hiv

Fighting makes us feel alive, until it kills us. If it doesn__ kill us, the pain of sitting alone with ourselves, quietly, under constant assault by our own thoughts and memories of war can easily be enough to make us wish we__ died in battle instead.

Unlike wealth, fame makes it easier for some men and more difficult for some to sleep around.

Perhaps this is why not one of 800 sexologists attending a conference raised a hand when asked if they would trust a thin rubber sheath to protect them during intercourse with a known HIV-infected person. I don't blame them. They're not crazy, after all. Yet they're perfectly willing to tell your generation that "safe sex" is within reach and you can sleep around with impunity. It is a terrible lie.

But we have, if not our understanding, our own experience, and it feels to me sealed, inviolable, ours. We have a last, deep week together, because Wally is not on morphine yet, because he has just enough awareness, just enough ability to communicate with me. I__ with him almost all day and night- little breaks, for swimming, for walking the dogs. Outside it snows and snows, deeper and deeper; we seem to live in a circle of lamplight. I rub his feet, make him hot cider. All week I feel like we__e taking one another in, looking and looking. I tell him I love him and he says I love you, babe, and then when it__ too hard for him to speak he smiles back at me with the little crooked smile he can manage now, and I know what it means. I play music for him, the most encompassing and quiet I can find: Couperin, Vivaldi, the British soprano Lesley Garret singing arias he loved, especially the duet from Lakme: music of freedom, diving, floating. How can this be written? Shouldn__ these sentences simply be smithereened apart, broken in a hurricane?All that afternoon he looks out at us though a little space in his eyes, but I know he sees and registers: I know that he__ loving us, actively; if I know nothing else about this man, after nearly thirteen years, I know that. I bring all the animals, and then I sit there myself, all afternoon, the lamps on. The afternoon__ so quiet and deep it seems almost to ring, like chimes, a cold, struck bell. I sit into the evening, when he closes his eyes.There is an inaudible roaring, a rush beneath the surface of things, beneath the surface of Wally, who has now almost no surface- as if I could see into him, into the great hurrying current, that energy, that forward motion which is life going on. I was never this close to anyone in my life. His living__ so deep and absolute that it pulls me close to that interior current, so far inside his life. And my own. I know I am going to be more afraid than I have ever been, but right now I am not afraid. I am face to face with the deepest movement in the world, the point of my love__ deepest reality- where he is most himself, even if that self empties out into no one, swift river hurrying into the tumble of rivers, out of individuality, into the great rushing whirlwind of currents. All the love in the world goes with you.

I am not, anymore, a Christian, but I am lifted and opened by any space with prayer inside it. I didn__ know why I was going, today, to stand in the long cool darkness of St. John of the Divine, but my body knew, as bodies do, what it wanted. I entered the oddly small door of the huge space, and walked without hesitating to the altar I hadn__ consciously remembered, a national memorial for those who died of AIDS, marked by banners and placards. My heart melted, all at once, and I understood why I was there. Because the black current the masseuse had touched wanted, needed, to keep flowing. I__ needed to know I could go on, but I__ also been needing to collapse. Which is what I did, some timeless tear span of minutes sitting on the naked gray stone. A woman gave me the kind of paper napkins you get with an ice cream cone. It seemed to me the most genuine of gifts, made to a stranger: the recognition of how grief moves in the body, leaving us unable to breathe, helpless, except for each other.

I could go into their reality any time I chose to, but they could never come into mine. This is what I called 'helping' them.

We__e all just people making decisions and accepting consequences as we march toward an impending and inevitable death.

With regards to getting laid and getting AIDS: Being interesting can be an interesting guy__ downfall.

Globally, millions of married men and women engage the servicesof sex workers each year. Despite growing health concerns aboutthe increased risk of STDs and HIV AIDS this trade continues toblossom, leading to the premature termination of several lives andthe dissolution of several marriages.

One is that if women__ sexuality in Africa wasn__ under assault, if women were able to say no, if women weren__ subject to predatory attacks by men, or predatory behavior generally, then you would have a disease in Africa called AIDS. But you wouldn__ have a pandemic.

AIDS would have claimed fewer lives if we had publicly recommended what I wish to call __he Presumption of Sickness,_ i.e., the principle that whomever we are about to sleep with is HIV-positive until proven HIV-negative.

Some women would not have contracted an STD or STDs had they not been on the pill.

May we each find in ourselves the courage we forgot we have, to see the beauty we forgot is inside us, while battling the demons we forgot we can slay, on a battlefield we forgot we can win.

The disaster, as Dad and others saw it, was the emerging AIDS crisis and the cultural attacks instigated by conservative against gay men and women in the early 1980s. It was found in the cruel indifference of President Ronald Reagan, who wouldn__ publicly address the epidemic until the end of his second term, after twenty thousand Americans had died, and the hostile rhetoric of conservatives close to Reagan like Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, and Pat Buchanan, Reagan__ future speechwriter. In 1983, Buchanan wrote of AIDS, __he poor homosexuals__hey have declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution.

Of course, it__ now obvious why he was so angry that day. People don__ move into hospice to live but to die. And that half an egg sandwich I ended up making him__hat sandwich was the last meal he ate in our Haight-Ashbury apartment, our one true home.

The heavy warlike losses of the AIDS years were relegated to queer studies classrooms, taught as gay history and not American history.

It was masturbation, not willpower, that made it possible for gazillions of women to walk down the aisle with their reputation and their hymen still intact.

Coco Chanel is said to have said that a girl should be two things: who and what she is. I say a girl should do two things: what and who she wants.