also intensified the bonds among them; as it accelerated an integration, it forged an even deeper separation. The old question of assimilation versus separatism became strangely moot. Now, both were happening at once—and feeding off the same psychological roots.

  I remember the first time I used the word “we” in print in reference to gay men. It was in an article I was writing as I witnessed my first AIDS death—of a stranger I had volunteered to help out in his final months. He was thirty-two years old when I got to know him, back in 1990. Without AIDS, we would never have met, and the experience changed my sense of gay identity for good. Before then, although I had carefully denied it, I had quietly distanced myself from much of what I thought of as “gay culture.” Tom helped to change this.

  He was the stereotype in so many ways—the seventies mustache, the Alcoholics Anonymous theology, the Miss America Pageant fan, the college swim coach. But he was also dying. His skin was clammy and pale. His apartment smelled of Maxwell House coffee and disinfectant and the gray liquid that was his constant diarrhea. I remember one day lying down on top of him to restrain him as his brittle, burning body shook uncontrollably with the convulsions of fever. I had never done such a thing to a grown man before, and as I did, the defenses I had put up between us, the categories that until then had helped me make sense of my life and his, these defenses began to crumble into something more like solidarity.

  For others, the shift was more dramatic. Their own incipient deaths unleashed the unfiltered rage of the late 1980s, as decades of euphemism and self-loathing exploded into one dark, memorable flash of activism. The fire behind ACT UP was by its very nature so combustible that it soon burned out. But its articulation of a common identity—the unsustainable starkness of its definition of homosexuality—left a residue behind.

  And I began to understand the pull of this identity more instinctively. Suddenly it seemed, as my twenties merged into my thirties, everyone was infected. Faces you had gotten used to seeing in the gym kept turning up on the obit pages. New friends took you aside to tell you they had just tested positive. Old flames suddenly were absent from the bars. I remember thinking that a new term was needed for something that was happening to me with increasing frequency: I would be walking along a street and see an old man coming toward me whom I vaguely recognized. And then I would realize that it wasn’t an old man; it was someone I knew who had just gone through some bout with pneumonia or some intestinal parasite. Like Scott, a soldier I had gotten to know as a 220-pound, 6-foot-3-inch, blue-eyed, blond-haired bundle of
energy. During the gays-in-the-military affair early in the Clinton administration, I had urged him to come out to his commanders and troops, sure that the new president would protect him. He told me I had to be out of my mind, and, of course, as it turned out, I was. And then, a few weeks later, he bumped into me on the street and confided the real reason he didn’t want to confront anyone. He was HIV-positive and needed the Army’s support. He told me with genuine anguish, as if the knowledge of his disease demanded a courage his disease would also have punished.

  Then, a mere year later, I saw him with a cane (literally), his spirit completely broken, his body shrunk to 140 pounds, his breath gone after the shortest walk, his eyes welling with the bitterness of physical pain and isolation. His lover of several years somehow endured the ordeal, nursing him every inch of the way, until Scott became a ninety-pound skeletal wreck, unable to walk, his hair weak and gray and glassy, his eyes sunken miserably into a scaly face. Scott never fully reconciled with his family. And after Scott died, his lover told me that his last words had been, “Tell my mother I hate her.”

  When I would tell my straight friends, or my work colleagues or my family, about these things, it wasn’t that they didn’t sympathize. They tried hard enough. It was just that they sensed that the experience was slowly and profoundly alienating me from them. And they sensed that it was more than just a cultural difference. The awareness of the deaths of one’s peers and the sadness evoked and the pain you are forced to witness—not just the physical pain, but all the psychological fear and shame that AIDS unleashed—all this was slowly building a kind of solidarity that eventually eliminated my straight friends from the most meaningful part of my life. There comes a point at which the experience goes so deep that it becomes almost futile to communicate it. And as you communicate less and less and experience more and more, you find yourself gravitating to the people who have undergone the same experiences, the ones who know instinctively, the people to whom you do not have to explain.

  I remember the moment when my friend Patrick told me he had AIDS. We had been friends for a long time, yet the meaning of that friendship had never been fully clear to us. But at that moment we were able to look each other in the eye and tell each other we would be there for each other, whatever it took and however hard it became. I don’t think I had ever made such a commitment before—to anyone. It survived watching him waste away, seeing him buckled over on the floor, thumping the ground from the pain of his infections; it survived him messing himself in panic as he fumbled with his IV; it survived his bloody-minded resistance to risky treatments that might have helped him; it survived the horrifying last hours in the intensive-care unit and the awkward silences with his family a year after he passed away. It survives still, as does the need to find a way to give it meaning in his absence.

  For a long time I never broke down or cried about any of this—the dozens of acquaintances who have died, the handful of friends I have mourned or resisted mourning, the sudden flashes of panic at the thought of my own mortality. But late one night I caught sight of Senator Bob Kerrey on Nightline. He was speaking haltingly of his relationship with Lewis Puller, the paralyzed Vietnam veteran who had survived the war, only to ultimately succumb to depression, alcoholism, and, finally, suicide. There was in Kerrey’s bitter, poignant farewell a sense that only he and a few others would fully understand Puller’s anguish. Kerrey grasped, because he had experienced, what it was to face extreme danger and witness in the most graphic way possible the deaths of his closest friends and colleagues, only to come home and find those experiences denied or ignored or simply not understood. And as he spoke, I felt something break inside me. Kerrey knew, as Mark Helprin expressed so beautifully in his novel A Soldier of the Great War, what almost every gay man, in a subtler, quieter way, has also learned: “The war was still in him, and it would be in him for a long time to come, for soldiers who have been blooded are soldiers forever. They never fit in.… That they cannot forget, that they do not forget, that they will never allow themselves to heal completely, is their way of expressing their love for friends who have perished. And they will not change because they have become what they have become to keep the fallen alive.”

  At the time of this writing, almost three times as many young Americans have died of AIDS as died in the entire Vietnam War.

  V

  In Camus’s novel The Plague, the description of how plagues end is particularly masterful. We expect a catharsis, but we find merely a transition; we long for euphoria, but we discover only relief tinged with, in some cases, regret and depression. For some, there is a zeal that comes with the awareness of unsought liberation, and the need to turn such arbitrary freedom into meaningful creation. For many more, there is even—with good reason—a resistance to the good news itself because “the terrible months they had lived through had taught them prudence.” The reactions to the news, Camus notes, are “diverse to the point of incoherence.” Many refuse to believe that there is any hope at all, burned by dashed expectations one time too many, “imbued with a skepticism so thorough that it was now a second nature.” Others found the possibility of an end too nerve-racking to bear and almost dared the plague to kill them before it was too late.

  And even now, among friends, there are those who refuse to be tested for a virus that, thanks to the new treatments, might be eliminated from the bloodstream. And there are those who are HIV-positive who are still waiting to take the drugs and are somehow unable to relinquish the notion that being positive is a death sentence that they can endure only alone. And there are those many who, having taken all the drugs they can, have found that for some reason the drugs will not work for them and watch as their friends recover while they still sink into the morass of sickness made all the more bitter by the good news around them. And those more who, sensing an abatement of the pressure, have returned, almost manically, to unsafe sexual behavior, as if terrified by the thought that they might actually survive, that the plague might end and with it the solidarity that made it endurable.

  You can already feel, beneath the surface, the fraying of the bonds. A friend in New York, HIV-positive for ten years, contemplates breaking up with his boyfriend because he suddenly realizes he is going to live. “I felt safe where I was,” he tells me. “But now I feel like an attractive person again. It’s more what you’re radiating inside—the feeling that, finally, you’re not a potential burden. I mean, maybe I’m not a potential burden.” Another positive friend, this one an AIDS advocate of hardened credentials, feels the meaning of his life slipping away. “At some point, you just have to go on,” he says. “You say that was a great period in your life, but it’s a big world and at some point you have to find a way to slip back into it and try and be a happy citizen. What I want is a boyfriend I love, a job that doesn’t make me crazy, and good friends.”

  But normalcy, of course, is problematic for gay America. The “normalcy” of gay life before AIDS is something few can contemplate and fewer remember. There are ways (the circuit parties) in which that history is repeated as farce, and ways (like the small revival of sex clubs) in which it is repeated as tragedy. But the solidarity of the plague years is becoming harder and harder to sustain. For the first time, serious resentment is brewing among HIV-positive men about the way in which AIDS has slowly retreated from the forefront of gay politics. And among the longest-term survivors, there is a depressing sense that a whole new generation of post-AIDS gay men have no understanding of the profundity with which their own lives have become suffused.

  Take John Dugdale, a thirty-six-year-old photographer living in New York, tall and chiseled, with dark hair and even darker eyes. But when Dugdale looks at you these days, he merely looks toward you. Some time ago, he became almost blind from an AIDS-related virus. He took the new drugs, experienced euphoria as they obliterated the virus from his blood, crashed again a few months later as the virus returned, then experienced yet another high as his health improved once more. He knows his own surviv
al is tenuous and is depressed by the shallowness of a culture that is clearly beginning to move on. As we chatted recently, he recalled with not a little edge a particular moment at the Black Party in New York earlier this year. It concerned a friend of his with AIDS, a bodybuilder who still prized himself on being able to consort with the best of the competition. There was one problem: he had lesions on his body, lesions he refused to have treated. And when he took his shirt off that night to dance with the throng, the lesions were all too visible. Not so long ago, they might have been viewed as war medals. Now, they’re something different. “This guy came up to him,” Dugdale recalled, “and said: ‘Would you please put your shirt on? You’re ruining it for everybody else.’ ”

  For some, of course, the ebbing of AIDS could mean that the old divisions between HIV-positive and HIV-negative men could heal. With a less catastrophic diagnosis, the difference in life span—and self-definition—between negative and positive men might narrow. But there is also another possibility: that with a smaller and smaller percentage of gay men having HIV, the isolation of those infected will actually increase, and that those with full-blown AIDS could feel more intensely alone than before.

  Even at the showing of the AIDS Memorial Quilt in Washington this year, the divides were subtly present. There were those who went to see the quilt itself or went to the candlelight vigil and those who went only to the many parties that filled the weekend. (In truth, many went to all.) And the internal tensions were palpable. It is as if many HIV-positive men have emerged from transformingly deep spiritual experiences only to reenter a culture that seems, at least in part, to be returning to the superficial. And the lifting of the veil of terror has served, paradoxically, only to isolate them still further in a subculture that has less time and less energy to sympathize or understand. The good news from the laboratory has robbed them not simply of the drama and intensity of their existence but also of the recognition of that drama and intensity. And even among their own kind.