VI
A difference between the end of AIDS and the end of many other plagues: for the first time in history, a large proportion of the survivors will not simply be those who escaped infection, or were immune to the virus, but those who contracted the illness, contemplated their own deaths, and still survived. If for some this leads to bitterness, for others it suggests something else entirely. It is not so much survivor guilt as survivor responsibility. It is the view of the world that comes from having confronted and defeated the most terrifying prospect imaginable and having survived. It is a view of the world that has encompassed the darkest possibilities for homosexual—and heterosexual—existence and now envisions the opposite: the chance that such categories could be set aside, that the humanity of each could inform the humanity of the other.
Greg Scott is a Washingtonian I’ve known for years. We’re both in our early thirties, and as the plague has unfolded over the last decade it has affected us in different ways. Greg is from a traditional southern family, and when he was thrown out of the Navy for being a homosexual, he threw himself into years of furious activism. When I first came to know him, he was renowned in D.C. for hanging around bars and staring wildly at passersby as a prelude to either lecturing or seducing them. For a short period of time, he would follow me around D.C. screaming, “Collaborator!” to punish me for the sin of writing or voicing politically incorrect views. But we both knew, at some level, that we were in the epidemic together, and so when I saw him slowly declining over the last two years, I felt a part of myself declining as well. My friend Pat once described Greg as “hanging by the same length of rope” as he was, so for some time I half expected to see Greg’s face in the crowded obituary columns of the local gay paper along with the dozens of other faces I had known or seen over the years. When I wrote an op-ed piece a year ago hailing the latest breakthroughs in AIDS research, Greg came up to me in a bar and regaled me. “This is not a survivable disease!” he yelled over the music. “What do you know about it, anyway?”
So I learned to avoid Greg as far as I could. I never relished our meetings. Since he didn’t know I was positive, too, our conversations had this false air about them. The solidarity I felt was one I could not fully express, and it ate away at me. I occasionally spotted him walking his dog in the neighborhood, his body, always thin, now skeletal, his large, staring eyes disfigured by lesions, his gait that of a sixty-year-old. When my parents visited, I pointed him out from a distance on the street, in some doomed attempt to help them understand: “See. That’s my friend Greg.” Read: “See. That’s my friend Greg. Do you see what this is doing to us?” Last fall, Greg was taking morphine twice a day. He was on a regimen of sixty pills a day and was virtually bedridden. So when I caught sight of him five months ago, I literally jumped.
I had grown used to the shock of seeing someone I knew suddenly age twenty or thirty years in a few months; now I had to adjust to the reverse. People I had seen hobbling along, their cheekbones poking out of their skin, their eyes deadened and looking down, were suddenly restored into some strange spectacle of health, gazing around as amazed as I was to see them alive. Or you’d see them in the gym, skin infections still lingering, but their muscles slowly growing back, their skull-faces beginning to put on some newly acquired flesh. This is what Greg now looked like, his round blue eyes almost tiny in his wide, pudgy face, his frame larger than I remembered it: bulky, lumbering, heavy.
In one of those bizarre coincidences, I bumped into him the day I quit my job as editor of The New Republic. He was one of the first people I was able to tell, and from the minute I spoke to him, I could tell he was changed. The anger was somehow gone; a calm had replaced it. He seemed to understand intuitively why I might want to take time to rethink my life. As we parted, we hugged awkwardly. This was a new kind of solidarity—not one of painful necessity, but of something far more elusive. Hope, perhaps? Or merely the shared memory of hopelessness?
Since then, I’ve become used to Greg’s describing the contours of what he calls his “second life.” And he describes its emergence in a way that is shared by more people than just him. The successive physical and material losses of his illness stripped him, he recalls, of everything he once had, and allowed him, in a way that’s unique to the terminally ill, to rebuild himself from scratch. “There were times I was willing to accept that it was over,” he says. “But things were never fully tied up. There were too many things I had done wrong, things I wanted to amend, things I still wanted to do. I was hanging on tenaciously out of some moral judgment of myself because I knew I hadn’t got it right the first time.”
In his progressive illness, Greg had lost first his energy, then his ability to digest food, then his job, then his best friend, and then most of his possessions, as he sold them off to pay for medications. But he hung on. “In the early days,” he remembers, “I couldn’t imagine going through all that to stay alive. My friend Dennis would say that I’d never go that far. But then he died. Looking back, it’s absurd the lengths I went to. I’d never realized I cared so much about myself.” (Greg’s story brings to mind that of another friend: his illness finally threatened his sight, and he had to decide whether to pursue a treatment that involved an injection of a liquid directly into the eyeball. In other words, he had to watch as the needle came closer and closer and finally penetrated his eye. I remember asking him how on Earth he could go through with it. “But I want to see,” he told me.)
“When you’re in bed all day, you’re forced to consider what really matters to you,” Greg elaborates. “When the most important thing you do in a day is your bowel movement, you learn to value every single source of energy. You go into yourself and you feel different from other people, permanently different.” Some gains are subtle. “It sparked a new relationship with my grandmother. Like me, she was suddenly finding she couldn’t drive her car anymore, so we bonded in a way we’d never bonded before. You suddenly see how people are valuable. I mean, if you’re healthy, who has time for this old lady? And suddenly this old lady and I have so much in common. And I still have that. That’s a gain. I have an appreciation and love for her that I never fully had before.” Some gains are even more profound. “My grandfather would say, ‘You don’t squeak under the bottom wire unless you’re meant to.’ And I feel that there’s this enormous responsibility on me that I’ve never felt before. And it’s a pleasant responsibility. I mean, lay it on me.”
“Responsibility” is, perhaps, an unusual word for Greg to be using, and until AIDS it was not one usually associated with homosexuality. Before AIDS, gay life—rightly or wrongly—was identified with freedom from responsibility, rather than with its opposite. Gay liberation was most commonly understood as liberation from the constraints of traditional norms, almost a dispensation that permitted homosexuals the absence of responsibility in return for an acquiescence in second-class citizenship. This was the Faustian bargain of the pre-AIDS closet: straights gave homosexuals a certain amount of freedom; in return, homosexuals gave away their self-respect. But with AIDS, responsibility became a central, imposing feature of gay life. Without it, lovers would die alone or without proper care. Without it, friends would contract a fatal disease because of lack of education. Without it, nothing would be done to stem the epidemic’s wrath. In some ways, even the seemingly irresponsible outrages of ACT UP were the ultimate act of responsibility. They came from a conviction that someone had to lead, to connect the ghetto to the center of the country, because it was only by such a connection that the ghetto could be saved.
And in the experience of plague, what Greg felt on a personal level was repeated thousands of times. People who thought they didn’t care for one another found that they could. Relationships that had no social support were found to be as strong as any heterosexual marriage. Men who had long since gotten used to throwing their own lives away were confronted with the possibility that they actually did care about themselves and wanted to survive and failed to see themselves
as somehow inferior to their heterosexual peers. A culture that had been based in some measure on desire became a culture rooted in strength. Of course, not everyone experienced such epiphanies. Some cracked; others died bitter or alone. Many failed to confront the families and workplaces and churches in ways that would have helped provide the capacity to survive. But many others did. And what didn’t destroy them made them only more resistant to condescension.
And as gay culture shifted in this way, so did gay politics. The radicalism of ACT UP segued into the radicalism of homosexuals in the military and same-sex marriage. From chipping away at the edges of heterosexual acceptance, suddenly the central ramparts were breached. Once gay men had experienced beyond any doubt the fiber of real responsibility—the responsibility for life and death, for themselves and others—more and more found it impossible to acquiesce in second-class lives. They demanded full recognition of their service to their country, and equal treatment under the law for the relationships they had cherished and sustained in the teeth of such terror. AIDS wasn’t the only thing that created this transformation of gay demands, but it was surely linked to them at a deep psychological level.
Plagues and wars do this to people. They force them to ask more fundamental questions of who they are and what they want. Out of the First World War came women’s equality. Out of the second came the welfare state. Out of the Holocaust came the state of Israel. Out of cathartic necessity and loss and endurance comes, at least for a while, a desire to turn these things into something constructive, to appease the trauma by some tangible residue that can give meaning and dignity to what has happened. Hovering behind the politics of homosexuality in the midst of AIDS and after AIDS is the question of what will actually be purchased from the horror. What exactly, after all, did a third of a million Americans die for? If not their fundamental equality, then what?
VII
Last, the things I want to remember.
In the past six months, I have begun to believe I will live a normal life. By “normal,” of course, I don’t mean without complications. I take twenty-three pills a day—large cold pills I keep in the refrigerator, pills that, until very recently, made me sick and tired in the late afternoon. But normal in the sense that mortality, or at least the insistence of mortality, doesn’t hold my face to the wall every day. I mean I live with the expectation that life is not immediately fragile; that if I push it, it will not break.
It is a strange feeling, this, and a little hard to communicate. When you have spent several years girding yourself for the possibility of death, it is not so easy to gird yourself instead for the possibility of life. What you expect to greet with the euphoria of victory comes instead like the slow withdrawal of an excuse. And you resist it. The intensity with which you had learned to approach each day turns into a banality, a banality that refuses to understand or even appreciate the experience you have just gone through.
Of course, I remember feeling this banality before and I remember the day it ended. I remember the doctor offering me a couple of pieces of candy, before we walked back into his office and he fumbled a way of telling me I was HIV-positive. I’ve thought about that moment a lot in the past few months. When my doctor called recently to tell me that my viral load was now undetectable, part of me wanted to feel as if that first moment of mortality had been erased. But, of course, that moment can never be erased. And not simply because I cannot dare hope that one day the virus might be wiped completely from my system, but because some experiences can never be erased. Blurred, perhaps, and distanced, but never gone for good. And, in fact, beneath the sudden exhilaration, part of me also wants to keep the moment alive, since it allowed me to see things that I had never been able to see before.
I saw, to begin with, that I was still ashamed. Even then—even in me, someone who had thought and worked and struggled to banish the stigma and the guilt and the fear of my homosexuality—I instinctively interpreted this illness as something that I deserved. Its arrival obliterated all the carefully constructed confidence in my own self-worth. It showed me in a flash how so much of that achievement had been illusory—how, in a pinch, I still loathed and feared an inextricable part of who I was.
The diagnosis was so easily analogized to my sexuality not simply because of how I got it but also because it was so confoundingly elusive. I felt no sickness. I had no symptoms. There was nothing tangible against which I could fight—no perceptible, physical ailment that medicine could treat. So it seemed less like an illness than like some amorphous, if devastating, condition of life. Suddenly it existed as my homosexuality had always existed, as something no one from the outside could glean, something I alone could know and something that always promised a future calamity.
For days after my diagnosis, I went through periodic, involuntary shaking spasms. My head literally sank onto my chest; I found it hard to look up or see where I was going. The fear of death and sense of failure—and the knowledge that there was nothing I could do to escape this awareness—kept me staring at the sidewalk. At night, asleep, exhaustion gave way to anxiety as panic woke me up. And then, one morning, a couple of weeks later, after walking with a friend to get some coffee and muffins for breakfast, I realized in the first few sips of coffee that for a few short seconds of physical pleasure I had actually forgotten what had just happened to me. I realized then that it was going to be possible to forget, that the human mind could find a way to absorb the knowledge that we are going to die and yet continue to live as if we are not. I experienced in some awful, concentrated fashion what I used to take for granted.
From then on, I suppose, I began the journey back. I realized that my diagnosis was no different in kind from the diagnosis every mortal being lives with—only different in degree. By larger and larger measures, I began to see the condition not as something constricting, but as something liberating—liberating because it forced me to confront more profoundly than ever before whether or not my sexuality was something shameful (I became convinced that it was not), and liberating because an awareness of the inevitability of death is always the surest way to an awareness of the tangibility of life.
And unlike so many others who are told they are going to die, and so many people who had been told they were HIV-positive before me, I had time and health and life ahead. In one way, as I still lost friend after friend, and as others lived with griefs that would never be expunged, I experienced this with a certain amount of guilt. But also, as someone graced by the awareness of a fatal disease but not of its fatality, a heightened sense of the possibilities of living. I realized I could do what I wanted to do, write what I wanted to write, be with the people I wanted to be with. So I wrote a book with a calm I had never felt before about a truth I had only belatedly come to believe. The date I inscribed in its preface was two years to the day since my diagnosis: a first weapon against the virus and a homage to its powers of persuasion.
And for a precious short time, like so many other positive people, I also sensed that the key to living was not a concentration on fighting the mechanics of the disease (although that was essential) or fighting the mechanics of life (although that is inevitable), but an indifference to both of their imponderables. In order to survive mentally, I had to find a place within myself where plague couldn’t get me, where success and failure in such a battle were of equal consequence. This was not an easy task. It required resisting the emotional satisfaction of being cured and the emotional closure of death itself. But in that, of course, it resembled merely what we all go through every day. Living, I discovered for the second, but really the first, time, is not about resolution; it is about the place where plague can’t get you.
Only once or twice did I find that place, but now I live in the knowledge of its existence.
So will an entire generation.
My America
November 24, 1996 | THE SUNDAY TIMES
My old colleague, the legendary British journalist and drunk Henry Fairlie, had a favorite story about his l
ong, lascivious love affair with America. He was walking down a suburban street one afternoon in a suit and tie, passing familiar rows of detached middle-American dwellings and lush, green Washington lawns. In the distance a small boy—aged perhaps six or seven—was riding his bicycle toward him.
And in a few minutes, as their paths crossed on the pavement, the small boy looked up at Henry and said, with no hesitation or particular affectation: “Hi.” As Henry told it, he was so taken aback by this unexpected outburst of familiarity that he found it hard to say anything particularly coherent in return. And by the time he did, the boy was already trundling past him into the distance.
In that exchange, Henry used to reminisce, so much of America was summed up. That distinctive form of American manners, for one thing: a strong blend of careful politeness and easy informality. But beneath that, something far more impressive. It never occurred to that little American boy that he should be silent, or know his place, or defer to his elder. In America, a six-year-old cyclist and a fifty-five-year-old journalist were equals. The democratic essence of America was present there on a quiet street on a lazy summer afternoon.
Henry couldn’t have imagined that exchange happening in England—or Europe, for that matter. Perhaps now, as European—and especially British—society has shed some of its more rigid hierarchies, it could. But what thrilled him about that exchange is still a critical part of what makes America an enduringly liberating place. And why so many of us who have come to live here find, perhaps more than most native Americans, a reason to give thanks this Thanksgiving.
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