Visions and Revisions Read online

  Additionally.

  And counting.

  6

  October 4, 1989, 12:39 P.M.

  Ladies and Gentlemen, please: Robert Glück is alive! Yes, we say, alive. Now, what does one do w/ that knowledge? Well, for starters, one skips on down to A Different Light and purchases Reader, Mr. Glück’s new book. Of short stories, a novel, essays? Who knows? But look, I thought the man was dead. I mean, I have no idea how true or fictional Jack the Modernist or Elements of a Coffee Service is, but he uses the first person, he calls himself Bob, he refers to past stories in present ones. He sure makes them seem real. And you know, if he did all the stuff he said he did, then, well, there’s a good chance that he could’ve been dead. I suppose I want to chat w/ the guy, say Hey, I was afraid you were dead, but that may be too prying. Still, might be nice to establish a brief rapport with the guy, w/ another author, an odd one to be sure, but a good one.

  So that’s that.

  Sat Aug. 4, 1990

  Needle Ex.

  10:30–2

  Bleach kits (Start 82) (34 in Park) (13 left over) (69 out)

  Needles 419 (30 to Brooklyn) (109 to Park) (70 left) Needles in

  Bleach kits: 69 out

  Needles: 319 out (109 in Park)

  Needles in: 198 in

  Zoe, J-C, Allison, me, Sharon (Gerry & Nolan on video)

  Cops at table when we arrived; left before we set up. Mob scene at park; one man threatened to take our needles. J-C and Nolan found needles in playground & got video footage. Rick showed up, virtually ODing; Z. & J-C cleaned him up, I gave him $3 that had been donated to us by a client.

  Pink Panthers

  5:30 →

  Nov. 12, 1990

  My only note on workshop today: S Koch laughed at S Graham’s fag joke. Why am I not surprised?

  1/16/91

  He said to me yesterday, What bothers? concerns? worries you most about seeing? dating? sleeping with an HIV-positive person? I said, That you’ll die. He said, But isn’t there anything more immediate? I said, You mean that I’ll get infected? No, that doesn’t really bother me.

  [Later]

  I said, Do you mean that you’ll get sick? That to me, is just part of the fear that you’ll die.

  We said other things too, but this was the amazing thing. That here we were, 2 23-year-olds, and we were talking about the impending death of one of them. I’ve been getting this feeling in the last day—and I’ve only known Derek for six days, so I still measure time in increments like days, hours—I’ve been getting this feeling that since we’ve done such a good job talking about the issues we should now be spared having to deal with them. I.e., Derek shouldn’t get AIDS, shouldn’t be HIV-positive. I’ve been getting that feeling, and I’ve been getting it in such a way that I believe it—I believe Derek is completely healthy, I believe he’ll live forever. I feel justified in using that word.

  And, too, during this same day I’ve thought about Derek dead, or in the hospital. Every drug we discussed tonight at T&D—I wondered, Can this help him? Will this keep him alive?

  I know how I am. I’ve always known. I’ve known (how funny to repeat that word) Derek for 6 days, yet already I’ve made of him so much. God, I like him. I’m only awaiting his permission to fall in love. Am I ridiculous? I question myself, rather than just write it: I am ridiculous. Derek and I do not understand the same world, we don’t understand the world in the same way. But I know myself, I know immediately if I like someone, and I like Derek. But what I never know is, Does he like me? He’s so fucking low-key, and I want to demand responsiveness—I want to demand that he fall for me as quickly as I’m falling for him. What is the bottom line? I am—and probably should be considered as such—a distraction from his one purpose in life, which is keeping himself alive. I would be insanely selfish to try to interject myself into his life. This doesn’t change the fact that I want him. It just makes me realize that he has to want me, and he has to choose to what extent I’ll be in his life.

  God, how big that word gets in this context.

  Nov. 19, 1991

  This man came into the store today. He was about 30, black, & his clothes & his teeth suggest that he was very poor, & he tried to steal a little packet of potpourri. Potpourri. There’s something sad about that, that he went for a little thing that only cost $7 & smelled good, as opposed to something like Calvin Klein underwear, a status symbol, or an expensive sweater that he could sell for cash. But he went for something that, I think, he wanted. I wonder if he is homeless; I wonder what he would use to burn it in. I can imagine him opening the plastic & staring at the small leaves & cedar needles, & pressing it close to his face & getting only the most faint whiff of, of what? A forest? A season? A memory?

  He couldn’t read; he’d never be able to find out that he was supposed to soak the potpourri in water, & then heat the mixture, to release the smell. He tried to read “Paul Smith”; he said “Pierre Cardin” & I think that’s only because the way both designers write their names is similar, & Pierre Cardin has been around for so long.

  Oh, his teeth. All the poor people who come into this store have bad teeth. His were brown, & he’d apparently lost several in back because the ones in front had spaces as large as teeth between them. That’s just so terrible, I think, it’s one of the little things that makes poverty really unbearable: looking into the mirror & smiling & being revolted, seeing all the decay of your life manifested in your face in a display of happiness, & knowing that the world sees this as well.

  It’s dark out & and it’s warm, & I’m still a little lost. The world isn’t making much sense to me today, as usual, time is moving forward a little too quickly, & what I’m thinking about is Derek dying, & me growing old. It’s silly to think of both of these things on the same day, let alone in the same hour. It’s silly all the things you can think about at once. Mike “you-should-know-I-have-a-lover” Mogensen came by today, and I do wish I could get to know him better. He’s good at little touches, a tap on my knee when he asked me how I was, & there’s that delicacy & strength about his body, that pliancy & resiliancy [sic], the idea that he’ll bend for a long time before he’ll break. “Look at the faces,” the subway graffito read, “they are etched w/ the misery of their existence.” Who is the person who wrote that? Is he some college-educated smart-ass who read FM Ford’s line “The record of human existence is a record of sorrow” [sic], or is he some poor man who got caught trying to steal a box of potpourri?

  Oh, now I’m making social commentary & I was just trying to describe Mike. Well he did get dicked out of his job today, a combination of someone’s carelessness & some boss’s ruthless attitude as s/he decided to try to play parent & teach him a lesson by depriving him of a week’s salary. I mean, what’s he supposed to eat on for the week, his good looks? I think we’ve almost reached a stage in history where it’s become impossible to talk about social injustices of that kind because they’re just so obvious & widespread that anything an artist could say about them is already apparent to his or her audience. At least, that’s how I feel when I see most political art. Tell me something I don’t know, I want to say.

  An observation: a pair of men who are a couple walk slower than a pair of men are who are just friends.

  March 30, 1992

  ACT UP:

  (Just as a by the way: don’t forget about your ideas for [1] different color tape on foam core or plexiglass & [2] the lumberyard thingy.)

  April 8: Picket by patients @ the Terence Cardinal Cooke Care Center

  Re: Eric Sawyer on the Antonio Pagan et al zap. The rhetoric at this meeting is still incredible. The VV flyer they handed out said as much and more than he did; why can’t we even talk to each other w/o resorting to propaganda? Our language isn’t our own anymore, it seems; we don’t even trust ourselves to tell the plain truth.

  There’s someone crying at the back of the room. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?

  June 15, 1993

  There’s a
serial murderer loose on the streets of London, & he’s targeting gay men. According to a Times reporter who called me today to ask for my opinion on “how the homosexual community opens themselves to this kind of thing”: (note: I’ve no idea how she found out I was here), the killer is actually more specific: he’s going after men in S/M bars, or into S/M. I’m not sure what she expected of me, though from her comments she seems to have deduced from M&J that I’m into S/M (good for her), but I’m afraid I said something terribly, terribly stupid, since she woke me from my jet-lag nap when she called. I haven’t yet seen any reports in the gay press, so I don’t know what their take will be. Someone’s been calling the Sun claiming to be the killer, and claiming that he’ll go on killing at the rate of one a week; whether this is the real killer, or just someone trying to spur him on, remains to be seen.

  My theories so far? He’s probably not too attractive, since none of the men he killed were lookers—in fact, they bordered on the trollish. There’s no reason to assume that he’s a physically powerful man, since if these are S/M encounters, then he probably uses bondage as a pretext for rendering his victims helpless; almost certainly though, he’s presenting himself in bars as a top, & he’s probably in his mid-30s to mid-40s, as all his victims seemed to be. No word yet on which bars his victims frequented or were last seen at. He’ll also ask to go back to your place.

  New Scotland Yard has suggested as one possible motive the idea that he contracted HIV from “a homosexual encounter,” and is now seeking revenge. That, too, is certainly unknowable at this point, although suggesting it w/o any proof proves one thing: homo- and AIDSphobia are as entrenched as ever in the institutions of government.

  7

  When I think back to the hothouse period between 1987 and 1996, which is to say, the second half of the first half of the AIDS epidemic, which is to say, the years between the founding of ACT UP and the sudden and almost wholly unanticipated success of protease inhibitors and combination therapy—the conferences, the demos, the marches and parades, the meetings in the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center and the Great Hall at Cooper Union and in apartments scattered around the East Village and Lower East Side (this last blurs the line into sex)—I see it through a scrim of despair and failure, the former understandable, the latter less so, given the profound changes so soon to come, and the pivotal role ACT UP played in bringing them about. This disconnect has long puzzled me because, despite the global nature of the plague—despite 34 million HIV-positive people in the world, and nearly three million new infections each year, not to mention almost two million deaths—we beat the epidemic here. In America, I mean, in New York, or at least in my circle of friends. People stopped dropping dead is what I mean, and many of the people who continue to die are victims of extenuating circumstances as much as HIV: of addiction, and broken health care, and an increasingly stratified educational system that’s created a permanent and disempowered underclass. But still. We won. The AIDS wards are empty, the streets aren’t lined with walking corpses.

  But even as I write that I think of a pair of my friends named Alan Rivers and Byron Clayton, and the first time I tried to save someone by writing about him—about them in this case—or at least to save a piece of them in the event that the epidemic claimed their lives. They were one of those gay couples whose fraternal resemblance made a certain kind of homophobe especially uncomfortable. Both were pale and wiry with brown crewcut hair, Alan five-eight, Byron five-seven, and both had pierced nipples as well; in the years before every block in the Village sported a tattoo parlor and piercing shop, I think they did each other’s. I saw Byron’s one night when he changed his shirt for a Pink Panthers patrol and a light caught the silver rings, making them flash on his chest (“Did they hurt?” I’d asked him; “Yes!” was his terse reply), but didn’t learn of Alan’s until Byron told me how his lover’s X-rays had been the talk of St. Vincent’s. Doctors and nurses came from all over, pediatrics, geriatrics, OB/GYN, to see the two perfect circles that stood out clearly despite a backdrop of dark, fluid-filled lungs. At that point it was just pneumonia, but by the following week it was clearly Pneumocystis carinii, and yes, Byron told me, he had tested positive as well. They’d been tested together, but Alan’s PCP diagnosis beat the lab by a week. To my mind, it was as though someone had whispered in Byron’s ear, You have seven, eight years to live, and in Alan’s, You have three. But the epidemic understood better than I that these numbers were means, that some people lived longer than this, others not so long. Which is to say: Alan was dead in a little over a year, Byron in two.

  Now, as I read over what little I managed to get down on paper twenty-three years ago, I see that the only aspects of Alan and Byron’s lives I recorded were those the epidemic intersected, and as such my words feel like a testament to AIDS rather than to the people it affected, the lives it claimed. I understand why this happened, though it doesn’t make me feel any better: Alan and Byron were the first people I knew to discover that they were HIV-positive after I’d met them. We met in ACT UP and had only known each other six weeks before Alan was hospitalized, and for two of those weeks I didn’t see him because he was tired, Byron told us: he was run-down, he had a bad cold, we’re not sure what’s wrong, he’s in the hospital, he has AIDS. Shortly before, during a midnight picnic—Alan, Byron, me, Jean-Claude—Alan had told us how beat he’d been lately, how he couldn’t catch his breath after climbing a flight of stairs. You’re thirty, we’d told him, these things happen when you turn thirty. Join a gym, increase your lung power, meet hot men. No one mentioned the A-word—including Alan, though we knew he was trying to tell us he thought he had it. We were all AIDS activists, but still we pushed it away, because AIDS, like any disease, wears the faces of those it affects, and it was easier to fight—less emotional, certainly—when the enemy wasn’t human. This isn’t the talk show message, of course. The producers of talk shows and human-interest segments on the evening news believe that by putting a face on the epidemic they rouse viewer sympathy—and they do, and that’s the problem. HIV (or cancer, or a miscarriage, or a divorce, or a box office flop) becomes a life lesson, the proverbial blessing in disguise, the window God opens when he closes a door, each bromide making HIV that much more benign, until it starts to seem not like something that should be avoided or resisted but something that should practically be embraced, a distinction, a gift even, a badge of honor and a path to wisdom, viz., Andrew Sullivan’s declaration near the end of 1996: “It allowed me to see things that I had never been able to see before.” During the four- or five-year period when AIDS was the focus of my political and artistic life, and consequently my social and sexual life, I did my best to keep the disease and those it affected separate in my mind, because I didn’t want to fall into the trap of fighting for one person I knew, or even a hundred or a thousand people I knew, lest when those battles were won or lost (absit omen) I should make the mistake of thinking that the war itself had been won or lost. Which, of course, is exactly what happened.

  Or maybe I just wanted to insulate myself from tragedy, from pain. In my life, these things happened to other people. My mother died shortly before my fourth birthday, my father’s three subsequent marriages were full of heartache and turmoil. But I always understood it as his heartache and turmoil, and at some point over the course of my first two decades came to conceive of myself as a bit player in someone else’s misery, an Ishmael, a Marlowe, a Lockwood, a John Dowell from The Good Soldier: a witness whose fate is to be the medium of other people’s tragedies, not recognizing until too late that the stories he’s telling are also his own, or that being a witness is as much a life as being a hero or victim. This sense of myself only grew stronger when I moved to New York and joined ACT UP and, after meeting several people my age who were HIV-positive, realized that my health had been protected partly by geography (I lived in central Kansas until 1985, where HIV had yet to make deep inroads) but also by fear: because of the ephemeral (to me) threat of HIV, and the more
palpable menace of homophobia, I didn’t come out until I was nineteen, didn’t lose my virginity until a year later, in 1988, by which time the tenets of safe sex were well known, and undoubtedly saved my life. Although there was a little luck involved too, by which I mean that I was so nervous the first time I got fucked that I didn’t use a condom—didn’t even think about using a condom—which scared the shit out of me, just as his own unsafe encounter had so rattled Michael Warner in 1995. It would be the last time I had unprotected sex for nineteen years, until I got engaged in 2007.